1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Vaux of Harrowden, Thomas Vaux, 2nd Baron

1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, Volume 27
Vaux of Harrowden, Thomas Vaux, 2nd Baron
19480481911 Encyclopædia Britannica, Volume 27 — Vaux of Harrowden, Thomas Vaux, 2nd Baron

VAUX OF HARROWDEN, THOMAS VAUX, 2nd Baron (1510- 1556), English poet, eldest son of Nicholas Vaux, 1st Baron Vaux, was born in 1510. In 1527 he accompanied Cardinal Wolsey on his embassy to France; he attended Henry VIII. to Calais and Boulogne in 1532; in 1531 he took his seat in the House of Lords, and was made Knight of the Bath at the corona- tion of Anne Boleyn. He was captain of the Isle of Jersey until 1536. He married Elizabeth Cheney, and died in October 1556. Sketches of Vaux and his wife by Holbein are at Windsor, and a finished portrait of Lady Vaux is at Hampton Court. Two of his poems were included in the Songes and Sonetles of Surrey (Tottel's Miscellany, 1557). They are " The assault of Cupid upon the fort where the lover's hart lay wounded, and how he was taken," and the "Dittye . . . representinge the Image of Deathe," which the gravedigger in Shakespeare's Hamlet misquotes. Thirteen pieces in the Paradise of Dainty Devices (1576) are signed by him. These are reprinted in Dr A. B. Grosart's Miscellanies of the Fuller Worthies Library (vol. iv., 1872).