agement of his attack were equally fatal, and he never obtained the confidence either of his officers or his soldiers (cf. Penn, ii. 32; Thurloe, iii. 646, 754). His army, however, was composed of very inferior and undisciplined troops hastily got together and badly equipped. His wife, who accompanied him, says in her journal: ‘The success was ill, for the work of God was not like to be done by the devil's instruments. A wicked army it was, and sent out without arms or provisions.’
After the fall of the house of Cromwell, Venables began to promote the restoration of the monarchy. According to a story told in the life of Dr. Barwick, his own horror at the execution of Charles I and the persuasions of a royalist lady early induced him to undertake the overthrow of Cromwell, and he purposed employing the troops raised for the expedition to the West Indies for that object. There is no contemporary evidence of any kind to support this improbable fiction (Life of Dr. John Barwick, ed. 1724, pp. 165, 184). In 1659, however, he was won over to the king's cause, though he cautiously avoided taking part in Sir George Booth's insurrection. When Monck came into England he appointed Venables governor of Chester (25 Feb. 1660; Clarke MSS.) ‘I am very glad,’ wrote Hyde to Barwick, ‘that Colonel Venables is governor of Chester, of whose affections the king hath not the least doubt; yet I have thought to ask you a question concerning him long, whether he be of the Independent party in point of religion; which I have heard constantly averred by some who have great kindness for him; and together with that a great opinion of his parts and understanding which methinks should hardly consist with the other’ (Life of Dr. John Barwick, pp. 431, 451, 522). Venables obtained nothing at the Restoration. In 1664 he was informed against as concerned in what was known as the Yorkshire plot, but the charge met with no belief (Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1663–4, p. 512). He sheltered William Veitch [q. v.] when he was in hiding in England after the Pentland rising, and seems to have remained a nonconformist (M'Crie, Memoirs of Veitch and Brysson, 1825, p. 23; Autobiography of Henry Newcome, ii. 207). He died in July 1687, aged 75, or, according to another account, 70 (Heywood, Northowram Register, p. 72).
Venables married, first, Elizabeth, daughter of Thomas Rudyard of Rudyard, Staffordshire; secondly, in 1654, Elizabeth, widow of Thomas Lee of Darnhall, and daughter of Samuel Aldersey (Notes and Queries, 3rd ser. v. 120). Shortly after the Restoration he bought the estate of Wincham, where his descendants are still settled. His portrait, the autobiography of his second wife, and some manuscripts relating to the West Indian expedition are still preserved there (Chetham Miscellany, iv. 3, 9).
Venables published in 1662: ‘The Experienced Angler, or Angling improved, being a general discourse of angling, imparting many of the aptest ways and choicest experiments for the taking of most sorts of fish in pond or river,’ 12mo. To it is prefixed an epistle by Izaak Walton to his ingenious friend the author. ‘I have read,’ says Walton, ‘and practised by many books of this kind … yet I could never find in them that height for judgment and reason which you have manifested in this.’ A fifth edition appeared in 1683, and one, with a life of Venables prefixed, was published in 1827.
[A good life of Venables is given in a note to the Discourse of the Civil War in Lancashire, edited by W. Beaumont (Chetham Soc.), 1864, pp. 97–100; Some Account of General Robert Venables (Chetham Miscel. vol. iv. 1871); Notes and Queries, 3rd ser. v. 120; Ormerod's Cheshire, i. 658; letters of Venables are printed in the Thurloe State Papers and in Carte's Collection of Original Letters, 1739. Narratives of the Jamaica Expedition are printed in Leonard Howard's Original Letters, 1753, pp. 1–21; the Harleian Miscellany, ed. Park, iii. 510; Granville Penn's Life of Sir William Penn, 1833, ii. 28–132; Long's Hist. of Jamaica, 1774; Burchett's Complete Hist. of the most remarkable Transactions at Sea, 1720.]
VENDIGAID, CADWALADR (d. 664?), king of the Britons. [See Cadwaladr.]
VENDRAMINI, GIOVANNI (1769–1839), engraver, was born at Roncade, near Bassano, Italy, in 1769, and at the age of nineteen came to England and placed himself under Bartolozzi, one of whose ablest pupils he became, and to whose house at Fulham he succeeded in 1802. Among his early works, which are all in the stipple style, are ‘St. John the Baptist,’ after Raphael; five of the set of ‘Cries of London,’ after Wheatley; and ‘The Power of Love,’ after D. Pellegrini. About 1802 he became associated with Sir Robert Ker Porter [q. v.], whose panoramic pictures of the ‘Storming of Seringapatam,’ ‘The Passage of the Alps by the Russians under Suwarrow,’ and the ‘Death of Sir Ralph Abercromby,’ he engraved on a large scale between 1802 and 1805. At the same period he engraved Porter's ‘Twenty-six Illustrations to Ana-
