Verney sided with the king in the civil war, and suffered heavily for his loyalty; his pay as well as that of his men was constantly in arrears; the grief of his father's death at Edgehill was embittered by the sorrow and indignation he felt that his eldest brother, Ralph, should support the parliament; his portion invested in the aulnage was practically forfeited, and he suffered most of all from the mistakes he witnessed daily in the conduct of his own leaders. In 1642 he served with Ormonde in Ireland, in the savage warfare against unarmed and untrained peasants. ‘Nobler spirit never was,’ writes Gardiner, ‘than that of Edmund Verney, a younger son of Charles's knight-marshal, yet even his temper was lowered by the element in which he worked.’ ‘The enemy runs from us wheresoever we meet them,’ he writes, ‘but if we chance to overtake them, we give no quarter, but put all to the sword.’ He sent the same report after the taking of Trim; he saw much fighting, and was wounded at Rathconnel. He was knighted in 1644, and made lieutenant-governor of Chester; he served during the two sieges, and was highly valued by Lord Byron and other commanders. After the surrender of Chester, Sir Edmund rejoined Ormonde, to whom he was devotedly attached; and their portraits were painted in Paris by Egmont in 1648, as companion pictures. They returned to Ireland to take part in the last fierce struggle against Cromwell. Sir Edmund had previously been reconciled with his brother.
Ormonde committed the command of his own regiment to his friend, when he sent the flower of his army with Sir Arthur Aston to reinforce the defenders of Drogheda. Sir Edmund wrote thence (9 Sept. 1649) earnestly begging Ormonde to fall on the enemy's camp to make a diversion. He survived the horrors of the assault and Cromwell's massacre of the inhabitants, but the few who had escaped were ‘sought out and killed in cold blood.’ Among these was Verney, who was enticed, even from the presence of Cromwell, by a certain Roper, who then ‘ran him thro' with a tuck’ (Gardiner).
His portrait (a head) in oils, by Egmont, is at Claydon House.
[Verney Memoirs, vols. i. and ii., Verney Papers, ed. Bruce (Camd. Soc.); Gardiner's Hist. of Engl. x. 175, and Hist. of the Commonwealth, i. 124, 128, 135; Traill's Social Engl. iv. 92; Clarendon's Hist of the Rebellion, fol. edit. iii. 264; manuscripts at Claydon House.]
VERNEY, Sir FRANCIS (1584–1615), buccaneer, born in 1584, was eldest son of Sir Edmund Verney of Penley, Hertfordshire, and Claydon, Buckinghamshire (d. 1599), by his second wife Audrey Gardner, widow of Sir Peter Carew. Sir Edmund Verney (1590–1642) [q. v.] was his half-brother. His misfortunes began young; his masterful stepmother (Mary Blakeney) married him as a boy to her daughter by a former marriage, Ursula St. Barbe; and persuaded his father to divide with her son Edmund the property settled wholly upon Francis by his uncle's will. The will was superseded, and the fresh settlement was confirmed by act of parliament (39 Eliz.) in 1597.
Francis was educated at Trinity College, Oxford, matriculating on 19 Sept. 1600. He had all the advantages that a fine face and figure, great personal courage, and a magnificent taste in dress could bestow. His father died in 1599. He was knighted at the Tower on 14 March 1603–4. As soon as he was of age he turned fiercely upon Dame Mary Verney, and appealed to the House of Commons to upset the family arrangement which they had previously sanctioned as unjustly depriving him of his rights during his minority. Famous counsel were employed on each side; Sir Francis lost his case, sold his estates (1607–8), escaped from his wife's sharp tongue, and went abroad, leaving no address. He reached Jerusalem in his wanderings, and is mentioned as attending service at the English embassy in Paris on his return. He was a great traveller, ‘fought several duellos,’ and squandered his large fortune. At this time Captain Philip Giffard, a connection of the Verneys, commanded two hundred Englishmen, mostly gentlemen volunteers, in the service of Muley Sidan, who claimed to be emperor of Morocco. Sidan's father, Muley Hamet, had received from Queen Elizabeth ‘extraordinary favours of good value;’ therefore it was not impossible for Englishmen to help Sidan against other aspirants to the throne. But after his defeat in 1607 some of these wild spirits took up a less honourable form of warfare. Philip Giffard was captain of the Fortune, in what was practically a pirate fleet, and Sir Francis Verney is mentioned among his associates, ‘making havoc of his own countrymen, and carrying into Algiers prizes belonging to the merchants of Poole and Plymouth’ (Gardiner).
There is a tradition that he ‘turned Turk,’ and, being taken prisoner by Sicilians, served them as a galley-slave for two years. William Lithgow [q. v.] found ‘the some time great English gallant Sir Francis Verney’ in ‘extremest calamity and sickness’ in the hospital of St. Mary of Pity at Messina in 1615, where he died on 6 Sept. An English
