VAUX, Edward (1588-1661)

Vaux had a long history of involvement in Catholic opposition to the crown. He had been implicated in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and imprisoned from 1612 to 1614 for refusing to take the oath of allegiance and again in 1625 for resisting a search for arms at his house in Boughton. In 1632 he married Elizabeth Knollys, widow of William Knollys^† earl of Banbury. She too was a Catholic and had been living at Vaux’s house for some time. Vaux was widely believed to be the father of her two sons, Edward and Nicholas. Suspicion was fuelled by the speed of their marriage – some five weeks after the death of her first husband – and by Vaux’s unusual arrangements for the settlement of his estate. In 1635 he settled all his lands on the eldest son of the countess as Edward (1627–45), ‘commonly called Edward Vaux’; after Edward’s death, he settled the same in 1646 on her other son, Nicholas, ‘now earl of Banbury … heretofore called Nicholas Vaux’.

Vaux’s Catholicism made him a target of the parliamentarian regime but he spent much of the civil wars abroad. G. Anstruther, Vaux of Harrowden, 466–7. His Northamptonshire lands were sequestered for recusancy, his house was looted and timber was also seized. CCAM, 1316–17; CCC, 2011–12; HMC 5th Rep. 73–74. His compositions suggest that he had been forced to sell much of his land, probably on disadvantageous terms. Anstruther, Vaux of Harrowden, 471. In a petition read before the Lords on 18 June 1660 he claimed that sequestration had cost him ‘personal estate to the value of £10,000 and upwards’ and that he was left with scarcely £300 a year with which to maintain himself and his family. Although one might expect Vaux to exaggerate his difficulties, even the sequestrators had valued his estates at only £300 a year in 1644. HMC 8th Rep. pt. 1 (1881), 468. Twenty years after his death the manors of Great and Little Harrowden, which he had settled on his illegitimate son Nicholas Knollys, titular 3rd earl of Banbury, were said to be worth between £1,100 and £1,200 a year, but this is likely to be an overestimate. TNA, C 22/543/5.

Vaux made no attempt to take his seat in the House of Lords. At a call of the House on 30 July 1660 he was listed as absent and was thus not present during the proceedings over the right of Banbury to take his seat. On 20 May 1661 he was listed as having leave to be absent. He died in September and was succeeded by his brother, Henry.