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Mildmay Fane

(1600 — 1666)

Mildmay Fane was born around 1600, probably in Kent, to Francis Fane, first Earl of Westmorland, and his wife Lady Mary Mildmay, daughter of Queen Elizabeth’s Treasurer. From around 1615 until 1617, Fane attended Emmanuel College, Cambridge, which had been founded by his grandfather, Sir Walter Mildmay. Fane served as MP for Peterborough (1620-21;1626-28) and for Kent (1625), and was created a Knight of the Bath at the time of the coronation of Charles I. He married Grace Thornhurst in 1628 and after her death in 1637, Fane remarried in 1638 to Mary Townshend, daughter of Sir Horace Vere. Fane is best-known for his friendship with the poet Robert Herrick, whom he knew from the 1620’s and who dedicated several poems to him. Like Herrick, Fane lived retired in the country and dedicated his life to letters rather than to the public career, which might have been expected of him, given his high aristocratic birth. Fane’s involvement in the Civil War was short Fane’s best-known work is a collection of poems entitled Otia sacra (1648), but Fane was also a skilled translator of the Roman epigrammist Martial and wrote, for private performance in his private theatre at Apethorpe, Northamptonshire, a masque, Candia restaurata, for which he even designed the sets and special-effects machinery as well as writing the text and composing some of the music. Much of Fane’s poetry survived, but still remains unpublished, although he is being increasingly anthologised. In addition to his retirement poems, Fane also included poetry addressed to various members of the royal family, hoping that they could reverse their political for-tunes and re-establish England as a kind of Arcadia. Fane makes a royalist icon of the young Prince of Wales (later Charles II) as the symbol for a rebirth. Mildmay Fane’s poetry is mostly lyrical in nature, and often has the theme of retirement. Otia sacra, as its title implies (“Sacred meditations”), contains mostly sacred poems, and is full of strange experimental shape-poems and emblems. The book also contains poems, which are quite personal in nature, and reveal the character of the poet; in a poem entitled My happy life, for example, Fane celebrates his own disengagement from public life. “But full contented with my owned I let all other things alone,” he says; “Which better to enjoy thou strife, I settle to a Country life”. There has recently been a revival of interest in Mildmay Fane, although much of his work, including dramas and masques, remains unpublished. Fane died on February 12, 1666.