Thomas, Lord Vaux: poet; born at Harrowden, England, about 1516; educated at Cambridge; attended Cardinal Wolsey in his embassy to Charles V. 1527; succeeded to the title, and took his seat in the House of 1530; accompanied Henry VIII. to Calais and Boulogne 1532; became a Knight of the Bath and governor of the island of Jersey 1533. He was the author of a number of admired poems in the collection called “The Paradise of Daynty Devises” (1576), of which the best are entitled “The Assault of Cupid” and “The Aged Lover renounceth Love, “first published in Tottel’s “Miscellany of Songs and Sonnets” (1557). Died in Oct. 1556.

  A man of much facilitie in vulgar makings…. His commendation lyeth chiefly in the facilitie of his meetre, and the aptnesse of his descriptions such as he taketh vpon him to make, namely in sundry of his Songs, wherein he sheweth the counterfait action very liuely and pleasantly.

  The lord Vaulx, whom I have supposed, and on surer proof, to be another contributor to this miscellany, could not be the Nicholas lord Vaux, whose gown of purple velvet, plated with gold, eclipsed all the company present at the marriage of prince Arthur; who shines as a statesman and a soldier with uncommon lustre in the history of Henry VII., and continued to adorn the earlier annals of his successor, and who died in the year 1523. Lord Vaux the poet, was probably Thomas lord Vaux, the son of Nicholas, and who was summoned to parliament in 1531, and seems to have lived till the latter end of the reign of queen Mary…. Great numbers of Vaux’s poems are extant in the “Paradise of Dainty Devises;” and, instead of the rudeness of Skelton, they have a smoothness and facility of manner, which does not belong to poetry written before the year 1523, in which lord Nicholas Vaux died an old man.

  The compositions of Lord Vaux are uniformly of a moral and pensive cast, and breathe a spirit of religion and resignation often truly touching, and sometimes bordering on the sublime.

  Vaux belonged to the cultured circle of the courts of Henry VIII and Edward VI, and emulated the poetic efforts of Sir Thomas Wyatt the elder and the Earl of Surrey. Such of his work as survives and has been identified consists of short lyrics. Most of it breathes an affected tone of melancholy which is unredeemed by genuine poetic feeling; but some of Vaux’s poems show metrical facility and a gentle vein of commonplace reflection which caught the popular ear.