Second Baron Vaux of Harrowden Thomas, Lord Vaux

Thomas Vaux, the second Baron Vaux of Harrowden, was a Tudor poet from Harrowden, Northamptonshire. In 1527, he accompanied Cardinal Wolsey to France and traveled with Henry VIII to Calais and Boulogne in 1537. He was made a Knight of the Bath at Anne Boleyn’s coronation and was Captain of the Isle of Jersey. The great German portraitist Hans Holbein the Younger sketched both Vaux and his wife, Elizabeth Cheney.

Lord Vaux’s poetry was included in Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) and the miscellany titled The Paradise of Dainty Devises (1576). One of his poems, “The Aged Lover Renounceth Love,” is misquoted by one of Ophelia’s gravediggers in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.