Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 58.djvu/182

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as rich as his government would let him,’ and was charged with selling even his own servants. He was superseded by the Earl of Carlisle in March 1678 (Oldmixon, British Empire in America, 1708, ii. 278–81; cf. Bridges, Annals of Jamaica, i. 273–81. Papers relating to his administration are among the Marquis of Bath's manuscripts: see Hist. MSS. Comm. 3rd Rep. p. 190, 4th Rep. p. 237). He succeeded his brother in the courtesy title of Lord Vaughan in 1667, and his father as third Earl of Carbery in 1686.

Like several other members of the family, he had a taste for literature. Besides being president of the Royal Society (1686–9), he was one of Dryden's earliest patrons, from as early as 1664, and wrote some commendatory verses which are prefixed to his ‘Conquest of Granada’ (1670–2). In August 1678 the poet in turn dedicated to Vaughan, who had then just returned from Jamaica, one of his coarsest poems, ‘Limberham’ (Scott, Dryden, vi. 6). Pepys describes him as ‘one of the lewdest fellows of the age, worse than Sir Charles Sedley’ [q. v.] (Diary, ed. 1848, iv. 265). He was also one of Charles II's most servile courtiers, and pressed savagely for Clarendon's impeachment in 1667 (ib. p. 357; Ranke, Hist. of England, iii. 451). In 1679 he took part in the debate on securing the protestant religion (ib. iv. 82). He lived chiefly at a house (since called Gough House) which he had built at Chelsea (Lysons, Environs of London, ii. 90). He was a member of the Kit-Cat Club, and a ‘very fine’ portrait of him by Sir Godfrey Kneller, which used to be hung up in the club, was engraved by Cooper (for ‘Memoirs of the Kit-Cat Club,’ p. 124), and is now in the possession of W. R. Baker, esq., of Bayfordbury, Hertfordshire (Hist. MSS. Comm. 2nd Rep. App. p. 69).

He was thrice married, but died on 12 Jan. 1712–13 without male heir, when the barony of Vaughan and the Irish honours became extinct. By his second wife, Anne, daughter of George Savile, first marquis of Halifax [q. v.], who died in childbirth in 1689 (Luttrell, i. 212, 560), he had an only daughter and heiress, Anne, who married, in 1713, Charles Paulet or Powlett, third duke of Bolton [q. v.], but died without issue on 20 Sept. 1751, leaving the Vaughan estates, by this time the largest in West Wales, to her kinsman, John Vaughan of Torcoed (d. 1765), whose grandson in 1804 bequeathed them, out of personal affection, to his friend John Campbell, first baron Cawdor, in whose descendants they are still vested.

There are numerous portraits of this family preserved at Derwydd, Carmarthenshire, in the possession of Alan Stepney-Gulston, esq., who is descended from a younger brother of the first Earl of Carbery. They include a portrait of the third earl, painted by Guest in 1703; a mezzotint engraving by Faber (1733), after Kneller; and a painting, after the school of Mignard, of the last Lady Carbery. There are at Golden Grove over twenty other portraits of various members of the Vaughan family, including three of the second earl, while some other heirlooms are in the possession of the representatives of the Duke of Bolton.

The present barony of Carbery is a new and independent creation, dating from 1715, and conferred on a family named Evans, originally sprung from Carmarthenshire (Jones, Brecknockshire, ii. 669, and Corrigenda), and said to be ‘not very distantly related to the Vaughans’ (Kit-Cat Memoirs, loc. cit.).

[In addition to the authorities cited see, as to the pedigree of the family, Burke's Extinct Peerage (s.v. ‘Vaughan’), p. 546, and Landed Gentry, ed. 1868 (sub nom. ‘Watkins, Penoyre’), p. 1620, Golden Grove Book of Manuscript Pedigrees, deposited by Earl Cawdor at the Record Office; Yorke's Royal Tribes of Wales, ed. 1887, pp. 106–7; Nicholas's County Families of Wales, 2nd edit. pp. 217, 259, 264, 936; Sir Thomas Phillipps's Carmarthenshire Pedigrees, p. 1; and cf. Archæologia Cambrensis, 4th ser. xii. 201, 220–38, and 273–88, and 5th ser. x. 168. Most of the contemporary papers relating to the part taken by Carbery in the civil war are printed in Phillips's Civil War in Wales and the Marches, vol. ii., and Fenton's Pembrokeshire, App. p. 7 (cf. pp. 194, 443), and are summarised in Laws's Little England beyond Wales, pp. 320–32, cf. 337. See also Commons' Journals, iii. 52, iv. 365, 444, v. 64, 104; Lords' Journals, viii. 184, 198–9, 706–7; Cambrian Journal (for 1861), viii. 17 et seq.; Webb's Civil War in Herefordshire, i. 377–9, ii. 30; Clive's History of Ludlow, pp. 184, 290; Some Notices of the Stepney Family by Robert Harrison (privately printed, 1870), pp. 9–13, 28, 30; Williams's Parliamentary Hist. of Wales, pp. 44–6; information kindly supplied by Alan Stepney-Gulston, esq., Derwydd, and Alcuin C. Evans, esq., Carmarthen.]

D. Ll. T.

VAUGHAN, ROBERT (1592–1667), Welsh antiquary, was the only son of Howel Vychan ap Gruffydd ap Hywel of Gwengraig, near Dolgelly, and his wife Margaret, second daughter of Edward Owen of Hengwrt, a son of ‘Baron’ Lewis Owen (d. 1555) [q. v.] On Hywel's acquisition of Hengwrt (by purchase, not by marriage—see Byegones for 1872, p. 99), it became the seat of the family. Robert was born in 1592, and on 4 Dec. 1612 matriculated at Oxford as a commoner of Oriel College. He left without taking a degree, and spent the rest of his life at Hengwrt in studious retirement,