page_title: Sir Frederick Fletcher-Vane, 2nd Baronet
section_title: Family life
hierarchical_section_title: Sir Frederick Fletcher-Vane, 2nd Baronet / Family life
caption_attribution_description: English: Memorial to Captain Walter Vane who died in the Sortie from Bayonne during the Napoleonic Wars, April 1914. The memorial tablet was erected by his father Sir Frederick Fletcher-Vane, 2nd Baronet at St Bega's Church, Bassenthwaite, then in the County of Cumberland
context_page_description: Sir Frederick Fletcher-Vane, 2nd Baronet, was a British politician, landowner and aristocrat. He was MP for the pocket borough of Winchelsea, between 1792 and 1794, the borough of Carlisle, between 1796 and 1802, and again for Winchelsea, between 1806 and 1807. Sir Frederick was the 2nd Baronet of Hutton and a descendant of Sir Henry Vane the Elder. In 1788 he served as High Sheriff of Cumberland.
  In the words of his grandson, Sir Frederick Fletcher Vane ‘was not without the faults and passion of youth’. He has also been described as a ‘colourful and difficult character’. Notwithstanding the last remark, expressed after Sir Frederick's death, his character and personality while alive were interesting enough to see him successfully proposed for membership of Brooks's in 1796 by the Whig politician and wit, Charles James Fox, Brooks's being a club where the Prince of Wales was a member. Sir Frederick joined the Whig Club on 11 April 1797 and, in 1798, Coleridge and Wordsworth made use of Sir Frederick's library at Hutton.
context_section_description: It is not known when Sir Frederick began an affair with Hannah Bowerbank, a ‘companion’ to Sir Frederick's mother at Hutton in the Forest, according to the memoir of Sir Frederick's grandson, later Sir Francis Patrick Fletcher Vane, 5th Baronet.  On 22 August 1794, Hannah Bowerbank gave birth to a daughter, also named Hannah.  A son was born on 9 July 1795, Walter Vane, and the ‘intimacy between Sir Frederick and Hannah continued and they lived together at various places in Cumberland and among others at Broughton Hall in the parish of Bridekirk’. The children were baptised on 16 July 1795 at St Mary's Parish Church, Marylebone, London.
  Sir Francis describes Hannah Bowerbank as coming from a ‘good though impoverished family’.  It is not clear that they were in fact impoverished.  The obituary of Hannah Bowerbank's father, John Bowerbank, in the National Register in 1808 describes him as a ‘most respectable farmer under His Grace the Duke of Norfolk for upwards of 60 years and father of the present Lady Vane of Armathwaite’. In fact, John Bowerbank also managed the lands of the Hassells of Dalemain and the Fletcher Vane family at Hutton.
  The Bowerbank family had been settled at Johnby in the parish of Greystoke, County Cumberland, for several centuries and had intermarried with some of the leading Cumberland families of the time including the houses of Fetherstonhaugh and Musgrave.  The descendants of John Bowerbank (bp. 1598) and Grace Malleson (bp. 1601), John Bowerbank's 2x great grandparents, include George Stanhope, 8th Earl of Chesterfield (1822-1883), Thomas Bowerbank (1686-1768), Barrack Master of Portsmouth, Architect and Overseer of the Ordnance Board who amassed a considerable fortune, and the daughter of Thomas Bowerbank, Catherine ‘Kitty’ Bowerbank (1717-1804), a ‘lady of merit and fortune’, who married Captain Cotton Dent, one of the first Captains of the Royal Greenwich Naval Hospital and scion of the great Dent naval family which included Commander Digby Dent, best man to Lord Nelson at his wedding to Mrs Nisbet on the Island of Nevis.  Dent served with Nelson on HMS Boreas.  Another kinsman, John Bowerbank, a Lieutenant on HMS Bellerephon, accompanied Napoleon to exile on St Helena and he wrote an extant account of his observations during the voyage. The Bowerbank family were also notable in the church and academia, James Scott Bowerbank FRS being another kinsman.
  On 9 March 1797, Sir Frederick married Hannah Bowerbank at the church of St George the Martyr, Holborn, London.  At this point Hannah was pregnant with a third child, Francis Fletcher Vane, who was born on 29 March 1797; the precise date of the birth would be a future bone of contention, resulting in an unedifying lawsuit initiated by Sir Frederick's youngest son in 1872. After Francis's birth, it appears that for the next four years Sir Frederick and Lady Vane resided at Putney, then in Surrey, and ‘at other places in or about London’.
  Sir Frederick's first son, Walter Vane, was educated at Eton from 1805 to 1807 and thereafter at Charterhouse between 1808 and 1809 when the school was based at Smithfield, London. Walter was enlisted as a Lieutenant in the 1st Foot Guards on 11 September 1811 and served in the Peninsular Wars fought between Napoleon and the allied forces of Britain, Spain and Portugal to gain control of the Iberian Peninsula.  He fought between March 1813 and April 1814 at the battles of Bidassoa, Nivelle, Nive and Adour. Walter Vane attained the rank of Captain on 15 March 1814. At the time of Napoleon's capitulation in 1814, shortly before Napoleon's first exile to Elba, Walter Vane was in the camp of the Grenadier Guards at Bayonne.  The French General refused to believe that Napoleon could have conceded and the result is best summed up by Walter's nephew:
  The British learnt from their ships that Peace had been signed and sent word to the French General at Bayonne that this was so but the latter would not believe it, thinking it a ruse, perfide Albion and all that. But we, knowing the fact, relaxed in military precautions, an
caption: Memorial to Capt. Walter Vane at St Bega's Church, Bassenthwaite
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