Joseph Jane

Joseph Jane, (d. 1658), English politician and controversialist, was born in Liskeard, Cornwall, to an influential Cornish family. Joseph Jane was elected MP for the borough of Liseard for the 1625 parliament and in 1631, and in 1635–6 he was mayor of Liskeard.

In 1640 Jane was elected burgess of Liskeard to serve in the Long Parliament. He was one of several Cornish MPs who voted against the act of attainder against the earl of Strafford on 21 April 1641. His sympathies were unwaveringly royalist: he retired to the king's parliament at Oxford in 1643, and was the same year appointed one of the king's commissioners in Cornwall.

Charles I spent six nights at Jane's house in Cornwall in August 1644, and a further night on 4 September. It was probably about this time that Jane composed a ‘Relation of the state of the parties in Cornwall in 1642’, a manuscript combining a narrative account with political advice.

Jane was one of John Arundell's officers at the siege of Pendennis Castle from April to August 1646, and appears as a signatory to a desperate appeal for help addressed to the prince of Wales. After the surrender of Pendennis Castle on 17 August 1646 Jane went into exile and began to suffer financially. His estate was listed as sequestered on 24 April 1648, though he did not initially offer to compound. In the later 1640s, perhaps as late as 1649, he served under Sir John Grenville at Scilly; by September 1649 he was operating as an intelligencer to Edward Nicholas, secretary to the council of the exiled Charles Stuart.

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