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Henry Vane the Younger

Sir Henry Vane (baptised 26 March 1613 – 14 June 1662), often referred to as Harry Vane and Henry Vane the Younger to distinguish him from his father, Henry Vane the Elder, was an English politician, statesman, and colonial governor. He was briefly present in North America, serving one term as the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and supported the creation of Roger Williams' Rhode Island Colony and Harvard College. A proponent of religious tolerance, as governor, he defended Anne Hutchinson and her right to teach religious topics in her home which put him in direct conflict with the Puritan leaders in the Massachusetts Colony. He returned to England after losing re-election and eventually, Hutchinson was banned from the colony.

He was a leading Parliamentarian during the English Civil War and worked closely with Oliver Cromwell. He played no part in the execution of King Charles I, and refused to take oaths that expressed approval of the act. Vane served on the Council of State that functioned as the government executive during the Interregnum, but split with Cromwell over issues of governance and removed himself from power when Cromwell dissolved Parliament in 1653. He returned to power during the short-lived Commonwealth period in 1659–1660. His fight for government reform, a constitution, and civil and religious liberties  made him a man "too dangerous to let live" in King Charles II's view. Therefore, he was arrested under orders from King Charles II following his restoration to the throne. After long debate, Vane was exempted from the Indemnity and Oblivion Act, and was thus denied amnesty granted to most people for their roles in the Civil War and Interregnum.

Although he was formally granted clemency by Charles II, he was indicted on high treason by a Middlesex grand jury after charges were presented by the king's attorney general Sir Geoffrey Palmer in 1662. In a court proceeding in which he was denied counsel and the opportunity to properly prepare a defence, he was convicted by a Royalist jury. Charles withdrew his earlier clemency, and Vane was beheaded on Tower Hill on 14 June 1662.

Vane was recognised by his political peers as a competent administrator and a wily and persuasive negotiator and politician. His politics was driven by a desire for religious tolerance in an era when governments were used to establish official churches and suppress dissenting views. Although his views were in a small minority, he was able to successfully build coalitions to advance his agenda. His actions contributed to both the rise and downfall of the English Commonwealth. His books and pamphlets written on political and religious subjects are still analysed today. His writing A Healing Question advocated for a constitutional convention pre-dating the American Constitutional Convention by over a century. Vane is remembered in Massachusetts and Rhode Island as an early champion of freedom.

The New England Historical and Genealogical Society wrote of him in 1848: "Those who have been accustomed to view Roger Williams in his true character, – a great and wonderful man, a pioneer in establishing religious and consequently political liberty, – must accord the same virtues to Sir Henry Vane. It is true, the latter did not lay down his life here in our land, nor was he compelled to fly to the wilderness to enjoy his opinions; but he did die for them, when and where the greatest good would accrue to the world. If Roger Williams deserves all the praise and admiration from posterity which he now has, and which are sure to increase in all future time, Sir Henry Vane certainly deserves no less."

Early life
Henry Vane was baptised on 26 May 1613 at Debden, Essex. He was the eldest child of Sir Henry Vane the Elder, who came from the landed gentry, and Frances Darcy, who came from minor nobility. The elder Vane used the family's money to purchase positions at court, rising by 1629 to be Comptroller of the Household. Vane was educated at Westminster School, where his classmates included Arthur Heselrige and Thomas Scot, two other men who would figure prominently in English politics. Vane's friend and biographer, George Sikes, wrote that Vane was "[ignorant] of God" and of a temperament that made him "acceptable to those they call good fellows", but that he had a religious awakening at 14 or 15, after which he "and his former jolly company came to a parting blow." Vane then enrolled at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, where he studied in spite of his refusal to take the necessary matriculation oaths. He then travelled to Europe, where he was reported to be studying at Leiden and possibly in France and at Geneva.

Vane's father had been upset by his open adoption of Puritan views, fearing this would hamper his opportunities for advancement at court. In 1631 he sent the young Vane to Vienna as an assistant to Robert Anstruther, the English ambassador. This was apparently a quite privileged role, for Vane's writings of the time include messages written in French and in cipher.

During this trip the elder Vane was sent to negotiate with Swedish king Gustavus for an alliance; King Charles' unwillingness to act in the matter meant the effort was in vain. He was introduced to the king after returning to England, and encouraged by his father to seek a position in the privy chamber. His father engaged in numerous attempts to get him to give up his nonconformist views, without success. In order to worship as he chose, Vane then decided to go the New World, joining the Puritan migration.

New England
Vane left for the Massachusetts Bay Colony, arriving in Boston in October 1635 on a ship also carrying John Winthrop the Younger and Hugh Peter. The elder John Winthrop described Vane as "a young gentleman of excellent parts", and by the following month he had already been admitted as a freeman in the colony. He began playing a role in its judicial administration, deciding whether legal disputes had sufficient merit to be heard by a full court. Vane was instrumental in brokering the resolution to a dispute between the elder Winthrop and Thomas Dudley concerning matters of judicial conduct. In May 1636 Vane was elected governor of the colony, succeeding John Haynes. The situation he faced was complex, with issues on religious, political and military fronts and as a young man of twenty-three years, he was ill-prepared.

The colony was split over the actions and beliefs of Anne Hutchinson. She had come with her husband and children to the colony in 1634. During Vane's time as governor, she began holding Bible sessions at home, gaining a wide audience and sharing her opinions that the colonial leaders labelled as Antinomianism, the view that existing laws and practices were not necessary for salvation. Most of the older colonial leadership, including Dudley and Winthrop, espoused a more legalistic view. Vane was a supporter of Hutchinson and attended her Bible studies, as was at first the influential pastor John Cotton. Vane, however, immediately alienated some of the colonists by insisting on flying the English flag over Boston's fort. The flag had recently been the subject of controversy, since its depiction of the Cross of St George was seen by many colonists as a symbol of papacy, and John Endecott had notoriously cut the cross out of the Salem militia's flag. Vane's popularity declined further when he learnt in December 1636 that there were issues in England requiring his presence, and he attempted to resign. Although the court of assistants accepted his resignation, he withdrew it upon the request of the congregation of the Boston church.

During Vane's tenure a dispute with the Pequot tribe of present-day southeastern Connecticut boiled over into war. In 1636 the boat of a Massachusetts trader named John Oldham was found near Block Island, overrun by Indians. Further examination by the discoverers (after the Indians fled in canoes) uncovered Oldham's body on board. The attackers were at the time believed to be from tribes affiliated with the Narragansetts, but Narragansett leaders claimed that those responsible had fled to the protection of the Pequots. The Pequots were aggressively expansionist in their dealings with the surrounding native tribes (including the Narragansett), but had until then generally kept the peace with the nearby colonists. Massachusetts authorities were already angry that the Pequots had failed to turn over men implicated in the killing of another trader on the Connecticut River; the slaying of Oldham led to calls for action.

Despite the fact that Roger Williams had warned him that the Narragansetts were more likely responsible for Oldham's slaying, Governor Vane in August 1636 placed John Endecott at the head of a 90-man force to extract justice from the Pequots. Endecott's heavy-handed expedition did little more than destroy Pequot settlements, and sparked a military backlash. The Pequots struck back at settlements recently established on the Connecticut River by colonists from Massachusetts, and at the Saybrook Colony of the younger John Winthrop. In April 1637, Vane called a session of the general court that authorised the colonial militia to assist the other New England colonies in continuing the war.

Vane lost his position to the elder John Winthrop in the 1637 election. The contentious election was marked by a sharp disagreement over the treatment of John Wheelwright, another Hutchinson supporter. Winthrop won in part because the location of the vote was moved to Cambridge, reducing the power of Vane's Boston support. In the aftermath of the election Anne Hutchinson was put on trial, and eventually banished from the colony. Many of her followers seriously considered leaving after the election. At the urging of Roger Williams, some of these people, including Hutchinson, founded the settlement of Portsmouth on Aquidneck Island in the Narragansett Bay (later named Rhode Island and joined to Providence to form the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations). Vane decided to return to England. "Had he remained in New England, his enlightened mind and humane spirit would have held the Puritans back from the executions of witches and persecutions of other heretics which have added a dark chapter the early history of the States." Before his departure, he published A Brief Answer to a Certain Declaration, a response to Winthrop's defence of the Act of Exclusion; this act was passed after the election to restrict the immigration of people with views not conforming to the colony's religious orthodoxy.

Despite their political differences, Vane and Winthrop developed an epistolary relationship in the following years. Vane's legacy from his time in the New World includes the colonial legislation appropriating £400 for the establishment of an institute of higher learning now known as Harvard University, and his support of Roger Williams in the acquisition of Aquidneck Island from the local Indians that resulted in the formal beginnings of Rhode Island. The surviving accounts do not say that Vane provide the funds for the acquisition; Williams credits Vane as being "an instrument in the hand of God for procuring this island".

According to historian Michael Winship, Vane's experiences in Massachusetts significantly radicalized his religious views, in which he came to believe that clergy of all types, including Puritan ministers, "were the second beast of Revelations 13:11", "pretending to visible Saintship". This conviction drove his political activities in England, where he sought to minimise the power and influence of all types of clergy. Biographer Violet Rowe writes that "Vane's guiding principles in religious policy seem to have been two: a rooted distrust of clerical power, whether of bishops or presbyters, and a belief that the State should abstain from interference in church matters altogether."

Vane's stance can be seen in the way the first Rhode Island patent was drafted in 1643, when he sat on the Parliamentary committee charged with colonial affairs. Unique among all of the early English colonial charters, it contains provisions guaranteeing freedom of religion. (Vane assisted Roger Williams again in 1652, when the latter sought a confirmation of the Rhode Island charter and the revocation of a conflicting charter that had been issued to William Coddington.)

Return to England
On his return to England, he procured, with the assistance of the Earl of Northumberland and his father, a position as Treasurer of the Royal Navy in 1639. In this position he had the personally distasteful yet highly profitable task of collecting the hated ship money (a tax to support the Navy imposed by Charles I without Parliamentary approval). In June 1640 he was awarded a knighthood by King Charles. He married Frances Wray, daughter of Sir Christopher Wray, on 1 July 1640, after which his father settled upon him most of the family's holdings. These included Fairlawn in Kent, and Raby Castle, where Vane would make his home. According to his biographers, the relationship with Frances was anchored by shared spiritual goals and intimacy, and was happy and fulfilling. The connection with the admiralty secured for him election to the Short and Long Parliaments representing Hull. Vane had already formed or renewed associations with prominent opponents of Charles' policies, including John Pym and John Hampden. In the Short Parliament he was noted to be "capable of managing great affairs", with a "penetrating judgment" and an "easy and graceful manner of speaking." With others like Nathaniel Fiennes, he represented a younger generation of Puritans in the leadership of the Long Parliament that effectively managed affairs: as identified by Clarendon in his history, these included Hampden, Pym, and Oliver St John in the Commons, and Earl of Bedford and Viscount Saye and Sele in the Lords.

Vane was instrumental in the 1641 impeachment and execution of the Earl of Strafford, a member of the Privy Council. Vane discovered some confidential notes his father had made of a council meeting, and passed them to John Pym. The wording in those notes could be interpreted to mean that Strafford had proposed that Charles use the Irish Army to subjugate England. The evidence against Strafford was weak, and the impeachment failed. Pym consequently orchestrated the passage of a bill of attainder against Strafford, who was then executed in May 1641. The illicit means by which Pym acquired the notes caused a rift between the Vanes that healed only when the elder Vane eventually came to oppose the king.

In the Root and Branch petition debate in the Commons, from December 1640 and into 1641, Vane supported, as did Nathaniel Fiennes, the call for radical reforms in the Church of England, a position that put Vane in opposition to his father. Amid a sea of complaints about church governance, he and Fiennes in February 1641 were added to a committee that had been established the previous November to draft a report on the state of the kingdom. Their efforts led Vane to introduce the Root and Branch Bill in May 1641. The debate on the bill was acrimonious, and resulted in a clear indication of parliamentary support for church reform. In its wake mobs invaded churches, removing "scandalous images" and other signs of "popery". Vane made an impassioned speech that brought him to the front of his faction, claiming episcopacy (the governing structure of the Church of England) was a corrupt doctrine "hastening us back again to Rome." The bill died without a vote in August, when more critical matters arose to occupy Parliament. When Charles went to Scotland to rally Scottish forces to the royalist cause, the Commons began drafting what became known as the Grand Remonstrance. Many historians have claimed Vane had a role in drafting some of its language; this matter is disputed, but either way Vane did not participate in the debate. Narrowly passed by the Commons in November 1641, the document catalogued many grievances against the king and church, and served to further polarize political affairs. The king refused to enact any of the requested reforms. Upon his return from Scotland, the king also deprived both Vanes, father and son, of their administrative posts, in revenge for their roles in the execution of Strafford.

Early years
In the first six months of 1642, relations between the king and Parliament broke down completely, and factions supporting both sides took up arms. Parliament returned Vane to his post as Treasurer of the Navy, where he used connections to bring significant naval support to the Parliamentary side after Charles attempted to arrest five MPs on charges of high treason in December 1641. In June 1642, Charles rejected the Nineteen Propositions, the last substantive set of demands made by Parliament prior to the outbreak of the First English Civil War. After hostilities began that June with the siege of Hull, Vane was given a seat on the Committee of Safety, which oversaw Parliamentary military activities.

After the failure of the Root and Branch Bill, Parliament in 1643 called together the Westminster Assembly of Divines, a body of lay politicians, lords, and clergy whose purpose was to reform church governance. Vane sat on this body, which met periodically until 1648, as one of the lay representatives of the Independent faction. Not long after its first meeting in July, Vane was sent at the head of a Parliamentary commission seeking military assistance from the Scots. The Scots, who had been opposed to Charles in the Bishop's Wars (1639–40) over religious issues, were willing to assist the English Parliament if the latter were willing to allow the extension of the Presbyterian system of church polity to England. Vane was opposed to both Presbyterianism and Episcopalianism, but found a way to finesse an agreement. He proposed that the agreement, which covered a combination of religious and political topics, be called the Solemn League and Covenant, and he introduced slippery language into the agreement concerning "the example of the best Reformed churches". This language permitted the Scots to believe that their ideas would be adopted, while the English could interpret it to mean that English (i.e. Independent) practices could be adopted. The league and covenant were eventually approved by authorities in Scotland, England, and Ireland, and paved the way for Scottish entry into the war.

Following Vane's success in negotiating the Scottish agreement, the death of John Pym at the end of 1643 propelled Vane into the leadership of Parliament, along with Oliver St John, Henry Marten, and Arthur Heselrige. He promoted, and became a chief member of, the Committee of Both Kingdoms, established in February 1644 as a point were English and Scottish authorities could coordinate war activities. Vane was then sent to York in June 1644, then besieged by three Parliament armies, to urge Sir Thomas Fairfax and the Earl of Manchester to divert some of those forces to face Prince Rupert of the Rhine, who had recently taken Liverpool and was pillaging properties of Parliamentary supporters in Lancashire. While there he also proposed to the generals the establishment of a government which would depose Charles I and crown the Prince to make him King. This idea was roundly rejected by the old guard generals who believed Charles could still be accommodated, but found support with the rising star of Oliver Cromwell.

On 13 September 1644 Vane acted with St John and Cromwell in the Commons to set up a "Grand Committee for the Accommodation", designed to find a compromise on religious issues dividing the Westminster Assembly. He sought in its debate to identify loopholes for religious tolerance on behalf of the Independents. This exposed Vane's opposition to Presbyterianism, and created a rift between the pro-war Independents, led by Vane and Cromwell, and the pro-peace Scots and other supporters of Presbyterianism. The latter included the Earl of Essex, whose failures in the west of England reduced popular support for his cause, even as the military success of Cromwell at Marston Moor raised his profile.

Robert Baillie, on the realisation that the Parliamentary Independents, despite previous claims of support by Vane, were not on the side of the Scots, wrote "Sir Henry Vane and The Solicitor [St John]... without any regard for us, who have saved their nation and brought their two persons to the height of power now they enjoy and use to our prejudice".

Parliamentary victory
Overtures for peace talks were begun in November 1644 between king and Parliament. Vane was one of many negotiators sent to Uxbridge in a failed attempt to negotiate peace. Vane and the Independents were seen by some as a principal reason for the failure of these talks, because the Scots and Charles were prepared to agree on issues of church polity and doctrine and the Independents were not. The talks, which lasted from late January through most of February 1645, were overshadowed by the execution after impeachment by attainder of Archbishop Laud.

John Lilburne was known as a passionate fanatic who advocated for expanded civil rights, including the destruction of the aristocracy, and Parliament, thus he was a critic of the Commonwealth. Parliament began discussing a reorganisation of its military as early as November 1644, in part to remove some poorly-performing commanders, and to eliminate the regional character of the existing forces. In debate that principally divided the Commons from the Lords, Vane and Cromwell supported passage of the Self-denying Ordinance, forbidding military officers from serving in Parliament, and the establishment of the New Model Army, which would be capable of fighting anywhere in the country. The provisions of the Self-denying Ordinance also extended to individuals (like Vane) who held civil service posts, but included exceptions for those (like Vane) who had been turned out office by Charles and restored by Parliament.

Following the decisive Parliamentary victory at Naseby in June 1645, the first phase of the civil war was effectively over, but it dragged on for another year, before Charles surrendered to Scottish army commanders.

During this time, a new political faction began to rise within the military. Known as Levellers and led by John Lilburne and others, this populist force was in favour of greater press freedoms, and was opposed to at least some of the privileges of the aristocracy, including the existence of the House of Lords.

In January 1646, amid ongoing peace negotiations, Charles attempted to separate the Independents from other factions by proposing in letters to Vane an alliance with his faction against the Presbyterians. Vane was not amused by this, and responded by pointing out that he preferred the rights of "tender consciences" to be granted by Parliament rather than by the duplicitous king (papers exposing the king's negotiating positions as facades had been captured at Naseby, and had largely silenced the Royalist elements in Parliament).

Beginning in the summer of 1645, Raby Castle was ravaged by Scots royalists. In September 1645, the Vanes succeeded in getting Parliamentary approval to fortify Raby. During the war, Vane's father reported that Raby Castle had been "visited four times", suffering damages of £16,000. Vane withheld the return of treasury fees beginning in 1645 for two and half years until the same £16,000 suffered at Raby accumulated.

Interwar politics
By the end of the war the Presbyterian group in the Commons, led by Denzil Holles, William Strode, and Sir Philip Stapleton, was slightly stronger than the Independents. They proceeded to introduce legislation hostile to the views on religious tolerance held by Vane and Independents in the army. Vane apparently came to realise that the Presbyterian actions posed a threat equal to that of the Episcopalians, and that military action, having sidelined the latter, might also work against the former. The Independents attempted to negotiate terms favourable to them with Charles, but these were unsuccessful.

In 1647 Vane and Oliver Cromwell, the leader of the army's Independents, came to work closely together. The Presbyterian majority sought to disband the army to reduce the threat of those Independents, but issues over pay (which was in arrears), widows' pensions, and other grievances, prompted the Presbyterians to enter into negotiations with the army. Cromwell was eventually able to appease the army, but a Parliamentary purge of Independent officers followed, and the army was ordered to disband. Some Parliamentary leaders also began negotiating with the Scots for the return of their army, this time to oppose the English army.

The Parliament army mutinied, and under Cromwell's orders (possibly prompted by a warning from Vane) a detachment of troops seized Charles, who had been placed under a comfortable house arrest at Holmby. This forced the Presbyterian leadership to meet the army's demands for pay. They also established a commission to treat with the army, on which they placed Vane, presumably because of his influence with the military.

The negotiations between the army and Parliament were acrimonious. Mobs in Presbyterian-dominated London threatened Vane and other Independents. More than 50 Independent MPs, Vane among them, fled the city on 2 August for the protection of the army. The army then marched on London, with Vane and others at its head, and the Independents were again seated in Parliament. The Parliament then debated the army's Heads of Proposals for fixing the term and powers of Parliament and church governance. Key among its terms of interest to Vane was one that effectively stripped the church, either Episcopal or Presbyterian, of any coercive powers. The Heads of Proposals was also sent to Charles, who indicated agreement to some of its terms and opposition to others, and proposed further negotiations.

The king's proposal split the Independents between those, such as Vane and Cromwell, who were willing to negotiate with the king, and those who were not. Reverend Hugh Peter spoke out in favour of the "non-addresses" (i.e. no longer negotiating with the king). In November 1647, while the debate continued, Charles escaped his confinement at Hampton Court and made his way to the Isle of Wight. There he was recaptured and imprisoned in Carisbrook Castle. Offered proposals by the Scots and the Independents, he chose alliance with the Scots. Sectional violence between royalists, Presbyterians, and Independents, spread throughout the country, although the army maintained a tenuous peace in London.

War renewed
Violence flared throughout the country as the various factions armed and organised. A mutiny in the Royal Navy in May thrust Vane into attempts to prevent it from spreading, and to regain the support of the mutineers, who had declared for Charles. By mid-July, the army had regained control of most of England, and Cromwell defeated the Scottish army in August at the Battle of Preston. In the tumult, Vane appeared at times to be in opposition to some of the Independent factions, even having a falling out (quickly healed) with Cromwell, and many factions came to distrust him. Despite this he was one of the Parliamentary representatives for negotiations with Charles at Newport in September 1648. He was widely blamed for the failure of those negotiations over his insistence on "an unbounded liberty of conscience".

In the debates of late 1648 concerning the king's fate, Vane argued that the Parliament should constitute a government without the king "to make themselves the happiest nation and people in the world." His forceful speech on 2 December suggesting that the king would need to be eliminated as a political force was opposed by others, including Nathaniel Fiennes, who claimed that the concessions the king had made to date were sufficient that an agreement might be reached. Others suggested that rather than dividing the house by opposition to the king, it be divided by separating those who had gained in the war from those who had not, and that financial contributions be made from one group to the other. After an impassioned conciliatory speech by William Prynne, Parliament finally voted on 5 December that the king's concessions were sufficient.

On 6 December, the military stepped in to take control of matters. Troops led by Thomas Pride surrounded the Houses of Parliament, and systematically arrested arriving MPs who had been supportive of negotiation with the king. Vane did not appear that day; either he was aware of what was going to happen, or he may have stayed away because his side had lost the vote. This action, known as "Pride's Purge", resulted in the exclusion of more than 140 MPs.

The Parliament that sat became known as the Rump Parliament, and its first main order of business was the trial and execution of King Charles. During this process Vane refused to attend Parliament, although he was present as a spectator when the trial began on 20 January 1649. He later claimed to oppose putting the king on trial because of "tenderness of blood", and continued to fulfil the duties of his government posts, signing admiralty papers on the day Charles was executed.

The Commonwealth and Oliver Cromwell
After the execution of Charles, the House of Commons voted to abolish both the crown and the House of Lords. To replace the executive functions of the crown, it established a Council of State to which Vane was appointed. He refused to be seated until he could do so without taking any oath, in particular the first one, which required an expression of approval for the regicide. Vane served on many of the council's committees. On 1 August 1650 he was named president of the first Commission of Trade established by an Act of Parliament. The commission's instructions were to consider, both domestic and foreign trade, the trading companies, manufactures, free ports, customs, excise, statistics, coinage and exchange, and fisheries, but also the plantations and the best means of promoting their welfare and rendering them useful to England. This act's statesmanlike and comprehensive instructions, along with an October act prohibiting trade with pro-royalist colonies and the first Navigation Act of the following year, formed the first definitive expression of England's commercial policy.

In his role on committees overseeing the military he directed the provisioning of supplies for Cromwell's conquest of Ireland. As a leading member of the committee overseeing the navy (where he was joined by schoolmate Thomas Scot), he directed affairs in the naval First Anglo-Dutch War (1652–1654). Milton addressed an admiring sonnet to him in summer 1652. After the navy's disastrous performance against the Dutch in 1652, Vane headed the committee that reformed the navy, drafting new Articles of War and formally codifying naval law. Vane's reforms were instrumental in the navy's successes later in the war. He was also involved in foreign diplomacy, going on a mission to France (whose purpose is unknown) in 1652 to meet with Cardinal de Retz, and travelling again to Scotland to organise the government there after Cromwell's victories in the Third English Civil War.

Vane was also active in domestic affairs. He sat on a committee that disposed of Charles I's art collection, and made many enemies in his role on the committees for Compounding and Sequestration. These committees, on which Vane had also sat in the 1640s, were responsible for the distribution of assets seized from royalists and other government opponents, and for negotiating with those who had failed to pay taxes and other government charges. Some of the enemies he made while engaged in this work would one day sit in judgment against him.

The process by which the Parliament carried out the duties of the executive was cumbersome, and this became an issue with Cromwell and the army, who sought the ability to act more decisively. This attitude drove a wedge between Cromwell and Vane. Under pressure from Cromwell for new elections, the Parliament began to consider proposals for electoral reform. In January 1653 a committee headed by Vane made one such proposal. It called for suffrage to be allowed on the basis of property ownership, and it sought specifically to eliminate some so-called "rotten boroughs", which had small numbers of voters and were controlled by wealthy patrons. The proposal also called for some of the current members, whose republican credentials were deemed suitable, to retain their seats, so that the fledgling commonwealth might, as Harry Marten put it, be shepherded by "the mother that brought it forth". This latter clause was proposed specifically at the urging of the army by Vane, who realised that those who were charged with its implementation would be able to retain power. However, Cromwell, seeking a general election, was opposed to this scheme, and the two sides were unable to reconcile.

Although Parliamentary leaders, Vane among them, had promised Cromwell on 19 April 1653 to delay action on the election bill, Vane was likely one of the ringleaders who sought to have the bill enacted the next day before Cromwell could react. Cromwell was however alerted by a supporter, and interrupted the proceedings that would otherwise have passed the bill. Bringing troops into the chamber, he put an end to the debate, saying "You are no Parliament. I say you are no Parliament. I will put an end to your sitting." Vane protested, "This is not honest; yea, it is against morality and common honesty", to which Cromwell shouted in response, "O Sir Henry Vane, Sir Henry Vane; the Lord deliver me from Sir Henry Vane!" This ended the commonwealth, and Cromwell began to rule as Lord Protector. Vane, "daily missed and courted for his assistance", was invited to sit on Cromwell's council, but refused.

Effectively in retirement, Vane wrote the Retired Man's Meditations, published in 1655, this work, a jargon-laden religious treatise in which Vane wanders between literal and symbolic interpretation of Biblical scriptures, was treated by contemporaries and later analysts, including David Hume, as "absolutely unintelligible" and "cloudily formed". The same year, after Cromwell called for a fast day to consider methods by which his government might be improved, Vane wrote A Healing Question. In this more carefully structured political work, he proposed a new form of government based on a constitution decided by men attending a constitutional convention. He was encouraged to publish it by Charles Fleetwood, who had shown it to Cromwell. In a postscript to the work Vane wrote the words "the good old cause", a coinage that became a rallying cry in the next few years for Vane's group of republicans.

A Healing Question was seen by John Thurloe, Cromwell's Secretary of State, as a thinly-veiled attack on Cromwell, and its publication prompted a number of opposition political groups to step up their activities. Rumours circulated that protests raised by fringe religious groups like the Anabaptists and Quakers were due to Vane's involvement, prompting Cromwell's council to issue an order on 29 July 1656, summoning Vane to appear. Vane was ordered to post a bond of £5,000 "to do nothing to the prejudice of the present government and the peace of the Commonwealth", but refused. He was arrested shortly afterward and imprisoned in Carisbrooke Castle. While there he addressed a letter to Cromwell in which he repudiated the extra-parliamentary authority Cromwell had assumed. Vane was released, still unrepentant, on 31 December 1656.

During Vane's retirement he established a religious teaching group, which resulted in a group of admirers known as "Vanists". He also cultivated pamphleteers and other surrogates to promote his political views. Henry Stubbe, introduced to Vane by Westminster head Richard Busby, became a supporter, and defended him in his Essay in Defence of the Good Old Cause, and in Malice Rebuked (1659).

Richard Cromwell and after
Following Oliver Cromwell's death in September 1658, his son Richard succeeded him as Lord Protector. The younger Cromwell lacked the political and military skills of his father, and the political factionalism of the earlier Commonwealth began to resurface. When elections were called for a new parliament in December 1658, Cromwell attempted to prevent the election of both royalists and republicans. Vane, as a leader of the republican faction, was specifically targeted, but managed to win election representing Whitchurch. In the parliament's session, the republicans questioned Cromwell's claim to power, argued in favour of limiting it, and spoke against the veto power of the Cromwellian House of Lords, which was packed with supporters of the protector. The republicans were unsuccessful in enacting any substantive changes.

Vane formed an alliance with a group of republican military officers known as the Wallingford House party, who met secretly in violation of laws enacted to limit military participation in political matters. The Cromwellian factions in the parliament overreached in their attempts to control republican sentiment in the military, and Cromwell was forced to dissolve the parliament in April 1659. Cromwell, with little support in the military, abdicated several days later. Following a purge of pro-Cromwell supporters from the military and a widespread pamphleteering campaign, Cromwell's council recalled the Rump Parliament in May.

In the reconstituted Rump Parliament, Vane was appointed to the new council of state. He also served as commissioner for the appointment of army officers, managed foreign affairs, and examined the state of the government's finances, which were found to be in dismal condition. Through his work General John Lambert was sent to quell Booth's Rebellion, a royalist uprising in August 1659. Lambert's support of non-mainstream religious views like Quakerism, however, ensured his political downfall. After he and other officers were stripped of their command by Parliament in October, they rallied their troops and marched on Parliament, forcibly dissolving it. A committee of safety was formed, composed of the army grandees, and including Vane and Sir Bulstrode Whitelocke. He agreed to serve in part because he feared the republican cause was destined to fail without army support. This committee served only until December, but Vane played a vital role in trying to stop Vice Admiral Lawson from blockading London with some twenty-two ships. He negotiated with Lawson and when he couldn't stop the planned blockade, he informed the Committee of Safety. When the advance of General George Monck's army from Scotland led to the melting away of Lambert's military support, General Charles Fleetwood was forced to turn over the keys to Parliament House to the Speaker which led to the restoration of the full Long Parliament. For taking part in the committee of safety, Vane was expelled (over vocal objections from allies like Heselrige) from the Commons, and ordered into house arrest at Raby Castle. He went to Raby in February 1660, but stayed there only briefly and eventually returned to his house at Hampstead.

During the tumultuous year of the late 1650s proposals for how the government should be structured and how powers should be balanced were widely debated, in private, in public debates in Parliament, and through the publication of pamphlets. Vane used all of these methods to promote his ideas. In 1660 he published A Needful Corrective or Balance in Popular Government. This open letter was essentially a response to James Harrington's The Commonwealth of Oceana, a 1656 treatise describing Harrington's view of a utopian government, which included limitations on property ownership and a legislature with an elected upper chamber. Harrington's thesis was that power arose from property ownership, and concentrated land ownership led to oligarchic and monarchic forms of government. Vane disagreed with this, arguing instead that power came from godliness, and presented a somewhat apocalyptic argument in support of his idea. Vane supporter Henry Stubbe stated openly in October 1659 that permanent Senators would be required. These proposals caused a terminal split in Vane's alliance with Heselrige, whose followers mostly deserted Vane.

The Restoration
In March 1660 the Long Parliament finally dissolved itself, and elections were held for the Convention Parliament, which sat in May. This body, dominated by royalists and Presbyterians, formally proclaimed Charles II as king, and he was restored to the throne on 29 May 1660. In order to minimise acts of reprisal and vengeance for acts taken during the Interregnum, the parliament passed the Indemnity and Oblivion Act, under whose terms most actions were forgiven. Specific exceptions were made for those directly involved in the regicide. Although Vane did not support the regicide and would not take an oath of support for it afterwards, he was also, after long debate, named as an exception. The act was not passed until August 1660, and Vane was arrested on 1 July 1660 on the orders of the king and imprisoned in the Tower of London. The parliament, after passing the Indemnity Act, petitioned Charles to grant clemency to Vane and others, asking that his life might be spared. This petition was granted.

Despite the clemency, Vane remained in the Tower, and the income from his estates was seized. He suffered the privations of the prison, and was unable to discharge debts that ran to £10,000. He was transferred to the Isles of Scilly in October 1661 in order to limit access to him by potential conspirators who might be scheming to free him. He continued to write, principally on religious themes, seeking to come to terms with the political state of affairs and his condition. According to The People's Case Stated, written by Vane in this time, power originated with God, but resided primarily with the people: "The power which is directive, and states and ascertains the morality of the rule of obedience, is in the hand of God; but the original, from whence all just power arises, which is magistratical and co-ercitive, is from the will or free gift of the people, who may either keep the power in themselves or give up their subjection and will in the hand of another." King and people were bound by "the fundamental constitution or compact", which if the king violated, the people might return to their original right and freedom.

Following Vane's move to Scilly, the Cavalier Parliament passed a resolution in November 1661 demanding his return to the Tower for trial. Charles temporized, and in January 1662 the Parliament renewed the demand. Vane was moved back to the Tower in April 1662, and on 2 June 1662 he was arraigned on charges of high treason against Charles II. The trial began on 6 June before the Court of King's Bench, with four judges headed by Lord Chief Justice Robert Foster presiding, and with the king's attorney general Sir Geoffrey Palmer prosecuting. As was typical of those accused of treason, Vane was denied legal representation. He defended himself against charges of making war against the king during the civil war by asserting the sovereign power of parliament. Accused of imagining the death of the king in 1659, he argued that it was not possible to commit treason against a king not in possession of the crown. When the prosecution argued that the king was always in de jure possession, Vane pointed out that this rendered invalid the charges that he conspired to keep Charles II from exercising his power. The judges stepped in to point out this was irrelevant. The jury, which was packed with royalists, convicted him after thirty minutes of debate.

Vane attempted to appeal his conviction, and tried to get the magistrates to sign a Bill of Exclusion in which Vane catalogued all the problems he saw with his trial. However, the magistrates refused. Informed of Vane's conduct before and during the trial, Charles II now felt that Vane was too dangerous a man to be left alive, and retracted his clemency. (Unlike Vane, John Lambert at his trial had thrown himself to the mercy of the court, and was consequently exiled to Guernsey after his conviction.) Although Vane had been sentenced to the commoner's death of being hanged and then drawn and quartered, Charles was persuaded to grant him the gentleman's death of beheading. On 14 June 1662 Vane was taken to Tower Hill and beheaded. Noted diarist Samuel Pepys was there and recorded the event:

 * "He made a long speech, many times interrupted by the Sheriff and others there; and they would have taken his paper out of his hand, but he would not let it go. But they caused all the books of those that writ after him to be given the Sheriff; and the trumpets were brought under the scaffold that he might not be heard. Then he prayed, and so fitted himself, and received the blow; but the scaffold was so crowded that we could not see it done....He had a blister, or issue, upon his neck, which he desired them not hurt: he changed not his colour or speech to the last, but died justifying himself and the cause he had stood for; and spoke very confidently of his being presently at the right hand of Christ; and in all things appeared the most resolved man that ever died in that manner, and showed more of heat than cowardize, but yet with all humility and gravity. One asked him why he did not pray for the King. He answered, 'Nay,' says he, 'you shall see I can pray for the King: I pray God bless him!'"

In his final days Vane had made his peace with God, and had also carefully prepared the speech he intended to make at the execution. In order to preserve the speech, he gave copies to close friends who visited him in those days, which were later printed. Many viewed him as a martyr for continuing to espouse his cause, and some thought the king had lost more than he gained by having him executed. His body was returned to his family, who interred him in the church at Shipbourne, near the family estate of Fairlawn in Kent.

Family
Vane and his wife Frances had ten children. Of their five sons, only the last, Christopher, had children, and succeeded to his father's estates. He was created Baron Barnard by William III.

Works
A number of Vane's speeches to Parliament and other bodies were printed during his lifetime or shortly after, including The Speech Intended to Have been Spoken on the Scaffold, published in 1662.

Vane's other printed works include:
 * A Brief Answer to a Certain Declaration, 1637
 * The Retired Man's Meditations, 1655
 * A Healing Question Propounded, 1656
 * Of Love of God and Union with God, 1657?
 * The Proceeds of the Protector ... Against Sir Henry Vane, Knight, 1658
 * A Needful Corrective or Balance in Popular Government, 1659
 * Two Treatises: "Epistle General to the Mystical Body of Christ" and "The Face of the Times", 1662
 * The Cause of the People of England Stated, 1689 (written 1660–1662; the title may have been intended to be "Case" instead of "Cause")
 * A Pilgrimage into the Land of Promise, 1664
 * The Trial of Sir Henry Vane, Knight, 1662

The last work contains, in addition to his last speech and details relating to the trial, The People's Case Stated, The Valley of Jehoshaphat, and Meditations concerning Man's Life.

Some contemporary works were incorrectly attributed to him. Clarendon, in his History of the Rebellion, assigns to Vane credit for one speech in support of the Self-Denying Ordinance; later historians find this attribution spurious. The Speech against Richard Cromwell is probably the composition of a later writer, while The Light Shining out of Darkness may have been written by Henry Stubbe.

Reputation
Vane was widely recognized by contemporary chroniclers as a gifted administrator and a forceful orator. Even the royalist Clarendon had good words for him, and wrote of him as follows: "He had an unusual aspect, which ... made men think there was something in him of the extraordinary; and his whole life made good that imagination." Also, Clarendon credited Vane with having possessed "extraordinary parts, a pleasant wit, a great understanding, a temper not to be moved", and in debate "a quick conception and a very sharp and weighty expression". The 1662 biography The Life and Death of Sir Henry Vane the Younger by Vane's chaplain George Sikes included John Milton's "Sonnet 17", written in 1652 in praise of Vane, and presented to Vane that year.

He was an advocate of free thought in religion. Although his personal religious beliefs as noted in a few of his writings from prison were sometimes baffling, by readers as varied as Richard Baxter, Clarendon, Gilbert Burnet and David Hume. Biographer David Parnham writes "He presented himself as a 'witness' of light, as a spiritualist, as one dispensing advanced wisdoms in the epistemological setting of an imminent and apocalyptic age of the Spirit". Nevertheless, his religious beliefs weren't why he fought in Parliament nor why the King had him executed. He fought as an Independent in Parliament not aligned to any religious sect.

Vane's reputation was at its height in the nineteenth century, especially in the United States. English historian John Andrew Doyle wrote of Vane that he had acquired "a more dazzling reputation than has been granted to the lofty public spirit and statesmanlike foresight of Winthrop." William Wordsworth referenced Vane in his sonnet Great Men Have Been Among Us (1802). Charles Dickens included the exchange between Vane and Cromwell at the end of the Rump Parliament in his A Child's History of England, part-published in the early 1850s. In English Traits (1856), Ralph Waldo Emerson placed Vane on a list of historical English greats.

In April 1889, "WITH the single exception of Cromwell, the greatest statesman of the heroic age of Puritanism was unquestionably the younger Henry Vane. He did as much as any one to compass the downfall of Strafford; he brought the military strength of Scotland to the aid of the hard-pressed Parliament; he administered the navy with which Blake won his astonishing victories; he dared even withstand Cromwell at the height of his power, when his measures savored too much of violence...Yet before the beginning of his brilliant career in England, this young man had written his name indelibly upon one of the earliest pages in the history of the American people. It is pleasant to remember that this admirable man was once the chief magistrate of an American commonwealth. Thorough republican and enthusiastic lover of liberty, he was spiritually akin to Jefferson and to Samuel Adams...In his mind were the rudiments of the idea of a written constitution, upon which a new government for England might be built, with powers neatly defined and limited. One fancies that in some respects he would have felt himself more at home if he could have been suddenly translated from the Rump Parliament of 1653 to the Federal Convention of 1787, in which immortal assembly there sat perhaps no man of loftier spirit than his."

In 1897 the Royal Society of the Arts marked Vane's demolished Hampstead house on Rosslyn Hill, Vane House, with a blue plaque.

A statue to honour Vane by Frederick William MacMonnies was erected in the Boston Public Library. The plaque underneath states, "This statue was placed here at the request of James Freeman Clarke, D.D. an honoured citizen of Boston who nobly labored for the abolition of slavery in America. Vane was "An Ardent Defender of Civil Liberty and Free Thought in Religion. He maintained that God and Parliament were superior to the King."

James Kendall Hosmer, editing Winthrop's Journal in 1908, wrote of Vane: "... his heroic life and death, his services to Anglo-Saxon freedom, which make him a significant figure even to the present moment, may well be regarded as the most illustrious character who touches early New England history. While his personal contact with America was only for a brief space, his life became a strenuous upholding of American ideas: if government of, by, and for the people is the principle which English-speaking men feel especially bound to maintain, the life and death of Vane contributed powerfully to cause this idea to prevail."

Wendell Phillips, a prominent American abolitionist, friend of Frederick Douglas, and advocate for Native Americans, said, "Sir Harry Vane, in my judgment the noblest human being who ever walked the streets of yonder city,--I do not forget Franklin or Sam Adams, Washington or Fayette, Garrison or John Brown, -but Vane dwells an arrow's flight above them all, and his touch consecrated the continent to measureless toleration of opinion and entire equality of rights. We are told we can find in Plato “all the intellectual life of Europe for two thousand years;” so you can find in Vane the pure gold of two hundred and fifty years of American civilization, with no particle of its dross. Plato would have welcomed him to the Academy, and Fenelon kneeled with him at the altar. He made Somers and John Marshall possible; like Carnot, he organized victory; and Milton pales before him in the stainlessness of his record. He stands among English statesmen preeminently the representative, in practice and in theory, of serene faith in the safety of trusting truth wholly to her own defence. For other men we walk backward, and throw over their memories the mantle of charity and excuse, saying reverently, “Remember the temptation and the age.” But Vane's ermine has no stain; no act of his needs explanation or apology; and in thought he stands abreast of our age,--like pure intellect, belongs to all time."

title: Henry Vane the Younger


text:
Romanization

In linguistics, romanization is the conversion of text from a different writing system to the Roman (Latin) script, or a system for doing so. Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written text, and transcription, for representing the spoken word, and combinations of both. Transcription methods can be subdivided into phonemic transcription, which records the phonemes or units of semantic meaning in speech, and more strict phonetic transcription, which records speech sounds with precision.

Methods
There are many consistent or standardized romanization systems. They can be classified by their characteristics. A particular system's characteristics may make it better-suited for various, sometimes contradictory applications, including document retrieval, linguistic analysis, easy readability, faithful representation of pronunciation.
 * Source, or donor language – A system may be tailored to romanize text from a particular language, or a series of languages, or for any language in a particular writing system. A language-specific system typically preserves language features like pronunciation, while the general one may be better for cataloguing international texts.
 * Target, or receiver language – Most systems are intended for an audience that speaks or reads a particular language. (So-called international romanization systems for Cyrillic text are based on central-European alphabets like the Czech and Croatian alphabet.)
 * Simplicity – Since the basic Latin alphabet has a smaller number of letters than many other writing systems, digraphs, diacritics, or special characters must be used to represent them all in Latin script. This affects the ease of creation, digital storage and transmission, reproduction, and reading of the romanized text.
 * Reversibility – Whether or not the original can be restored from the converted text. Some reversible systems allow for an irreversible simplified version.

Transliteration
If the romanization attempts to transliterate the original script, the guiding principle is a one-to-one mapping of characters in the source language into the target script, with less emphasis on how the result sounds when pronounced according to the reader's language. For example, the Nihon-shiki romanization of Japanese allows the informed reader to reconstruct the original Japanese kana syllables with 100% accuracy, but requires additional knowledge for correct pronunciation.

Phonemic
Most romanizations are intended to enable the casual reader who is unfamiliar with the original script to pronounce the source language reasonably accurately. Such romanizations follow the principle of phonemic transcription and attempt to render the significant sounds (phonemes) of the original as faithfully as possible in the target language. The popular Hepburn Romanization of Japanese is an example of a transcriptive romanization designed for English speakers.

Phonetic
A phonetic conversion goes one step further and attempts to depict all phones in the source language, sacrificing legibility if necessary by using characters or conventions not found in the target script. In practice such a representation almost never tries to represent every possible allophone—especially those that occur naturally due to coarticulation effects—and instead limits itself to the most significant allophonic distinctions. The International Phonetic Alphabet is the most common system of phonetic transcription.

Trade
For most language pairs, building a usable romanization involves trade between the two extremes. Pure transcriptions are generally not possible, as the source language usually contains sounds and distinctions not found in the target language, but which must be shown for the romanized form to be comprehensible. Furthermore, due to diachronic and synchronic variance no written language represents any spoken language with perfect accuracy and the vocal interpretation of a script may vary by a great degree among languages. In modern times the chain of transcription is usually spoken foreign language, written foreign language, written native language, spoken (read) native language. Reducing the number of those processes, i.e. removing one or both steps of writing, usually leads to more accurate oral articulations. In general, outside a limited audience of scholars, romanizations tend to lean more towards transcription. As an example, consider the Japanese martial art 柔術: the Nihon-shiki romanization zyûzyutu may allow someone who knows Japanese to reconstruct the kana syllables じゅうじゅつ, but most native English speakers, or rather readers, would find it easier to guess the pronunciation from the Hepburn version, jūjutsu.

Arabic
The Arabic alphabet is used to write Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Pashto and Sindhi as well as numerous other languages in the Muslim world, particularly African and Asian languages without alphabets of their own. Romanization standards include the following:
 * Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft (1936): Adopted by the International Convention of Orientalist Scholars in Rome. It is the basis for the very influential Hans Wehr dictionary (ISBN 0-87950-003-4).
 * BS 4280 (1968): Developed by the British Standards Institution
 * SATTS (1970s): A one-for-one substitution system, a legacy from the Morse code era
 * UNGEGN (1972)
 * DIN 31635 (1982): Developed by the Deutsches Institut für Normung (German Institute for Standardization)
 * ISO 233 (1984). Transliteration.
 * Qalam (1985): A system that focuses upon preserving the spelling, rather than the pronunciation, and uses mixed case
 * ISO 233-2 (1993): Simplified transliteration.
 * Buckwalter transliteration (1990s): Developed at Xerox by Tim Buckwalter; does not require unusual diacritics
 * ALA-LC (1997)
 * Arabic chat alphabet

Persian
Notes:

Georgian
Notes:

Greek
There are romanization systems for both Modern and Ancient Greek.
 * ALA-LC
 * Beta Code
 * Greeklish
 * ISO 843 (1997)

Hebrew
The Hebrew alphabet is romanized using several standards:
 * ANSI Z39.25 (1975)
 * UNGEGN (1977)
 * ISO 259 (1984): Transliteration.
 * ISO 259-2 (1994): Simplified transliteration.
 * ISO/DIS 259-3: Phonemic transcription.
 * ALA-LC

Indic (Brahmic) scripts
The Brahmic family of abugidas is used for languages of the Indian subcontinent and south-east Asia. There is a long tradition in the west to study Sanskrit and other Indic texts in Latin transliteration. Various transliteration conventions have been used for Indic scripts since the time of Sir William Jones.
 * ISO 15919 (2001): A standard transliteration convention was codified in the ISO 15919 standard. It uses diacritics to map the much larger set of Brahmic consonants and vowels to the Latin script. The Devanagari-specific portion is very similar to the academic standard, IAST: "International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration", and to the United States Library of Congress standard, ALA-LC, although there are a few differences
 * The National Library at Kolkata romanization, intended for the romanization of all Indic scripts, is an extension of IAST
 * Harvard-Kyoto: Uses upper and lower case and doubling of letters, to avoid the use of diacritics, and to restrict the range to 7-bit ASCII.
 * ITRANS: a transliteration scheme into 7-bit ASCII created by Avinash Chopde that used to be prevalent on Usenet.
 * ISCII (1988)

Devanagari–nastaʿlīq (Hindustani)
Hindustani is an Indo-Aryan language with extreme digraphia and diglossia resulting from the Hindi–Urdu controversy starting in the 1800s. Technically, Hindustani itself is recognized by neither the language community nor any governments. Two standardized registers, Standard Hindi and Standard Urdu, are recognized as official languages in India and Pakistan. However, in practice the situation is,
 * In Pakistan: Standard (Saaf or Khaalis) Urdu is the "high" variety, whereas Hindustani is the "low" variety used by the masses (called Urdu, written in nastaʿlīq script).
 * In India, both Standard (Shuddh) Hindi and Standard (Saaf or Khaalis) Urdu are the "H" varieties (written in devanagari and nastaʿlīq respectively), whereas Hindustani is the "L" variety used by the masses and written in either devanagari or nastaʿlīq (and called 'Hindi' or 'Urdu' respectively).

The digraphia renders any work in either script largely inaccessible to users of the other script, though otherwise Hindustani is a perfectly mutually intelligible language, essentially meaning that any kind of text-based open source collaboration is impossible among devanagari and nastaʿlīq readers.

Initiated in 2011, the Hamari Boli Initiative is a full-scale open-source language planning initiative aimed at Hindustani script, style, status & lexical reform and modernization. One of primary stated objectives of Hamari Boli is to relieve Hindustani of the crippling devanagari–nastaʿlīq digraphia by way of romanization.

Chinese
Romanization of the Sinitic languages, particularly Mandarin, has proved a very difficult problem, although the issue is further complicated by political considerations. Because of this, many romanization tables contain Chinese characters plus one or more romanizations or Zhuyin.

Mandarin

 * ALA-LC: Used to be similar to Wade–Giles, but converted to Hanyu Pinyin in 2000
 * EFEO. Developed by École française d'Extrême-Orient in the 19th century, used mainly in France.
 * Latinxua Sin Wenz (1926): Omitted tone sounds. Used mainly in the Soviet Union and Xinjiang in the 1930s. Predecessor of Hanyu Pinyin.
 * Lessing-Othmer: Used mainly in Germany.
 * Postal romanization (1906): Early standard for international addresses
 * Wade–Giles (1892): Transliteration. Very popular from the 19th century until recently and continues to be used by some Western academics.
 * Yale (1942): Created by the U.S. for battlefield communication and used in the influential Yale textbooks.
 * Legge romanization: Created by James Legge, a Scottish missionary.

Mainland China

 * Hanyu Pinyin (1958): In mainland China, Hanyu Pinyin has been used officially to romanize Mandarin for decades, primarily as a linguistic tool for teaching the standardized language. The system is also used in other Chinese-speaking areas such as Singapore and parts of Taiwan, and has been adopted by much of the international community as a standard for writing Chinese words and names in the Latin script. The value of Hanyu Pinyin in education in China lies in the fact that China, like any other populated area with comparable area and population, has numerous distinct dialects, though there is just one common written language and one common standardized spoken form. (These comments apply to romanization in general)
 * ISO 7098 (1991): Based on Hanyu Pinyin.

Taiwan

 * 1) Gwoyeu Romatzyh (GR, 1928–1986, in Taiwan 1945–1986; Taiwan used Japanese Romaji before 1945),
 * 2) Mandarin Phonetic Symbols II (MPS II, 1986–2002),
 * 3) Tongyong Pinyin (2002–2008),  and
 * 4) Hanyu Pinyin (since January 1, 2009).

Cantonese

 * Barnett–Chao
 * Guangdong (1960)
 * Hong Kong Government
 * Jyutping
 * Macau Government
 * Meyer–Wempe
 * Sidney Lau
 * Yale (1942)
 * Cantonese Pinyin

Min Nan or Hokkien

 * Pe̍h-ōe-jī (POJ), once the de facto official script of the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan (since the late 19th century). Technically this represented a largely phonemic transcription system, as Min Nan was not commonly written in Chinese.
 * Tâi-uân Lô-má-jī Phing-im Hong-àn

Teochew

 * Guangdong (1960), for the distinct Teochew variety.

Min Dong

 * Foochow Romanized

Min Bei

 * Kienning Colloquial Romanized

Japanese
Romanization (or, more generally, Roman letters) is called "rōmaji" in Japanese. The most common systems are:
 * Hepburn (1867): phonetic transcription to Anglo-American practices, used in geographical names
 * Nihon-shiki (1885): transliteration. Also adopted as (ISO 3602 Strict) in 1989.
 * Kunrei-shiki (1937): phonemic transcription. Also adopted as (ISO 3602).
 * JSL (1987): phonemic transcription. Named after the book Japanese: The Spoken Language by Eleanor Jorden.
 * ALA-LC: Similar to Modified Hepburn
 * Wāpuro: ("word processor romanization") transliteration. Not strictly a system, but a collection of common practices that enables input of Japanese text.

Korean
While romanization has taken various and at times seemingly unstructured forms, some sets of rules do exist:
 * McCune–Reischauer (MR; 1937?), the first transcription to gain some acceptance. A slightly changed version of MR was the official system for Korean in South Korea from 1984 to 2000, and yet a different modification is still the official system in North Korea. Uses breves, apostrophes and diereses, the latter two indicating orthographic syllable boundaries in cases that would otherwise be ambiguous. What is called MR may in many cases be any of a number of systems that differ from each other and from the original MR mostly in whether word endings are separated from the stem by a space, a hyphen or – according to McCune's and Reischauer's system – not at all; and if a hyphen or space is used, whether sound change is reflected in a stem's last and an ending's first consonant letter (e.g. pur-i vs. pul-i). Although mostly irrelevant when transcribing uninflected words, these aberrations are so widespread that any mention of "McCune-Reischauer romanization" may not necessarily refer to the original system as published in the 1930s.
 * There is, for example, the ALA-LC / U.S. Library of Congress system, based on MR but with some deviations. Word division is addressed in detail, with a generous use of spaces to separate word endings from stems that is not seen in MR. Syllables of given names are always separated with a hyphen, which is expressly never done by MR. Sound changes are ignored more often than in MR. Distinguishes between ‘ and ’.

Several problems with MR led to the development of the newer systems:
 * Yale (1942): This system has become the established standard romanization for Korean among linguists. Vowel length in old or dialectal pronunciation is indicated by a macron. In cases that would otherwise be ambiguous, orthographic syllable boundaries are indicated with a period. This system also indicates consonants that have disappeared from a word's South Korean orthography and standard pronunciation.
 * Revised Romanization of Korean (RR; 2000): Includes rules both for transcription and for transliteration. South Korea now officially uses this system that was approved in 2000. Road signs and textbooks were required to follow these rules as soon as possible, at a cost estimated by the government to be at least US$20 million. All road signs, names of railway and subway stations on line maps and signs etc. have been changed. The change has been either ignored or grandfathered in some cases, notably the romanization of names and existing companies. RR is generally similar to MR, but uses no diacritics or apostrophes, and uses distinct letters for ㅌ/ㄷ (t/d), ㅋ/ㄱ (k/g), ㅊ/ㅈ (ch/j) and ㅍ/ㅂ (p/b). In cases of ambiguity, orthographic syllable boundaries were intended to be indicated with a hyphen, but this is inconsistently applied in practice.
 * ISO/TR 11941 (1996): This actually is two different standards under one name: one for North Korea (DPRK) and the other for South Korea (ROK). The initial submission to the ISO was based heavily on Yale and was a joint effort between both states, but they could not agree on the final draft.
 * Lukoff romanization, developed 1945–47 for his Spoken Korean coursebooks

Thai
Thai, spoken in Thailand and some areas of Laos, Burma and China, is written with its own script, probably descended from mixture of Tai–Laotian and Old Khmer, in the Brahmic family.
 * Royal Thai General System of Transcription
 * ISO 11940 1998 Transliteration
 * ISO 11940-2 2007 Transcription
 * ALA-LC

Nuosu
The Nuosu language, spoken in southern China, is written with its own script, the Yi script. The only existing romanisation system is YYPY (Yi Yu Pin Yin), which represents tone with letters attached to the end of syllables, as Nuosu forbids codas. It does not use diacritics, and as such due to the large phonemic inventory of Nuosu, it requires frequent use of digraphs, including for monophthong vowels.

Tibetan
The Tibetan script has two official romanization systems: Tibetan Pinyin (for Lhasa Tibetan) and Roman Dzongkha (for Dzongkha).

Cyrillic
In English language library catalogues, bibliographies, and most academic publications, the Library of Congress transliteration method is used worldwide.

In linguistics, scientific transliteration is used for both Cyrillic and Glagolitic alphabets. This applies to Old Church Slavonic, as well as modern Slavic languages that use these alphabets.

Belarusian

 * BGN/PCGN romanization of Belarusian, 1979 (United States Board on Geographic Names and Permanent Committee on Geographical Names for British Official Use)
 * Scientific transliteration, or the International Scholarly System for linguistics
 * ALA-LC romanization, 1997 (American Library Association and Library of Congress):
 * ISO 9:1995
 * Instruction on transliteration of Belarusian geographical names with letters of Latin script, 2000

Bulgarian
A system based on scientific transliteration and ISO/R 9:1968 was considered official in Bulgaria since the 1970s. Since the late 1990s, Bulgarian authorities have switched to the so-called Streamlined System avoiding the use of diacritics and optimized for compatibility with English. This system became mandatory for public use with a law passed in 2009. Where the old system uses <č,š,ž,št,c,j,ă>, the new system uses .

The new Bulgarian system was endorsed for official use also by UN in 2012, and by BGN and PCGN in 2013.

Russian
There is no single universally accepted system of writing Russian using the Latin script—in fact there are a huge number of such systems: some are adjusted for a particular target language (e.g. German or French), some are designed as a librarian's transliteration, some are prescribed for Russian travellers' passports; the transcription of some names is purely traditional. All this has resulted in great reduplication of names. E.g. the name of the Russian composer Tchaikovsky may also be written as Tchaykovsky, Tchajkovskij, Tchaikowski, Tschaikowski, Czajkowski, Čajkovskij, Čajkovski, Chajkovskij, Çaykovski, Chaykovsky, Chaykovskiy, Chaikovski, Tshaikovski, Tšaikovski, Tsjajkovskij etc. Systems include:
 * BGN/PCGN (1947): Transliteration system (United States Board on Geographic Names & Permanent Committee on Geographical Names for British Official Use).
 * GOST 16876-71 (1971): A now defunct Soviet transliteration standard. Replaced by GOST 7.79, which is an ISO 9 equivalent.
 * United Nations romanization system for geographical names (1987): Based on GOST 16876-71.
 * ISO 9 (1995): Transliteration. From the International Organization for Standardization.
 * ALA-LC (1997)
 * "Volapuk" encoding (1990s): Slang term (it is not really Volapük) for a writing method that is not truly a transliteration, but used for similar goals (see article).
 * Conventional English transliteration is based to BGN/PCGN, but does not follow a particular standard. Described in detail at Romanization of Russian.
 * Streamlined System    for the romanization of Russian.
 * Comparative transliteration of Russian in different languages (Western European, Arabic, Georgian, Braille, Morse)

Syriac
The Latin script for Syriac was developed in the 1930s, following the state policy for minority languages of the Soviet Union, with some material published.

Ukrainian
The 2010 Ukrainian National system has been adopted by the UNGEGN in 2012 and by the BGN/PCGN in 2020. It is also very close to the modified (simplified) ALA-LC system, which has remained unchanged since 1941.
 * ALA-LC
 * ISO 9
 * Ukrainian National transliteration
 * Ukrainian National and BGN/PCGN systems, at the UN Working Group on Romanization Systems
 * Thomas T. Pedersen's comparison of five systems

Overview and summary
The chart below shows the most common phonemic transcription romanization used for several different alphabets. While it is sufficient for many casual users, there are multiple alternatives used for each alphabet, and many exceptions. For details, consult each of the language sections above. (Hangul characters are broken down into jamo components.)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Romanization


text:
Norman Lear

Norman Milton Lear (July 27, 1922 – December 5, 2023) was an American screenwriter and producer who produced, wrote, created, or developed over 100 shows. Lear created and produced numerous popular 1970s sitcoms, including All in the Family (1971–1979), Maude (1972–1978), Sanford and Son (1972–1977), One Day at a Time (1975–1984), The Jeffersons (1975–1985), and Good Times (1974–1979). His shows introduced political and social themes to the sitcom format.

Lear received many awards, including six Primetime Emmy Awards, two Peabody Awards, the National Medal of Arts in 1999, the Kennedy Center Honors in 2017, and the Golden Globe Carol Burnett Award in 2021. He was a member of the Television Academy Hall of Fame.

Lear was known for his political activism and funding of liberal and progressive causes and politicians. In 1980, he founded the advocacy organization People for the American Way to counter the influence of the Christian right in politics, and in the early 2000s, he mounted a tour with a copy of the Declaration of Independence.

Early life and education
Norman Milton Lear was born on July 27, 1922, in New Haven, Connecticut, to Jeanette (née Seicol) and Hyman "Herman" Lear, a traveling salesman. He had a younger sister, Claire Lear Brown (1925–2015). Lear grew up in a Jewish household in Connecticut and had a bar mitzvah ceremony. Both parents were of Russian-Jewish descent.

When Lear was nine years old and living with his family in Chelsea, Massachusetts, his father went to prison for selling fake bonds. Lear thought of his father as a "rascal" and said that the character of Archie Bunker (whom Lear depicted as white Protestant on the show) was in part inspired by his father, and the character of Edith Bunker was in part inspired by his mother. However, Lear has said the moment which inspired his lifetime of advocacy was another event which he experienced at the age of nine, when he first heard antisemitic Catholic radio priest Father Charles Coughlin while tinkering with his crystal radio set. After hearing more of Coughlin's radio sermons, Lear said he found Coughlin would promote antisemitism by targeting people whom Jews considered to be "great heroes", such as US President Franklin Roosevelt.

Lear attended Samuel J. Tilden High School in Brooklyn, New York, graduated from Weaver High School in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1940 and attended Emerson College in Boston, but dropped out in 1942 to join the United States Army Air Forces.

Military career
Lear enlisted in the United States Army Air Forces in September 1942. He served in the Mediterranean theater as a radio operator and gunner on Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress bombers with the 772nd Bomb Squadron, 463rd Bomb Group of the Fifteenth Air Force; in a 2014 interview, he talked about bombing Germany. He flew 52 combat missions and received the Air Medal with four oak leaf clusters. Lear was discharged from the Army Air Forces in 1945. His World War II crew members are featured in the book Crew Umbriago by Daniel P. Carroll.

1950–1959
After World War II Lear had a career in public relations. The career choice was inspired by his Uncle Jack: "My dad had a brother, Jack, who flipped me a quarter every time he saw me. He was a press agent so I wanted to be a press agent. That's the only role model I had. So all I wanted was to grow up to be a guy who could flip a quarter to a nephew." Lear decided to move to California to restart his career in publicity, driving with his toddler daughter across the country.

His first night in Los Angeles, Lear stumbled upon a production of George Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara at the 90-seat theater-in-the-round Circle Theater off Sunset Boulevard. One of the actors in the play was Sydney Chaplin, the son of actors Charlie Chaplin and Lita Grey. Charlie Chaplin, Alan Mowbray, and Dame Gladys Cooper sat in front of Lear, and after the show was over, Charlie Chaplin performed.

Lear had a first cousin in Los Angeles, Elaine, who was married to an aspiring comedy writer named Ed Simmons. Simmons and Lear teamed up to sell home furnishings door-to-door for a company called The Gans Brothers and later sold family photos door-to-door. Throughout the 1950s, Lear and Simmons turned out comedy sketches for television appearances of Martin and Lewis, Rowan and Martin, and others. They frequently wrote for Martin and Lewis when they appeared on the Colgate Comedy Hour, and a 1953 article from Billboard magazine stated that Lear and Simmons were guaranteed a record-breaking $52,000 each to write for five additional Martin and Lewis appearances on the Colgate Comedy Hour that year. In a 2015 interview with Variety, Lear said that Jerry Lewis had hired him and Simmons as writers for Martin and Lewis three weeks before the comedy duo made their first appearance on the Colgate Comedy Hour in 1950. Lear also acknowledged in 1986 that he and Simmons were the main writers for The Martin and Lewis Show for three years.

In 1954, Lear was enlisted as a writer and asked to salvage the new CBS sitcom starring Celeste Holm, Honestly, Celeste!, but the program was canceled after eight episodes. During this time he became the producer of NBC's short-lived (26 episodes) sitcom The Martha Raye Show, after Nat Hiken left as the series director. Lear also wrote some of the opening monologs for The Tennessee Ernie Ford Show which aired from 1956 to 1961. In 1959, Lear created his first television series, a half-hour western for Revue Studios called The Deputy, starring Henry Fonda.

1967–1977
Starting out as a comedy writer, then a film director (he wrote and produced the 1967 film Divorce American Style and directed the 1971 film Cold Turkey, both starring Dick Van Dyke), Lear tried to sell a concept for a sitcom about a blue-collar American family to ABC. They rejected the show after two pilots were taped: "Justice for All" in 1968 and "Those Were the Days" in 1969. After a third pilot was taped, CBS picked up the show, known as All in the Family. It premiered January 12, 1971, to disappointing ratings, but it took home several Emmy Awards that year, including Outstanding Comedy Series. The show did very well in summer reruns, and it flourished in the 1971–72 season, becoming the top-rated show on TV for the next five years. After falling from the No. 1 spot, All in the Family still remained in the top ten, with the exception of the 1976-1977 television season where it ranked #12, and eventually became Archie Bunker's Place. The show was based loosely on the British sitcom Till Death Us Do Part, about an irascible working-class Tory and his socialist son-in-law.

Lear's second big TV sitcom, Sanford and Son, was also based on a British sitcom, Steptoe and Son, about a west London junk dealer and his son. Lear changed the setting to the Watts section of Los Angeles and the characters to African-Americans, and the NBC show Sanford and Son was an instant hit. Numerous hit shows followed thereafter, including Maude, The Jeffersons (both spin-offs of All in the Family), One Day at a Time, and Good Times (which is a spinoff of Maude).

Most of these Lear sitcoms share three features; they were shot on videotape in place of film, used a live studio audience, and dealt with current social and political issues. Maude is generally considered to be based on Lear's wife Frances, which she confirmed, with Charlie Hauck serving as main producer and writer.

Lear's longtime producing partner was Bud Yorkin, who also produced All in the Family, Sanford and Son, What's Happening!!, Maude, and The Jeffersons. Yorkin split with Lear in 1975. He started a production company with writers and producers Saul Turteltaub and Bernie Orenstein; however only two of their shows lasted longer than a year: What's Happening!! and Carter Country. The Lear/Yorkin company was known as Tandem Productions and was founded in 1958. Lear and talent agent Jerry Perenchio founded T.A.T. Communications ("T.A.T." stood for the Yiddish phrase tuchus affen tisch, "putting one's ass on the line". ) in 1974, which co-existed with Tandem Productions and was often referred to in periodicals as Tandem/T.A.T. The Lear organization was one of the most successful independent TV producers of the 1970s. TAT produced the influential and award-winning 1981 film The Wave about Ron Jones' social experiment.

Lear also developed the cult favorite TV series Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (MH MH) which was turned down by the networks as "too controversial" and placed it into first run syndication with 128 stations in January 1976. A year later, he added another program into first-run syndication along with MH MH, All That Glitters. He planned in 1977 to offer three hours of prime-time Saturday programming directly having stations place his production company in the position of an occasional network.

In 1977, African American screenwriter Eric Monte filed a lawsuit accusing ABC and CBS producers Norman Lear, Bud Yorkin, and others of stealing his ideas for Good Times, The Jeffersons, and What's Happening!! Monte received a $1-million settlement and a small percentage of the residuals from Good Times and one percent ownership of the show. Monte, due to his lack of business knowledge and experience as well as legal representation, would not receive royalties for other shows which he created. However, Lear and other Hollywood producers, outraged over the lawsuit, blacklisted Monte and labeled him too difficult to work with.

1980–1999
In 1980, Lear founded the organization People for the American Way for the purpose of counteracting the Christian right group  Moral Majority which had been founded in 1979. In the fall of 1981, Lear began a 14-month run as the host of a revival of the classic game show Quiz Kids for the CBS Cable Network. In January 1982, Lear and Jerry Perenchio bought Avco Embassy Pictures from Avco Financial Corporation. In January 1982, after merging  with company with T.A.T. Communications, the Avco was dropped, and the combined entity  was renamed as Embassy Communications, Inc. Embassy Pictures was led by Alan Horn and Martin Schaeffer, later co-founders of Castle Rock Entertainment with Rob Reiner.

In March 1982, Lear produced an ABC television special titled I Love Liberty, as a counterbalance to groups like the Moral Majority. Among the many guests who appeared on the special was conservative icon and the 1964 U.S. presidential election's Republican nominee Barry Goldwater.

On June 18, 1985, Lear and Perenchio sold Embassy Communications to Columbia Pictures (then owned by The Coca-Cola Company), which acquired Embassy's film and television division (including Embassy's in-house television productions and the television rights to the Embassy theatrical library) for $485 million of shares of The Coca-Cola Company. The brand Tandem Productions was abandoned in 1986 with the cancellation of Diff'rent Strokes, and Embassy ceased to exist as a single entity in late 1986, having been split into different components owned by different entities. Coca-Cola sold the film division to Dino De Laurentiis and the home video arm to Nelson Holdings (led by Barry Spikings). The TV properties continued under the Columbia Pictures Television banner.

Lear's Act III Communications was founded in 1986 and in the following year, Thomas B. McGrath was named president and chief operating officer of ACT III Communications Inc after previously serving as senior vice president. On February 2, 1989, Norman Lear's Act III Communications formed a joint venture with Columbia Pictures Television called Act III Television to produce television series instead of managing.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Act III Communications purchased several business journals, including Channels magazine that had been founded by Les Brown, former New York Times TV correspondent. Channels closed in 1990, by which time Act III and Brown published and edited Television Business International (TBI).

In 1997, Lear and Jim George produced the Kids' WB series Channel Umptee-3. The cartoon was notable for being the first television show to meet the Federal Communications Commission's then-new educational programming requirements.

2000–2023
In 2003, Lear appeared on South Park during the "I'm a Little Bit Country" episode, providing the voice of Benjamin Franklin. He also served as a consultant on the episodes "I'm a Little Bit Country" and "Cancelled". He attended a South Park writers' retreat, with some of his ideas making it onto South Park, and was the officiant at co-creator Trey Parker's wedding. South Park served as a bond between Lear and his son Benjamin, who wasn't familiar with his more known work from the 1970s.

In 2014, Lear published Even This I Get to Experience, a memoir.

Lear is spotlighted in the 2016 documentary Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You. In 2017, he served as executive producer for One Day at a Time, the reboot of his 1975–1984 show of the same name that premiered on Netflix starring Justina Machado and Rita Moreno as a Cuban-American family. He hosted a podcast, All of the Above with Norman Lear, since May 1, 2017. On July 29, 2019, it was announced that Lear had teamed with Lin-Manuel Miranda to make an American Masters documentary about Moreno's life, tentatively titled Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It.

In 2020, it was announced that Lear and Act III Productions would executive produce a revival of Who's The Boss? At the time of his death in 2023, he was overseeing multiple shows in development, including a planned reboot of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.

Awards and honors
Lear has been honored for his influence on American television and culture. Before All in the Family, television sitcoms in the 1950s and 1960s generally portrayed white American family life as comfortable and avoided raising issues such as racial discrimination and patriarchy. Beginning in 1971, All in the Family openly discussed current social and political topics and became the country's most popular show for five straight years. Lear's subsequent shows widened television's representation of racial and gender diversity, such as Good Times, the first television show centered on an African-American nuclear family;  Television screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky said that Lear "put the American people [on screen] ... he took the audience and put them on the set". However, it has been acknowledged that James L. Brooks TV series Room 222, which was not made by Lear and which debuted before Lear's shows debuted, was also among the first shows to not only feature an African American lead character in a less stereotypical role, a high school teacher, but also invoke serious contemporary issues, with the Television Academy Foundation stating that "A season and a half before Norman Lear made "relevant" programming a dominant genre with the introduction of programs like All in the Family and Maude, Room 222 was using the form of the half-hour comedy to discuss serious contemporary issues. During its five seasons on the air, the show included episodes that dealt with such topics as racism, sexism, homophobia, dropping out of school, shoplifting, drug use among both teachers and students, illiteracy, cops in school, guns in school, Vietnam war veterans, venereal disease, and teenage pregnancy".

In 1999, President Bill Clinton awarded Lear the National Medal of Arts, noting: "Norman Lear has held up a mirror to American society and changed the way we look at it." That year, he and Bud Yorkin received the Women in Film Lucy Award in recognition of excellence and innovation in creative works that have enhanced the perception of women through the medium of television. The Producers Guild of America awarded Lear its Achievement Award in Television in 2006; by the next year, the honor was named the Norman Lear Achievement Award in Television. In 2017, he was awarded the fourth annual Woody Guthrie Prize presented by the Woody Guthrie Center, recognizing an artist whose work represents the spirit of Woody Guthrie "as a positive force for social change". He became the oldest recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors later that year at the age of 95.

Lear's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame is located at 6615 Hollywood Boulevard. He received other numerous honorary accolades, including:

 * 1977: Peabody Awards: Lifetime achievement
 * 1977: American Humanist Association: Humanist Arts Award
 * 1980: Academy of Achievement Golden Plate Award
 * 1984: Television Academy: Hall of Fame
 * 2007: Britannia Awards Excellence in Television
 * 2017: National Hispanic Media Coalition Media Icon
 * 2017: Peabody Awards: Lifetime achievement

Political and cultural activities
Lear was an outspoken supporter of First Amendment and liberal causes. The only time that he did not support the Democratic candidate for president was in 1980 when he supported John Anderson over Jimmy Carter because he considered the Carter administration to be "a complete disaster".

Lear was one of the wealthy Jewish Angelenos known as the Malibu Mafia. In the 1970s and 1980s, the group discussed progressive and liberal political issues, and worked together to fund them. They helped to fund the legal defense of Daniel Ellsberg who had released the Pentagon Papers, and they backed the struggling progressive magazine The Nation to keep it afloat. In 1975, they formed the Energy Action Committee to oppose Big Oil's powerful lobby in Washington.

People for the American Way
In 1981, Lear founded People for the American Way (PFAW), a progressive advocacy organization formed in reaction to the politics of the Christian right. PFAW ran several advertising campaigns opposing the interjection of religion in politics. PFAW and other like-minded groups succeeded in their efforts to block Reagan's 1987 nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. Lear, a longtime critic of the Religious Right, was an advocate for the advancement of secularism.

Prominent right-wing Christians including Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and Jimmy Swaggart have accused Lear of being an atheist and holding an anti-Christian bias. In the January 21, 1987, issue of The Christian Century, Lear associate Martin E. Marty (a Lutheran professor of church history at the University of Chicago Divinity School between 1963 and 1998) rejected those allegations, stating the television producer honored religious moral values and complimenting Lear's understanding of Christianity. Marty noted that while Lear and his family had never practiced Orthodox Judaism, the television producer was a follower of Judaism.

In a 2009 interview with US News journalist Dan Gilgoff, Lear rejected claims by right-wing Christian nationalists that he was an atheist and prejudiced against Christianity. Lear held religious beliefs and integrated some evangelical Christian language into his Born Again American campaign. He believed that religion should be kept separate from politics and policymaking. In a 2014 interview with The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles journalist Rob Eshman, Lear described himself as a "total Jew" but said he was never a practicing one.

In 1989, Lear founded the Business Enterprise Trust, an educational program that used annual awards, business school case studies, and videos to spotlight exemplary social innovations in American business until it ended in 1998. He announced in 1992 that he was reducing his political activism. In 2000, he provided an endowment for a multidisciplinary research and public policy center, the Norman Lear Center, that explored the convergence of entertainment, commerce, and society at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

Lear served on the National Advisory Board of the Young Storytellers Foundation. He wrote articles for The Huffington Post. He was a trustee of The Paley Center for Media.

Declaration of Independence
In 2001, Lear and his wife, Lyn, purchased a Dunlap broadside—one of the first published copies of the United States Declaration of Independence—for $8.1 million. John Dunlap printed about 200 copies of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. Twenty-five copies survive today and only four of those are in private hands.

Not a document collector, Lear said in a press release and on the Today show that his intent was to tour the document around the United States so that the country could experience its "birth certificate" firsthand. Through the end of 2004, the document traveled throughout the United States on the Declaration of Independence Road Trip, which Lear organized, visiting several presidential libraries, dozens of museums, as well as the 2002 Olympics, Super Bowl XXXVI, and the Live 8 concert in Philadelphia. Lear and Rob Reiner produced a filmed, dramatic reading of the Declaration of Independence—the last project filmed by famed cinematographer Conrad Hall—on July 4, 2001, at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. The film is introduced by Morgan Freeman and Kathy Bates, Benicio del Toro, Michael Douglas, Mel Gibson, Whoopi Goldberg, Graham Greene, Ming-Na Wen, Edward Norton, Winona Ryder, Kevin Spacey, and Renée Zellweger appear as readers. It was directed by Arvin Brown and scored by John Williams.

In 2004, Lear established Declare Yourself which is a national nonpartisan, nonprofit campaign created to empower and encourage eligible 18- to 29-year-olds in America to register and vote. It has registered almost 4 million young people.

Lear was one of 98 "prominent members of Los Angeles' Jewish community" who signed an open letter supporting the proposed nuclear agreement between Iran and six world powers led by the United States. The letter called for the passage of the bill and warned that the ending of the agreement by Congress would be a "tragic mistake".

Personal life and death
Lear was married three times. His first marriage was to Charlotte Rosen in 1943. They divorced in 1956.

He was married to Frances Loeb, from 1956 to 1985. They separated in 1983, with Loeb eventually receiving $112 million from Lear in their divorce settlement, part of which she used to found Lear's magazine.

In 1987, he married Lyn Davis, who survived him. When she met Lear in 1984, Lyn was in the process of earning a doctorate in clinical psychology. She later became a documentary filmmaker through her production company Lyn Lear Productions.

From his three marriages, he had six children. He was a godparent to actress and singer Katey Sagal.

Lear died at his Los Angeles home on December 5, 2023, from cardiac arrest, as a complication of heart failure. He was 101. His body was cremated.

Numerous celebrities paid tribute to Lear, including Jimmy Kimmel, Bill Clinton, Tyler Perry, George Clooney, John Leguizamo, Jon Stewart, Valerie Bertinelli, Bob Iger, Rob Reiner, John Amos, Billy Crystal, Quinta Brunson, Rita Moreno, Mark Hamill, Ben Stiller, Albert Brooks and more. The Simpsons' episode 9 from the 35th season ends with the words "In memory of Norman Lear" and a picture of Lear where he is depicted as a character from the Simpsons.

TV productions
The chart does not include the made-for-television movies The Wave, which aired on October 4, 1981, or Heartsounds, which aired on September 30, 1984.

title: Norman Lear