Charles, 2nd Viscount Fane

Charles Fane, 2nd Viscount Fane (c. 1708 – c. 24 January 1766) was a landowner in Ireland and England, a Whig Member of Parliament and the British Resident in Florence.

He was the eldest son of Charles Fane, 1st Viscount Fane by his wife Mary (1686–1762) daughter of the envoy Hon. Alexander Stanhope, FRS and sister of the soldier-statesman James Stanhope, 1st Earl Stanhope (1673–1721). Fane was educated at Eton c. 1718–1725, and Geneva which was part of his 1726–1729 Grand Tour. He is reported to have left Venice on 20 January 1730 (Ingamells and Ford).

A friend and follower of John Russell, 4th Duke of Bedford (1710–1771) he was an Opposition Whig Member of Parliament (MP) for from 1734 to 1747, and a Member for Reading in Berkshire from 1754 to 1761.

Fane interrupted his duties as member for Tavistock when he was appointed Minister Plenipotentiary (British Resident) to the Tuscan court in March 1734, with an annual salary of 1,300 pounds. He coincided with the final months of Gian Gastone de' Medici, the last Medici Grand Duke. He was in Florence in person between 3 October 1734 and spring 1738; when Horace Walpole's later friend Horace Mann, his deputy, replaced him (as the Chargé d'Affairs). Here's Mann in a letter to Walpole of 7 September 1745:

He joined White's Young Club (a sub-set of the original) in its foundation year 1743. He succeeded his father in 1744 to estates in near Tandragee in county Armagh; near Lough Gur in county Limerick; at Basildon House in Berkshire; and near Tiverton in Devon. The Irish estates derived from Henry Bourchier, 5th Earl of Bath, an ancestral uncle by marriage, while the Devonshire estates had come from his maternal grandmother's family of Southcote.

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