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. Sean Gabb, a modern British libertarian, notes that Vane was in the vanguard on issues of religious freedom. Although he was "among a small and easily defeated minority", his successors 150 years later "were responsible for the clearest and most solid safeguards of civil and religious freedom ever adopted into a constitution."