Charles Vane, 3rd Marquess of Londonderry

Charles William Vane, 3rd Marquess of Londonderry, KG, GCB, GCH, PC (né Stewart; 18 May 1778 – 6 March 1854), was an Anglo-Irish nobleman, soldier and politician. He served in the French Revolutionary Wars, in the suppression of the Irish Rebellion of 1798, and in the Napoleonic Wars. He excelled as a cavalry commander in the Peninsular War (1807–1814) under Sir John Moore and the Duke of Wellington.

On resigning from his post under Wellington in 1812, his half-brother Lord Castlereagh helped him to launch a diplomatic career. He was posted to Berlin in 1813, and then as ambassador to Austria, where Castlereagh was the British plenipotentiary at the Congress of Vienna.

He married Lady Catherine Bligh in 1804 and then, in 1819, Lady Frances Vane-Tempest, a wealthy heiress, changing his surname to hers, thus becoming Charles Vane. In 1822 he succeeded his half-brother as 3rd Marquess of Londonderry, inheriting estates in the north of Ireland where, as an unyielding landlord, his reputation suffered in the Great Famine. It was a reputation he matched as a coal operator on his wife's land in County Durham. In opposition to the Mines and Collieries Act 1842, he insisted on his right to use child labour.