Birth of Jane Dormer, Future Duchess of Feria

Jane Dormer, the future Duchess of Feria, was born on Sunday, January 6, 1538. Her early biographer, Henry Clifford, noted the significance of the date:

Jane Dormer was born at Eythrope, not far from Aylesbury in the County of Buckingham, in her grandfather's house, on the 6th of January, the year of our Lord 1538, being Sunday, and the Feast of the Epiphany; therein presaging the virtues of her after life by coming into the world, when Christians were rejoicing in the birth of our Lord. In her baptism the name of Jane was given to her after her grandmother; and this name signifying grace, how well it did befit her will appear in her life. When she began to speak and discern and learn her duty, her natural inclinations might easily be seen. She was apt, very disciplinable, obedient, humble, awful, generous in her condition; so that she seemed a child only in years. She was much beloved by the servants and gentlewomen, that were in her grandmother's house, (for there were many of noble descent, commended by their parents, to learn good education and virtue in that house), all presaging, that so sweet conditions, in so tender years and so graceful a countenance, gave hope to produce answerable effects.

Note that "Jane" is a derivative of "John" meaning "God is gracious", so that's the reference Clifford makes to "this name signifying grace". By the beginning of 1538, Henry VIII's reformation of the Church in England was well underway with many of the monasteries being dissolved, shrines being destroyed; the Ten Articles, the Bishop's Book and other methods of determining what the new Church of England believed and taught, were developed: and Father Sebastian Newdigate, a Carthusian monk who had served at Henry VIII's court, had been hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn (on June 19, 1535).

The reason that last fact is important is the Sebastian Newdigate was Jane's grandmother's brother. Jane's grandmother was also named Jane and raised Jane until she went to Court. According to the 1888 Dictionary of National Biography:

In her early years she was the playfellow of Edward VI, whose tutor, Jane's maternal grandfather, would constantly send for her to read, play, dance, and sing with his pupil. Between Jane and Mary there sprang up a strong friendship, which continued unimpaired until the latter's death. They were inseparable companions, and often shared the same bedchamber; during the two months of Mary's last illness Jane Dormer was ever at her bedside, and it was into her hands that the dying queen committed her jewels to be handed over to Elizabeth. When Philip II came to England to marry Mary, he was accompanied by Don Gomez Suarez de Figueroa of Cordova, count of Feria, between whom and the queen's favourite maid of honour arose the attachment which led to their ultimate union. Jane's remarkable beauty and the sweetness of her disposition caused her hand to be sought in marriage by several English noblemen, among whom were Edward Courtenay, earl of Devonshire, the Duke of Norfolk, and the Earl of Nottingham, but by Mary's advice they were one and all rejected in favour of the Spaniard.

It's important to note that Jane's father's side of the family (the Dormer's) remained staunchly Catholic, while her mother's side of the family (the Sidney's) conformed to the Church of England.

Jane married the Count of Feria after Mary I died and then they left England for Spain, recognizing that Elizabeth  was not going to continue Mary's religious policies:

But before Philip was ready to return, Mary died, and Jane Dormer went back to her grandmother, now lodging in the Savoy. The Count of Feria, who was in England at the time, having been sent by Philip when he heard of the queen's sickness, strongly urged an immediate union, and accordingly the marriage took place on 29 Dec. 1558. The reason for this haste was the count's anticipation that the catholic supremacy was now at an end, and that consequently his stay in England would not be long. His fears were justified, and on learning that Elizabeth's coronation ceremony would not be in strict accordance with catholic usage, he refused, notwithstanding the queen's personal entreaty, to be present on the occasion, and at Philip's command prepared to leave the country. After arranging for his wife to follow him, he set out for Flanders in May 1559. At his wife's suggestion he obtained leave of the queen, in face of much opposition, to take with him the members of certain religious orders, including the Carthusian monks of Sheen, the nuns of St. Bridget of Sion, and the Dominican nuns of Dartford. The Countess of Feria remained at Durham House till the end of July, when Don Juan de Ayala arrived to escort her to Flanders. After a fare well interview with Elizabeth, who is variously stated by catholic and protestant writers respectively to have rudely slighted her and to have received her with marked affection, she started on her way to the continent, accompanied by her paternal grandmother, Alvara de Quadra, bishop of Aquila, and six attendant gentlewomen, among whom were included Lady Margaret Harrington, a sister of Sir William Pickering, Mrs. Paston, and Mrs. Clarentia, the favourite waiting-woman of Queen Mary. The journey was a triumphal progress.

Her biographer in the DNB, Alsager Richard Vian, pays tribute to her power and influence in Spain:

The duchess had the stronger character of the two, and her husband, in his will, left her sole guardian of their son and manager of his estates. At the time of his death he was in debt to the extent of three hundred thousand ducats, the whole of which she had cleared off before her son came of age and entered into possession of his estates. As a widow she continued to further the papal cause with unexampled zeal. More than once spies were dispatched from England to Spain to gain some insight into her supposed intrigues with the catholic church. At least four popes—Gregory XIII, Sixtus V, Clement VIII, and Paul V—personally corresponded with her. All Catholics who came to Spain from England received a welcome at her house, and were provided according to their needs with food, clothes, or money. She used all her influence at court to procure the release of such fugitives as were imprisoned on their arrival; on one occasion she obtained freedom for thirty-eight Englishmen imprisoned at Seville, and among others who owed their release to her intercession was Sir Richard Hawkins. In all matters the piety of the Duchess of Feria took a practical form. She took the habit of the third order of St. Francis, and wore it and the scapulary as long as she lived. Every week, and sometimes oftener, she supplied a supper to a monastery of this same order, of which both she and her husband, while he lived, were generous patrons.

She sounds like a most formidable woman! It's rather amazing there's no modern biography of her.

Duchess of Feria died on January 13, 1612 (on the feast of the Baptism of the Lord!) and was buried in the Convent of St. Clare in Zafra, Spain, which is now a museum.

Image Credit: a portrait believed to be of Jane Dormer, the Duchess of Feria, by Sir Anthonis Mor.

The English Armada

Last Friday was the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, originally called Our Lady of Victory to commemorate the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the Battle of Lepanto. Christoper Check's by-now classic (I almost said "iconic") telling of the story of that great naval battle includes the insight that our popular historical consciousness knows all bout the defeat of the Spanish Armada but is ignorant of the victory of Lepanto. We could also say that while everyone knows about the defeat of the Spanish Armada, few know about the defeat of the English Armada that followed. This post redresses that problem:

In the aftermath of the Spanish Armada, Elizabeth and her advisors saw a rare opportunity to destroy the remnants of Philip’s fleet before it was rebuilt. To achieve this, the English would create chaos in Spain’s newly acquired backyard: Portugal. In 1580, Spain had invaded its smaller Iberian neighbour and drove out its briefly ruling king António, who fled to England.

Consequently there was a small but relatively significant exiled Portuguese community in England and with the defeat of the Armada, António and his followers dreamt of regaining their homeland. The English set to work raising funds and an armed force to sail to Iberia with a three-pronged series of aims. The main objective outlined by Elizabeth and her Privy Council was to destroy the Spanish fleet that was being refitted at Santander and San Sebastian, but there were also unofficial aims.

The English were to intercept the Spanish silver fleet entering from the Americas and also gain the Azores Islands, which were officially Portuguese but were occupied by Spain. If the treasure and islands could be captured, it would deprive Philip of the wealth and strategic base that funded his European campaigns. The third and most unrealistic aim was to restore António to his Portuguese throne (despite the fact that he was virtually a pretender) with an English army landing in Portugal to encourage a popular revolution.

These aims were almost on a par with the Spanish Armada itself in terms of its ambition, and it would require careful planning, coordination and execution for it to succeed. It would be commanded by the experienced soldier Sir John Norreys, who would take charge of the land forces and the legendary seafarer Sir Francis Drake – who had helped defeat the Armada and was known to the Spaniards as “El Draque” (“The Dragon”). However, the “expedition to Portugal” started to go wrong before it even left England.

This English Armada, rather like the Spanish Armada, partially defeated itself, largely because of poor discipline:

While they were impatiently waiting, the volunteers broke into the warehouses and stole food and drink. By the time the professionals finally arrived, the expedition was ready to sail, but with reduced provisions. The fleet consisted of six royal galleons, 60 English armed merchantmen, 60 Dutch flyboats and 20 pinnaces. They contained 4,000 sailors, 1,500 officers and gentlemen adventurers along with the soldiers. There were possibly over 23,000 men in the expedition as a whole and buoyed with confidence they sailed straight for Lisbon.

However, the plunder of supplies at Plymouth meant that the ships ran out of food before they even reached Portugal. So the decision was made to attack Corunna on the northern coast of Spain in order to seize provisions, even though this meant bypassing Santander where many Spanish naval vessels were being refitted.

Read the rest there--it was a tremendous failure and one of Robert Devereux's steps down in Elizabeth's favoritism because he went to fight in Portugal against her explicit command and contributed to the failure of the expedition.

"England's Forgotten Muslim History"

Jerry Brotton, a professor of Renaissance studies at Queen Mary University of London, has written a book that gets the usual UK/USA treatment as to title and cover. In the UK his book is titled This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World. In the USA, it's The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam. The U.K. book description:

In 1570, when it became clear she would never be gathered into the Catholic fold, Elizabeth I was excommunicated by the Pope. On the principle that 'my enemy's enemy is my friend', this marked the beginning of an extraordinary English alignment with the Muslim powers who were fighting Catholic Spain in the Mediterranean, and of cultural, economic and political exchanges with the Islamic world of a depth not again experienced until the modern age. England signed treaties with the Ottoman Porte, received ambassadors from the kings of Morocco and shipped munitions to Marrakesh. By the late 1580s hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Elizabethan merchants, diplomats, sailors, artisans and privateers were plying their trade from Morocco to Persia.

These included the resourceful mercer Anthony Jenkinson who met both Süleyman the Magnificent and the Persian Shah Tahmasp in the 1560s, William Harborne, the Norfolk merchant who became the first English ambassador to the Ottoman court in 1582 and the adventurer Sir Anthony Sherley, who spent much of 1600 at the court of Shah Abbas the Great. The previous year, remarkably, Elizabeth sent the Lancastrian blacksmith Thomas Dallam to the Ottoman capital to play his clockwork organ in front of Sultan Mehmed. The awareness of Islam which these Englishmen brought home found its way into many of the great cultural productions of the day, including most famously Marlowe's Tamburlaine, and Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and The Merchant of Venice. The year after Dallam's expedition the Moroccan ambassador, Abd al-Wahid bin Mohammed al-Annuri, spent six months in London with his entourage. Shakespeare wrote Othello six months later.

This Orient Isle shows that England's relations with the Muslim world were far more extensive, and often more amicable, than we have appreciated, and that their influence was felt across the political, commercial and domestic landscape of Elizabethan England. It is a startlingly unfamiliar picture of part of our national and international history.

Writing for The New York Times before the book comes out in the USA, Brotton summarizes his argument:

In the 1580s she signed commercial agreements with the Ottomans that would last over 300 years, granting her merchants free commercial access to Ottoman lands. She made a similar alliance with Morocco, with the tacit promise of military support against Spain.

As money poured in, Elizabeth began writing letters to her Muslim counterparts, extolling the benefits of reciprocal trade. She wrote as a supplicant, calling Murad “the most mighty ruler of the kingdom of Turkey, sole and above all, and most sovereign monarch of the East Empire.” She also played on their mutual hostility to Catholicism, describing herself as “the most invincible and most mighty defender of the Christian faith against all kind of idolatries.” Like Muslims, Protestants rejected the worship of icons, and celebrated the unmediated word of God, while Catholics favored priestly intercession. She deftly exploited the Catholic conflation of Protestants and Muslims as two sides of the same heretical coin.

The ploy worked. Thousands of English traders crossed many of today’s no-go regions, like Aleppo in Syria, and Mosul in Iraq. They were far safer than they would have been on an equivalent journey through Catholic Europe, where they risked falling into the hands of the Inquisition.

The Ottoman authorities saw their ability to absorb people of all faiths as a sign of power, not weakness, and observed the Protestant-Catholic conflicts of the time with detached bemusement. Some Englishmen even converted to Islam. A few, like Samson Rowlie, a Norfolk merchant who became Hassan Aga, chief treasurer to Algiers, were forced. Others did so of their own volition, perhaps seeing Islam as a better bet than the precarious new Protestant faith. . . .

Elizabeth’s Islamic policy held off a Catholic invasion, transformed English taste and established a new model for joint stock investment that would eventually finance the Virginia Company, which founded the first permanent North American colony.Read the rest there.

Writing for The Catholic Herald, however, Francois Soyer, associate professor in Late Medieval and Early Modern History at the University of Southampton, sees some problems with Brotton's thesis:

England’s ties with the Muslim Ottoman Empire did indeed make an impact on military events but in a very different way. They must be studied within the wider background of diplomatic and military developments elsewhere in Europe, the Mediterranean and even the Middle East. . . .

For Philip II of Spain, the heretical Protestants in Northern Europe came to dominate all other issues: the Calvinist rebels in the Netherlands, their English allies, and the Protestants in France posed a danger to the Catholic Church and Philip’s own authority.

Similarly, the primary threat for the Sunni Ottoman Sultan became the Shiite Safavid dynasty in Persia (modern-day Iran). As Shiites, the Safavids challenged the theological legitimacy of the Sultan in the Islamic world and threatened the Ottoman heartlands in Anatolia. The Ottomans initiated a conflict against the Safavids in 1578 (until 1590) and the rivalry between both Muslim dynasties continued into the seventeenth century. Both the superpowers of the age had effectively decided that the enemies within their faith represented a great threat than the infidel.

It is therefore hard to see how the ties Elizabeth forged with the Ottoman played any role in “holding off a Catholic invasion”. Indeed, in this respect her strategy could be seen as having been a singular failure. When the Armada sailed against England in 1588, it comprised a number of ships that were redeployed from Mediterranean squadrons due to the absence of an Ottoman threat. The galleass La Girona, which sank off Country Antrim with tremendous loss of life in October 1588, was just one of these redeployed galleys and galleasses that were more suited to naval warfare in the Mediterranean than the North Atlantic.

The Ottoman Sultan and his officials may well have welcomed English envoys and trade links and made pleasing diplomatic noises. But they offered no real military help. Diplomatic relations in early modern Europe and the Mediterranean were often moulded by a brutal realpolitik in which expediency trumped religious loyalties: my enemy’s enemy was my friend, whether or not he was an infidel. Elizabeth wasn’t the first European monarch to seek a Muslim ally (the French Kings had previously sought Ottoman help against the Habsburgs); she wasn’t the last, either (even Philip III of Spain would later seek to cultivate relations with the Safavids to counter any Ottoman threat).

Read the rest there.