Henry Jermyn, 1st Baron Dover


The Lord Dover

Henry Jermyn, 1st Baron Dover
Bornc.1636
Rushbrooke Hall, Suffolk
Died6 April 1708
Cheveley, Cambridgeshire
Buried
Bruges, Belgium
Allegiance English Royalists (before 1660)
 England (1660–1688)
Jacobites (1688–1690)
CommandsLieutenant-General of the Royal Guard
Battles/warsWilliamite War in Ireland
Spouse(s)Judith Poley (m.1675)
RelationsThomas Jermyn (father)
Lord Jermyn (brother)
Lord St Albans (uncle)

Henry Jermyn, 3rd Baron Jermyn and 1st Baron Dover, 1st Jacobite Earl of Dover PC (c. 1636 – 6 April 1708) was an English courtier, peer and favourite of James II.[1]

Jermyn was born into a Royalist gentry family shortly before the English Civil War. During the exile of the royal family and after the Stuart Restoration in 1660, he was a member of the court of Charles II of England thanks to the influence of his powerful uncle, Henry Jermyn, 1st Earl of St Albans. At court he surpassed his uncle in reputation for profligacy and was the sometime lover of Anne Hyde, Lady Castlemaine, Lady Shrewsbury and Frances Jennings.[2][3]

A convert to Roman Catholicism, he was a childhood friend of James, Duke of York and received many honours upon James' accession to the throne in 1685. He remained loyal to James after the Glorious Revolution in 1688 and fought as a Jacobite during the Williamite War in Ireland, but in 1690 he pledged his loyalty to William and Mary. He was referred to in the Memoirs of the Count de Grammont as "Little Jermyn" and "the favoured of Venus and the desperate duellist".[4][5]

  1. ^ "Jermyn, Henry, third Baron Jermyn and Jacobite earl of Dover". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/14781. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  2. ^  One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the public domainChisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Dover, Henry Jermyn, Earl of". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 8 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 453. This cites:
  3. ^ Macaulay, Thomas Babington (1849). The History of England from the Accession of James the Second (Volume 2). Longman & Company. p. 47.
  4. ^ Hamilton (Count), Anthony (1902). Memoirs of the Count de Grammont. Great Britain: Unit Library. p. 93.
  5. ^ Ellis, George-James (1829). The Ellis Correspondence. Henry Colburn. p. 65.