# Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Vere, Francis

​VERE, Sir FRANCIS (1560–1609), general of the English troops in the service of the united provinces of the Netherlands, the second son of Geoffrey Vere, was born most probably at Crepping Hall, Essex, in 1560. The father, Geoffrey Vere, brother of John de Vere, sixteenth earl [q. v.], married, in 1556, Elizabeth, daughter of Richard Hardekyn (d. 1558) of Wotton House, Castle Hedingham, Essex. He survived the eldest brother about six years, and the widow then settled at Kirby Hall, near Hedingham, where Francis and his brothers, (Sir) Horace Vere [q. v.] and Robert, were brought up. His sister Frances married, in 1601, Robert Harcourt [q. v.] of Stanton Harcourt.
When Francis was but two years old he received a legacy of 20l. from his uncle, the sixteenth Earl of Oxford. Among the ‘Carmina Scholæ Paulinæ in regni Elizabethæ initium’ (Brit. Mus. Royal MS. 12 A. lxvii. f. xviii.) are some Latin elegiacs signed ‘ffranciscus Verus.’ As, however, these verses were probably written in 1558, nothing can safely be deduced from this appearance of the name.
Francis and his brother Robert were initiated in the military art by old Sir William Browne, who had served for many years in the Low Countries (Lodge; Brown, Genesis, p. 834), and in 1580, when he was barely twenty, Francis made with Captain Francis Allen ‘a voyage to Polonia,’ possibly to serve in the Polish army (Birch, Lives, i. 57). Before he came of age Vere had decided to adopt the profession of a soldier. Elizabeth, spurred to action by the murder of the Prince of Orange, having decided in the summer of 1585 to send a small English army under the Earl of Leicester to assist the revolted provinces, the drum was beaten all over England for volunteers, and early in December Vere joined the expeditionary force at Colchester, and three days later set sail from Harwich for Flushing and The Hague. Having sailed merely as a volunteer, Vere had no definite status in Leicester's army; but in February 1586 he succeeded in attaching himself to the suite of Peregrine Bertie, lord Willoughby de Eresby [q. v.], who had married his first cousin, Lady Mary de Vere. Willoughby was given the command of a troop of horse, in which Vere commenced his active service in the Netherlands. Within a month of his arrival Willoughby was made governor of the important town of Bergen-op-Zoom, and there, in May, Francis Vere took part in a smart brush with the enemy, in which a convoy of four hundred and fifty wagons was cut off on the Antwerp road by Willoughby, and three hundred men were slain. Two months later he took part, under Prince Maurice, Sir Philip Sidney, and Willoughby, in the night march to Axel and the surprise of that place. He took part, too, in the sieges of Doesborgh (August) and Zutphen (September). Shortly after these affairs his name was included in an official list of ‘valiant young gentlemen’ competent to command a company; and in the course of the autumn he was nominated captain of a hundred and fifty men in the Bergen-op-Zoom garrison, to receive pay from 12 Nov. 1586. In the spring of 1587 his troop was temporarily moved to Ostend (Acts of Privy Council, new ser. xv. 90).
In June 1587 Alexander of Parma opened a campaign by the siege of Sluys, assembling an army at Bruges early in the month for that purpose. Supplies and troops were hurried into the threatened town by the allies, under the command of Sir Roger Williams [q. v.], and it was on the ramparts of Sluys (the scene of former English victories) that Vere, in the company of the brave Sir Thomas Baskerville [q. v.], won his spurs against the renowned tercio viejo, the pick of the Spanish infantry, the model of the military organisation of Europe. The siege was prolonged by heroic efforts until 2 Aug., when Francis Vere, ‘twice wounded, but not disabled,’ marched out with the garrison to embark for Flushing, and was henceforth spoken of as ‘young Vere who fought at Sluys.’ Upon the resignation of Leicester in the ensuing December, Willoughby succeeded as general of the English auxiliary forces, and Vere's hopes of promotion were thereby increased.
In October 1588 he won great applause under the governor, Sir Thomas Morgan [q. v.], at Bergen-op-Zoom, upon which strong place the Duke of Parma, after the defeat of the Spanish armada, had concentrated his attention. The keys of the place were the two water-forts commanding the communication between the town and the Scheldt; ​the command of one of these was entrusted to Vere, and he distinguished himself by foiling a treacherous assault upon the northern of these sconces, led by Sir William Stanley (1548–1630) [q. v.] and some high Spanish officers. This discomfiture was so signal that it effected the raising of the siege and the withdrawal of Parma. Vere had well earned the knighthood that he received at the hands of Willoughby upon the conclusion of the siege (25 Oct.). He obtained leave for England, went home with a letter from Lord Willoughby to the lord treasurer, dated 3 Nov. 1588, and was by Burghley introduced to the queen. He spent a little over two months at his home in Essex, and returned to the theatre of war in February 1589, when he was appointed sergeant-major-general of the forces, or second in command to the general. Willoughby, however, resigned his post finally (after several futile efforts) in May 1589. A number of veteran officers of distinction, including Baskerville, Williams, Drury, Wilford, and Sir John Norris, were withdrawn from the Netherlands to serve either in France or Ireland, and the path was thus cleared for a young officer of approved valour and conduct, who, without interfering with the prerogatives of the governors of the cautionary towns, or claiming in any degree the state and the viceregal pretensions of a generalissimo, could act as the real leader of the English troops in the field. From August 1589 Sir Francis Vere, with the rank of sergeant-major-general (and pay of 20s. soon raised to 40s. per diem), was placed in command of all her majesty's soldiers out of the garrisons in the Netherlands. The supreme commands were reserved nominally for the general and lieutenant-general, but these posts were never filled.
The first operations under Vere's orders were the two expeditions for the relief of Rheinberg, the second of which, in October 1589, was led with the utmost dash and daring by the sergeant-major-general in person. He spent the following winter in improving the organisation of his force by forming a depôt at Utrecht, by remodelling as far as possible his list of captains, and by filling up the cadres and working out an efficient system of checks to prevent frauds. During December he played a part in the ingenious stratagem of Prince Maurice by which the town of Breda was won from the Spaniards. In June 1590, being ‘wonderfully skilled in the work of intrenching’ (Markham, Epistles of War, 1622), he personally superintended the construction of the fort of Knodsenburg, designed to threaten Nymeguen; and next month he directed a somewhat risky enterprise in the escalade of the detached fortress of Recklinghausen in Westphalia. In November he was back at Flushing incorporating four hundred recruits from England in his little army. In May 1591 by a clever ruse he secured the possession of the Zutphen sconces, and so smoothed the way for the prompt capture of the town by Maurice. Next month he led an unsuccessful attack upon a breach made in the walls of Deventer, but the town surrendered very soon afterwards. In September he concerted some brilliant manœuvres for the relief of Knodsenburg, leading up to the capture of Nymeguen on 12 Oct. In July 1592 he was again wounded at the assault upon Steenwerk preceding the surrender of that town; and in August, despite orders from home to the contrary, he dashed to the relief of Maurice when in danger from a sortie made by the garrison of Koevorden.
During the winter he was employed on the uncongenial duty of shipping off companies which he had drilled and trained to serve under other commanders in France or Ireland. There were left, however, four thousand effective English troops in the Netherlands at the commencement of 1593, and Gertruydenburg (Geertruidenberg) surrendered to Maurice and Vere in the early summer of this year. The great event of 1594 was the siege and capture of Groningen in the north of the united provinces. Vere worked in the trenches side by side with the regiments of Friesland and Zeeland; many of his contingent fell, and among those promoted to fill up vacancies were his brothers, Horace and Robert. Sir Francis himself had a narrow escape, the buckler under which he was reconnoitring the walls being struck by a large shot. Upon the surrender of the town on 15 July, Vere was despatched with a force of five thousand to escort the youthful Count Philip of Nassau to Sedan through an enemy's country, a dangerous service, which he performed in the face of a large hostile force without mishap.
Meanwhile, in July 1593, there had been a great improvement in Vere's position. Fearful lest the queen might possibly withdraw him from the Netherlands, the States-General offered him eight hundred florins a month in order to secure the retention of his services, and his acceptance of the offer was graciously approved by Elizabeth. At the same time he by no means escaped the occasional jealousy of the queen or the reprimands of Burghley for his slackness in her majesty's service, in contrast to his active zeal on behalf of the Dutch. Since 1589, when he was temporarily suspected of having ​fomented a mutiny in Gertruydenburg, his relations with the States-General, with Maurice and Barneveldt, and with Sir Thomas Bodley [q. v.], the queen's envoy at The Hague, had been uniformly good. In 1595 Philip of Nassau conceived a daring scheme (to which Vere gave a reluctant assent) for surprising the Spanish force on the Rhine, near Wesel, under the nonagenarian Mondragon. But Mondragon, though ninety, was still the ablest of the Spanish generals after the death of Parma, and he lured the Dutch and English cavalry into a most skilfully prepared ambush, in which Vere's brother Robert lost his life by a lance-wound in the face. Sir Francis took the sad news home to his mother. On his visit to England he was specially consulted by the queen, and chosen by her to conduct the confidential negotiations with the Dutch in view of the counterstroke which it was decided to aim at Spain in a more vital part than the Netherlands.
On 1 March 1596 Vere arrived at Middelburg. He found the States-General somewhat inclined to evade his propositions, but succeeded in giving them the requisite character of urgency, and he sailed at the end of the following month with a thousand of his veterans (in Dutch pay) to join at Dover the Cadiz expedition under the joint command of Lord Howard of Effingham and Essex. Vere was lord-marshal, lieutenant-general, and one of the six members of Essex's council of war. He could not altogether escape the rivalries from which he was so happily exempt in the Low Countries, but he took the lead with an excellent steadying effect at the capture of the town of Cadiz, in which Essex himself impetuously led the stormers (21 June). The expedition, with Vere on the Rainbow, arrived safely at Plymouth, after the sack on 8 Aug., and Vere passed some of the succeeding winter at the court. He was again to serve as a sea captain in the summer of 1597 in the Islands' voyage, and we are told that he applied himself in the interval to the study of ‘sea-cases.’ He sailed in the Mary Rose, master John Winter, on 9 July 1597, and again, after putting back from stress of weather and a most severe ‘bucketing,’ on 17 Aug.; like his comrades, he had little opportunity of adding to his reputation by this injudiciously managed sea-raid. On his return he defended the conduct of his general before Elizabeth. Nevertheless the seeds of dissension seem to have been sown during the voyage between Vere and Essex, who had hitherto been staunch friends and correspondents.
In the autumn of 1597 Vere was once more in Holland, and at The Hague was in frequent intercourse with Barneveldt; it was mainly through the latter's influence in the States-General that at Vere's instance a more aggressive policy was decided upon in December against the formidable Spanish infantry. A force was accordingly secretly collected by Prince Maurice at Gertruydenburg to attack the advanced guard of the Spaniards under the Count of Varras at Turnhout. The English contingent, forming nearly a third of the little army of between five thousand and six thousand cavalry and infantry, was under the command of Vere and Sir Robert Sidney. A complete surprise was effected, and Varras had barely time to effect a retreat in the small hours of the morning of 24 Jan. 1598 before Maurice occupied the town. An immediate pursuit was counselled by Vere, who, with a small force of cavalry, succeeded in effectually cutting off the infantry of the enemy's rearguard and securing six hundred prisoners. His action was warmly applauded, and Elizabeth wrote herself to signify her ‘good liking’ of Vere's services.
In May it was decided by the English government (having regard to the rapidly increasing prosperity and burden-bearing capacity of the united provinces) that the relations between England and Holland should be revised and a new treaty negotiated on a basis which should render the war less burdensome to England. With a view to these negotiations, Vere was selected by the queen and Burghley as special envoy to the States-General, with George Gilpin [q. v.], the resident minister at The Hague, as his colleague. He was instructed on 7 June 1598 to remind the states of the sacrifices England had made on their behalf, and to point out that if the Dutch persisted in their resolution to make no peace with the Spanish monarchy, the queen would still stand by them, but on condition only of a repayment of a portion of their debt and a regular contribution towards the maintenance of the English garrisons in Holland (see Instructions in Cotton. MS. Galba D. xii. 159).
On 18 June Vere was received with his colleague at The Hague, and delivered a speech embracing the various points of his instructions, whereupon, after numerous conferences, a satisfactory settlement was arrived at—the states acknowledging a debt of 800,000l., and stipulating that they would contribute 30,000l. annually towards the cost of the English troops in the Netherlands. The new treaty was signed on 16 Aug. 1598. Twelve days before this Burghley died, but Vere was quite secure in the con​fidence of Sir Robert Cecil, and during the autumn he received a convincing mark of royal favour by his appointment to the governorship of the important cautionary town of Brill (De Briel) and his promotion to be general of the queen's forces in the Netherlands and of the English troops in the pay of the states. He went out to Brill to organise his new government in the early spring of 1599, being accompanied by Edward Cecil (afterwards Viscount Wimbledon) [q. v.] and by his brother Horace. He arrived to find the Dutch straining every nerve to save the island and town of Bommel, situate in the Maas between Dordrecht and Nymeguen, from a carefully concerted assault by the admiral of Aragon. Early in May the admiral captured Crèvecœur, occupied the land, and laid siege to Bommel. Early in July Vere crossed the Maas with six thousand men, and made a brilliant attack on the Spanish entrenchments, and, the vigilance of the allies being seconded by a mutiny in the camp of the enemy, the Spaniards had to beat an ignominious retreat before the close of the month.
In the summer of 1600 the States-General, upon the advice of Barneveldt, resolved to carry the war into the enemy's country by landing a powerful force on the Flemish coast and laying siege to Nieuport, a few miles south-west of Ostend. The Dutch army effected a landing in safety during the last days of June, and on 1 July arrived the news that the Archduke Albert was approaching with a large force from Ghent with a view of preventing their further advance. To Vere was entrusted the command of the allied vanguard consisting of 4,350 men, of whom sixteen hundred were English, and when it was decided to give battle in the dunes, on 2 July, he planted his vanguard in an advantageous position on two sandhills and a ridge about two miles north of Nieuport. The bulk of the cavalry was drawn up on the seashore, and the reserves under Prince Maurice about three hundred yards south of Vere's forlorn hope on the ‘East Hill.’ The battle began about 2 p.m. with a desperate struggle at push of pike between the 250 English posted on this hill and the pick of the Spanish infantry. Vere designates this portion of the fight as the ‘Bloody Morsel,’ his men being gradually overborne by overwhelming numbers. Messenger after messenger was despatched by Prince Maurice, but brought no reinforcement; the commander rode in person down into the hollow to cheer his men, and when retreat became imperative, after receiving a musket-shot in the thigh and another in the leg, he was with difficulty extricated from his dead horse. His wounds compelled his retirement from the field, but Prince Maurice at this juncture rallied the broken vanguard and advanced with his main force to the West Hill, where he made a determined stand. Furious charges by Sir Horace Vere, Ogle, Fairfax, and Sir Edward Cecil destroyed the cohesion of the Spanish tercios, and about four o'clock they broke and fled. The archduke made his escape to Bruges. Zapena and the admiral of Aragon were taken prisoners, while about a third of the Spanish army were put hors de combat. Of the sixteen hundred English, no fewer than eight hundred were either killed or wounded. Vere's wounds proved serious, but his name was in every one's mouth, and he was gladdened by a letter from the queen, to whom Prince Maurice had written attributing the victory in great measure to the judgment and valour of the English general (Sidney Papers, ii. 204; cf. Hexham, True Relation of the Battell of Nieuport in Flanders … Delft, 1641; A New Ballad of the Great Overthrow .. gave to the Archduke, 1600, s. sh. fol.).
The battle of Nieuport was the most signal victory won by the Dutch patriots in the field during the war of independence, but the defence of Ostend was of even greater moment to their cause. On 5 July 1601 the Archduke Albert began the siege with twenty thousand men and fifty siege guns in position. The States-General rightly attached vital importance to the defence of this outlying post, which they consequently transferred from the hands of Vandernood to the more experienced management of Vere, to whom ample powers were confided. After a brief visit on the part of Vere to England in quest of recruits, the Dutch governor delivered up the keys to Sir Francis on 9 July 1601, and the strength of the garrison was raised from two thousand to three thousand five hundred. After the sieges of Leyden and Antwerp, perhaps no siege of the period attracted more universal attention (references to the siege of Ostend appeared in Tourneur's Atheists Tragedie and in other pieces of the day). The governor's first care was to strengthen the defences of the Polder or port meadow, which, though situated outside the wall, would have afforded a most dangerous base of attack for the enemy, and he next provided for the safe entry and unloading of ships from the sea bearing supplies. Shortly after he had completed these sagacious precautions he was unhappily wounded severely in the head by a stray shot, and had to leave Ostend for a few weeks. He returned on 19 Sept. to find ​his garrison still further augmented by recruits from England. The scions of distinguished families in Scotland and France, as well as from Holland and England, flocked to the place to learn the art of war under a veteran so distinguished. By some of these young ‘popinjays,’ who came to Ostend not for discipline but for diversion, Vere was considerably annoyed, and he took no pains to conceal how much he deprecated their presence. Conspicuous among this class was the Earl of Northumberland, who left the place in high dudgeon at the ‘discommodities of the place’ and the ‘little observance’ done him. The severity of Vere's discipline may have had something to do with the dwindling of the garrison, reduced by December to little more than two thousand men. A gale of wind prevented the arrival of any reinforcement, and supplies were running short. Vere realised his weakness when on 4 Dec. the archduke delivered a general assault, which was repulsed with the utmost difficulty. He managed to gain a little time by some sham negotiations with the enemy (see Extremities urging the Lord-general Sir F. Veare to offer the late Anti-parle with the Archduke Albertus, London, 1602, 4to); and happily before the month closed five men-of-war arrived from Zeeland with men and material, which they managed to disembark under a heavy fire. In January 1602 the enemy began preparing for another general assault. By this time the Spaniards had fired nearly two hundred thousand shots into the town, and scarcely a whole house was left standing. On the night of 7 Jan. they made a desperate assault upon the breaches at the north-west corner of the town, between the works called Porc-espic (ravelin) and Helmund (bastion), near which point Vere himself conducted the operations. Since the new year, however, Vere had considerably strengthened his position, and after several hours' fighting the enemy were repulsed at all points, the opening of the western sluice by Vere's orders at a critical moment of the retreat washing many of the besiegers into the sea. This triumphant defence was followed by a lull in the attack, and on 7 March Vere was withdrawn from Ostend (which held out two years and a half longer) in order to take up a command in the field. Before doing so, however, he went over to England to obtain permission from the queen to levy more recruits for service in the Netherlands. While about the court he was challenged to a duel by the Earl of Northumberland, who had felt himself personally slighted by Vere at Ostend, but he declined to meet the earl while he himself was engaged upon public service (cf. Gent. Mag. 1854, vol. i.; Addit. MS. 25247, ff. 308–11).
Returning without delay to The Hague, Vere found himself at the head of a splendid force of eight thousand Englishmen in the pay of the states. On 7 July siege was laid by Vere and Prince Maurice to the small town of Grave, near Nymeguen. There, in the following month while inspecting the trenches, Sir Francis was struck by a bullet just under the right eye. He lay in a critical condition at Ryswyk for several months. In January 1603 he was active again, and engaged upon an arduous conflict with the States-General, from whom he demanded jurisdiction over his own men, untrammelled by any interference by Dutch magistrates. The Dutch authorities seemed inclined to concede the point to their veteran commander, ‘second only to Maurice in their army;’ but on 21 March Vere was stunned by the news of the death of Queen Elizabeth, which he received through Prince Maurice at Ryswyk. He took measures to have James I proclaimed in Holland, and he was continued by the new king in the governorship of the Brill; but in 1604 James made a treaty of peace with Spain, and in the summer of that year Vere retired from the service of the states, retaining only the honorary command of his regiment of horse, and settled on his property at Tilbury Lodge, near Kirby Hall, the home of his mother and elder brother. In August 1605 he paid a last visit to The Hague, bearing letters from James I to the States-General. He took leave of his old comrade Prince Maurice and of the states in May 1606, and returned to England next month, bearing with him a substantial proof of Dutch regard in the form of a pension of 500l. annually. On 15 June 1606, upon his return to England, he was appointed governor of Portsmouth and the isle of Portsea, in succession to the Earl of Devon. Henceforth his time was passed between Portsmouth and Tilbury Lodge. On 26 Oct. 1607 he married at Mitcham a girl of sixteen, Elizabeth, daughter of John Dent (d. 1595), a citizen of London, by his second wife, Alice (Grant).
Vere spent his unwonted leisure in inditing his straightforward and soldierlike ‘Commentaries,’ or short narratives of ‘the diverse pieces of service wherein he had command.’ These notes were jotted down for private circulation only, but in 1657 they were published at Cambridge as ‘The Commentaries of Sir Francis Vere,’ in small folio, by Dr. William Dillingham [q. v.], who had accidentally lighted upon the manuscript ​(Brit. Mus. Grenville, with autograph letter of Sir F. Vere inserted). The ‘Commentaries’ have been reprinted in the seventh volume of Arber's ‘English Garner’ (1883). Between 1605 and his death Vere made generous donations in money and books to the library which his old friend Bodley was founding at Oxford.
Vere lived to see the coronation of his life's work by the truce of April 1609 recognising the independence of the Dutch republic. He died in London somewhat suddenly, and at the early age of forty-nine, on 28 Aug. 1609. He left no issue. He was buried next day, with a soldier's funeral, in Westminster Abbey, where a splendid monument in black marble (modelled upon the tomb of Engelbert of Nassau at Breda) was erected to his memory by his young widow. She married, as her second husband, in August 1613, Sir Patrick Murray. The only portrait of Vere is a half-length profile, now at Welbeck Abbey; this was engraved by Faithorne to illustrate the ‘Commentaries,’ and is reproduced in Mr. Fairfax Murray's ‘Welbeck Catalogue,’ 1894, p. 132. It depicts a young man with aquiline features and an alert and resolute cast of expression. In October 1609 a ‘Funerall Poeme’ commemorating Vere came from the pen of the dramatist Cyril Tourneur [q. v.]
Vere came to the front in an age of great commanders like Drake and Ralegh, Norris and Williams, and, trained as he was in the school of Parma (the greatest general of the day when in the maturity of his powers), he was rivalled by few, if indeed by any, of his contemporaries in soldierly accomplishment. For Vere was not only a strategist and a leader and organiser of men in the field, but he was also quite at home on shipboard; a capable artilleryman and scoutmaster, and an expert engineer. He was, moreover, a diplomatist who combined tact with modesty, and was thus able to maintain an exceptionally difficult position with such economy and success that he was singled out more than once for delicate diplomatic missions. It is true that, unlike some of his greatest contemporaries, he did not excel as a courtier. Comparatively young as he was at the close of his active service, he was regarded as the Nestor of his profession, and as a transmitter of the best military tradition of his day he is entitled to rank almost with Spinola, who held him in the highest admiration. Among Vere's pupils in the military art, in addition to his brother Horace, were Sir Thomas Fairfax, Sir Ferdinando Gorges, Francis and Gervase Markham, Edward Wingfield, Miles Standish, and many other notable soldiers both in the old country and in New England.
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