Friend of Elizabethan exiles: the colourful life of Jane Dormer

Thomas Cromwell’s biographer Diarmaid MacCulloch once told me that my father’s family, the Dormers, had been servants of the great enforcer of Henry VIII’s Reformation. This may have been a tease. It is a matter of family pride that Jane Dormer’s great- uncle, the Carthusian monk Sebastian Newdigate, was executed for refusing to accept the Royal Supremacy. Jane, Duchess of Feria (1538-1612), was named after his pious sister, her grandmother.

Most of Jane Newdigate’s Dormer descendants remained stubbornly Catholic over the centuries of persecution that followed, but they were never aggressive about it. Under Elizabeth I, the Dormers paid fines as recusants rather than attend Church of England services, and hid priests so they could hear the banned Catholic Mass. Mainly, they just kept their heads down.

Jane was different. Though a mere daughter (and such creatures not ‘family’, according to one of my male relatives), she is remembered as Dormer rather than Suarez de Figueroa, because, as Simon Courtauld’s biography shows, she was one of the most colourful figures of the Tudor era. As an English Catholic, she went nose to nose with Elizabeth I, channelling something of the spirit of her dead mistress, Mary I. Her father, Sir William Dormer, had been made a Knight of the Bath on Mary’s accession, as a reward for resisting the pretensions of Lady Jane Grey, the ‘Nine Days’ Queen’. His 16-year-old daughter attended on the Catholic queen at her coronation as one of her maids of honour.

Jane was soon known as a beauty: ‘Dormer is a darling, and of such lively hue/ That whoso feeds his eyes on her may soon her beauty rue,’ wrote the poet Richard Edwards. She was also judged efficient and trustworthy.