Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 15.djvu/423

  

DOYLE, THOMAS, D.D. (1793–1879), catholic divine, born on 21 Dec. 1793, was prosecuting his studies at St. Edmund's College, Ware, where he had acted as organist, when a sudden dearth of priests obliged the bishop, Dr. Poynter, to confer on him the priesthood in 1819 before he had finished his theological curriculum. He was sent to St. George's, then the Royal Belgian Chapel, in the London Road, Southwark, in 1820, and nine years later he became senior priest there. It was owing to his exertions that the large cathedral, dedicated to St. George, was built, from designs by Arthur Welby Pugin, in St. George's Fields, on the spot where in 1780 Lord George Gordon assembled his followers to march to the houses of parliament in order to protest against any concessions to the catholics. The works were begun in September 1840, and the building was consecrated on 4 July 1848. The Protestant Association issued a special tract on the occasion entitled ‘The Opening of the new Popish Mass House in St. George's Fields.’ The opening was attended by all the English, and several Irish, Scotch, and foreign bishops, and also 260 priests, together with members of the orders of Passionists, Dominicans, Cistercians, Benedictines, Franciscans, Oratorians, and Brothers of Charity. The church was the finest Roman catholic edifice built in England in post-reformation times. When the papal hierarchy was re-established in 1850, Doyle was constituted provost of the cathedral chapter of the newly erected see of Southwark. He was a great friend of Cardinal Wiseman, and of John, earl of Shrewsbury, who employed him in several matters of trust and confidence. His frequent letters to the ‘Tablet,’ under the signature of ‘Father Thomas,’ were full of a quaint humour peculiar to himself. He died at St. George's on 6 June 1879, and was buried in the cathedral.



D'OYLIE or D'OYLY, THOMAS, M.D. (1548?–1603), Spanish scholar, third son of John D'Oyly of Greenland House in the parish of Hambleden, Buckinghamshire, by his wife Frances, daughter of Andrew Edmonds of Cressing Temple, Essex, and formerly a maid of honour to Queen Elizabeth, was born in Oxfordshire in or about 1548. Elected fellow probationer of Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1563, he took his degrees in arts, B.A. 24 July 1564, M.A. 21 Oct. 1569, and supplicated for the bachelorship of medicine in 1571, but unsuccessfully (Reg. of the Univ. of Oxford, Oxford Hist. Soc., p. 253). He therefore left Oxford with a resolve to study at some foreign university, when, happening to attract the notice of Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, he came to be employed abroad in a civil as well as a medical capacity. He also became intimate with Francis Bacon, and, on going abroad, travelled for some time with the latter's brother, Anthony Bacon, as appears by a letter dated 11 July 1580 from Francis, then a student at Gray's Inn, to D'Oylie at Paris, in which he signs himself ‘your very friend’ (Addit. MS. 4109, f. 122, copy of letter by Dr. T. Birch). The Bacon and D'Oylie families were connected, D'Oylie's eldest brother, Sir Robert D'Oylie, having married Elizabeth Bacon, half-sister to Francis (, Annals, 8vo edit. vol. ii. pt. ii. p. 210). About 1581 D'Oylie proceeded M.D. at Basle; he was certainly doctor in 1582, for he is thus described in an endorsement by the Earl of Leicester on one of his letters to his lordship, dated ‘from Antwerp ye 28 of Maye 1582’ (Cotton MS. Galba, C. vii. f. 233). In this letter he gives particulars of the siege of Oudenarde, and would appear to have then held a medical appointment in the army at Antwerp. He continued some time abroad; and there are further letters from him to the Earl of Leicester, dated at Calais, 12 Nov. 1585 and 14 Nov. 1585, and at Flushing, 23 Nov. 1585. In the first he gives a highly diverting account of an adventure that befell him and his ‘companie,’ who, having ‘put out from Grauelinge the 13 of October, the 14 of the same weare taken not farr from Dunkerk … and wear rifled of al their goods and apparrel unto their dubletts and hose,’ ‘with daggers at our throts,’ adds D'Oylie; he mentions, however, that they had found nothing in his chest but ‘phisick and astronomie books,’ he having ‘drowned all his lordship's letters out of a porthole.’ From the ‘hel hounds of Dunkerk, as he calls them, he had then just escaped to Calais (ib. viii. ff. 206–8). On his return to England D'Oylie settled in London, where, having been previously admitted a licentiate on 21 May 1585, he became a candidate of the College of Physicians on 28 Sept. 1586, and a fellow on the last day of February 1588. He was incorporated at Oxford on his doctor's degree 18 Dec. 1592. The following year he was appointed censor, and was re-elected in 1596 and 1598. At the beginning of the last-named year, as he himself informs us,