Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 58.djvu/237

 Herbert, earl of Montgomery, and died 1628–1629.

Oxford's second wife was Elizabeth, daughter of Thomas Trentham of Rocester Priory, Staffordshire; she was buried at Hackney on 3 Jan. 1612–13. By her he was father of Henry de Vere, eighteenth earl [q. v.]

[Cooper's Athenæ Cantabr. ii. 389–92, 554; Cal. State Papers, Dom.; Wright's Queen Elizabeth; Dugdale's Baronage, i. 199–200; Markham's Fighting Veres; Nicholas's Life of Sir Christopher Hatton; Martin A. S. Hume's Life of Lord Burghley; Walpole's Royal and Noble Authors; Cal. Hatfield Papers.] 

VERE, 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 (, 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 (, 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;