Jerome Bowes

Sir Jerome Bowes (died 1616) was an English ambassador to Russia and Member of Parliament in England.

Early life He was born into a Durham family, the son of John Bowes, and his wife Ann, née Gunville, whose family were from Gorleston, then in Suffolk. His name is included in the list of the gentlemen who followed Edward Clinton, to France, on his expedition to avenge the fall of Calais. It has been inferred from a casual mention of him by John Stowe that he was a client of Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester in 1571, but he was banished from court six years later for slanderous speech against him. John Milton, in his Brief History of Moscovia, gives an account of this embassy, taken from Richard Hakluyt. There are some additional anecdotes recorded in Samuel Pepys's Diary, told to him by a group of customs officers in 1662, eighty years after the event, and in Samuel Collins's Present State of Russia (1671).

Later years There is only fragmentary evidence for Bowes' subsequent activities. In a report by the lord chief baron of the exchequer he appears in a discreditable light, as having fraudulently dealt with a will under which he claimed (the record is undated, but assigned to 1587 in the Calendar of State Papers, Domestic). On 5 February 1592 a special licence was granted him to make drinking-glasses in England and Ireland for twelve years; He was elected to parliament in 1601 for Lancaster and 1604 for Reading. Russian diplomatic documents name Bowes as one of the English officials who were looking after the embassy of Grigoriy Mikulin in 1600-1601.

By 1599 he was living at Charing Cross, where, in 1607 his house was robbed in a well-documented case, in which a female servant was murdered. Bowes was buried on 28 March 1616 in Hackney Church. A portrait of him, painted in the year of his embassy, is in the Suffolk Collection.

Writings In his retirement from court he translated from the French an Apology for the Christians of France ... of the reformed religion (1579).