Thomas D'Oylie

Thomas D'Oylie, or D'Oyly ( – 1603), was a leading English physician and Spanish scholar of the Elizabethan era.

Background He was the third son of John D'Oylie of Greenlands House, Hambleden, Buckinghamshire and Chislehampton, Oxfordshire, and his wife Frances Edmondes, daughter of Andrew Edmondes of Cressing Temple, Essex. Her mother was Elizabeth Bledlow (died 1556), who after Andrew's death remarried the Welsh statesman John Williams, 1st Baron Williams of Thame. Frances was a former maid of honour to Elizabeth I, and was frequently at Court in her later years. In a humorous letter to Leicester from Calais in 1585, he described having set out by ship from Gravelines, only to be seized and searched at dagger point by "the hell-hounds of Dunkirk", sent by the Governor of Dunkirk to apprehend him (the "Dunkirkers" were pro-Spanish and notorious pirates). However, the "hell-hounds" failed to find the incriminating letters they were looking for, which Thomas had prudently thrown out the porthole. and was buried in the Hospital church, St Bartholomew-the-Less, Smithfield.

Anne seems to have died between 1598 and 1602. They had three sons, Norris, Michael and Francis (a late child, born in 1597, when his parents had been married almost 30 years), later a judge in Ireland, and was the mother of the noted Benedictine scholar Serenus de Cressy.