Unable, however, to recover at Lisbon any money, he made his way to the Spanish court at Madrid. There he was held ‘in great reputation and credit.’ He was promised admission to the order of San Iago, and a formal commission was given to him as general or admiral of an ‘armado’ destined to attack the Turks and Moors in the Levant, and to hamper the Dutch trade there. In pursuit of this project, Shirley, in July 1607, arrived at Naples, where he was admitted to the council of state and war; but he found time to pay a brief visit at Prague to the Emperor Rudolf, who created him a count of the empire after he had recounted his experiences in Morocco. In the spring of 1608 he visited various towns of Italy, collecting stores in his capacity of ‘admiral of the Levant seas,’ and on returning to Madrid was granted by the king fifteen thousand ducats ‘towards his charge’ as a mark of approval of his activity. In 1609 Shirley set out from Sicily in command of a fleet for an attack on the Turks and Moors in the Mediterranean, but the only practical outcome of his ostentatious preparations, which were regarded with outspoken suspicion by English observers, was a futile descent on the island of Mitylene. His failure was followed by his dismissal from his command, and he never recovered the blow.
Completely discredited, and in direst poverty, he made his way in 1611 from Naples to Madrid, where he met and quarrelled with his brother Robert. In pity of his misfortunes, the king of Spain allowed him a pension of three thousand ducats a year; but the greater portion was allotted to the payment of his heavy debts, and the residue barely kept him from starving. He tried to ingratiate himself with the jesuits, and sank to concocting impracticable plots against his enemies. In 1611 he began to compile, and in 1613 he contrived to publish in London, a tedious account of his early adventures in Persia. In 1619 Sir Francis Cottington, the English ambassador at Madrid, reported of Sir Anthony: ‘The poor man comes sometimes to my house, and is as full of vanity as ever he was, making himself believe that he shall one day be a great prince, when for the present he wants shoes to wear.’ He remained at Madrid in beggary till his death. He sometimes called himself the Conde de Leste, and was constantly obtruding new and impracticable projects on the notice of the council of state. Wadsworth, in his ‘English and Spanish Pilgrim,’ 1625, stated that among the English fugitives at the court of Spain ‘the first and foremost was Sir Anthony Sherley, who stiles himself Earl of the sacred Roman Empire, and hath from his Catholic Majesty a pension of 2,000 ducats per annum, all of which in respect of his prodigality is as much as nothing. This Sir Anthony Sherley is a great plotter and projector in matters of state, and undertakes by sea stratagems, to invade and ruinate his own country, a just treatise of whose actions would take up a whole volume.’ He died after 1635. He left no issue.
Shirley published in 1613: 1. ‘Sir Anthony Sherley: his Relation of his Travels into Persia, the Dangers and Distresses which befel him in his Passage … his magnificent Entertainment in Persia, his honourable Imployment there hence as Ambassadour to the Princes of Christendome, the cause of his disappointment therein, with his Advice to his brother, Sir Robert Sherley; also a true relation of the great Magnificence … of Abas, now King of Persia,’ London, 1613. It is a dull book, abounding in vapid moralising. The original manuscript is in the Bodleian Library (Ashmole 829). A Dutch translation appears in P. van der Aa's ‘Naaukeurige Versameling der … Zee-en Land Reysen’ (1707); vol. lxxix.
A rare engraving (in an oval) by Ægidius Sadeler is dated 1612, and is sometimes prefixed to copies of Sir Anthony's ‘Travels’ (1613). Another rare print has some Latin elegiacs below the portrait. A marble bust is at All Souls' College, Oxford. The half-length portrait dated 1588, belonging to Sir Thomas Western, bart., of Rivenhall, Essex, which has usually been described as a picture of Sir Anthony, is really a portrait of his brother-in-law, Sir John Shurley.
[Most of the information accessible about Sir Anthony and his two brothers is collected in The Three Brothers: or the Travels and Adventures of Sir Anthony, Sir Robert, and Sir Thomas Sherley, in Persia, Russia, Turkey, and Spain, &c., with portraits, London, 1825; in The Sherley Brothers, by one of the same House (Evelyn Philip Shirley), Roxburghe Club, 1848; and in E. P. Shirley's Stemmata Shirleiana, London, 1841 (new edit. 1873). A brief summary of Sir Anthony's career appears in Burrows's Worthies of All Souls', and some of his letters to Essex and Cecil are calendared with the Hatfield MSS. and among the State Papers. At least five more or less full accounts of Shirley's adventures in Persia are extant. The first, A True Report of Sir A. Shierlie's Journey … by two Gentlemen who followed him the whole time of his travail, was published in 1600; a second, ‘New and large discourse,’ by William Parry [q. v.], appeared in 1601; a third, ‘Three English Brothers … Sir Anthony Sherley his Em-
