Henry Jermyn, 1st Baron Dover

Henry Jermyn, 3rd Baron Jermyn and 1st Baron Dover PC (c. 1636–1708) was an English peer and supporter of James II.

Jermyn was the second son of Sir Thomas Jermyn, of Rushbrooke, Suffolk, who died in 1659, and his wife Rebecca Rodway, who married secondly Henry, 3rd Viscount Brouncker. He surpassed his uncle, Lord St Albans, in reputation for profligacy, figuring frequently as "the little Jermyn" in the Grammont Memoirs, as the lover of Lady Castlemaine, Lady Shrewsbury, Miss Jennings and other beauties of the court of Charles II of England.

According to rumour his most notable conquest was Charles's widowed sister Mary of Orange, whom he met several times during her brother's exile, and there were even stories that they were secretly married. Historians generally discount these rumours, but Charles II took them seriously, and reprimanded his sister for her lack of discretion, but with no effect: Mary sharply reminded her brother that his own love affairs hardly entitled him to judge her moral conduct. Charles was especially angry because of the similar rumours that Jermyn's uncle Lord St Albans had secretly married the Queen Dowager Henrietta Maria. As John Phillipps Kenyon remarked, to have one Jermyn as an in-law would have been bad enough; to have two would have been intolerable.

He was a noted duelist and a lifelong gambler. In a notorious duel with Colonel Thomas Howard, (younger brother of Charles Howard, 1st Earl of Carlisle), in August 1662, which Samuel Pepys refers to in his Diary, Jermyn was left for dead. He recovered, but his second Giles Rawlings was killed by Howard's second Colonel Carey Dillon, later the 5th Earl of Roscommon: the cause is said to have been the rivalry between Jermyn and Howard for the affections of Lady Shrewsbury, who was notorious for the number of her lovers.

...
Wikipedia