Sir Thomas Glover was English Ambassador to the Sublime Porte of the Ottoman Empire

Ottoman Empire

The Ottoman EmpireIt was usually referred to as the "Ottoman Empire", the "Turkish Empire", the "Ottoman Caliphate" or more commonly "Turkey" by its contemporaries...

 in Constantinople

Constantinople

Constantinople was the capital of the Roman, Eastern Roman, Byzantine, Latin, and Ottoman Empires. Throughout most of the Middle Ages, Constantinople was Europe's largest and wealthiest city.-Names:...

 from 1606 - 1611.

Glover was born to a Protestant family, his great uncle had been burnt at the stake for his beliefs during the reign of Queen Mary

Mary I of England

Mary I was queen regnant of England and Ireland from July 1553 until her death.She was the only surviving child born of the ill-fated marriage of Henry VIII and his first wife Catherine of Aragon. Her younger half-brother, Edward VI, succeeded Henry in 1547...

, while during the reign of Elizabeth I his father rose to become Sheriff of London. According to Scottish author and traveller William Lithgow

William Lithgow (traveller and author)

William Lithgow , traveller, writer and alleged spy, born at Lanark, South Lanarkshire, Scotland, claimed at the end of his various peregrinations to have tramped 36,000 miles on foot....

  Glover was born to an English father and a Polish mother and was born and raised in Constantinople, where Glover served as secretary to the English Ambassadors Edward Barton

Edward Barton (English diplomat)

Sir Edward Barton was Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, appointed by Queen Elizabeth I of England.Barton went to Constantinople in 1578, in the pay of the Levant Company, as secretary to the founder of the English embassy in the city, William Harborne and in 1588 succeeded Harborne as ambassador....

 and Sir Henry Lello before succeeding Lello as ambassador in 1606. Fluent in Turkish, Greek, Italian and Polish he was a competent diplomat and respected in the court. He is known to have imprisoned the catholic traveller and scholar Hugh Holland

Hugh Holland

Hugh Holland , the son of Robert Holland, was born in Denbigh in the north of Wales. He was educated at Westminster School under William Camden, where he excelled in classics, and proceeded in 1589 to Trinity College, Cambridge on a scholarship...

 for speaking out against Elizabeth.

The English writer William Strachey

William Strachey

William Strachey was an English writer whose works are among the primary sources for the early history of the English colonisation of North America...

 served as his secretary for a period and he also gave lodging to other travllers and writers including the fore-mentioned Lithgow and George Sandys

George Sandys

George Sandys was an English traveller, colonist and poet.-Life:He was born in Bishopsthorpe, the seventh and youngest son of Edwin Sandys, archbishop of York. He studied at St Mary Hall, Oxford, but took no degree...

.

Glover's wife Anne, a Polish woman he had met and married in Constantinople , died and was buried in the city in 1612.