FLETCHER, GILES (c. 1548-1611), English author, son of Richard Fletcher, vicar of Cranbrook, Kent, and father of the poets Phineas and Giles Fletcher, was born in 1S48 or 1549, and educated at Eton and King's college, Cambridge. In 1580 he married Joan Sheafe, of Cranbrook. In 1585 he sat in parliament for Winchelsea. He was employed on diplomatic service in Scot land, Germany and Holland, and in 1588 was sent to Russia to the court of Tsar Theodore, with instructions to conclude an alliance between England and Russia, to restore English trade, and to obtain better conditions for the English Russia company. The factor of the company, Jerome Horsey, had already obtained large concessions through the favour of the protector, Boris Godunov, but when Dr. Fletcher reached Moscow in 1588 he found that Godunov's interest was alienated, and that the Russian Government was contemplating an alliance with Spain. He was badly lodged and treated with contempt, and was not allowed to forward letters to England, but the English victory over the Armada and his own patience secured for English traders ex clusive rights of trading on the Volga and their security from the infliction of torture. He returned to England in 5589 in company with Jerome Horsey, and in 1591 he published Of the Russe Commonwealth, a comprehensive account of Russian geography, government, law, methods of warfare, Church and manners. Horsey also wrote a narrative of his travels, published in Purchas his Pilgrimes (1626). The Russia company were alarmed at the freedom of Fletcher's book, and had it suppressed. In 1856 it was edited in full for the Hakluyt Society.
Fletcher was appointed "remembrancer" to the city of London, and an extraordinary master of requests in 1596, and became treasurer of St. Paul's in 1597. He was saved from imprisonment as surety for his brother's debts, in 1596, by Essex, and was actually imprisoned in i6oi, apparently for attributing Essex's disgrace to Raleigh. Fletcher was employed in 1610 to negotiate with Denmark on behalf of the "Eastland Merchants"; he died next year, and was buried on March 11, in London.
The Russe Commonwealth was issued in an abridged form in Hakluyt's Principal Navigations, Voyages, etc. (vol. i. p. 473, ed. of 1598), a somewhat completer version in Purchas his Pilgrimes (pt. 3, ed. 1625), also as History of Russia in 1643 and 1657. Fletcher also wrote De literis antiquae Britanniae (ed. by Phineas Fletcher, 1633), a treatise on "The Tartars," printed in Israel Redux (ed. by S[amuel] L[ee], 1677), to prove that they were the ten lost tribes of Israel, Latin poems published in various miscellanies, and Licia, or Poemes of Love in Honour of the admirable and singular vertues of his Lady, to the imitation of the best Latin Poets . . . whereunto is added the Rising to the Crowne of Richard the third (1593). This series of love sonnets, followed by some other poems, was published anonymously. Most critics, with the notable exception of Alexander Dyce (Beau mont and Fletcher, Works, i., p. xvi., 1843), have accepted it as the work of Dr. Giles Fletcher on the evidence afforded in the first of the Piscatory Eclogues of his son Phineas, who represents his father (Thelgon), as having "raised his rime to sing of Richard's climbing." See E. A. Bond's Introduction to the Hakluyt Society's edition of The Russe Commonwealth (1856) ; also Dr. A. B. Grosart's pref atory matter to Licia (Fuller Worthies Library, Miscellanies, vol. iii., 1871) , and to the works (1869) of Phineas Fletcher in the same series. Fletcher's letters relative to the college dispute with the provost, Dr. Roger Goad, are preserved in the Lansdowne mss. (xxiii., art. 18 et seq.), and are translated in Grosart's edition. See also H. E. Cory, Spenser, the School of the Fletchers, and Milton (Univ. of California Publications, No. 5, 1912) .