Double portrait of Robert Shirley and his Circassian wife Teresia, c.1624-1627 - he wears the exotic Persian clothes which so impressed his European hosts, whilst she wears her native style of dress but also holds a flintlock pistol and a pocket watch, symbols of the technologies Europe were introducing to Persia
He went with his brother Anthony to Persia in 1598. Anthony was in SafavidPersia from December 1, 1599 to May 1600. He was given 5,000 horses to train the Persian army according to the rules and customs of the Englishmilitia. He was also commanded to reform and retrain the artillery. When he left Persia, he left his brother, Robert, behind with fourteen Englishmen who lived in Persia for years. Having married Teresia, a Circassian lady, he stayed in Persia until 1608 when Shah Abbas sent him on a diplomatic errand to James I and to other European princes. He was employed, as his brother had been, as ambassador to several princes of Christendom, for the purpose of uniting them in a confederacy against the Ottoman Empire.
He went first to Poland, where he was entertained by Sigismund III Vasa. In June of that year he was in Germany, and received from the Emperor Rudolph II the title of Earl (count palatine) and knight of the Roman Empire. Pope Paul V also conferred upon him the title of Earl. From Germany Sir Robert went to Florence and from thence to Rome, where he entered, attended by a suite of eighteen persons, on Sunday, 27 September1609. He next visited Milan, and then proceeded to Genoa, whence he embarked to Spain, arriving in Barcelona in December 1609. He sent for his Persian wife and they remained in Spain, principally at Madrid, until the summer of 1611.
In 1613 he returned to Persia, but in 1615 he came back to Europe and lived for some years in Madrid. In a pleasingly serendipitous meeting Shirley's caravan came across that of Thomas Coryate, the eccentric traveller and travel writer (and attendant of Prince Henry's court in London) in the Persian desert in 1615. Shirley's third journey to Persia was undertaken in 1627, but soon after reaching the country he died at Qazvin.
There are several double portraits of Shirley and his wife in English collections, including the private collection of R.J.Berkeley and of Petworth House.
