Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford: A Short Biography

A Concise Overview of the Life of Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford (1550–1604):
Elizabethan Courtier, Poet, Playwright, and Patron of Literature, Arts, and Theatre

The de Vere Family

When Elizabeth Tudor became Queen of England in 1558, the Earldom of Oxford was one of the oldest lines of nobles in the country, Aubrey de Vere having held land under Edward the Confessor and later marrying into the family of William the Conqueror.

The new queen appointed John de Vere, the 16th Earl her Lord Great Chamberlain. John de Vere’s only son Edward was born at Hedingham Castle, the Oxford family seat in the center of Essex, on April 12, 1550. His only full sibling, Mary, was born four years later. Their mother Margery was the sister of Arthur Golding, a scholar and translator who was close to the family.

Childhood & Education

As a young child, Edward was tutored by Sir Thomas Smith, a distinguished scholar. In 1558 Edward matriculated at St. John’s College, Cambridge. His father, the 16th Earl, sponsored his own company of actors, who toured throughout the region and performed for the family and their guests at Hedingham Castle, including Queen Elizabeth when she made a personal visit in 1561.

In August 1562, John de Vere died and the twelve-year-old Edward became the 17th Earl of Oxford. According to the law of the time, all noblemen under the age of 21 became wards of the Crown, their education and upbringing the responsibility of the Royal Court of Wards. Edward was required to enter the London household of Sir William Cecil (later Lord Burghley), Master of the Court of Wards. Cecil’s influence and authority as guardian, mentor, financial trustee, father-in-law, and reproving critic overshadowed his life for the next four decades.

Court Duties and First Marriage

Oxford, from his earliest years, displayed the attributes of a prodigy. In 1563, one of his tutors, the antiquarian Laurence Nowell, declared that “my work for the Earl of Oxford cannot be much longer required.” He was awarded honorary degrees from Cambridge in 1564 and Oxford in 1566. As a teenager, he entered the life and activities of the Court, and in time, reputedly because of his good looks, dancing and musical ability, and courtly graces, became a favorite of the queen.

As a young man, Oxford began a life-long practice of sponsoring works of literature. Over the decades, more than thirty volumes of poetry or prose, both originals and translations, were dedicated to him, some of which bore his own introductory essays or poems. In 1567 he was admitted to Gray’s Inn, one of the four Elizabethan “inns of court,” or law schools.

In the spring of 1570, Oxford served in the queen’s military campaign in Scotland under the Earl of Sussex. When he attained his majority in 1571 and took his seat in the House of Lords, a marriage was arranged between Oxford and Cecil’s teenage daughter Anne. The queen made Cecil a baron the same year, making Anne’s social rank more suitable to marry an earl under the intensely class-conscious standards of the time — but Oxford may have resented the marriage, which may well have been effectively imposed on him by Cecil or the queen, or perhaps both. He had ample grounds for resentment over the exploitative nature of the wardship system, from which he emerged with a crushing debt to the queen, contributing to financial difficulties that dogged him all his life. His childhood guardian had now become his father-in-law, whose power as one of Elizabeth’s top advisors continued to grow.

Oxford’s relationship with Anne, at any rate, appears to have been tense during the early years. He appears to have delayed consummation of the marriage. In an age without birth control, Anne only first became pregnant about three years later, in early 1575, about the same time that Oxford departed on a tour of continental Europe (primarily Italy) that lasted more than a year, well into 1576. A daughter, Elizabeth, was born later in 1575. For a time at least, Oxford expressed doubt about her paternity, causing a scandalous family rupture (and outright separation from Anne) that lasted until the early 1580s when they finally reconciled.

Poetry and European Travel

During the early 1570s several of Oxford’s poems were published, notably in A Paradyse of Dainty Devices (1576), and in the next two decades about twenty separate poems that can be attributed to him appeared in print. Another dozen have been found in manuscript; about half of which did not bear his name. He also earned a reputation for his horsemanship and skill at jousting, competing in, and winning, three of Elizabeth’s tournaments in the 1570s and 1580s.

Oxford’s European tour that took him into France, Germany, Italy (including Sicily), and possibly Greece. During this tour of 15 months he is known to have visited Paris, Roussillon, Strasbourg, Lyon, Padua, Venice, Genoa, Verona, Florence, and Siena. On his trip home his ship was attacked in the Channel and he was captured by Dutch pirates. He was released, stripped but unharmed, on the English shore.

Throughout his life de Vere maintained friendships with literary men, and at one time or another employed such writers as Thomas Churchyard, John Lyly, and Anthony Munday. Lyly, the author of two of the earliest English novels, Euphues: the Anatomy of Wit (1578) and Euphues and his England (1579), dedicated the latter to de Vere and acted as his personal secretary. De Vere also sponsored companies of both adult and boy actors, employing Lyly as their manager, and in the early 1580s held a lease on the indoor Blackfriars Theater.

Libels, Scandal, and Financial Troubles

Although raised as a Protestant, de Vere was rumored to have Catholic sympathies, and in 1580 he confessed to Queen Elizabeth his close associations with a group of prominent Catholics. He revealed a plot among them to overthrow her and form a government friendly to the Catholic King Philip of Spain. Although the Queen eventually forgave Oxford, the resulting uproar led to the arrest of several of the aristocratic conspirators. Those charged then accused Oxford of similar crimes, adding accusations of lechery, drunkenness, and homosexuality. De Vere, though also briefly imprisoned, was not charged with any crime.

In March 1581, a Gentlewoman of the Queen’s Bedchamber, Anne Vavasour, gave birth to a son fathered by Edward de Vere. A disapproving Queen jailed both parents briefly, and de Vere was absent from court for the next two years. The child, Edward Vere, later distinguished himself as a soldier and scholar and was knighted by King James I in 1607. During the early 1580s, several street fights took place between Vavasour’s relatives and Oxford’s men, in one of which (it appears) himself was involved and sustaining a severe leg wound that apparently caused him to limp thereafter. He would complain of his lameness in his letters.

From his teenage years, de Vere was known as an elegant dresser and a lavish spender. There is evidence that the Queen, through her agents, systematically mulcted him of much of his property, although his own expensive life style contributed as well to the loss of his considerable fortune and almost all his ancestral lands. In 1586, the queen began giving him an unusual grant of £1,000 per year, a fabulous sum cumulatively equivalent (over the years) to many millions of dollars in modern currency. The terms of the grant specified that Oxford was not accountable to anyone else for how he spent the funds, but the queen herself could have terminated it at any time, thus giving her a tight hold over him. His continued to ply her with requests for various lucrative offices or monopolies that might have given him more financial independence.

Second Marriage and Birth of an Heir

There is evidence that at the time of the Spanish Armada de Vere outfitted what may have been his own ship, and he may have commanded it during the battle. In 1588 de Vere’s wife Anne died, leaving him with three daughters who were then taken into the household of their grandfather William Cecil. In 1591 de Vere married Elizabeth Trentham, daughter of a wealthy courtier and one of the Queen’s Maids of Honor. In 1593 she gave birth to a son, Henry, who under the law of legitimacy inherited his father’s title as the 18th earl in 1604. The family moved to the London suburb of Hackney.

Hidden Writer

In A Discourse of English Poetry (1586) the Earl of Oxford was praised as the “most excellent” of poets at Court, and the author of The Arte of English Poesie (1589) asserted that he would be known as the best of the courtly poets “if their doings could be found out.” In 1598, in a collection of comments on literature – Palladis Tamia – Francis Meres included him in a list of the best comic playwrights. His life-long association with the theater, with players, and with playwrights is unquestionable. However, no play by de Vere has survived, nor is there any record of his name being associated with any play. In 1595 his daughter Elizabeth married William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby who at the time was said to be writing plays, and late in 1604, another daughter, Susan, married Philip Herbert, Lord Montgomery, one of the dedicatees of Shakespeare’s First Folio.

Death in 1604

The 17th Earl of Oxford died in June, 1604 and was buried in the Church of St. Augustine, Hackney. His life and achievements remained obscure until 1920, when John Thomas Looney, an English schoolmaster, revealed his authorship of the Shakespeare canon in “Shakespeare” Identified in Edward de Vere the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford.

References:

J. T. Looney: “Shakespeare” Identified in Edward de Vere the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, Cecil Palmer, 1920
B. M Ward: The Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, 1550-1604, from Contemporary Documents, John Murray, 1928
Charlton Ogburn Jr.: The Mysterious William Shakespeare, EPM Publications, 1984; 2nd ed. 1992

[originally published on the Shakespeare Oxford Society (now SOF) website, Dec. 19, 2005; extensively revised, 2021]