This Month in Oxfordian History – September

By Sara Hill

A legal document called an Inquisitio Post-Mortem (IPM) dated September of 1604 supposedly ratified the death earlier in the year of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. Or did it? Mysterious circumstances (many more than can be laid out here) surrounding Oxford’s alleged death on June 24, 1604, just might rank it as one of England’s oldest and most puzzling cold cases.

Let’s reopen the case by examining the IPM.

An IPM wasn’t a report upon examination of a dead body. Rather, it was a report upon examination of a dead man’s property. The main purpose was to collect any fees due, to establish wardship on any youthful heir, and to determine if a reversion of property rights to the Crown was in order. Oxford’s September 1604 IPM assessed his extensive holdings in Essex, including the forest of Essex and the Keepership of Havering, its royal manor and hunting ground. The document ordinarily would be seen as proof of recent death. But then, four years later in 1608, a second IPM was executed on Bishopsgate, another of the Earl’s properties. Why the long delay?

Whenever it was that Oxford actually died, he apparently died intestate — no will has ever been found. This would have resulted in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury issuing Letters of Administration to his next of kin, most likely, to his widow, Elizabeth Trentham Vere, for execution of his estate. But no Letters of Administration to his widow or anyone else have been found either.

In his article, “A Monument without a Tomb: The Mystery of Oxford’s Death” (The Oxfordian, Volume VII, 2004), Christopher Paul discusses the many correspondents who wrote not a single word to each other about Oxford’s death. In one case Paul discovered a six-month gap in a theretofore-regular correspondence between two contemporaries during the period in question.

This lack of acknowledgement is, of course, unusual, given that de Vere was the pre-eminent nobleman of his time, a celebrated poet, Lord Great Chamberlain, and member of the House of Lords. Oxford’s death should have had the entire London aristocracy and nobility abuzz, if not in mourning. There were no public eulogies by fellow poets and no state funeral. Instead, as perhaps predicted by Hamlet, there was silence.

So how does the date of Oxford’s death relate to the authorship question?

Since Shakspere of Stratford was 14 years younger than Oxford and died in 1616, traditional academics, presuming he is the author, use his lifetime to date the plays. Indeed, it is an often-repeated assertion by Stratfordians that de Vere died before The Tempest was written. Oxfordians, of course, disagree, arguing for a much earlier timeline. They maintain that de Vere wrote some of the plays as early as his teens and over his lifetime revised and polished them.

Some think he worked on them—or on something else*—after 1604.

But we have one more piece of evidence—actually another curious lack of evidence: the papers of Robert Cecil, Secretary of State, Master of Wards, de Vere’s former brother-in-law and sometime nemesis. These also fail to mention Oxford’s death.

Could all these absences add up to one conclusion?

That someone in position to carry out wholesale censorship scrubbed clean the records of Oxford’s death?

But missed the IPM?

Or did Oxford not die on June 24, 1604?