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[1550-1562]

On april 12, 1550, in the private apartments of a british stone-walled medieval fortress, a lord and lady welcomed their heir into the world. If the boy survived, the child's father John de Vere, sixteenth earl of Oxford could henceforth rest assured that when he died, his own son would carry forward the title of seventeenth earl.

From the moment of christening at Castle Hedingham in the eastern county of Essex, Edward de Vere would be known as Viscount Bolbec. Lord Edward's high birth would place him in adulthood among kings and queens and the powerful men around them who ran the state. His fate was to be their gadfly and fool, a black sheep of this ancient and revered family. But nothing at the time of his birth would have led anyone to suspect that such a strange and ungainly future awaited.

This biography will proceed under the assumption that, by himself or in collaboration, Edward de Vere wrote under the name William Shakespeare. He is not the Shakespeare with whom we are familiar.

Edward de Vere's ancestors had, for four hundred years, played a leading role in the wars and politics of England. In an uninterrupted succession from the Norman Conquest onward, de Veres had served the crown as statesmen and military commanders. After 1142, de Veres also wore the coronet of the earldom of Oxford. The first earl of Oxford had supported Empress Matilda's (unsuccessful) claim to the throne against King Stephen; the second earl had served under King John; the third earl had taken up arms against John; the seventh earl led a naval fleet against the French at Calais and laid siege to Rheims. The ninth earl, the most infamous of his line, had been a consort and royal favorite of the homosexual king Richard II, and had forfeited his lands on Richard's fall. The eleventh earl had served Henry V at Agincourt. The twelfth earl had fought in the Wars of the Roses and was executed by King Edward IV.

The history of the fifteenth earl is intimately bound up with the history of Tudor England. The fifteenth earl had supported the divorce of King Henry VIII's queen Catherine and carried the crown for the coronation of Anne Boleyn, mother of the future queen Elizabeth. Edward de Vere himself was named after Henry's only son, England's king Edward VI. The 13-year-old king Edward sent a gilded chalice for Lord Edward's christening on April 17, 1550.

Infant mortality rates demanded that children be baptized soon after birth, lest they die in the nursery without being blessed by holy water dooming their souls to limbo. Then again, limbo was just the sort of idolatrous belief that the reformist king Edward was working to abolish. When Henry VIII founded the Church of England in 1534, it was little more than a British denomination of Catholicism. Communion still assumed the physical transformation of wine into blood and bread into the body of Christ. Much of the Mass in Henry VIII's day was still read in Latin. Saints and sacraments of yore blessing of the candles at Candlemas, releasing of the doves from the roof of St. Paul's on Whit Sunday remained firmly in place. Henry's son, on the other hand, was a reformer. Edward VI set out to smash all remaining vestiges of Catholic beliefs. He enacted new laws to support Protestant reformers. He commissioned new books of homilies and a Book of Common Prayer; and in a bold stroke of radicalism, his government made English the primary language of the church service.

In the mid-sixteenth century, the ancient earldom of Oxford was a vestige of a bygone age. The earldom's seat was a place called Castle Hedingham in East Anglia, northeast of London, set on a hill near the river Colne. The river wound through East Anglia, past another de Vere estate at Earls Colne, and into the North Sea via Colchester. Hedingham had been built within the first century after the Norman Conquest (1066), when the family's ancestors came across the channel from their home in the Cùtentin Peninsula of Normandy. William the Conqueror granted Castle Hedingham and thirteen other estates to the de Veres for their military service in helping the Normans overrun the Saxons. Castle Hedingham's central Norman keep the one building that remains today was a foreboding stone fortress roughly 60 feet on each side and 110 feet tall. Built to withstand the engines of a medieval siege, the keep sheltered five stories that included soldiers' quarters, a munitions room, and a banquet hall and armory beneath a twenty-one-foot-high Norman arch. Brick walls around the entire hilltop estate formed a first defense against attackers. Inside stood the keep, a stable and barnyard, a brewhouse, a granary, a chapel, a tennis court, lodgings, kitchens, and pantries. In its exemplary battle, the castle was besieged in 1216 by King John himself.

Edward de Vere's father owned some three hundred castles and mansions across England. But each of these medieval manors generated enormous bills as well as a dwindling supply of income. Many properties were forever in the red. Feudal estates had been ideal holdings to command in the centuries after the Conquest, when the government required its lords to provide armies for crusades and wars. The Tudors, on the other hand, needed money. Those who could generate a steady stream of income were the new men of the age. A keen business manager might have spent a career making the holdings of the earls of Oxford productive and profitable once again. But John de Vere, sixteenth earl of Oxford or Earl John, as he was commonly called was no businessman.

Personally, John de Vere seems to have been a man both boorish and cultured. His relationships with women can only be described as rocky. Earl John abandoned, but did not divorce, his first wife. One of his mistresses, to whom he may have been bigamously married, was beaten up by his in-laws and other associates. He abandoned a second mistress and left a woman to whom he was engaged, on the day before their wedding. And yet Earl John was also a generous patron, sponsoring a dramatic troupe (the Earl of Oxford's Men) that featured some of the finest actors in England. According to the scholar and diplomat Sir Thomas Smith, "I think no man of England . . . could do so much and so readily with threatenings, imprisonments, and pains as my lord doeth here with the love that the gentlemen and the whole country beareth to him."

A story survives of Earl John hunting wild boar in France. His French companions were armed as if for war, while he was "no otherwise attired than as when he walked in his own private bedchamber, only a dancing rapier by his side." When the hunting party cornered the beast, Earl John dismounted and attacked the boar with his inferior blade much to the consternation of his fellow hunters. "My lords," he replied to his astonished companions, "what have I done of which I have no feeling? Is it the killing of this English pig? Why, every boy in my nation would have performed it. They may be bugbears to the French: to us they are but servants."

Of Margery, Earl John's second wife and Lord Edward's mother, few records survive. What she thought about her husband's romantic history is unknown but probably not hard to guess. Countess Margery's two known references to her son, both found in letters written to the Secretary of State Sir William Cecil, appeared at a time when the young lord Edward had been moved out of the house. These missives give only passing mention of her child and do not request any information about his life or well-being. The countess, it appears, lived out the teachings of the sixteenth-century humanist Juan Luis Vives, whose popular book Instruction of a Christian Woman told mothers that "cherishing marreth the sons and it utterly destroyeth the daughters."

This skewed philosophy of mothering consistently appears as the norm in Shakespeare. Lord Edward would grow up to portray caring and nurturing mother figures almost as emissaries from an alien world loving Lady Macduffs in a land where brutal Lady Macbeths command center stage. A third of the Shakespeare canon features no mothers whatsoever.

While the author named characters after other family and friends his cousins Horatio and Francis Vere, for instance, are known to eternity as Hamlet's Horatio and Francisco the name Margery gets only a passing mention, in The Merchant of Venice:

Launcelot. I am Launcelot, your boy that was, your son that is, your child that shall be.

Old Gobbo. I cannot think you are my son.

Laun. I know not what I shall think of that. . . . I am sure Margery your wife is my mother.

At the time of Edward's birth, the sixteenth earl and his countess had one other child, Katherine, from the husband's first marriage. Katherine was approximately nine years older than Edward. (Her exact birth date is unknown.) She, too, never appears to have been close to her half-brother and would later file a slanderous lawsuit against her sibling accusing him of being a bastard. Sometime around Lord Edward's fourth year, his other sister, Mary, was born.

As Castle Hedingham was the family seat, it is safe to assume that no small part of Lord Edward's early childhood was spent there. As a toddler inside this ancient castle, Edward's formative years were probably quite lonely ones, living with an indifferent mother and a distant, feudal lord of a father. During the winter months, when the sixteenth earl's dramatic troupe was not touring the provinces, the players would have stayed at the castle to entertain the family and revel away the long, cold nights while the troupe's fool (some have suspected the otherwise unemployed jester from Henry VIII's court Will Somers) would naturally have been a magnet for a precocious and lonesome child with a budding sense of verbal foolery. Hamlet's heartfelt words over Yorick's skull certainly suggest an author reflecting on his earliest days:

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his back a thousand times, and now how abhor'd in my imagination it is! my gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kiss'd I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now, your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar?

By the great stone fireplace in this ancient Norman keep, the players and the patriarch no doubt favored the young heir with tales of his ancestors' exploits.

Such accounts of de Vere family successes and failures would color how Lord Edward would later portray the story of England in the Shakespeare history plays. Shakespeare's histories reveal an acute sense of de Vere family legend: the Shakespeare canon rewrites English history not only to glorify the Elizabethan dynasty (the House of Tudor) but also to amplify some of the earls of Oxford's greatest accomplishments and paper over some of the earls of Oxford's greatest embarrassments.

Robert, the third earl of Oxford, living in the time of King John (1199-1216), had helped to force the monarch to sign the Magna Carta at Runnymede. There the earl was elected one of the Great Charter's twentyfive guardians. Excommunicated by the pope for insolence, the third earl committed treason when he joined a rebellion to hand the throne over to the French dauphin. In response, King John laid siege to Castle Hedingham a military campaign that ended in the French dauphin returning to his home country and John retaining the throne. In Shakespeare's account of this era (King John), the traitor third earl is never even mentioned.

On the other hand, the thirteenth earl of Oxford brought fame to the annals of family legend. He patronized leading men of letters, including the translator and printer William Caxton. The thirteenth earl also helped depose the Yorkist king Richard III in the storied battle of Bosworth. A stone basrelief now thought to have hung in Castle Hedingham tells the tale of this battle, with an unhorsed Richard III one can almost hear him crying, "My kingdom for a horse!" grasping at his crown while a victorious Henry Tudor rides triumphantly with the earl of Oxford close at his side.

Shakespeare is hardly subtle about the esteem he accords this illustrious de Vere: In the Shakespeare Henry VI plays, the thirteenth earl becomes "valiant Oxford" and "brave Oxford, wondrous well belov'd." Shakespeare's Henry VI plays have the Earl of Oxford retreating from one battle only to take up arms against the Yorkists at Dorset. At the Battle of Tewksbury, "sweet Oxford" determines the place where the enemies will be fought. In reality, the historical thirteenth earl of Oxford was neither at Dorset nor at Tewksbury and was certainly not worthy of the undying praise Shakespeare heaps upon him. Shakespeare also poked fun at his own infatuation with his ancestor, inserting a gratuitous joke into Henry V about the thirteenth earl of Oxford's most inglorious moment a friendly fire incident that led to an embarrassing defeat at the Battle of Barnet.

Copyright © 2006 Mark Anderson

Tags: Biographies & Memoirs

About the Author

Journalist Mark Anderson has devoted more than a decade to researching the life of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, publishing articles on de Vere in Harper's, The Boston Globe, and on PBS.org. He has also been a contributing writer for Wired.