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In the winter of 1552-53, King Edward VI fell ill with what doctors now think was a virulent strain of pneumonia. On July 6, 1553, the prophecies of a long and illustrious Edwardian Age did not come to pass. The sixteen-year-old monarch had died. Next in line to the throne after a botched attempt to crown the Protestant sympathizer Lady Jane Grey was King Edward's half-sister Mary, as zealously Catholic as her brother was Protestant.

Mary hated her younger half-sister Elizabeth, who the new queen thought was just a bastard child of her father's strumpet Anne Boleyn. Elizabeth assured her elder half-sibling that she celebrated Catholic Mass with an honest and open heart. But, according to one eyewitness, Princess Elizabeth was also "very timid and trembled when she spoke" with Mary.

As England's Protestants had feared, "Bloody" Mary, as she would soon be known, wanted foremost to return England to the Roman faith. The tools of the Spanish Inquisition awaited the application of her reactionary zeal.

Smart courtiers who valued their lives and lands discovered in themselves a renewed love of Catholicism. Protestants-at-heart learned to keep their antipapist curses to themselves. Earl John was one of many nobles drafted into supervising Mary's burnings of Protestant heretics.

Sometime during Lord Edward's youth when is not precisely known the child was moved out of Castle Hedingham and into the household of Sir Thomas Smith. Former Secretary of State to the late king Edward, Smith was a Protestant friend of the family. According to a letter written years later between two of Smith's courtly colleagues, Smith had, at some point during Lord Edward's youth, made Lord Edward his "scholar." During Queen Mary's reign, Smith was otherwise unemployed, enjoying a prosperous country life at his riverside estate of Ankerwicke in Buckinghamshire, near Windsor Castle. Smith had also recently married into a family that owned an Essex estate named Hill Hall, a day's ride from Castle Hedingham.

Smith would later write to the Lord Treasurer of England that Lord Edward was "brought up in my house." By this statement, Smith likely meant that he home-schooled his young student at either Hill Hall or Ankerwicke. However, since Hill Hall was under construction during much of the 1550s, Smith's Buckinghamshire estate is the more likely site of a rigorous classical and Renaissance education for one precocious earl-in-waiting. The former statesman and Cambridge University regius professor of civil law may have felt that the task of tutoring a mere child was a demotion. But Smith's instruction of Edward de Vere would, in the end, prove to be an inestimably generous gift to the world of English letters.

Ankerwicke was a manor that overlooked the Thames and stood an hour's walk from Datchet Mead, Frogmore House, and the town of Windsor, all part of the local color that form the backdrop of Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor. Although Ankerwicke was pulled down in the nineteenth century, inventories of the twenty-room domicile survive detailing a comfortable but still modest household containing such curious items as a "picture in a table," "a hanging of cosmography," and three unidentified "painted pictures." In 1555, the forty-two-year-old Smith, who had recently served as provost of nearby Eton College, was settling into Ankerwicke with his new wife, Philippa Wilford, the childless widow of an Essex landowner.

The Smiths' marriage remained childless, too, although the husband had an illegitimate son, Thomas, three years older than Lord Edward, who may have spent some time in the family household. Disburdened of raising her own brood, Philippa Smith, in her early thirties at the time, was probably the closest the former Hedingham resident ever had to a caring mother figure in his life. When, as a young adult, Edward de Vere was recuperating from a deadly illness, he holed himself up amid surroundings that must have sparked childhood memories of a nurturing environment the nearby town of Windsor.

Nurturing, however, would only have consumed a small portion of the day's agenda in the Smith household.

Education started early in those days. In one extreme example, the French essayist Montaigne was already fluent in Latin by the age of six. Nobles in particular were given little time to enjoy childhood. In the words of the handbook on upper-class child-rearing, Thomas Elyot's Boke Named the Governour (1531), "That infelicity of our time and country compelleth us to encroach somewhat upon the years of children, and especially of noblemen, that they may sooner attain to wisdom and gravity." What a student might today encounter in college was deemed appropriate for elementary-school-aged children.

Some of Lord Edward's earliest lessons were at the hands of a truly gifted educator. According to Smith's twentieth-century biographer Mary Dewar, "There is evidence that [Smith] was an outstanding teacher. Apart from his brilliant formal ëoratory' he held strong views on the techniques of teaching and thorough study. His recommendations to young students intending to apply themselves to the law in his inaugural lecture are formidable." One contemporary even compared Sir Thomas Smith to Plato.

The analogy was apt and not just for Smith's tendency to surround himself with the brightest young minds. Intellectually, Smith was also an insatiable omnivore. In his biographer Dewar's words, "[Smith's] colleagues and students were always dazzled by his wide range of interests and impressed by his capacity to discuss any topic and pronounce learnedly in almost any field of study." One of Smith's students called Smith "the flower of the University of Cambridge." According to Smith's seventeenth-century biographer John Strype, Smith was "reckoned the best scholar [at Cambridge] University, not only for rhetoric and the learned languages, but for mathematics, arithmetic, law, natural and moral philosophy."

Lord Edward, as his "scholar," would have had access to Smith's library of hundreds of books. In 1566, Smith inventoried his collection at more than four hundred titles quite sizable for its day in theology, civil law, history, philosophy, mathematics, medicine, grammar, and literature. Nearly all these works were in foreign tongues. Smith was fluent in Latin, Greek, French, Italian, Spanish, and Hebrew; it's likely that the scholar introduced his student to these languages via the cornucopia of culture at his fingertips. Works by Livy, Tacitus, Virgil, Plutarch, Saxo Grammaticus, Edward Halle, Plato, Pliny, Homer, Ovid, Pindar, Aristophanes, Sophocles, Plautus, Petrarch, Dante, and Boccaccio lined Smith's bookshelves. Modern scholars have found all of these authors inspiring and informing the writings of Shakespeare.

In 1554, Smith was working on what would become an influential tract concerning international economics, "For the Understanding of the Exchange." Smith also interested himself in mathematics, geography, and astronomy and indulged these scientific instincts with projects (erecting sundials and constructing geographical globes) and experiments (he would conduct his own observations of the supernova of 1572). Smith's textbook on government and politics De Republica Anglorum would influence the Shakespeare history plays as well as Measure for Measure and Julius Caesar. Observations Smith recorded about Spanish pronunciation show up in Love's Labors Lost. Smith's fascination with horticulture, pharmacology, and medicine is shared by Shakespeare, who specialists in these fields say must have been an "expert gardener" and "an apothecary and a student of medicine." Smith did not shy away from heretical writings, either, carrying both Copernicus's revolutionary tract on cosmology De Revolutionibus and the complete works of Niccolò Machiavelli in his library.

At the center of Smith's universe, though, was the law. Legal studies represented to Smith an ideal playground for the true Renaissance intellect. The educator reserved contempt for lawyers who practiced as if the law were an isolated subject unto itself. Following Justinian's Pandects, the classic treatise interpreting Roman law, Smith believed legal training first required a mastery of subjects including philosophy, rhetoric, language, and history. One of Smith's later students, the Cambridge academic Gabriel Harvey, recorded in his journals his frustration at the reading Smith mandated before a student could even crack the spine on Justinian.

For nearly two centuries, eminent lawyers and judges have recognized in Shakespeare a fellow man of the craft, someone whose unerring legal allusions and metaphors betrayed an expertise that can only have come from years of study in the field. With Sir Thomas Smith as his earliest teacher, it is little wonder that Shakespeare used legal terminology, in the words of the nineteenth-century legal historian Richard Grant White, "as if it were a part of the language of his daily life, making no mistakes that can be detected by a learned professional critic."

Beyond the rigors of legal studies, Lord Edward would also have learned the forms of recreation that rounded out a gentleman's education. Chief among those were hawking and hunting. Commoners were traditionally prohibited from either hunting deer or keeping a bird of prey although these prohibitions did not prevent hunting from becoming a popular Elizabethan sport. The arcane terminology of hunting and hawking intentionally kept arcane to enforce the conventional class distinctions serves as fodder in Shakespeare for vivid metaphors concerning love, marriage, death, war, and sex. The hunt and the law both represented worlds apart from the experience of many English subjects. Both would have become firsthand knowledge at Ankerwicke.

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.