Childhood, Part 3

'Shakespeare' by Another Name
by Mark Anderson

(Page 6 of 8)

The year 1558 marked two major events in Edward de Vere's life: He began his brief university career, and his queen came to the throne. The two were probably connected. As a Protestant and a former Secretary of State, Smith expected that he would hold government office again under the Protestant Elizabeth. When Queen Mary was discovered to be suffering from cancer, Smith prepared to return to the seat of power. In October 1558, a month before Queen Mary's death, de Vere was enrolled at Smith's alma mater, Queens' College at Cambridge University. Men typically went to college in their early teens. As de Vere was only eight, he was entered as impubes, too young to take the university's oath of fidelity. Three months later, de Vere also enrolled at St. John's College, although he continued to reside at Queens' College.

De Vere's curriculum at Cambridge does not survive. Only one record concerning the replacement of a broken windowpane in de Vere's Queens' College dormitory room taunts the ages with its inconsequence.

The turbulence of a Catholic nation turned Protestant turned Catholic about to turn Protestant again was mirrored in the Cambridge University campus. Once the nation's wellspring of higher learning, Cambridge under Mary Tudor had become a reactionary government institution given over to despotism. To be admitted for a degree, Cambridge students in Queen Mary's day had to swear an oath of papal supremacy and condemn as "pestiferous heresies" the teachings of Martin Luther and his ilk. Two years before Edward de Vere's enrollment, the King's College scholar John Hullier was arrested for nonconformity and burned alive by the banks of the river Cam. In an even more ghastly display of Marian barbarity, the bodies of two recently deceased foreign Protestant professors had been exhumed, chained together, and publicly burned on the university's Market Hill.

Nonetheless, the eight-year-old's brief stay on campus was probably enlightened by Cambridge's one beacon of learning during the dark decade of the 1550s, Dr. John Caius. Caius was a cosmopolitan and moderate Catholic professor of medicine, who had studied anatomy under Andreas Vesalius at the University of Padua in that faraway Italian Renaissance utopia, the Republic of Venice. De Vere would later reencounter Caius once the doctor had been appointed court physician to the soon-to-be-crowned queen Elizabeth. Caius (d. 1573) would twice be memorialized by name in Shakespeare, both in the character of the French doctor in Merry Wives of Windsor and in the alias the Earl of Kent assumes during his period of exile in King Lear.

Also in 1558, state records reveal the hiring of the tutor Thomas Fowle for de Vere. The post carried with it a handsome annuity of £10. Fowle was a hot-blooded Protestant, like Smith, although less distinguished in his erudition. Fowle's scholarly record and curriculum with de Vere do not survive, nor do accounts of his teaching style.

On November 17, 1558, cancer retrieved Bloody Mary from her missionary calling on this earth. The passing of Mary Tudor marked the third British royal death in nearly twelve years. The prospects for yet another short-lived Tudor monarchy tainted the enthusiasm that greeted the wan and frail-looking Elizabeth as she entered London six days later. The twenty-five-year-old queen consulted her astrologers for the most auspicious date to be crowned Elizabeth I of England, Ireland, and France. (England still hadn't come to grips with its loss of the last patch of French soil, Calais, earlier in the year.) Her Majesty waited until after the Christmas season had passed.

During December and January, foreign visitors to London could be forgiven for believing that the city was under siege. Cannon fire from the Tower and from specially equipped barges on the Thames punctuated the young queen's frequent visits throughout the city and Westminster. From Elizabeth's first days on the throne, she was no cloistered royal, sheltered from her subjects like a precious work of art. Elizabeth was a true politician, in the modern sense of the word, and she could win over a room or work a crowd like any of the best vote-seekers today.

Practically evey nobleman and -woman in the nation and not a few of the thousands of English gentry, too attended Queen Elizabeth's coronation and banquet on January 15, 1559. The eight-year-old Lord Edward undoubtedly made the pilgrimage with his fellow Cambridge students to Westminster sometime in early January. Earl John had claimed his ancestral right as Lord Great Chamberlain of England to serve as royal water-bearer, enabling Her Majesty to symbolically wash herself before and after the coronation feast. De Vere's mother, Countess Margery, served as one of the queen's numerous ladies-in-waiting at the Westminster Abbey service.

As if inaugurating the stylistic Renaissance her reign would usher in, Elizabeth had four complete outfits made for each portion of the day's proceedings. In her city processional gown, Her Majesty frequently stopped the royal train along the parade route to converse with subjects presenting Christian tableaux and allegories of time and justice. Elizabeth's remarkable gift for oratory is preserved in this, her first official day as monarch addressing her subjects. "I will be as good unto you as ever queen was to her people," she told the assembled crowds in London's Cheapside. "No will in me can lack. Neither, do I trust, shall there lack any power. And persuade yourselves that for the safety and quietness of you all, I will not spare, if need be, to spend my blood."

Her coronation service, complete with two costume changes, featured a monarch for the first time swearing the oath of office on an English Bible. Bowing to Catholic tradition, some of the ceremony was read in Latin. The archbishop also elevated the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. But, although she took communion, the Anglican Elizabeth withdrew herself behind a curtain during the elevation of the Host. The feast that followed, celebrating a newly crowned monarch resplendent in violet velvet, carried on from three p.m. till one o'clock the following morning.

As an introduction to the woman who, in concert with her chief ministers, would map out the terrain that Lord Edward would be navigating for the rest of his life, the festivities of January 15 must have been as overwhelming and exhausting as the voluminous accounts of the day that soon appeared in London booksellers' stalls.

Copyright © 2006 Mark Anderson

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.