Childhood, Part 4

'Shakespeare' by Another Name
by Mark Anderson

(Page 7 of 8)

The following fall, Queen Elizabeth gave Sir Thomas Smith, Earl John, and the queen's handsome favorite, Lord Robert Dudley, an assignment. She had already begun entertaining suitors for her hand in marriage, and the duke of Finland would soon sail to England to press the case for his elder brother Eric, king of Sweden. In early October of 1559, the group rode to Colchester to greet the duke. Lord Edward probably joined his tutor and father on the journey.

With the accession of Queen Elizabeth, Dudley had vaulted to a position of unrivaled power unlike any other during the whole of the Elizabethan age. He was also emerging as a serious candidate for Elizabeth's hand. Dudley's greatest hindrance at the time was the inconvenient fact that he was already married.

Dudley, Smith, and Earl John escorted the Swedish noble through Colchester, parading their train through the hilly town with all the ceremony befitting royalty. Hundreds rode in formation, with eighty men displaying gold chains and the tawny livery of the earls of Oxford. Following the train were two hundred more yeomen bearing an embroidered emblem of the blue boar, the earl of Oxford's heraldic badge, on their left shoulder. The columns of horses, men, and military hardware then set off for London, where the journey would end at Oxford House near London Stone.

Both court and Parliament were working to ensure that Elizabeth marry soon. All but perhaps Elizabeth herself hoped that, within a few years at most, a sensible husband not the Master of the Horse Dudley could be settled upon. Then the real business of running England could begin. And Elizabeth could concern herself with the proper role of queens: delivering heirs to the throne.

That Her Majesty would soon marry was taken as a given. The disastrous reign of Elizabeth's predecessor Mary only reinforced the prevailing prejudice that a woman was simply incapable of running a country by herself. As the Protestant polemicist John Knox wrote in 1558, "To promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion, or empire above any realm, nation, or city, is repugnant to nature, contumely to God, a thing most contrary to his revealed will and approved ordinance; and finally, it is the subversion of good order, of all equity and justice." Quotations from the Bible and from Aristotle buttressed Knox's ad feminam attack, which was repeated in more muted tones by authors such as Thomas Becon and even Sir Thomas Smith.

However, Elizabeth confounded the pundits of her day. Her refusal to marry Sweden would be the first of many nuptial evasions.

When news arrived in 1561 that the still unmarried queen would be visiting Castle Hedingham in August, little in the eleven-year-old Edward's life could have been more exciting. For a few glorious days, all the power and stature belonging to this realm would be contained within the walls of his family's ancestral estate. His father would be the center of the court's attention.

The Elizabethan royal summer progress, of which the 1561 Hedingham visit played just one small part, was the queen's great annual outreach campaign. In July, Elizabeth would depart from the city which during the summer became more subject to plague outbreaks anyway. Her Majesty would invite herself into the country seats of ten or fifteen noble families. The queen and the hundreds of retainers and courtiers that made up her royal household would take over their hosts' estates for several days of feasting, hunting, and entertainments. As one Puritan critic wrote, during the annual progress season Elizabeth was "entirely given over to love, hunting, hawking, and dancing, consuming day and night with trifles [plays]. . . . He who invents most ways of wasting time is regarded as one worthy of honor." And it was the progress that made each of these diversions a full-time job that carried on into the fall.

More than three hundred carts, stretching down the road as far as the eye could see, trucked luggage and provisions from site to site.

At each stop, the queen would address and mingle with hundreds of locals from the surrounding shires. It appealed to her notorious vanity to be treated like an earthbound deity by a new phalanx of admirers every few days. Simply by visiting a household, she paid her host family a singular honor. However, each household also tried to outdo all others in extravagance. All parties thus conspired to maximize the estate-crushing magnitude of their burden. In her wake, Elizabeth often left behind a family whose purse had been ransacked. And the deer population in her hosts' parks, decimated by the wholesale slaughter that was the typical royal hunting party, might take years to restore.Elizabeth's 1561 progress worked its way northeast from greater London and Havering into Chelmsford and to the city of Colchester where Sir Thomas Smith, Earl John, and Lord Robert Dudley had met the Swedish embassy to England two years before. Britain's oldest recorded town, Colchester was once the capital of Roman Britain, with ruins dating back to the pre-Christian era.

On August 6-9, Queen Elizabeth and her roving train of opulence which, one is tempted to suppose, included an eleven-year-old heir to the region's great earldom descended upon Ipswich.

Although the Ipswich city fathers entertained the court with all the customary pageantry, the queen still lost her temper at her hosts. Her Majesty was shocked to find widespread "undiscreet behavior" among the ministers and readers at the colleges. There was, as one courtly correspondent lamented to the archbishop of Canterbury, a "great variety in [ad]ministration" of communion, including clerics giving the sacrament in their street clothes. "The ministers follow the folly of the people," the letter writer added, "calling it charity to feed their fond humor." Elizabeth was most shocked by the presence of women and children in the sacred spaces of the colleges and cathedral closes. Then and there she wanted to prohibit clergy from marrying altogether. But she was talked down to proclaiming an edict that only prohibited women from lodging at the universities. This measure would later come back to haunt the queen and provide inspiration for the comedy Love's Labor's Lost.

Also at Ipswich, Elizabeth and her assembled throng took in one or more plays written by the former Carmelite monk John Bale. The Ipswich players, it is now thought, staged his history of the reign of King John. Bale's King Johan was a work of Protestant propaganda that had debuted before the court of Elizabeth's father twenty-five years before. Scholars have long noted Bale's likely influence on the Shakespeare play King John, even though Bale's King Johan was available only in manuscript and never, so far as is known, staged anytime after the early 1560s. If the young de Vere were not in the audience that night in Ipswich, he would at least have had access to Bale's manuscript, since Earl John had been one of Bale's longtime patrons.

King Johan purports to tell the history of England's legendary thirteenth-century king a man most famous today for his reluctant signing of Magna Carta. However, King Johan in no small part is also about sixteenth-century England. Since King John's claim to the throne was often compared to Queen Elizabeth's, any play celebrating John's reign was, by extension, a public affirmation of Elizabeth's sovereignty.

The Protestant propaganda in Bale's King Johan is impossible to miss. Throughout the play, Bale's righteous, antipapist king opposes such transparently Catholic villains as Sedition, Dissimulation, Treason, Usurped Power (symbolizing the pope), and Private Wealth (a cardinal). Sedition and Dissimulation ultimately succeed in assassinating the king, but the noble hero Verity (Bale's tip of the hat to his patron) emerges to defend the king's good name and to help his colleague Imperial Majesty (the House of Tudor) carry John's anti-Catholic crusade forward. "He that condemneth a king condemneth God without doubt," says Verity. ". . . I charge you, therefore, as God hath charged me, to give to your king his due supremity and exile the pope [from] this realm for evermore."

Though the play seems heavy-handed today, King Johan was in fact a groundbreaking piece of drama for its time. It departed from the traditional morality plays by dramatizing contemporary politics, drawing upon English history not just biblical tales or folklore as the playwright's polemical tool. It was also the first English play to cast a historical English king as a character onstage and to portray a tragic hero as a man of essential virtues, not just vice.

One can readily picture Bale, a learned and contentious sixty-five-year-old, greeting the heir to his patron's earldom. The eleven-year-old child had probably never met a playwright before this moment. The young de Vere would certainly have been impressed by the royal and courtly attention lavished upon the dramatist. Whether at Castle Hedingham or later, after he'd inherited the family's papers and manuscripts, de Vere could also have read Bale's other writings, including his history of a knight from King Henry V's day. Bale's Chronicle of the Blessed Martyr Sir John Oldcastle exhorts English authors to retell English history with a decidedly Protestant slant now that England has thrown off the yoke of Rome. "Set forth the English chronicles in their right shape," Bale urges his readers. De Vere would, in fact, grow up to do just this, crafting an entire epic of history plays that refocused and distorted English history so as to, as Bale puts it, discard old "Romish lies and other Italish beggaries." The most celebrated character from the Shakespeare history plays, Sir John Falstaff, would be based in part on Oldcastle.

Also on hand during the August 1561 progress to Castle Hedingham was a man Sir Thomas Smith had known since his earliest days at Cambridge. Much to Smith's frustration, Sir William Cecil had advanced in government far beyond him. During Mary's reign, Cecil had helped to orchestrate Princess Elizabeth's survival and ultimate rise to power. While outwardly conforming to Catholicism one contemporary called Cecil a "creeper to the cross" Cecil had also maintained a secret correspondence with the princess, providing her with insider knowledge from the court and valuable counsel. As an administrator, Cecil proved to be an undisputed master. At times strategically savvy and sly as a fox, he could also be a maddeningly plodding and unoriginal thinker. But it was his keen instinct for political survival that made him Elizabeth's closest and dearest advisor and, as she put it, her "code of laws." The queen would keep this wily statesman, a man she would nickname "Sir Spirit," by her side until his dying day.

A crafty, scheming, and disarmingly politic man, Cecil at age forty had already become the most powerful man in England short of Elizabeth's favorite, Dudley. Earlier in the year, before his appearance at Castle Hedingham, Elizabeth had appointed Cecil to the coveted post of Master of the Court of Wards and Liveries. The court of wards was an institution set up to supervise the lands and wealth of underage heirs and to arrange their marriages. It was a plum of an assignment, since the Master of Wards had notorious leeway to tap into and otherwise manipulate some of the country's richest estates. The office had been profitable for Cecil's predecessor Sir Thomas Parry, and Cecil would harvest this cash farm to his own financial and political advantage.

At the time of the queen's Hedingham visit, Cecil's son Thomas was living in Paris. According to intelligence Cecil had gathered, Thomas was also gaining a reputation as a lout. As the elder Cecil wrote in a letter posted from Hedingham, he had learned that his child was becoming "sloth[ful] in keeping his bed, negligent and rash in expenses, careless in apparel, an immoderate lover of dice and cards; in study soon weary, in game never." De Vere would later caricature Cecil as Hamlet's officious and manipulative court counselor Polonius who sends his spies to check on his wayward son Laertes, living in Paris.

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.