Childhood, Part 5

'Shakespeare' by Another Name
by Mark Anderson

(Page 8 of 8)

Sometime around or soon after the departure of the queen's train from Hedingham, Earl John began to negotiate with a family of royal lineage for marriage with Lord Edward. On July 1, 1562, Earl John and Henry Hastings, earl of Huntington, drew up a marriage contract. This agreement ensured that Edward, once he turned eighteen, could choose one of Henry Hastings's younger sisters Mary or Elizabeth to be his bride. The twenty-seven-year-old earl of Huntington was descended of royal blood from a brother to Richard III and was considered at the time the most likely inheritor of the throne should Queen Elizabeth die childless. Earl John had secured a step up in the world for his son, enabling Edward to marry into a potential future royal family of England.

At twelve, Edward was still two years shy of the legal age of consent for marriage contracts. The Hastings-de Vere deal was not legally binding in 1562. However, to ensure that the Hastings-de Vere marriage go through, the two patriarchs would only need to reaffirm the contract in April 1564, once Edward had reached the age of consent. If he played the courtly game right, Edward's children or grandchildren might someday look forward to sitting on the throne of England themselves.

But those royal progeny were not meant to be. Mary Hastings would, in fact, die years later, an unmarried woman. Yet this tall, lean and fair-haired beauty exerted enough of a sentimental tug on the author's heartstrings that he would later look fondly back upon her as one that got away, a love's labor lost. Hastings would later cause a scene at court when she publicly refused a marriage offer by the czar of Muscovy's envoy. The event gained so much notoriety that Love's Labor's Lost spoofs it. The play's wooing lords (Ferdinand, Longaville, Berowne, and Dumaine) disguise themselves as ambassadors from Muscovy and try to win over the mistress Maria (Mary Hastings) and her friends. But just as Mary Hastings dressed down the real-life Russians, in Love's Labor's Lost Maria and her three friends rebuke the supposed Muscovites.

The Hastings daughters would constitute the final image of de Vere's childhood. Mary's eyes may have uttered "heavenly rhetoric" and she may have been the "empress of . . . Love" to quote the infatuated suitor describing Maria in Love's Labor's Lost. But the "vapor vow" to Mary/Maria would soon be broken, though it was, as the forsworn suitor says, "no fault of mine." Only a month after Earl John had sealed the marriage contract with the Hastings family, a new and unexpected shock wave would shake the foundations of Lord Edward's world.

On August 3, 1562, at Castle Hedingham, Edward's father died. Earl John was forty-three years old. He'd prepared a will his second known will less than a week beforehand. Although this act might seem like hasty preparations for the hereafter, the historical record suggests Earl John was neither ailing nor on death's doorstep at the time. In late June, the sixteenth earl had accompanied his dramatic troupe on a tour to Ipswich and had adjudicated day-to-day business of the local government, collecting fees from the local "alehouses and tipling houses." The language of the earl of Huntington marriage contract also suggests the father of the presumptive groom anticipated a long life stipulating provisions presuming a time when Earl John would have other male children of his own and even when he would become a grandfather.

Before his father's death, life was good with all the prospects only getting better. Lord Edward looked forward to his teenaged years, free from the burdens of labor, enjoying some of the finest opportunities the Elizabethan Age had to offer in learning and leisure.

But now, whether he wanted the title or not, the twelve-year-old Edward de Vere had become the seventeenth earl of Oxford. Because he was still in his minority, Lord Edward would now be under the administration of the royal Court of Wards and Liveries. His marriage would become a commodity to be bought or sold like property by Sir William Cecil, Master of the Court of Wards. With Earl John's death, the Hastings marriage deal was effectively over before it had even been made official. Any fantasies of marrying into a potential royal family of England were now just so much faerie dust.

The love's labor that de Vere had lost was not just Mary Hastings or her sister Elizabeth. It was also an entire alternate universe wherein de Vere had remained the master of his own fate into his young adulthood.

But how much had the twelve-year-old boy come to know the foreboding figure of his father? Behind the Shakespeare mask, he would twice portray Earl John's passing in All's Well That Ends Well and Hamlet as something that takes place before the play's action begins, an event that carries less significance in itself than it does in its aftermath. Edward knew his father in death, one suspects, as he did in life: a specter to be contemplated from a distance.

Edward, Countess Margery, and several trusted servants were brought in as executors of the sixteenth earl's will. Earl John left household items, livestock, several manors, and money to various friends, servants, family, and charities.

Earl John had also vested a "use" on his properties wherein he conveyed them in trust to the duke of Norfolk a twenty-six-year-old nephew and to the queen's favorite, Sir Robert Dudley. It was a legalistic trick sometimes used to avoid the possibility of a child losing his inheritance in the Court of Wards bureaucracy.

However, from a child's perspective, the "use" surely looked like trading one swindle for another. For in short order, records of the Court of Wards reveal that Dudley had been rewarded with "all . . . the lands . . . and all and singular there appertaining in the counties of Essex, Suffolk, and Cambridgeshire, late the inheritance of the Right Hon. John de Vere, earl of Oxford." In scarcely more than a year after Earl John's death, Edward's mother was complaining about Dudley's diversion of revenues from the farm income of Earls Colne to line his own pockets.

In 1562, Dudley was worrying other courtiers, since his wife, Amy Robsart, had recently been found dead at the bottom of a staircase. Dudley was now available to marry Elizabeth and become King Robert.

It doesn't take a paranoiac to piece together Dudley's gains derived from Earl John's death both de Vere family properties and the nullifying of Edward's marriage match with potential royal significance and wonder whether the usurper was also a murderer.

In Hamlet the theft of family inheritance and the murder of a father achieve tragic grandeur. Shakespeare's Hamlet is concerned, not only with the passing of his father, but also with his lost family properties. As hamlet notes, "I can say nothing no, not for a king upon whose property and most dear life a damned defeat was made" (emphasis added); the prince later adds that his father was poisoned "for his estate."

Edward's noninheritance would be his first taste of the brutal and backstabbing world of the Tudor court. To survive, he, too, would learn the language of courtly realpolitik a dialect that he would ultimately translate for the stage under the Shakespeare guise. This "riotous inn," this "palace of tongues," would be home for the rest of de Vere's life. And the author would soon enough find that "the art o' the court," in the words of a banished courtier in Cymbeline, is "as hard to leave as keep, whose top to climb is certain falling, or so slippery that the fear's as bad as falling."

Earl John's body lay at Castle Hedingham for twenty-two days as the family made funeral arrangements. Noble funerals were events of consequence and pomp, like a wedding, that required weeks of planning. Heralds from the Royal College of Arms were typically called in as freelance consultants funerals were an important source of income for them to plan the ceremony and prepare the many heraldic banners and badges that would festoon the church and adorn the liveries of the servants performing their various ceremonial duties. In the words of the diarist Henry Machyn, Earl John's funeral at the end of August, held probably at the parish church at Earls Colne, featured "three Heralds of Arms . . . with a standard and a great banner of arms, and eight banner rolls, crest, target, sword, and coat armor, and a hearse with velvet and a pall of velvet and a dozen of scutcheons [heraldic shields] and with many mourners in black; and a great moan was made for him."

Three days after burying his father, de Vere prepared to leave the quiet world of country estates and hilltop luxuries behind. The knowledge he had absorbed after years of intensive schooling, under the likes of Sir Thomas Smith and Thomas Fowle, would now lie offstage. At the other end of his journey, as the child readied his train of servants to depart out of the Castle Hedingham gates, stood a world of power, mystery, and romance that the boy must have dreaded as much as he yearned for it.

His immediate future was now to serve as a ward of the crown, living in the household of that strange, officious man whom the boy had seen the year before spying on his own son. Sir William Cecil was to be the child's new foster father. The halcyon days of youth had come to an abrupt end. He would depict this moment, in its shocking starkness, in the opening lines of All's Well That Ends Well:

Countess In delivering my son from me, I bury a second husband.Bertram And I in going, madam, weep o'er my father's death anew; but I must attend His Majesty's command, to whom I am now in ward, evermore in subjection.

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.