Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford

• 1. Introduction

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  Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford was born on the 12th of April 1550 at Hedingham Castle in Essex, heir to the second-oldest earldom in England. His father died when he was twelve, leaving him a ward of Queen Elizabeth and placing him in the household of her chief advisor, Sir William Cecil. What followed was a life of extraordinary contradictions: a court favourite who never held real power, a celebrated patron of the arts who sold off nearly every acre he owned, a poet praised by contemporaries whose verses later critics found uneven at best, and a man whose volatile temperament ensured that nearly every advantage life handed him was eventually lost. How did a nobleman born to such rank and promise end up dying without public or private notice, buried in an unmarked grave? And how did a man who never held a government post come to be, four centuries after his death, the most prominent alternative candidate proposed for the authorship of Shakespeare's works?

• 2. Ward of the Crown

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  At Cecil House, the twelve-year-old Oxford studied dancing, French, Latin, cosmography, writing exercises, drawing, and common prayers. His first tutor there, the antiquarian Laurence Nowell, wrote to Cecil after only eight months that his work for the Earl "cannot be much longer required." Scholars have read that departure as either evidence of Oxford's intractability or his precocity outpacing Nowell's ability to teach him. His uncle Arthur Golding, in a 1564 dedication, described the young Oxford as already deeply interested in ancient history and contemporary events.

  In August 1564 Oxford was one of seventeen noblemen and knights in the Queen's party awarded an honorary Master of Arts degree by the University of Cambridge. He received another from the University of Oxford on a royal progress in 1566. In February 1567 he entered Gray's Inn to study law. But in July of that same year, at seventeen, he killed an under-cook named Thomas Brincknell while practising fencing in the backyard of Cecil House. The coroner's jury, which included the future historian Raphael Holinshed, returned a verdict of suicide by the victim, ruling that Brincknell, drunk, had deliberately run onto Oxford's blade. The verdict left Brincknell's pregnant wife destitute; she delivered a stillborn child shortly after his death.

  By 1569 Oxford's reading list included a gilt Geneva Bible, Chaucer, Plutarch, Cicero, Plato, and two books in Italian. That same year he made the acquaintance of the mathematician and astrologer John Dee and became interested in occultism. He also received his first vote for membership in the Order of the Garter that year, an honour he would seek repeatedly and never attain.

• 3. Marriage and Money

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  Oxford had been contracted in childhood to marry a sister of the Earl of Huntingdon, but that indenture was allowed to lapse after his father's death. In the summer of 1571 he declared an interest in Cecil's fourteen-year-old daughter, Anne, who had earlier been pledged to Philip Sidney. Cecil's elevation to Lord Burghley in February of that year had raised his daughter's standing, and Sidney's family was declining in royal favour. The marriage took place at the Palace of Whitehall on the 16th of December 1571, in a triple wedding attended by the Queen. Burghley gave Oxford land worth £800 and a cash settlement of £3,000 as Anne's dowry; the money vanished without trace.

  The financial mathematics of Oxford's early life were punishing. When he attained his majority in April 1571, Elizabeth demanded £3,000 for overseeing his wardship and a further £4,000 for suing his livery. He pledged double those amounts if he failed to pay on time, putting a potential total obligation of £21,000 in play before he had properly taken possession of his own estates. The fines assessed against him in the Court of Wards alone totalled some £3,306. He entered bonds to the Court totalling £11,000 and two further private bonds of £6,000 apiece.

  Oxford was still not in full possession of his inheritance when, in the summer of 1574, Elizabeth admonished him for his extravagance. On the 1st of July he bolted to the continent without permission, travelling with Lord Edward Seymour to Calais and then Flanders, carrying what the record describes as a great sum of money. The Queen dispatched two Gentlemen Pensioners to bring him back under threat of heavy penalties. He was in London by the 28th of the month and promised a licence to travel properly to Paris, Germany, and Italy in exchange for good behaviour.

• 4. Italy and Its Aftermath

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  In January 1575 Elizabeth issued a formal travel licence, and Oxford departed England in the first week of February. A month later he was presented to the King and Queen of France in Paris. News that his wife Anne was pregnant had reached him there, and he sent her extravagant presents. But somewhere during the journey his trust in her and in the Cecil family broke down entirely, and he became convinced the expected child was not his.

  He spent a year in Italy, captivated, the record says, by Italian fashions in clothing, jewellery, and cosmetics. John Stow recorded that Oxford introduced various Italian luxury items to the English court, including embroidered and scented gloves. Elizabeth I owned a pair of decorated perfumed gloves that for many years was called the "Earl of Oxford's perfume." His own judgment of Italy, written to Burghley from Siena in January 1576, was less enthusiastic: "for my lekinge of Italy, my lord I am glad I haue sene it, and I care not euer to see it any more vnles it be to serue my prince or contrie."

  By the time he left Venice in March 1576, the Italian financier Benedict Spinola had lent Oxford over £4,000 for his fifteen-month tour, while over a hundred tradesmen in England were pursuing debts worth thousands more. Crossing the Channel in April, his ship was seized by pirates from Flushing who stripped him to his shirt and, one account says, might have killed him had not one of them recognised who he was. Back in England he refused to live with Anne, took rooms at Charing Cross, and insisted that she not attempt to speak to him. He remained estranged from her for five years.

• 5. Scandal, Violence, and Exile

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  On the 23rd of March 1581 Sir Francis Walsingham informed the Earl of Huntingdon that two days earlier Anne Vavasour, one of the Queen's maids of honour, had given birth to a son fathered by Oxford, who had then withdrawn himself with apparent intent to leave the country. Oxford was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London, along with Anne and the infant, who would later be known as Sir Edward Vere. Burghley intervened, and Oxford was released on the 8th of June, though he remained under house arrest until July.

  The street consequences of the affair were prolonged and violent. In March 1582 Oxford and Anne Vavasour's uncle, Sir Thomas Knyvet, clashed in the streets of London; Oxford was wounded, one of his servants killed. A second fray followed on the 18th of June, and a third six days after that, when Knyvet's faction killed another of Oxford's men. In a letter to Burghley three years later, Oxford mentioned attending him "as well as a lame man might," suggesting his injuries from those encounters were permanent.

  The charge that drew the most detailed documentation from the period involved claims by the Earl of Arundell and Henry Howard that Oxford had committed serial assaults on boys in his household. The most thoroughly documented case concerned an Italian boy named Orazio Coquo, who testified to the Venetian Inquisition on the 27th of August 1577 that Oxford had recruited him from the choir of Santa Maria Formosa in Venice on the 1st of March 1576. Coquo arrived in Dover with Oxford on the 20th of April 1576 and fled eleven months later, on the 20th of March 1577, helped by a Milanese merchant who gave him twenty-five ducats for the journey. When asked whether he had sought Oxford's permission before leaving, Coquo replied that he had not, "because he would not have allowed me to leave." None of the three parties, Oxford, Arundell, or Howard, was ever indicted or tried. Oxford was reconciled to the Queen in May 1583 at Theobalds, but never recovered his former standing at court.

• 6. Patron of the Arts

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  Between 1564 and 1599, twenty-eight works were dedicated to Oxford by authors including Arthur Golding, John Lyly, Robert Greene, and Anthony Munday. Of his thirty-three dedications, thirteen appeared in original or translated works of literature, a higher proportion of literary works than other patrons of comparable means. Beginning in 1580, he patronised both adult and boy acting companies, a company of musicians, and also sponsored tumblers, acrobats, and performing animals.

  Sometime after November 1583, Oxford bought a sublease of premises used by the boy companies in the Blackfriars and gave it to his secretary, the writer John Lyly. Lyly installed Henry Evans, a Welsh scrivener and theatrical enthusiast, as manager of Oxford's Boys, composed of the Children of the Chapel and the Children of Paul's. The new Oxford's Men toured the provinces between 1580 and 1587, and Oxford's Players remained active until 1602. The composer John Farmer, who was in Oxford's service, dedicated his 1591 publication The First Set of Divers and Sundry Ways of Two Parts in One to his patron, noting Oxford's love of music.

  In 1586 Angel Day dedicated The English Secretary, the first epistolary manual for writing model letters in English, to Oxford. In 1590 Edmund Spenser addressed to Oxford the third of seventeen dedicatory sonnets prefacing The Faerie Queene, celebrating his patronage of poets. Scholar Steven W. May described Oxford as "a nobleman with extraordinary intellectual interests and commitments" whose biography exhibits "a lifelong devotion to learning."

• 7. The Poet's Voice

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  Oxford's manuscript verses circulated widely in courtly circles. Three of his poems, "When wert thou born desire," "My mind to me a kingdom is," and "Sitting alone upon my thought," appear repeatedly in surviving sixteenth-century manuscript miscellanies. His earliest published poem appeared in Thomas Bedingfield's 1573 translation of Cardano's Comforte, a work Oxford supported with a commendatory letter urging Bedingfield to publish.

  In 1576 eight of his poems appeared in the poetry miscellany The Paradise of Dainty Devises. According to its introduction, all the poems in the collection were intended to be sung, but Oxford's were almost the only genuine love songs included. One of those poems, later described as "a defiant lyric without precedent in English Renaissance verse," opens: "Framed in the front of forlorn hope, past all recovery, / I stayless stand to abide the shock of shame and infamy."

  Contemporary praise was emphatic. William Webbe named Oxford "the most excellent" of Elizabeth's courtier poets. Puttenham's The Arte of English Poesie, published in 1589, placed him first on its list of courtier poets and excerpted "When wert thou born desire" as evidence of "his excellance and wit." Francis Meres' Palladis Tamia in 1598 listed Oxford first, by social rank, among seventeen playwrights "the best for comedy amongst us." Later assessments were harsher; the scholar Steven W. May described his poetry as "competent, fairly experimental... working in the established modes of mid-century lyric verse," while C. S. Lewis found in it only "a faint talent" that was "for the most part undistinguished and verbose." None of the plays attributed to him in his lifetime survive.

• 8. The Authorship Question

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  The Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship proposes that Oxford wrote the plays and poems traditionally attributed to William Shakespeare. J. Thomas Looney, an English schoolmaster, introduced it in a book published in 1920. Though rejected by nearly all academic Shakespeareans, the theory has remained among the most popular alternative authorship arguments ever since, and was the central theme of the 2011 film Anonymous.

  Oxford died on the 24th of June 1604 at King's Place in Hackney, of unknown causes. He was buried on the 6th of July in the churchyard of St Augustine's in Hackney. His death passed, the record says, without public or private notice. His grave was still unmarked on the 25th of November 1612, when his widow Elizabeth Trentham signed her will asking to be buried "as neare vnto the bodie of my said late deare and noble lorde and husband as may bee" and requesting that "there bee in the said Church erected for vs a tombe fittinge our degree." The 18th Earl of Oxford never fulfilled his mother's request, and the location of both graves has been lost.