ON AN AFTERNOON in September, during the fourth year of Queen Elizabeth's
reign, a young nobleman came riding into London out of Essex at the
head of a procession of seven-score horses caparisoned in black. So
wretched were the country roads that the journey of some forty miles
had required three days. The narrow streets of the city were ill-paved,
tortuous, and dirty; there were no causeways, no posts: the people were
obliged to draw back into doorways for the horsemen to pass. As the
word went round that the twelve-year-old Earl of Oxford, hereditary
Lord
Great Chamberlain of England, was riding through the town, groups
at the crossroads swelled, and heads appeared at upper windows for a
sight of this new first earl of the realm, heir of the ancient and honorable
family of de Vere which was second in eminence only to the Monarch.
Grimy hands were waved and greetings rang out, some to be quickly muted
at the signs of mourning, as the procession moved spiritedly along "through
London and Chepe and Ludgate, and so to Temple Bar."
It was a rude but hearty and sanguine populace, always eager for a
show, responsive to pageantry, for which their young Queen had already
manifested a fine aptitude and zest. They could not foresee that within
a space of years they would be welcoming this young lord for his own
gay and infectious charm, their laughter ringing out in happy recognition
when he appeared in company with the Queen, at times bearing the Sword
of State, either setting forth upon a royal progress or to celebrate
amid wild scenes of patriotic fervor some event like the homecoming
of Sir Francis Drake.
But still less could they have conceived, living as they did in an
isolation such as only a fog of ignorance can produce, that with this
dramatic arrival in London of young Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl
of Oxford, from the great feudal castle of his forefathers, the effulgence
of the Renaissance, of which as yet only a few bright rays emanating
from Italy had struck highlights in England, would, through his association
with their learned, picturesque, pleasure-loving sovereign, expand and
glow, illuminating their country and their race with a radiance that,
for centuries to come, would inspire the world. Strikingly enough, the
young Earl was soon nicknamed "Phoebus" at court.
John de Vere, Sixteenth Earl of Oxford—"the good Earl"—had
died on August 3, 1562, and been buried in the mausoleum of his ancestors
at Earl's Colne, the Priory of which had been founded in 1100 by Aubrey
de Vere. The funeral, on August 31, had been ordered in true feudal
style, with "three Heralds of Arms, Master Garter, Master Lancaster,
Master Richmond, with a standard and a great banner of arms, and eight
banner-rolls, crest, target, sword and coat of armour, and a hearse
with velvet, and a dozen of scutcheons, and with many mourners in black;
and a great moan made for him." 1
Castle Hedingham, famed among the ancient estates of England, was once
"unsurpassed in all the land." Here the de Veres had flourished
for five hundred years "in great riches, honour, and power."
Queen Mathilda had died at Hedingham after having created the third
Aubrey de Vere Earl of Oxford; his father, the second Aubrey, with his
successors, having been made Lord Great Chamberlain of England, in 1106,
by King Henry I. The first Aubrey, or Alberic, de Vere, was of Danish
origin. For his support of William of Normandy in the Conquest he had
been granted vast estates in the southern and eastern counties; one
of these being Chenesiton, now Kensington. 2
Situated upon its scarped plateau, this walled and moated Norman keep,
with its bastions and parapets, its parks and pleasure-grounds, extensive
forests and hunting preserves, courtyards, stables, barns, granges,
chapel, tennis-court and butts, had been the home from birth of the
young Lord Bolebec, now become the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford. It was
here that he had learned to ride with such ease and dash that Giles
Fletcher was one day to write a Latin poem extolling his fearless and
graceful horsemanship; here with his father he had taken part in the
chase, in shooting, and hunting the stag; here he had become skilled
in falconry.
At Hedingham, under the tutelage of Arthur
Golding and Thomas Smith, the boy had progressed so rapidly in the
studies of French, Latin, History, and "Cosmography" that
he was entered as an impubes fellow-commoner at Queen's College,
Cambridge, at the age of nine, receiving his A.B. degree at St. John's
College at fourteen; he received his M.A. at Oxford two years afterwards.
To his tutors must go some of the credit for the advanced scholarship
of the precocious young Edward de Vere. Arthur Golding, half-brother
of the second Lady Oxford and thus his uncle, was the translator, "in
flowing and spirited fourteeners," of Ovid's Metamorphoses,
with which his pupil became so familiar in early youth that its poetry
and classic beauty were woven into his consciousness among all the other
indelible sensory impressions and vivid experiences of childhood.
In the array of heroes who peopled the boy's imagination—not only
because their exploits had been shared by his own forbears, but because
their descendants were his friends and associates, their pride his pride,
and their eminence part of his own—were the violent, hard-living,
imperious Hotspurs, Nevilles, Cliffords, who had spent their lives amid
"the tumult of predatory war or in the gloomy repose of garrisoned
and moated castle," like this home of his youth at Hedingham. It
was a rich and colorful heritage, the tang of barbarism sharpening the
sense of honor, responsibility, and prestige to the point where assurance
became a nonchalant hauteur. England was theirs: their martial prowess
had helped to create it; they had put the Tudors on the throne; they
would defend their country and their sovereign to the death.
During the reign of the Catholic Mary and her consort Philip, King
of Spain, the de Veres had lived inconspicuously, retired within their
bastioned walls; for the sympathies of the Sixteenth Earl had been with
the anti-papal position of Henry VIII. (He had named his son for the
short-lived Edward VI.) Benedictine friars, who had been established
nearby, continued, after the monasteries were dissolved, quietly to
serve the Veres in religious offices, according to the ritual to which
they had long been accustomed, and were often beholden to "the
good Earl" for protection and support. But the loyalty of this
family to Elizabeth was devoted and absolute. And she knew that well.
While the young Edward had been bred in the cognizance of his family's
martial exploits and his duty to the Monarch, he was at the same time,
through family ties with the foremost poets and scholars of the day,
imbued with an appreciation of literature and the arts. Besides having
as his tutors the learned Arthur Golding and Sir Thomas Smith, who was
a statesman, scholar, and author, he was related by the marriage of
his father's sisters, Frances and Anne Vere, to the poet Earl
of Surrey and to Lord Sheffield, a man not only skilled in music
but also author of "a book of sonnets according to the Italian
fashion." Moreover, the Sixteenth Earl maintained a company of
players to provide diversion for the long winter evenings. To a precocious,
sensitive, and highly impressionable boy with a natural aptitude for
literature, a gift for music and an innate love of pageantry, these
influences were stimulating, enhancing life and his vision of the world—both
the ancient classical world and the modern tumultuous one.
The year before his father's death, when the young Lord Bolebec was
eleven, Queen Elizabeth paid a visit with her entourage to Castle
Hedingham, remaining there for five days. Very likely it is from
Elizabeth's progresses to the country seats of her nobles that we have
the expression, "to entertain royally," for these gala visits
taxed the resources of even her wealthiest subjects. Great banquets
were served to scores of persons; for the daytime elaborate outdoor
sports were provided, such as hawking and hunting—it was the fashion
for ladies of the period to shoot at deer with the crossbow—and
in the evening masques and stage-plays were arranged. Perhaps the Queen
played on the virginals for the assembled company, her courtiers listening
enthralled, or seemingly so. Or they danced the galliard, the lively
canary, and the stately pavan with its slow cinque-pace movement. Elizabeth
in after days said she had been "used to dance . . . after the
Italian manner of dancing high." She continued to do so for many
years.
In this third year of her reign, the Queen was stately and fair, regal
though young, vivacious and witty in spite of her great learning and
the strains of her hazardous and unhappy girlhood. Her brilliance and
charm, together with her authoritative presence and the magnificence
of the occasion, must have been a wondrous thing in the observant eyes
of the future poet who would dramatize so romantically the ways of princes
and their courts. The conversation he listened to and perhaps participated
in must have induced feverish excitement in a mind which was ever prone
to meet intellectual and emotional stimulus with an intense response.
The Queen would have taken sharp note of this handsome, impetuous,
idealistic youth. Indeed, from the time of his advent to her court in
the following year, as a Royal Ward, throughout the remainder of their
lives, her interest in him never abated. If her affection and her favor
fluctuated from time to time as the years went by, so it did with them
all, for she was a vain and capricious woman. Yet her respect for his
high attributes of mind and character remained constant; and to this
she made formal attestation.
Upon his entrance into London on the September afternoon, five months
after his twelfth birthday, the turbulent emotions of the young Lord
Oxford were confused. Deeply felt was his grief for his father, to whom
he had been especially close; the ties to his mother were not strong,
nor evidently had hers been to her husband, if one is to judge by the
speed with which she remarried. Mingled with this pervasive sorrow,
darkened by his first intimate experience of gruesome death and ornate
mourning, was his sense of new dignity as bearer of the oldest, most
august name in all England, of his prestige as first earl of the realm,
Lord Great Chamberlain, the nobleman nearest in rank to the Queen's
Majesty. He would take part in the life at court, where he would see
ambassadors from foreign lands and hear French, Italian, and Spanish
spoken fluently, as well as the Latin of cultivated discourse to which
he was already accustomed. It was well known that the Queen spoke and
wrote in Greek also. "When I came to the throne," she once
told a French ambassador, "I knew six languages better than my
own." He had heard that she read Sophocles, besides the Romans—Cicero,
Livy, Seneca—in which he himself was already proficient, and that
she wrote sonnets as well as shrewd, learned speeches.
Poetry he loved with passion. He had already tried his hand at verses
in Latin and English too, stimulated by the poems of his neighbor, George
Gascoigne, who was bearing him company on his journey to the court,
but they were stiff, imitative now of his uncle of Surrey, now of Lord
Vaux, or written in the manner of George's translations from the
classics. George was only eight years his senior, a congenial companion.
It was said that the English court had become a center of learning
second only to the courts of Italy and France. He meant to go one day
to the Continent to fight for his country and bring his share of glory
to the Vere name.
These dirty streets, these rough ignorant men and slovenly women, the
grimy urchins darting under the horses' very legs, whistling shrilly
or squealing like pigs, causing the startled beasts to rear and toss
their manes—what a mob, what a din of noise, but what gusto too!
How they cheered and bobbed their heads in the low doorways of the taverns,
or sighed and moaned in tribute to the appurtenances of mourning, some
extending their cans of beer in a friendly toast, shouting and shoving,
pledging him as a young prince come into his high estate. It was a new
experience to him, potent and stirring.
The beat of hundreds of hooves clanked against the paving-stones, echoing
far back along the narrow lanes. Off to the left was the Thames, with
Whitehall around the bend. Tomorrow he would pay his duty to the Queen's
Majesty.
The horses pranced. Gascoigne had fallen back a little. The young Earl
sat erect, his heart high. He was leaving sorrow behind and entering
a brilliant new world.
The advent of Edward de Vere in London has a symbolic significance
which is profoundly dramatic. It was one of those high clear moments
in the world's history when diverse forces seem to meet in an instantaneous
harmony for the creation of something fresh and wondrous. This sensitive,
impressionable young aristocrat in riding away from funeral pomp into
the teeming life of the English capital, was leaving medievalism, with
its preoccupation with death and gloom, for the vivid affirmation of
life which was the essence of the Renaissance. Seldom is a great transition
so strikingly epitomized in an individual as was the present one in
the person of the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford. Henry VIII had considered
himself a humanist, and indeed the first beginnings of the new mode
had appeared sporadically during his reign; but it was in the reign
of Elizabeth that the individual came into his own with the flowering
of the spirit which was like the emergence of exultant life from a dark
chrysalis.
In his study of the Italian Renaissance, John Addington Symonds eloquently
describes the situation with regard to Europe, to which the great awakening
had of course come long before:
Behind stretched centuries of mediaevalism, intellectually barren
and inert. Of the future there were as yet but faint foreshadowings.
Meanwhile the force of the nations who were destined to achieve the
coming transformation was unexhausted; their physical and mental faculties
were unimpaired. No ages of enervating luxury, of intellectual endeavour,
of life artificially preserved or ingeniously prolonged, had sapped
the fibre of the men who were about to inaugurate the new world. Severely
nurtured, unused to delicate living, these giants of the Renaissance
were like boys in their capacity for endurance, their inordinate appetite
for enjoyment. No generations of hungry, sickly, effete, critical,
disillusioned, trod them down.... Their fresh and unperverted senses
rendered them keenly alive to what was beautiful and natural. They
yearned for magnificence and instinctively comprehended splendour....
Everything seemed possible to their young energy; nor had a single
pleasure palled upon the appetite. Born, as it were, at the moment
when desires and faculties are evenly balanced, when the perceptions
are not blunted nor the senses cloyed, opening their eyes for the
first time on a world of wonder, these men of the Renaissance enjoyed
what we may term the first transcendent springtime of the modern world.
Nothing is more remarkable than the fullness of life that throbbed
in them. Natures rich in all capacities and endowed with every kind
of sensibility were frequent. Nor was there any limit to the play
of personality in action. 3
All this is true of Edward de Vere and of what he was bringing to the
Elizabethan world. For he was the first man of the Renaissance in England.
Others followed him, men "rich in all capacities and endowed with
every kind of sensibility." But he was the first, and he was the
greatest of them all. It is to Elizabeth's everlasting credit, and to
her everlasting glory as well, that she recognized his genius and allowed
nothing to interfere with its development.
There is a story recorded that midway [through] the young Earl's journey
a hard shower had overtaken his procession, giving him and his friend
Gascoigne a drenching. He had resented this abrupt dampening, especially
since the morning had shone with promise of fair weather, and he was
unaccustomed to being crossed or flouted. But today, when he entered
London, the skies had remained clear, and now the long twilight had
set in with a limpid serenity which enhanced the visible world with
its far-flung light, reaching farther than eye could see or even the
mind of a poet could measure.
NOTES
1. Machyn's Diary; ed. Nichols. Camden Society,
1848. back
2. B. M. Ward: The Seventeenth Earl of Oxford;
cit. Dugdale's Baronage (1675), vol. I, p. 188. All quotations
from Ward, unless otherwise specified, are from this biography. back
3. Renaissance in Italy; p. 8. back
