THE YEAR following Elizabeth's accession had seen the official establishment
of the Reformed Church as the Church of England. Although many of the
aristocrats remained Catholics, they were forbidden by law to employ
the Roman ritual.
But the embers were only covered, not extinguished, and they continued
to smoulder, ejecting sporadic flame, until eventually they burst into
a conflagration which involved Catholics and Protestants in a life-and-death
struggle, a final showdown between the might of Spain and the resolute
force of England. Its prolonged heat and glow tinged every aspect of
English life, profoundly affecting politics, literature, and the stage,
no less than daily affairs and the well-being of the people.
Elizabeth had begun by endeavoring to chart a middle course between
Catholicism and the Reformed Church, refusing to renew the ties with
Rome severed by her father. She was wise enough not to be too drastic:
she herself liked an impressive ritual, and she restored the Carnival
In 1558 or '59 she said to Feria, the Spanish Ambassador, "I do
not intend to be called Head of the Church, but I shall not let my subjects'
money be carried out of the realm to the pope any more; the bishops
are a set of lazy scamps." And later she told Mendoza, "I
have never castigated the Catholics except when they would not acknowledge
me as their queen; in spiritual matters I believe as they do."
1 Indeed,
according to Macaulay, "A crucifix, with wax lights burning round
it, stood in her private chapel. She always spoke with disgust and horror
of the marriage of priests."
Religious services were uniform in externals, but some latitude was
allowed the bishop of the diocese and the incumbent of the parish. In
the people's view, "Psalm-singing and heresy were both of foreign
origin" and therefore to be regarded with suspicion. But the Queen
maintained a nice balance, and, as the Protestant party waxed in strength,
held it disorderly for the proceedings of Protestantism, a State affair,
to be discussed in the pulpit. In the course of a sermon at St. Paul's
upon an occasion when she was present in company with de Silva, then
Spanish Ambassador, Dean Nowell "rather roughly handled" the
subject of images. The Queen interrupted, crying out sharply from her
seat: "To your text, Mr. Dean! Leave that; we have heard enough
of that! To your subject."
It will be recalled that Dean Laurence Nowell, brother of the Dean
of St. Paul's, was for a time Lord Oxford's tutor, as the Puritan Golding
had been. This fact may help to explain why, although Oxford was brought
up in the Catholic ritual, it is impossible to tell from his writings
what his own leanings may have been; often they were patently toward
skepticism.
The far-reaching intentions of Philip
II of Spain did not become apparent even after he sent the Duke
of Alva to the Netherlands to put down Protestantism by force in 1567.
It was actually the Earl of Oxford who, thirteen years later, was to
sound the warning to Elizabeth of the danger arising from Spain's tireless
intrigues with the Catholics of England to establish Mary Stuart upon
the English throne. He himself, however, seems to have remained throughout
his life personally aloof from the contests between the Papists and
the adherents of the Reformed Church. Undoubtedly he and Elizabeth saw
eye to eye here, as upon so many other subjects, and it was only when
her safety as Queen was threatened that he took a stand.
Oxford's opposition to the Puritans stemmed from their interference
with the theatre. Leicester was to become more and more identified as
the head of the Puritan movement, drawing into his orbit his nephew,
Philip Sidney, and the poet Spenser. Spenser, although always a friend
and admirer of Oxford, was the most articulate of them all, his Faerie
Queene being a poetic allegory of a chivalric form of Puritanism,
with Una standing for Elizabeth and the scarlet-clad Duessa for Catholicism,
symbolized by Mary Queen of Scots.
Lord Oxford had pursued his study of law at Gray's
Inn not with the intention of making it his profession but in order
to fit himself for fulfilling his responsibilities to the State, as
a member of the House of Lords and in whatever further capacities might
be required, as well as to equip himself for looking after his numerous
landed properties. Clearly his expectation was that he would follow
a martial career in the tradition of the Veres who had borne so influential
a part in England's development as a nation. Incidentally, much more
than law was taught at the Inns of the Court in Elizabeth's time. Here
young noblemen were schooled in the ways of the court—in courtly
and diplomatic language and behavior, in dancing, fencing, all the arts
of a gentleman. Plays and masques were given, in which they took part,
as writers and actors. Only the sons of the nobility and the high gentry
were admitted.
It was the Thirteenth
Earl of Oxford who had helped to win the fight for the Lancastrians
at Bosworth Field against the Yorkists under Richard III, resulting
in the coronation of the Earl of Richmond as Henry VII. For this he
had been richly rewarded and had stood as godfather, in 1491, to the
King's infant son, who was to become Henry VIII.
The Fifteenth Earl had carried the crown at the coronation of Anne
Boleyn as Queen in 1533. He had married the wealthy Elizabeth Trussell
of Warwickshire, near Stratford, from whom Edward, the Seventeenth Earl,
inherited his estate on the Avon.
The Eleventh Earl had been one of Henry V's ablest lieutenants and
had held a command at the Battle of Agincourt. (It is interesting that
in the early play, The
Famous Victories of King Henry the Fifth, which constitutes
a kind of matrix for the dramas of King Henry IV and King
Henry V, this Earl of Oxford was given a conspicuous part as the
King's adviser and principal lieutenant, though in a later revision
a maturer hand directed all the glory upon the King.)
Robert de
Vere, the Ninth Earl, married the grand-daughter of King Edward
III, a cousin of Richard II. While commanding an army against Bolingbroke,
he was defeated and subsequently banished by the Parliament of the victorious
Henry IV. He died in exile in France, gored to death by a wild boar.
Curiously enough, seven generations later, Edward's father, the Sixteenth
Earl, was threatened with a similar fate, also in France. While hunting
the wild boar in sport, he had alighted from his horse and strolled
away from the vicinity of his companions, when the infuriated beast
rushed out of the bushes and charged him. With only his rapier for defense,
the Earl slew the boar, to the great amazement of the French huntsmen.
These incidents are particularly striking in view of the fact that the
name Vere suggests Verres, which means boar. The family
cognizance was the Blue Boar, their coat of arms displaying two boars,
as well as a Harpy and a Mullioned Star.
The first Vere, Aubrey, as we have said, fought at the Battle of Hastings,
receiving the Conqueror's half-sister in marriage and also the gift
of many valuable estates. His grandson and namesake was rewarded for
an heroic victory over the Persians during the Crusades with the recognizance
of the five-pointed silver star, or mullet. Leland's Itinerary tells
how, in 1098,
the night coming on and waxing dark, the Christians being four miles
from Antioch . . . God willing [their] safety, showed a white Star
or Molette of five points . . . which to every man's sight did light
and arrest upon the standard of Albry the Third, there shining excessively.
2
Queen Elizabeth, however, had her own plans for the young Earl of Oxford,
although she yielded after a time to his plea, allowing him to join
the Earl of Sussex as an aide in the campaign of April and May, 1570,
to put down the revolt in the north which had been incited by Northumberland,
Westmoreland, and other Catholic nobles. It was for the Duke of Norfolk's
share in the ambitious plot of which this was the initial outburst that
he was ultimately convicted and executed for treason, the plan having
been to marry him to the Queen of Scots and put her and himself upon
the throne of England. The most strenuous efforts on the part of his
cousin, Lord Oxford, failed to save him.
When the revolt in the north had been quelled, Sussex sent his aide
back to London. The young Earl's arrival at Vere House is described
by Stowe in his Annals:
. . . and so to his house by London Stone, with four score
gentlemen in a livery of Reading tawny, and chains of gold about their
necks, before him; and one hundred tall yeomen in the like livery
to follow him, without chains, but all having his cognizance of the
slue Boar embroidered on their left shoulder. [Vere House was] a fair
and large built house pertaining to the prior of Tortington in Sussex,
since to the Earl of Oxford. . . . Which house hath a fair garden
thereto, lying on the west side thereof. 3
(It is on London Stone that Jack Cade strikes his staff, in
2 Henry VI: IV.6, and proclaims himself Mortimer, Lord of the
city.)
As a result of his association with Sussex in this campaign a firm
friendship grew up between the younger and the older man which was to
last until the death of Sussex thirteen years later, with Oxford ever
Sussex's "staunchest supporter at Court." But this deep loyalty
was to place Lord Oxford in opposition to the powerful Leicester, sworn
enemy to Sussex; and, with a curious consistency, other situations were
to develop to widen the cleavage between these two and thus affect the
young Earl's friendship with Philip Sidney, Leicester's nephew. Oxford
seems never to have troubled to be politic but to have been guided by
the dictates of his heart, with the result that he got into the kind
of trouble sanguine, spontaneous people usually do get into.
He had a respect, amounting to a religious code, for the truth. His
name, Vere, of course means truth—literally truly, verily—and
he was ever mindful of the analogy. The motto, Vero Nihil Verius,
which he caused to be inscribed upon his coat of arms, can be read,
Nothing truer than truth, or Nothing truer than Vere.
The young Oxford's relationship with the Earl of Sussex had the effect
of encouraging and channelling his already enthusiastic interest in
dramatic production, for, as Lord Chamberlain, Sussex maintained a company
of actors for court performances; so perhaps his star was guiding him,
after all.
England was ruled and dominated by Elizabeth, the last of the absolute
monarchs. Determined to make her reign peaceful and prosperous, the
Queen was wise enough to profit by the mistakes of her predecessors,
not only those of her half-sister, the religious fanatic, Mary Tudor,
but also those responsible for the long ruinous period which had begun
with Richard II and continued until her grandfather, Henry VII, became
King. This had been the era during which the great feudal nobles, through
their greed for power, had contended among themselves in the Wars of
the Roses, draining England's lifeblood.
Now, under the rule of this Queen who, in 1558, had ascended the throne
at the age of twenty-five, the great Catholic nobles were no longer
all-powerful, though they were dying hard. Elizabeth's ministers were
chosen from a different stratum: Sir William Cecil, after 1571 Lord
Burghley, who was to be her chief minister and counsellor for forty
years, the Protestant Robert Dudley, afterward Earl
of Leicester, Sir
Francis Walsingham, Sir
Nicholas Bacon and later his son Francis, Christopher
Hatton, and Walter Ralegh. This was a "new crowd" in government
and court life, none of them save Dudley, who was the son of Northumberland,
having belonged to the nobility until Cecil was elevated. Despite Leicester's
impetuosity, bad judgment and personal ambitions, they kept the ship
of state steady upon perilous seas, Cecil and Leicester acting at times
as salutary checks upon each other. But the actual ruler was the Queen,
one of the greatest sovereigns in history. She made the vital decisions
after listening to her counsellors. Vacillating, wilful, procrastinating,
mendacious, cruel, unreliable, and penurious as she was, she yet had
the inestimable and ineffable quality of greatness.
Her policy was right for the times; so were her arrogance, her sense
of drama, her shrewdness and tact in her relations with the people,
for whom she put on a magnificent show. As she rode forth in her gilded
coach upon her royal progresses through streets decorated with green
branches and festoons, accompanied by her train of handsomely dressed
and mounted courtiers and maids, trumpets, drums, church-bells celebrated
her advent, thrilling the populace.
All the streets of the city through which she was to pass were freshly
sanded and gravelled, and the houses hung with cloth of arras, rich
car-pets and silk; but Cheapside, then called "the golden Chepe,"
made a [great] display . . . being hung with cloth of gold and silver,
and velvets of all colours. All the crafts of London were ranged in
their liveries from St. Michael the Quern as far as Aldgate. 4
The Queen was gracious and courteous to all, allowing the common citizens
free access to her presence, accepting and reading their petitions on
the spot with a regal condescension which won their hearts. For almost
the entire span of her long reign the people of England adored their
Good Queen Bess.
The only member of the old feudal aristocracy who was close to Elizabeth
was Edward de Vere, and he was essentially a literary man, poet and
dramatist, patron of writers and players. For an indeterminate period
between 1570 and 1581, no other man, not even Leicester, stood in a
more intimate relation to her than he did. The passion they shared for
literature and the drama drew them together and, though a stronger one
was to unite them for a time, it was this which outlasted all others.
While the Queen's Lords Steward and Lords Chamberlain were in several
cases members of the old nobility—for example, Henry Stanley, Fourth
Earl of Derby, and Henry FitzAlan, Twelfth Earl of Arundel—the
fact is that they were never particularly influential.
Upon his coming of age in April 1571, 5 the Earl of Oxford took his seat in the House of
Lords, the occasion being the opening of Parliament, for the first time
in five years, by the Queen. It had become imperative to raise funds
for defense. A great ground-swell of Catholic unrest expressing itself
in the Ridolfi plot, of which the northern revolt had given the first
tangible evidence, threatened to undermine the stability of the kingdom.
Elizabeth had been excommunicated by the Pope. And the Catholics were
determined, with powerful help from abroad if necessary, to supplant
her with the Catholic Mary Stuart.
The procession to the Houses of Parliament was one of bright and imposing
pageantry. Attired in her imperial robes and wearing a coronet of gold
set with pearls and precious stones, Her Majesty rode in a "coach
drawn by two palfreys covered with crimson velvet . . . embossed and
embroidered very richly." 6
The Earl of Oxford, as Lord Great Chamberlain, entering the House of
Lords for the first time, carried the Queen's train, as she was conducted
from Westminster Abbey to the House of Lords, taking precedence over
other noblemen, including the Earl
Marshal and the Lord Admiral. Here, in a speech retailing the benefits
bestowed by the Queen, the Lord Keeper cited the delivery from "the
bondage of Roman tyranny"; he praised "Her Majesty's wisdom
in governing," her "clemency and mercy. No Prince of this
realm," he said, "hash had his hands so clean from blood."
Elizabeth, resolved to maintain a just neutrality between the Reformed
Church and the Catholics, ignored the bills in which she considered
the Commons were going too far. The position of the Earl of Oxford was
likewise impartial as he sat in his hereditary place in the House of
Lords witnessing the maneuvers in the sectarian struggle. Although a
member of the old aristocracy, he was the son of a noble who had joined
the Reformed Church and the ward of its titular leader. Upon this subject,
as we have observed, he and his sovereign appeared to see more or less
eye to eye; in any case, she had his loyal allegiance.
This year that he came of age was the beginning of the young Earl's
heyday. High in the Queen's favor, he was to be for the next ten years
fortunate in almost all he undertook. Of course there were minor troubles
and anxieties, even violent emotional crises, but during the 1570's
he reached a dazzling peak of human eminence and of human accomplishment
as well.
He himself recorded candidly, as was his wont, the relationship in
which he stood to the Queen during those early years, in a sonnet written
in a form which he was to make familiar and beloved. It was entitled,
Love Thy Choice, and was signed with his name.
Who taught thee first to sigh, alas! my heart?
Who taught thy tongue the woeful words of plaint?
Who filled your eyes with tears of bitter smart?
Who gave thee grief and made thy joys to faint?
Who first did paint with colours pale thy face?
Who first did break thy sleeps of quiet rest?
Above the rest in court who gave thee grace?
Who made thee strive in honour to be best?
In constant truth to bide so firm and sure,
To scorn the world regarding but thy friends?
With patient mind each passion to endure,
In one desire to settle to the end?
Love then thy choice wherein such choice thou bind,
As nought but death may ever change thy mind.
Earle of Oxenforde
NOTES
1. F. Chamberlin: The Sayings
of Q. Eliz.; pp. 123, 166. back
2. Vol. VI, p. 40. Cit. by
Ward; p. 4. back
3. Stowe's Annals;
p. 34. (Our italics.) back
4. Strickland: Lives of
the Queens of England, vol. III, p. 149. back
5. His birthday was April
12, old style, April 23, by the new. back
6. Ward; p. 52; quot. D'Ewes:
Journals; p. 130. back
