CHAPTER 2.
The man whose Bible forms the subject of this dissertation was born, we are told¹, into the ancient
noble house of Vere on April 12 1550, at the midpoint of the short and anarchic reign of Henry VIII's
pious but ineffective Protestant son Edward VI, and only three years
before the bloody counter-
reformation effected by Edward’s half-sister Mary Tudor. England had another eight years to wait for
Elizabeth I to ascend the throne; she restored the nation to moderate Protestantism and civil peace,
ushering in the "golden age" of Gloriana in a reign which lasted fifty years and cultivated the genius of
"Shakespeare,” Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson.
The de Veres had held the earldom of Oxford since Edward's ancestor Aubrey de Vere (1040-1088)
had "come in
with the conqueror.” By the reign of Elizabeth I they were the oldest intact patrilineal
dynasty within the English nobility. After the death of his first wife Dorothy Neville, by whom he had
one child, John de Vere, the sixteenth Earl of Oxford, remarried in 1548; his second wife was Marjorie
Golding, the sister of the noted Calvinist theologian and translator Arthur Golding. The couple raised two
children -- Edward and his sister Mary². At the death of John in August 1562, young Edward, now the
17th Earl of Oxford, entered the Court of Wards and the care of William Cecil, the newly appointed master
of this venerable institution. An account of the orphan boy's flamboyant escort into London from his
ancestral estate at Castle Hedingham in Northern Essex, preserved in Machyn's diary for September 3,
1562, vividly pictures him passing through London, Chepe and Ludgate, and from there on to Temple
1
Hatt. MSS Cal. (XIII.142). The document is Lord Burghley's memorandum (January 3, 1576), taken on the instruction of The Queen's own
physician Richard Master (see Lansdowne MSS. 19.83, excerpted by Ward 114-115), who requested that "there may a note be taken from the day
of her [Anne Cecil's] first day of quickening, for thereof somewhat may be known noteworthy". It is curious that in the midst of all this sound
and fury about Anne's own pregnancy, while trying to remember and make note of every time during the past six months when his daughter and
her husband were lodged in the same household, to see if he could pin a paternity button on the husband, the Master of the Court of Wards should
pause to recalculate the husband's birthday. Note to the third (Feb 2003) printing: some critics seem to have misunderstood this footnote. They
need to read more carefully. Hatt. XIII.142 is, aside from mention of Oxford’s baptismal cup, an item of evidence which came to light
subsequent to the writing of this dissertation, the only document known the writer which states or even implies the birth date of the 17th Earl of
Oxford.
2 I have not been able to discover Mary Vere's date of birth.
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