Without John de Vere, 13th Earl of Oxford, there may have never been a Tudor reign.
John de Vere, 13th Earl of Oxford, was born on 8 September 1442 to John de Vere, 12th Earl of Oxford and Lady Oxford, Elizabeth Howard. The Oxfords were devout Lancastrian loyalists, determined to fight to the death for the man they considered to be the rightful sovereign, King Henry VI. Regardless of his genealogy and mental health, Henry VI had been anointed king, and therefore to rebel against his reign was — in the eyes of many — to rebel against God’s will.
Sadly, both John’s father and John’s older brother, Aubrey de Vere, would give their lives in the struggle to keep King Henry VI on his throne. In early 1462, the 12th Earl and his eldest son were convicted of high treason by John Tiptoft, 1st Earl of Worcester, Constable of England, for rebellion against King Edward IV. Aubrey was beheaded upon Tower Hill on 20 February 1462, and the Earl was executed on the same scaffold six days later.
Killing Aubrey first, making the Earl sit for days in the Tower knowing his eldest son was dead, seems spiteful; an act of malice by either King Edward or his adherents. However, King Edward, didn’t take away the family’s title or lands, allowing them to pass to the younger son, who became the 13th Earl of Oxford. Perhaps this is because Oxford was married to the youngest sister of the king’s greatest ally, Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick, or perhaps the king hoping that Oxford would be like several other courtiers who were willing to ignore the executions of family members in exchange for royal favour.
King Edward certainly tried to win over the new earl to Team York. The king made Oxford a Knight of the Bath at the coronation of the new queen, Elizabeth Woodville, in May of 1465. The king even asked Oxford to fill in for his brother-in-law, the Earl of Warwick, as Lord Great Chamberlain. Alas for the king, his attempts to win John de Vere loyalty failed. The 13th Earl of Oxford never forgave the Yorks for the deaths of his father and brother. The earl continued to clandestinely support the usurped King Henry VI and Henry’s son, Edward of Westminster, Prince of Wales.
In November of 1468 Oxford was discovered scheming on behalf of King Henry VI and was thrown into the Tower, where he confessed to (possibly even bragged about) his treason. King Edward went easy on Oxford anyway. The king was wisely attempting to woo the peers who still backed the old regime rather than kill them, and he was probably trying not to upset the 16th Earl of Warwick (whom he had enraged by marrying Elizabeth Woodville) any further by killing Warwick’s brother-in-law. King Edward therefore released Oxford from the Tower before 7 January 1469., and even granted him a general pardon a few months later.
Notwithstanding Edward’s efforts, Oxford remained committed to the Lancastrian cause. In July of 1469 he gleefully joined the 16th Earl of Warwick and the king’s brother, the Duke of Clarence, in rebellion. The Edgecote campaign failed, but Oxford would still not give up. He sailed for France, where he joined King Henry VI’s wife, Margaret of Anjou, and Edward of Westminster. In September 1470 Oxford, Warwick, and Clarence were to stage another rebellion, and this time their invasion was successful — King Henry VI was restored to the throne.
Oxford was well rewarded for his loyalty. On 13 October he carried the Sword of State in front of the king as the processed through London to St Paul’s, and he was appointed the new Lord High Constable of England. Just two days later, Oxford “tried and condemned for high treason the same Earl of Worcester who had in 1462 condemned Oxford’s own father and brother.”
The revenge must have been sweet.
King Henry’s resumption of the crown didn’t last long, though. Edward IV invaded the kingdom in March of 1471, intent on ruling once more. Oxford was able to prevent Edward IV and his troops from coming ashore in Norfolk, but Edward sweet-talked the city of York into allowing him to land after he swore that he was just trying to reclaim his dukedom. Edward was, of course, lying through his teeth. Once he’d gotten his troops onto terra firma, he marched south, gathering support as he went, and cake-walked into London where he promptly took Henry VI hostage.
Oxford and Warwick attempted to defeat Edward and get the king back at at the Battle of Barnet on 14 April 1471, but were unsuccessful. Oxford did well as commander of the right wing, defeating the forces of Lord Hastings and only losing his position when his men started prematurely looting. Oxford marshalled them and brought them back into the fray, but “they lost their way in the fog and suddenly emerged on their own army, who mistook the Vere star for Edward’s sun in splendour, and met them with a flight of arrows. Whereupon Oxford and his men cried “Treasoune! treasoune” and fled.”
Warwick was killed at Barnet, and three weeks later Edward of Westminster was killed at Battle of Tewkesbury. With the king imprisoned, the heir dead, and the last Lancastrian hope a young Welshman named Harri Tudur who was barely in his teens and who had only a very tenuous claim to the crown, there seemed to be nothing else for Oxford to fight for. All his loyalty had been for naught.
Oxford and two of his younger brothers, George and Thomas de Vere, who had also fought at the Battle of Barnet, fled to Scotland with less than 50 men. (A third younger brother, Richard, had become a priest and was considered safe from Yorkist retaliation.) From Scotland the earl and his brothers returned to France, where they became pirates and continued to be pains in King Edward IV’s royal backside.
The pirating earl and his brothers were captured on 15 February 1474 and imprisoned in Hammes Castle, near Calais. By this time, King Edward IV had justifiably had enough of the recalcitrant earl’s sass. Oxford was attainted and his lands confiscated. The earl tried to escape (or commit suicide) in 1478, but was thwarted in the attempt. It seemed as though Oxford and his brothers would languish in their prison for the rest of their lives.
Then, in the spring of 1484, King Edward IV died. Instead of crowning King Edward V, the late king’s brother declared his nephews to be bastards and took the throne for himself, become King Richard III. I would be seriously surprised if Oxford didn’t experience profound schadenfreude to hear that Richard had turned on his brother’s heirs, as the Yorks had (in Oxford’s undoubted opinion) betrayed King Henry VI in their lust for power.
King Richard’s reign was off to a rocky start. Except for his devoted followers in the North of England, people had turned against him when his nephews ‘disappeared’ from the Tower of London. Otherwise loyal Yorkist adherents were turning from him. There was a rebellion in October 1483, and even after it failed nobles still kept throwing their support behind the Welsh upstart, Harri Tudur. Richard III knew that Oxford was a dangerous and bone-deep enemy of the Yorks, and wanted to move him the hell out of France, that Harri Tudur was gathering Lancastrians and a multitude of anti-Ricardian Yorkists around him. Richard thus ordered Oxford’s transfer to an English prison on 28 October 1484. However, before Richard’s forces came to get him, Oxford talked Sir James Blount, the man in charge of Hammes Castle, into not only letting him free –- but also into going with him to join Harri Tudur’s men.
It is most likely that Blount had been loyal to Edward IV, and therefore Oxford would have pointed out that they had a common enemy now in Richard III, the man most people considered to have murdered King Edward V and his little brother. The only way that either of them could get revenge for their fallen lord was to destroy Richard, and the best way to destroy Richard was to aid a Tudor invasion. So away Blount and Oxford went to find the last Lancastrian.
Reportedly, Harri Tudur was “ravished with joy incredible” when Oxford showed up at the French court, as he should have been. Not only was Oxford a military commander of proven excellence, he had already demonstrated his worth by convincing the entire garrison of Hammes Castle to come over to Tudur’s side as well.
Harri Tudor, having been under house arrest most of his life, had no experience in battle. A bookish man, he knew his strength lay in administration and government. Therefore, when the Tudors invaded England to dethrone Richard III, Harri wisely turned over the command of the troops to his uncle, Jasper Tudor, and Oxford.
The Tudor forces invaded England in the summer of 1485, and on 22 August they met Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field. While Harri stayed well-back from the fighting, Oxford commanded the vanguard and the Welsh archers, who were armed with fearsome longbows. Oxford used the men under his command to penetrate Richard’s army in a triangular formation that was afterwards known as the “Oxford Wedge”, which he might have learned about while studying the history of Alexander the Great. The Welsh troops, who were determined to bring victory to the man the bards were calling Y Mab Darogan – “The Son of Prophecy” – the man who would fulfill Merlin’s prediction that one day a Welsh prince would sit on the throne of England, went through Richard’s vanguard like a hot knife through butter. Oxford’s wedge of raging Welshmen disrupted Richard’s battle lines and put him unexpectedly on the defensive.
In spite of the brilliant tactics used by Oxford and Jasper Tudor, the invaders were badly outnumbered and would have probably lost if it hadn’t been for several of Richard’s nobles turning on him when he needed them the most. Richard died fighting valiantly in battle, supposedly at the hands of a Welshman, and Harri Tudur became Henry Tudor, King Henry VII. The knew monarch claimed to have earned the throne “by right of conquest” … thanks in large part to the 13th Earl of Oxford.
Neither King Henry VII nor his heirs ever forgot how much they owed to Oxford. As soon as possible, Oxford’s
attainder was repealed [and]he was restored to his estates and titles … [Oxford was made] Lord Admiral on 21 September, and chief steward of the Duchy of Lancaster south of Trent and Constable of the Tower of London on 22 September 1485. He was also appointed the first Captain of the Yeomen of the Guard. He was sworn of the Privy Council, and recognized as Hereditary Lord Great Chamberlain of England. As Lord Great Chamberlain he officiated at the coronations of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, bearing the king’s train at the coronation and setting the crown upon the king’s head at the coronation banquet. By 1486 he had been invested with the Order of the Garter. He was present at most great court occasions, and stood godfather to the king’s eldest son, Arthur, Prince of Wales, in 1486 … he commanded the vanguard at Stoke, the last battle of the Wars of the Roses … and in 1497 was one of the commanders against the Cornish rebels at Blackheath … By 1499, Oxford’s yearly landed income had risen to £1600.
Oxford was not ungrateful either. Not only did he serve the Tudors as zealously as he had once served King Henry VI, he commissioned the building of the church of St. Peter and St. Paul, Lavenham to express his thankfulness to God for the unlikely Tudor victory at Bosworth. The son of King Henry IV’s maternal half-brother was now on the throne instead of a York, and it must have seem as miraculous to Oxford as it did to everyone else.
When King Henry VIII inherited the crown, he was as loyal to the Oxford family as his father had been. Oxford officiated as Lord Great Chamberlain at the new king’s coronation, and further rewarded for his past services to the Tudors. Furthermore, the 13th earl’s grandson, John de Vere, 15th Earl of Oxford, was given a place by the king’s side as one of the monarch’s closest friends and most respected courtiers.
The 13th Earl of Oxford lived in comfort and with the respect of the king until he died peacefully in his home, Castle Hedingham, on 10 March 1513. He was 72 years old, which was considered tremendously long-lived for the time. He was buried on 24 April at Colne Priory, a Benedictine priory founded by one of his ancestors, Aubrey de Vere I, less than 50 years after the Norman invasion of England. The late earl’s funeral was as lavish, with nine hundred expensive black gowns given as gifts to his mourners, and a “mounted knight, armed with an axe, was led into the choir by two knights and delivered the axe to the bishop, who gave it to the heir”.
The 15th Earl took his grandfather’s place as a powerful favorite in the Tudor court. He was with Henry VIII at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and with the king when Henry met Charles V at Dover. The 15th Earl of Oxford was also given the post of Lord Great Chamberlain for life, made a Knight of the Garter, and appointed to the Privy Council. It was Oxford who bore the crown at Queen Anne Boleyn’s coronation in April 1533, and during the Dissolution of the Monasteries he was given Colne Priory without having to pay for it. Oxford later attend the christening of the future King Edward VI, and the funeral of Queen Jane Seymour. Most importantly, the 15th earl was one of the few peers, along with Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, to escape the wrath of the increasingly mentally unstable king in his later years.
The Tudors remained loyal to Oxfords for generations. It was Queen Elizabeth herself who took Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, (who some people argue was the “real” Shakespeare) into her safekeeping when his father, John de Vere, 16th Earl of Oxford, died young. The misdeeds and misbehaviour of the 17th earl were always forgiven by the queen with a generosity that was undeserved, and almost unheard of for others during her reign.
The Oxford family would continue to remained loyal to the crown for centuries. The very last Earl of Oxford, Aubrey de Vere, 20th Earl of Oxford, was a Royalist during the English Civil War. As a final reward, Oxford’s only surviving child, a daughter named Lady Diana de Vere, was married Charles Beauclerk, 1st Duke of St Albans, one of illegitimate sons of King Charles II, a descendant of Henry VII’s daughter, Margaret Tudor. Thus, the Oxfords were finally united with the royal bloodline they had served so faithfully, for so long.