Why De Vere Tutors?

De Vere Tutors is named for the de Vere family, who were Earls of Oxford for 561 years from 1142 to 1703. The Victorian historian Lord Macaulay described the de Veres as ‘the longest and most illustrious line of nobles that England has seen.’ When Aubrey de Vere, 20th and last Earl of Oxford, died on 12 March, 1703, his only surviving daughter and heiress, Lady Diana de Vere, had already been married for 10 years to Charles Beauclerk, 1st Duke of St. Albans, the illegitimate son of King Charles II and the comic actress Nell Gwyn. The line they started continues today and has amalgamated the two surnames into ‘de Vere Beauclerk’.

Originally Norsemen, the de Veres were said to have moved from Denmark to Normandy, where they settled in and around the village of Ver (in the Cherbourg Peninsula). Others have claimed that they were originally from Veere in Holland (veer in Dutch means a feather or quill). Alberic de Ver (born c.1040) arrived in England with William the Conqueror’s invading force and was granted lands in the counties of Middlesex, Cambridge, Huntingdon, Suffolk and Essex. His son Alberic II, created Lord Great Chamberlain by King Henry I, built the family’s principal seat of Hedingham Castle , whose towering Norman keep still pierces the north-west Essex sky. His grandson, Aubrey, was made Earl of Oxford in 1142 by Empress Matilda, mother of Henry II.

Robert de Vere, the 3rd Earl, was among the list of 25 magnates appointed to enforce King John’s observance of Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215. John de Vere, the 7th Earl, fought at the Battle of Crecy in 1346 under Edward III and at Poitiers ten years later under his eldest son, Prince Edward of Woodstock, known as the ‘Black Prince’. His grandson Robert de Vere (b. 1362), the 9th Earl, was a great favourite of Richard II who created him Duke of Ireland for life, together with a grant of lordship over the entire territory of Ireland. Having been forced to flee abroad owing to the enmity of the King’s relatives, he was killed by a boar while hunting near Louvain in the Low Countries. That was in 1392, four years after having been attainted by the so-called Merciless Parliament.

The Earl’s titles and possessions (excepting the Lord Great Chamberlainship) were restored to his son, Aubrey de Vere, whose elder son Richard became the 11th Earl in 1400. Richard commanded troops at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, in which the English and Welsh forces decimated the French ruling class with minimal losses of their own. The Wars of the Roses saw the de Veres take the Lancastrian side. The 12th Earl of Oxford’s loyalty to the deposed Henry VI cost him and his  eldest son, Aubrey, their lives; both were arrested for treason and, following their trial at Westminster Hall, beheaded. The 13th Earl, John de Vere, helped to restore Henry VI to the throne in 1470 and, after many periods of danger and exile, played his part in ushering in the Tudor era by joining the future Henry VII and leading his archers at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. His attainder was reversed by Henry, who made him Lord High Admiral of England, Ireland and Aquitaine, Constable of the Tower of London, and godfather to his son and heir, Prince Arthur.

The 14th, 15th and 16th Earls were, like the 13th, all Johns and all led fairly conventional public lives under the Tudor monarchs. All that changed, however, with the 17th Earl, Edward de Vere (c.1548-c.1604), a brilliant poet-jouster at the Court of Elizabeth I, and one who roused both devotion and exasperation in his monarch. Something of a cuckoo in the de Vere nest, Edward’s true lineage and status (and indeed his dates) have yet to be placed on firm ground. What is certain is that he was fascinated by the theatre from an early age and that this fascination quickly turned to involvement, both as a patron and a playwright, albeit one who in the latter role was forced to camouflage his blossoming profession in line with court protocol.  It was a passion that took him to Italy, in particular to Venice, where he studied the commedia dell’arte as well as innovations in stagecraft. He had a house built there and quickly became known as ‘the Italianate Englishman’. In his zeal, he brought the flame of the Italian Renaissance to England.

An increasing number of scholars now accept that Edward de Vere wrote under the pseudonym ‘William Shakespeare’, a hypothesis which explains the absence of plays under the de Vere name (despite high praise from his fellow writers) and makes sense of the strange gaps and silences in the record of his life. His name and reputation were no doubt stained in the eyes of his fellow courtiers by his whole-hearted association with the public stage. As Thomas Edwards hinted in reference to Shakespeare in his Narcissus (1595), the true author could not take credit for his great works:

‘Amid’st the centre of this clime,
I have heard say doth remain,
One whose power floweth far,
That should have been of our rhyme
The only object and the star.’

Ben Jonson took up the image of the star when he ended his astonishing tribute to Shakespeare in the preface to the First Folio of 1623 with the words: Shine forth, thou star of poets!

The heraldic badge of the Earls of Oxford was a silver star (or mullet argent) and their motto Vero Nihil Verius (‘Nothing Truer than Truth’). I cannot think of a better watchword for an educational venture than ‘truth’. Indeed, it must be both the guiding star and the goal of any such enterprise. Let us end, therefore, with the words of Edward Thring, a great educationalist and former headmaster of Uppingham School, who wrote in his Theory and Practice of Teaching (1885):

‘Man moves in an everlasting mystery of unknown life, from which a new truth may flash at any moment, and education trains the loving eye into a working power able to see truth.’