OXFORD
By Paul Streitz
Oxford Institute Press
For Hilda and Natasha
On July 21, 1548 in the early hours of the morning, Princess Elizabeth gave birth to a son. The father was Thomas Seymour, her stepfather. The child was placed in the home of John de Vere 17th Earl of Oxford. The child was raised was Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. He is better known to the world by his pen name, "William Shakespeare."
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Streitz, Paul, 1943–
Oxford: Son of Queen Elizabeth I
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2001 129201
Paperback: ISBN 978-0-9713498-0-3
Seventh Printing
Paperback edition of this book can be found on Amazon.com
Copyright 2001 by Paul Streitz
Oxford Institute Press (links to other authorship books of interest can be found here.)
8 William Street
Darien, CT 06820
Cover Design: Paul Streitz
Cover Art: R.C. Bailey
Published by Paul Streitz at Smashwords
Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616, Authorship, Oxford Theory
Oxford, Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of, 1550–1564, —Authorship
De Vere, Edward, 1548–1604, Biography
Tudor, Elizabeth, 1533–1603, Biography
Dramatists, English—Early modern, 1500–1700—Biography
Nobility—Great Britain—Biography.
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Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Sex, Murder, Incest and Tudors
Nobility's Reason for Existence
Katherine Parr and the Lord Admiral
Chapter 3: A Hasty Marriage and Three Murders
The Fall of Edward Seymour and the reign of Queen Mary
The Rise and Quick Demise of John de Vere
Chapter 4: A Not So Brief Chronicle
Oxford's Signature: "Edward VII"
Chapter 5: A Literary and Theatrical Life
Castilglione's Il Cortegaiano (The Courtier)
Court Playwright and Impresario
Oxford and the King James Bible
Chapter 6: Shakespeare Appears
Creation of the Stratford Myth
Chapter 7: Yet Another Changeling
Shake-speares Sonnets Revisited
Should a Tudor again be on the Throne
In Appreciation
Mr. Russell des Cognets (1923) of Lexington, Kentucky has been a steadfast supporter of the Earl of Oxford as Shakespeare for fifty years. He first became acquainted with Oxford in 1949. He has collected several copies of the English school teacher’s, J. Thomas Looney, 1920 book “Shake-speare” Identified in Edward de Vere, the seventeenth earl of Oxford.
He has been a patron of many other Oxfordian writers, scholars and educational efforts. This includes support for William Plumer Fowler’s pamphlet, Phoenix and Turtle, which Percy Allen believes the loveliest of all of Shakespeare’s poems.
Dorothy and Charlton Ogburn, who wrote the biography of Oxford: This Star of England: William Shake-speare Man of the Renaissance and their son Charlton, Jr., who wrote The Mysterious William Shakespeare, were his friends in the Oxfordian movement. He also had a long friend-ship with Mr. Gordon Cyr, past president of the Shakespeare-Oxford Society. Mr. des Cognets was a supporter of the SOS newsletter for many years.
Russell fondly remembers being in England during War II in the 104th Division, U.S. 1st Army. In Europe as an infantryman, he participated in the capture of Cologne and the Remagen Bridge on the Rhine. He vividly recalls liberating the Nordhausen concentration camp near the Elbe River.
At the present time Russell is deeply involved with assisting Concordia University’s new Humanities Building in Portland, Oregon. With its emphasis on Shakespeare authorship studies, it will be one of the largest, most unique academic authorship centers in the world. Mr. des Cognets has made possible the “des Cognets-Cowles” Shakespeare studies center, which will hold papers, books, research and academic materials and provide study space for Shakespearean scholars.
Mr. des Cognets is a 1941 graduate of the Woodbury Forest Preparatory School in Orange Virginia and the University of Kentucky in 1948. For many years he was a breeder of milking shorthorn cattle, and also bred thoroughbreds for the Keeneland sales ring. In 1979, he married Julia Crouch of Lexington. They have a son, Russell III (1981).
Mr. Russell des Cognets’ generous support has made this book possible.
In Acknowledgement
This work rests on the shoulders of many scholars and researchers who patiently endured the derision of the established academic world. They have produced groundbreaking work that will be more appreciated in coming years. Among those ever-living Shakespearean scholars are Delia Bacon, George Greenwood, Mark Twain, B.M. Ward, J. Thomas Looney, Eva Turner Clark, Charles Wisner Barrell, Charlton Ogburn, Dorothy Ogburn, and Charlton Ogburn, Jr.
My special thanks to Elisabeth Sears for her pioneering work on Oxford; to Pidge Sexton; to Stephanie Caruana and Elisabeth Sears for their exhaustive work on Oxford’s early literary history; to Katherine Chiljan for her list of dedications to Oxford; to Robert Brazil for his work on Shakespeare’s printers; to Barbara Burris for her work on the Ashbourne Portrait; to Mark Alexander for his insights on Shakespeare’s legal world; to Vincent Cuenca for advice on the Spanish language; to Professor Tom Holland for his Latin translations; to Nina Greene for her Internet discussion group and to all those who participated in debates on the issues found in this book; to Blanche Parker of the Darien Library for her assistance; to Robin Matchett for his prognostication on Oxford’s birth; to Susan Harris of the Bodleian Library and Lori Johnson of the Folger Shakespeare Library; to Gretchen Haynes and Franklin Cook for their editorial and editing guidance; to Eileen Duffin, Marilyn Clarke, Natasha Streitz, David Yuhas and Carla Johnson for their proofing skills; to Marilyn Clarke for her perceptive comments on Oxford; and to Hank Whittemore for his encouragement, his comments, and his invaluable assistance.
Gentle Reader
The British monarchy remains out of bounds, more so than other social institutions. Indeed, one could say that a conspiracy of silence surrounds the extraordinary and probably unique hierarchical system of privilege that emanates from the monarch. Why? Because those who are close enough to see what goes on behind the palace walls keep their lips buttoned in the hope that they too might be co-opted into that system via highly coveted awards. Blabbermouths are not knighted. Nor are they retained as friends or servants. Neither do they keep the affection of princes…..Ilse Hayden
It is almost impossible to write a balanced study of Elizabeth I. The historiographical tradition is so laudatory that it is hard to avoid either floating with the current of applauding opinion or creating an unseemly splash by swimming too energetically against it. The marketing of Elizabeth began in her own reign, with the efforts of Protestants, official propagandists, and profit-seeking balladeers. Enthusiastic praise was turned into structured history by William Camden, who wrote his Annales in the 1610’s. Camden formulated the historiographical agenda for the reign, and historians have usually followed his scheme: Elizabeth inherited chaos at home and threats from abroad, but with her own foresight and skill she imposed unifying solutions to national problems. The reign of Elizabeth was thus a golden age of progress, in which a careful queen inspired her people to greatness and checked any divisive militant tendencies. The ‘Camden version’ has dominated interpretations of Elizabeth over the past century: it was followed in most of the almost 90 biographies published since 1890….Christopher Haigh
It is inconceivable that anyone who has [encountered genius] could maintain the belief that genius is often held back by social factors. If genius is not given form by context, it will make its own. It is this aggressive reordering of context that is genius. It is simply unimaginable that context, whether the intellectual matrix facing the genius or the social and economic factors touching his life, could dissuade him…Steven Goldberg
A Few Dissenters
[Shakespeare] carries the court influence with him, unconsciously, wherever he goes. He looks into Arden and Eastcheap from the court standpoint, not from these into the court, and he is as much a prince with Poins and Bardolph as he is when he enters and throws open to us, without awe, without consciousness, the most delicate mysteries of the royal presence…The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded
SIGMUND FREUD
I no longer believe that William Shakespeare, the actor from Stratford, was the author of the works which have so long been attributed to him. Since the publication of Shakespeare Identified, by J. T. Looney, I am almost convinced that the assumed name conceals the personality of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford….Autobiographical Study, 1927
The name “William Shakespeare” is most probably a pseudonym behind which there lies concealed a great unknown. Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, a man who has been regarded as the author of Shakespeare’s works, lost a beloved and admired father while he was still a boy, and completely repudiated his mother, who contracted a new marriage soon after her husband’s death….Abriss der Psycho-Analyse, 1940
We will have a lot to discuss about Shakespeare. I do not know what still attracts you to the man of Stratford. He seems to have nothing at all to justify his claim, whereas Oxford has almost everything. It is quite inconceivable to me that Shakespeare should have got everything secondhand: Hamlet’s neurosis, Lear’s madness, Macbeth’s defiance and the character of Lady Macbeth, Othello’s jealousy, etc. It almost irritates me that you should support the notion….Letter to A. Zweig, 1937
MARK TWAIN
Isn’t it odd, when you think of it, that you may list all the celebrated Englishmen, Irishmen, and Scotchmen of modern times, clear back to the first Tudors—a list containing five hundred names, shall we say?—and you can go to the histories, biographies, and cyclopedias and learn the particulars of the lives of every one of them. Every one of them except one—the most famous, the most renowned—by far the most illustrious of them all—Shakespeare!—About him you can find nothing. Nothing of even the slightest importance. Nothing worth the trouble of storing away in your memory. Nothing that even remotely indicates that he was ever anything more than a distinctly commonplace person.
I answered as my readings of the champions of my side of the great controversy had taught me to answer: that a man can’t handle glibly and easily and comfortably and successfully the argot of a trade at which he had not personally served. He will make mistakes; he will not, and cannot, get the trade-phrasings precisely and exactly right; and the moment he departs, even a shade, from a common trade-form, the reader who has served in that trade will know the writer hasn’t.
For experience is an author’s most valuable asset; experience is the thing that puts the muscle and the breath and the warm blood into the book he writes.
The author of the Plays was equipped, beyond every other man of his time, with wisdom, erudition, imagination, capaciousness of mind, grace, and majesty of expression. Everyone had said it, no one doubts it. Also, he had humor, in rich abundance, and always wanting to break out. We have no evidence of any kind that Shakespeare of Stratford possessed any of these gifts or any of these acquirements…Is Shakespeare Dead? 1909
CHARLIE CHAPLIN
In the work of the greatest geniuses, humble beginnings will reveal themselves somewhere but one cannot trace the slightest sign of them in Shakespeare…. Whoever wrote [Shakespeare] had an aristocratic attitude.
JOHN ADAMS
Stratford upon Avon is interesting as it is the Scaene of the Birth, Death and Sepulture of Shakespeare. Three doors from Inn, is the House where he was born, as small and mean, as you can conceive. They shew Us an old Wooden Chair in the Chimney Corner, where He sat. We cut off a Chip according to the Custom. A Mulberry Tree that he planted has been cut down, and is carefully preserved for Sale. The House where he died has been taken down and the Spot is now only Yard or Garden. The Curse upon him who should removed his Bones, which is written on his Grave Stone, alludes to a Pile of some Thousands of human Bones, which lie exposed in that Church. There is nothing preserved of this great Genius which is worth knowing—nothing which might inform Us what Educations, what Company, what Accident turned his Mind to Letters and the Drama. His name is not even on his Grave Stone. An ill sculptured Head is sett up by his Wife, by the Side of his Grave in the Church. But paintings and Sculpture would be thrown away upon his Fame. His Wit and Fancy, his Taste and Judgment, His Knowledge of Nature, of Life and Character, are immortal….From a letter when Adams and Thomas Jefferson visited Stratford-upon-Avon. Jefferson wrote nothing about the occasion except a record of his expenses.
MALCOLM X
Another hot debate I remember I was in had to do with the identity of Shakespeare. No color was involved there; I just got intrigued over the Shakespearean dilemma. The King James translation of the Bible is considered the greatest piece of literature in English. They say that from 1604 to 1611, King James got poets to translate, to write the Bible. Well, if Shakespeare existed, he was then the top poet around. But Shakespeare is nowhere reported connected with the Bible. If he existed, why didn’t King James use him?
SIR DEREK JACOBI
"I subscribe to the group theory. I don't think anybody could do it on their own," says Sir Derek Jacobi. "I think the leading light was probably de Vere as I agree that an author writes about his own experience, his own life and personalities."
WALT WHITMAN
Conceived out of the fullest heat and pulse of European feudalism—personifying in unparalleled ways the medieval aristocracy, its towering spirit of ruthless and gigantic caste, with its own peculiar air and arrogance (no mere imitation)—only one of the “wolfish earls” so plenteous in the plays themselves, or some born descendant and knower, might seem to be the true author of those amazing works, works in some respects greater than anything else in recorded literature….November Boughs, 1888
HENRY JAMES
I am “sort of” haunted by the conviction that the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practiced on a patient world. The more I turn him round and round the more he so affects me. But that is all—I am not pretending to treat the question or to carry it any further. It bristles with difficulties, and I can only express my general sense by saying that I find it almost as impossible to conceive that Bacon wrote the plays as to conceive that the man from Stratford, as we know the man from Stratford, did.
ORSON WELLES
I think Oxford wrote Shakespeare. If you don’t agree, there are some awfully funny coincidences to explain away.
MARK RYLANCE
As an actor, my training is to look for the motivation necessary for any act. I find that the unfortunately limited evidence of the Stratfordian authorship theory seems to reveal little more than monetary motivation.... I find the work of the Shakespeare Oxford Society reveals a character, in Edward de Vere, motivated to use the mask of drama to reveal the true identity and nature of his time, as only someone in his position would have known, and as was the well established habit so clearly demonstrated in Hamlet.
MR. JUSTICE LEWIS F. POWELL, JR.
I have never thought that the man of Stratford-on-Avon wrote the plays of Shakespeare. I know of no admissible evidence that he ever left England or was educated in the normal sense of the term. One must wonder, for example, how he could have written The Merchant of Venice.
PAUL H. NITZE
I believe the considerations favouring the Oxfordian hypothesis.... are overwhelming. ...It's fashionable today to declare "the death of the author"; the author's life and experience count for naught. Any consideration of the author's intention or meaning is rejected. Rejected, too, is any thought that the author was communicating ideals of value to the spectator or the reader. For those afflicted by this fashionable myopia, who Shakespeare was, how he lived and what he was trying to tell us are irrelevant. But fashions come and go, and I am told there are signs that the negation of authorial intention in academic literary criticism has peaked.
CHARLTON OGBURN
Nothing we know about de Vere or about Shakespeare is incompatible with their having been the same; that the positive indications that they were the same are plentiful and striking and accumulate with investigation; that the facts are found to eliminate all other candidates, leaving de Vere the only one who could have been Shakespeare…The Mysterious William Shakespeare
J. THOMAS LOONEY
After all there are few joys in life like that of laying hold of some new and important truth, and carrying it to others in the full and assured faith that such truth is destined to prevail. It is in the conscious and successful propagation of constructive ideas that man attains the highest sense of self-realization, and if our “Shakespeare” beliefs do not, of themselves, belong to the highest domains of thought, they, at any rate, deal with literature which does; and, in my opinion, by giving us the personality which informs and vitalises that literature, contribute the largest factor towards its right interpretation….Letter to Eva Turner Clark, June 26, 1926
Introduction
When I began this book, my intention was to write a biography of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, that focused on his personality, literary life, and creativity: a portrait of the artist. The book was not intended be an argument for “Who Wrote Shakespeare,” but rather a biography of Oxford as the author.
I felt it was important to understand aristocratic life in the Elizabethan age, which was the childhood environment of the young Oxford. This involved reading a good number of books on the Tudors and particularly on Queen Elizabeth. The more I read, the more I realized that historians of the period were concealing more than they were revealing about Elizabeth’s personal life. This was especially true about Elizabeth’s relationship with Thomas Seymour during 1548 when she was a girl of fourteen years. Practically all historians of the period claim nothing untoward happened. This is despite substantial evidence to the contrary; for them the image of the Virgin Queen remains intact.
Elizabethan history was, and still is today, an effort in damage control to protect the reputation of the Virgin Queen. The first historian might present facts A and B, the second historian might present facts C and D, and the third historian might present facts E and F, and so on. After presenting a limited number of the facts, each historian concludes that the rumours of Elizabeth having a child at age fourteen were only rumors. Yet, no historian has presented all the facts from A to Z, which paint a picture not easily dismissed. For example, one historian prints one innocuous legal deposition in full but completely omits a more damaging deposition. These selective presentations would convince a reader of only one biography that the issue was covered and the case found unproven.
The few presses that existed were controlled by the Crown, critics of the monarchy were ruthlessly suppressed, and the Crown had a network of spies and informers to track dissidents. Any written records of the Queen’s misbehaviour would be few, and it would be sheer luck if any did survive. In addition, only about five percent of the population was literate, and that percent consisted mainly of the aristocrats, the clergy, and the lawyers. These social classes were the ones that most benefited from the benevolence of the monarch and were hardly likely to commit any transgressions of the monarch to paper. Those in the lower social classes, such as servants, townspeople and midwives, were not literate and thus were unable to leave any written historical record. In short, it is a historical investigation where the historian can expect to find little, if any, direct documentation.
Often the documents that do survive are from the very sources most likely to be the key conspirators, so these documents are not likely to contain any incriminating evidence. Written historical documents can often be misleading or deliberately false. To expect a substantial written historical record of events that persons in high places wanted kept secret would be to expect a record that never would have been created in the first place.
However, the superiority of hard historical evidence, such as letters and other documents, is somewhat overstated. For example, if a bloody knife were found with the fingerprints of the suspect on it, that could be regarded as hard evidence. However, if the victim and the knife were in the suspect’s kitchen, it may well be that the fingerprints were the result of normal household use. In other words, the hard evidence is also dependent upon the circumstances; therefore, in some sense, all hard evidence is circumstantial. J. Thomas Looney’s comment on circumstantial evidence provides a useful insight:
"A few coincidences we may treat as simply interesting; a number of coincidences we regard as remarkable; a vast accumulation of extraordinary coincidences we accept as conclusive proof. And when the case has reached this stage we look upon the matter as finally settled, until, as may happen, something of a most unusual character appears to upset all our reasoning. If nothing of this kind ever appears, whilst every newly discovered fact adds but confirmation to the conclusion, that conclusion is accepted as a permanently established truth.".1
Four criteria are suggested to examine the possibility of a hidden, secret child: First, were there any rumours or gossip about the birth of such a child? While rumours and gossip are not substantive evidence, they are often part of oral folk history that has a basis in fact and merits further investigation. As we will see, even the written historical record provides substantial grounds for suspicion.
Second, was there a period of time when the proposed mother was not in public view? Human females are severely limited in activities the last month of pregnancy. When their pregnancies are publicly visible, they need seclusion, concealment, and a group of attendant women to assist in the childbirth.
Third, was there a child raised nearby the alleged mother that receives special or unusual treatment? Was the child reared as a nephew or as a child of a close friend? Further, the child might receive special consideration from the birth mother. Similarly, does the child seem to receive special consideration from those surrounding the mother?
Fourth, did the adult life of the alleged child indicate a relationship to the alleged mother or parents? In the case of an author, do his literary works reveal themes and associations with the alleged mother and the child’s hidden place in society?
Thus, the purpose of this book evolved from being a literary biography of an artist to an examination of the historical evidence to determine whether or not Elizabeth had a child in the summer of 1548 and whether or not this child was raised as Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, better known to the world as the author “William Shakespeare.” His correct name and title would be:
Edward Tudor-Seymour
Prince of England (the title would be Prince of Wales)
17th Earl of Oxford
In the years since the first printing of this book, I have come to an even greater appreciation of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. In the short period between the death of Henry VIII to the death of Queen Elizabeth I, England experienced a literary, political, economic and social transformation.
(Note: Parentheses in original quotes are represented as ( ); those added by this author are represented by brackets [ ]. Italics added by this author are noted as [Italics added]; otherwise the italics are as they appear in the source.)
“Shakespeare” or “Author” refers to the true author of the works, whoever that might be. The “man from Stratford-upon-Avon” or “Shakspere” refers to the person from Stratford. “Edward de Vere” or “Oxford” denotes Edward Tudor-Seymour, Prince of England, 17th Earl of Oxford.
The government went from a monarchial dictatorship to a monarch under the law. English nationalism emerged, not simply loyalty to the monarch. And England became a country rooted in law, not the dictates to the monarch. The full implications of Oxford’s impact are perhaps a subject for a full book, but for the moment, let it suffice to say that Oxford was more than a prince, poet and playwright, he was the founder of what we now might call the English-speaking or Anglo-American civilization.
Chapter 1: Sex, Murder, Incest and Tudors
Hamlet:
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story.
Hamlet’s story is a Shakespearean drama of seduction, betrayal, murder and incest. It is not a tale of a Virgin Queen nobly leading her country, nor is it the story of a rural genius shrouded in mystery. Rather, it is a spectacle of clashing personalities, searing passions, shameful behaviour, reprehensive crimes, calculated murders and appalling sexual obsession. Yet, out of this caldron emerged the finest literary mind the world has ever known and the finest civilization ever to grace this planet: the English civilization.
Shakespeare was more than a poet and playwright. He was the founder of one of the Anglo-American civilization. In the short period, from the death of Henry VIII in 1531 to the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603, England transformed itself from laws under a monarch to a monarch under the law. Gone were the days when a cross word from the monarch meant death on the chopping block. Gone were the days when religious dissent meant burning at the stake. The monarch was no longer a god-like figure to be unquestionably obeyed, but a ruler constrained by reason, law and morality.
Shakespeare was The Elizabethan Renaissance. His genius, boundless energy and relentless drive for truth transformed both the monarchy and his country. His plays broke all barriers and with forbidden topics such as the morality of kings, the death of tyrants and the rule of law. His plays taught the illiterate the histories of England. He engendered the population with a sense of morality and rationality from the stage, not the pulpit. He encouraged loyalty to England as the country faced invasion from the most powerful nation on the earth.
Shakespeare spoke loudest and has lasted longest because he spoke the truth. His characters, Macbeth, Falstaff, Portia, Henry V and Lear live on in on our individual and collective memories. They illustrate that immoral decisions have catastrophic consequences.
Shakespeare thought that the highest duty of a writer was to instruct the monarch. But the monarch was not just a human figure, but also the embodiment of the realm. Through his plays, the abstracts of truth, justice, and morality were vividly seared into the consciousness of king and commoner alike. Each human being for Shakespeare was a sentient creature who had both the capability and responsibility to make moral decisions.
Shakespeare was appalled by what he saw at court, but he turned his experiences into immortal dramas. He wrote, produced and published his dramas and poems to shock all sensibilities. Who would dare in Venus and Adonis to describe an older Queen seducing a young man, who is killed by a boar, symbol of the house of Oxford? Who would dare show the murder of tyrants to a royal dictatorship?
Shakespeare was The Courtier-poet at the Elizabethan court. Pirates kidnapped him. He toured Renaissance Italy. He was wounded in a duel in the streets of London. His uncle executed his father. He was a man of towering physical, intellectual and moral courage.
Shakespeare fought through the censorship of his day by being born to a position that enabled him to present his plays first in the court, then in the theatres of London and the touring companies. Rather, than the comfortable privileged live of a noble Shakespeare was the outcast, the artistic outsider in the world of the power hungry. He was Hamlet at the court of Elizabeth. He was Prince Hal at Gad’s Hill. He was Henry at Agincourt. He was Prospero, exiled to a barren island on the English coast. There he turned out his final works: Shake-speares Sonnets, The Tempest and the King James Bible.
Shakespeare was Hamlet. This is Hamlet’s story. It begins with the Tudors.
Incest and Bastards
Henry VIII was second in line to the throne, behind his older brother Arthur. In 1500, Arthur married Spain’s Princess Catherine of Aragon, and then he died two years later. Arthur was ill throughout the two years of his marriage, and Catherine maintained that their union was never consummated. Both boys were subject to the same ruthless, sadistic treatment given other children of his era. A disobedient child had to crawl across the room to beg forgiveness of a parent. An ambassador reported that Henry VIII was so afraid of his father that he could only mumble in his presence. The ambassador further reported that the king had nearly beaten the young Henry to death.1
Terrified children grow up to be terrifying rulers as they displace their fears and angers on their helpless subjects.
After Arthur’s death, Henry received a Papal dispensation to marry his sister-in-law even though no one questioned at the time Catherine’s assertion that she was a virgin. Henry and Catherine were married for fifteen years before Henry started proceedings to divorce using the previous marriage to his brother as grounds for annulment.
Incest for the Elizabethans did not mean only sexual relations between biologically related individuals. For example, if a man had sexual relations with a woman and then had sexual relations with her sister, the second relationship would be incestuous. This was the doctrine of carnal contagion. Incest was the fundamental personal-political-legal-religious issue of the Tudor dynasty, affecting all claims to the throne. If Arthur had sexual relations with Catherine, then the marriage would have been valid. Consequently, Henry’s marriage with Catherine would have been incestuous and grounds for an annulment.
Henry VIII began proceedings to divorce Catherine based on incest by disputing Catherine’s assertion that she had been a virgin when she married him. He claimed that she had relations with his brother and, therefore, the marriage was invalid despite the dispensation he had obtained to marry her. Catherine maintained stoutly that she was a virgin when she married Henry. This dispute resulted in the long, rancorous legal and papal wrangling over Henry’s divorce from Catherine. Despite Henry’s attempts to coerce Catherine into granting him a divorce, she maintained until her death that she was the legitimate Queen of England. All of Catholic England and Europe supported her claim. Incest was the rationale for Henry’s divorce, yet the more fundamental cause was Catherine had not brought forth a male heir. Henry had gone further than his usual dalliances by falling madly in love, lust, or infatuation with Anne Boleyn.
The incest issue emerged again when Henry VIII wanted Anne Boleyn executed when she too failed to produce the desired male heir to the throne. Mary Boleyn, Anne’s sister, was acknowledged to have been Henry’s mistress before his marriage to Anne. According to Elizabethan thinking, the marriage between Henry and Anne would have been incestuous because of Henry’s relations with her sister. However, Henry did not proceed along these lines when he sought to divorce Anne Boleyn. Instead, he claimed that Anne had been unfaithful with Mark Smeaton, a musician of the court, with her brother, George Boleyn and had relations with two other men, who were wealthy political supporters of Anne.
Henry and his supporters included Anne’s brother in the charges to reduce the influence of the Boleyn faction and, at the same time, to gain the properties that a conviction would cause to be forfeited to the Crown. Under Tudor law, someone convicted of treason would forfeit his or her property to the Crown. This was a device that Henry used several times to rid himself of troublesome nobles and enrich himself at the same time.
The charges against her brother and the other men were patently false, and they went to the block claiming they were innocent. The charges against Mark Smeaton had some grounds of suspicions while the others were unfounded. He was seen leaving the Queen’s apartment late one evening. She insisted that he was there to play music, but Mark Smeaton confessed that he was guilty of carnal relations with the Queen. In a day when a man thought his last true confession on Earth could mean eternal salvation or damnation, he may have been speaking the truth.
Anne may have seen Mark Smeaton as a necessary but desperate means to produce a male heir for the aging king. Henry VIII had four or more illegitimate children, three of whom were males, so Henry was confident that his wife was at fault for failing to produce a male. Henry’s eldest illegitimate son was Henry Fitzroy, by his mistress Elizabeth Blount. The king married the mother to Gilbert Tailboys of Lincolnshire and sent her off to the country. The son was openly acknowledged as the king’s, but his surname was not Tudor. Neither did he carry the name of his foster father or his mother’s maiden name; rather, he carried a surname that had been created for him, Fitzroy, which meant “son of king.” This buttresses the argument that the custom of raising children under another name and in another household was familiar to the Elizabethans. Later, the young man became the Duke of Buckingham, and at one time, he was in line to inherit the throne, but he died when he was eighteen.
Henry’s second son was Henry Cary, later Lord Hunsdon, by his mistress Mary Boleyn, the aforementioned older sister of the king’s wife Anne Boleyn. More than once, Henry married ex-mistresses to his senior ministers. This procedure was a retirement plan of sorts for the mistress. For the minister, it generally meant the good graces of the king and financial rewards. For the boy, it meant that he had a nominal father, but that did not seem to matter very much. When Elizabeth was born in 1533, Henry Cary was nine and he blurted out one day that he was the son of his lord, the sovereign king. Apparently, his mother had told him this, but it is doubtful whether he committed such an indiscretion again. Henry Cary was made Lord Hunsdon decades later when Elizabeth became queen. Ironically, he became Lord Chamberlain (but not Lord Great Chamberlain) and the supposed head of a theatre company. The third alleged son was Sir John Perrot whose mother was Mary Berkeley. When in the Tower, Sir John asked how Elizabeth could treat her own brother so badly. There was also alleged to have been a daughter, Etheireda whose mother was Joan Dobson. There may have been other children by other lower-born women of the court, but these go unrecorded.
To summarize, Henry VIII had a number of children who were raised in a number of homes with a number of males as foster fathers. Although known to be sons of the king, they nevertheless carried the names of their foster fathers. This practice can then be described as a Tudor practice of dealing with unwanted children of royalty. The handling of Henry’s illegitimate children foreshadows the method used to handle Elizabeth’s illegitimate children.
The incest questions directly influenced Elizabeth’s legitimacy in several ways. First, there was the argument of the Catholics that Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon was legitimate. Therefore, the marriage of Henry to Anne Boleyn was invalid and Elizabeth was a bastard. Second, Parliament declared her a bastard in 1536 after her mother was convicted of adultery and incest and beheaded. Third, another allegation not brought forth by Henry VIII was that Anne Boleyn’s sister Mary had been his mistress and, therefore, his marriage to Anne had been an incestuous one through the doctrine of carnal contagion. An act of Parliament in 1536 declared that to sleep with the sister of one’s mistress was to commit incest, further reconfirming Elizabeth’s status as a bastard.
The issue of incest was not an abstract one to The Young Elizabeth. It was at the centre of the various Tudor claims to the throne of England and Elizabeth’s right to be the sovereign of England. The Catholic opponents of Elizabeth were those most vocal that Elizabeth was the illegitimate daughter of a whore with no right to be monarch.
Psychology of the Tudors
Historians are reluctant to discuss the psychological motivation of groups or individuals. The field known as psychohistory has made little headway over the past twenty years in producing an understanding of the behaviour of leaders or the groups they lead. History, for those lacking such psychological orientation, is a parade of events, dates, and personalities with little understanding of the motivations, backgrounds, childhoods, or psychological history of the participants. Such historians seem to regard the behaviour of any ruler or historical personage as a matter of personal intellectual choice no matter how bizarre, cruel, avaricious, or psychotic. If any individual of contemporary society tortures and murders twenty people, it is both criminal and psychotic. However, if a monarch tortures and burns a thousand heretics for having the wrong faith, it is not considered as psychotic behaviour, but an accepted, even if unenlightened, practice of the times.
Conventional historians, in addition, are unable to make any judgments or give any psychological explanations of the behaviour of groups, either current or historical; that is, why do groups and their leaders act at times as if they are in a psychotic trance? For example, how did perfectly law abiding, Bible carrying Americans during the 1930’s often gather and on the slightest provocation lynch Negro men? Alternatively, how did one of the enlightened Western countries that had produced such notable men as Goethe and Albert Einstein engage in the systematic destruction of millions of humans? If conventional historians are reluctant to make psychological examinations of the rulers of nations, they are even more reluctant to examine the psychology of nations, epochs, or societies. There is some inhibition against regarding any society as psychologically dysfunctional, no matter how reprehensible the behaviour of that society. Nevertheless, neurotic, sociopathic, psychotic behaviour is what it is. Saying it is another century or another culture cannot ameliorate that. Human sacrifices are psychotic human reactions to psychological trauma whether it is the sacrifice of Aztec virgins, martyrs of the Christian era, lynchings in the United States, millions to gas chambers, or millions to Gulags.
In contemporary society, we expect that a child that is abused by beatings, torture and emotional isolation will have a difficult, if not psychotic, adulthood. We are not surprised that a sizeable number of criminals and psychotics have such childhoods. However, what happens when an entire society beats, tortures, and terrifies its children? Such a society will act out its fears and aggressions in open sociopathic behaviour such as the murder and torture of despised groups and individuals. Thus, Tudor society was fundamentally more psychologically primitive than modern Western society. The paranoid fears and aggressive psychotic behaviour openly manifested itself in Elizabethan custom and law. The skulls of executed criminals were placed on posts to line the roadway. Torture was used to extract “confessions” from the accused. Poisoning of opponents was considered a viable option for removing political enemies. The press was censored and controlled by the monarchy. Dissenting writers were punished by floggings. John Stubbs lost his right hand. Anthony Babbington, a conspirator against Elizabeth, was hanged, cut down, and while still alive, had his genitals cut off, was split open, and then cut into quarters. A quick death by the executioner’s axe was seen as mercy.
Disease and death came early and regularly to the Elizabethan population. Peasants were threatened by famines caused by too much or too little rain. Plagues were endemic to cities in the summer because animal and human sewage ran in the streets. Crowds cheered as bears, chained to posts, were ripped apart by savage dogs. Pit bulls are so named because they were set upon bulls to tear them apart for the amusement of crowds. These manifestations of sadistic, psychotic behaviour were not limited to the criminal class but were expressed as the social norm through church permissions and secular law. Death and cruelty marked this period in a way that we can barely imagine as twentieth century human beings. There were never any feelings of guilt or remorse that this was not a proper standard of human behaviour. The ability to empathize with another’s feelings, emotions or pain was a quite undeveloped quality in the Elizabethan personality.
The Tudor monarchs were a family of terrified children who grew into terrified rulers. As children, they were subject to the abuse and neglect that produces terrified children in any society; the only difference is these children happened to be born in royal families. At birth, they were taken from their mothers and wrapped in swaddling. Swaddling was strips of cloth wrapped around the child, binding it like a mummy. The child was immobilized for months. The children were nursed by a series of wet nurses and cared for by servants of the Crown. While not physically beaten because of their royalty (unless by their royal parents), the children were constantly terrified by warnings of hell and damnation for their evil natures. They were isolated from their parents, whom they were taught to worship from afar. The close warmth of physical comfort and nurturing was a foreign notion to Elizabethans. The idea that parents should do what was best for the welfare of the child was an unheard concept. The child was meant to do whatever was best for the parent, not the other way around. In the landed aristocracy, the wishes of the young adult meant little when it came to marriage. The marriages were arranged to ensure the best property arrangement for the parents, and the wishes of the child were not relevant. Female children, if they were thought of at all, were largely seen as breeding stock for the male hereditary lines.
The upbringing of the royal children was almost a perfect prescription for developing neurotic or psychotic adults. If not the direct recipients of violence, they saw others murdered and executed around them. These children were in chronically stressful situations from the moment of their birth, not only because of the absence of meaningful parenting by their mothers and fathers, but also because they were often in fear for their very lives. Both Mary and Elizabeth were threatened with death by their next of kin. When Princess Mary refused to take the oath of supremacy recognizing Henry as head of the church, Henry wanted to execute her. It was Sir Thomas Cranmer, then bishop of Winchester, who saved her life by urging the King not to execute his own daughter. Cranmer organized the compromise whereby Mary Tudor signed a humiliating document that forced her to recognize:
“that the marriage heretofore had between his Majesty and my mother the late Princess Dowager, was by God’s law and man’s law, incestuous and unlawful.”.2
In the case of Elizabeth, her mother was legally murdered by her father. Elizabeth was later threatened with death by her sister Mary for her alleged participation in the Wyatt rebellion, an uprising against Mary’s Catholic policies.
Children brought up in such environments have distinct emotional characteristics and patterns of behaviour as adults. As adults, they cannot form meaningful bonds of love and attachment with other human beings. Their relationships with others are distrustful and erratic. Often great passion is followed by complete abandonment and murder. Intimacy produces the fear of being overwhelmed, which is followed by an equally strong rejection. However, the Tudor children, as opposed to non-royal children, became kings and queens and in such exalted positions they could act out their infantile aggressions on the national and world scene. Tudor monarchs did not have to torture small animals when at a whim they could pass a new law or send human sacrifices to the stake to appease their inner torments. The term “whipping boy” comes from the punishment of young princes. When a royal prince committed some infraction of the rules, he was not whipped. Instead, a fellow student or child in the royal court received the thrashing. The custom taught a valuable lesson to the young princes; that is, when you are a royal, others will pay for your sins.
The Tudors as adults were manipulative and cruel. They wreaked personal vengeance on others beyond all comprehension. In an instant, a loyal and loving wife could become a villainous traitor headed for the block. Henry VIII could blithely walk away from the legal murder of his second wife, Anne Boleyn, and marry his new wife the next day. Henry would consider executing his daughter Mary for refusing to bow to his wishes, and he was only dissuaded from doing so by his counsellors. The young Edward VI could be convinced to sign the death warrants of his two uncles. Bloody Mary would send hundreds to painful, fiery deaths for their religious beliefs. Elizabeth was willing to condone murder to have the man she loved for a husband. The Tudors trusted no one, and no one trusted them. If the number of religious burnings is a rough gauge of the relative degree of psychological stability of the rulers, Henry VIII burned eighty-one heretics in thirty-eight years, Queen Mary burned about three hundred in five years, and Elizabeth burned five, in forty-five years.
The ability to form affectionate and lasting relationships and to have a conscience and a standard of behaviour toward others beyond immediate gratification of needs was not in the Elizabethan personality. Even into modern times, the ability of royal families to form affectionate bonds between members of the family is limited. Movies and videos show royal families moving around a garden with each member several feet distant from the others. Physical touching between child and parent or parent and child was limited.
Despite these limitations of and generalizations about the Tudor monarchs, Elizabeth functioned at a somewhat higher level of affection and responsibility than her parents and sister. While her ability to form relationships was impaired and she was capable of great personal cruelty, she did not act out her personal traumas on the English nation. During her reign, there was none of her sister’s burning heretics or her father’s twisted religious policies.
Elizabeth addresses the dissolving of Parliament in 1593 and acknowledges the obligation of the ruler for the protection of the ruled:
"Many wiser princes than my selfe you have had, but one onely excepted (whom in the dutie of a child I must regard, and to whom I must acknowledge my selfe farre shallow) I may truly say, none whose love and care can bee greater, or whose desire can be more to fathome deeper for preventions of danger to come, or resisting of dangers, if attempted towardes you, shall ever be found to exceed my self.".3
Hers was a quantum leap in realization that the ruler had obligations and responsibilities to the ruled. One cannot imagine such a speech by Henry VIII or Queen Mary. For them, the obligations flowed one way, and one way only, that was the obligation of the subjects to the monarch with no corresponding obligation of the monarch to the subject. From one point of view, Elizabeth’s speech and her actions during her reign show a ruler capable of having a personal attachment to those she ruled: put another way, with the state being synonymous with the extended family, that the parent had obligations and responsibilities to the child. Therefore, Elizabeth’s reign was a watershed in human history, and much of it was due to her unique personal intelligence and strength that enabled her to transcend much of her childhood history.
From an opposite point of view, Elizabeth was caught between conflicting domestic and international forces. She constantly vacillated and refused to give any firm directions to the country’s foreign or domestic policies, except to keep her own power and prerogatives as queen. She was parsimonious with the nation’s budget and abhorred spending for military purposes. The result of her indecisions was a rule of prudence dictated as much by circumstances as by the Queen’s wisdom and personal good judgment.
The Nobility’s Reason for Existence
In contrast to popular belief, the aristocrats of Elizabethan society were not absolute owners of great names, great wealth, land, and titles. Rather, they were proprietors in return for fealty to the sovereign, that is person, not the state. They could be asked to give up properties at any time and were required to perform whatever services the monarch desired. A nobleman could not refuse the request of the Queen to go and live in Ireland for twenty years or assume a foreign diplomatic assignment. The Queen’s physician was quickly at the doorstep of those nobles who claimed ill health to avoid duty. Aristocrats could not marry, travel abroad, or engage in any commercial enterprises without the permission of the monarch. Elizabeth was quick to vent her wrath on any of her ladies-in-waiting who married and threw several of them in prison for marrying without her permission, a permission she was often loathe to give, especially in her later years.
Elizabeth marked her reign by progresses or tours of the countryside where she and the entourage of her court visited the country homes of the aristocrats. The aristocrats were expected to pay the entire costs of the Queen’s visit plus give the Queen gifts of gold plate. The Queen would not be reticent to express her displeasure if such gifts were inadequate. Such visits impoverished many an aristocrat.
It was service to the state, or service to the state as represented by the monarch, that justified the existence of the aristocratic class. In exchange for their duties, they expected to be rewarded with lands and commercial privileges commensurate with their rank and efforts on behalf of the Queen. The aristocrats agreed with a caste system wherein privilege was a payment for service; what they generally disagreed with was that the rewards were often promised but not given. They did not object to their servitude per se, nor did they have any vision of any other social system that did not involve such servitude; what they objected to was lack of appropriate reward for their servitude.
The Elizabethan notions of property were still very much feudal in both concept and execution. The Crown owned all the property; the aristocrats were “tenants of the Crown” for the property they controlled. In turn there were “tenants of the lord,” and in turn subtenants of those. No one really owned any real property free and clear of these mutual obligations. As Sir Thomas Smith (later a tutor of Oxford puts it, “No man holdeth land simply free in England, but he or she that holdeth the crown of England: all others hold their land in fee,”.4. That is, they were all tenants of the Crown and none owned land outright.
If an aristocrat (tenant of the Crown) died without a male heir of twenty-one years of age, the underage heir became a ward of the Crown, which then controlled the properties and marriage rights in an elaborate wardship system. Properties did not automatically return to the heir upon reaching majority, but instead the heir had to sue for livery to regain his properties. Often these properties were in a reduced state after exploitation by the guardians. The annual average revenue to the Crown for the administration of these wardships during Elizabeth’s reign was £14,700 .5 which was a considerable sum. This feudal system led to chronic abuses of the heirs. It could be viewed as an indirect method of taxation, extortion, or theft by the Crown from the underage heirs.
There is no agreed upon manner of computing what an Elizabethan pound would be worth in today’s currency. Some items that we would consider commonplace might be extremely costly, such as books, while other staples of existence might not be as expensive. One manner of reckoning is that Shakspere’s house in Stratford-upon-Avon, which seems a solid middle-class dwelling, was purchased for about £60. If we assume that such a dwelling today would be £150,000 or $300,000, then an Elizabethan pound is equivalent to £2,500. These comparisons are very rough. Oxford was later to receive a yearly stipend of £1,000 or roughly £2,500,000 per year in current money or $5,000,000.
From one point of view, Elizabethan England can be imagined as a very large corporate state in which everyone was employed by the state, the state owned all the property, and the monarch was the head of the state. None could object to or refuse the dictates of the monarch; no more than one can object to or refuse the dictates of a modern corporate hierarchy. Of course, in a modern society, one can actually resign a corporate position, but a nobleman of the Elizabethan era could neither refuse an order of the monarch nor resign his aristocratic title. The nobleman was bound for life to the system and to the monarch.
For an Elizabethan, the thought of social change or of a flexible social order would be anathema. This would be true for both the upper classes and for the lower classes of society. While the fixed structure of the class system prevented (or at least allowed very little) social mobility, it did provide a haven of psychological safety. The class system was sanctified by religion and regarded as part of the natural order of life. It could only be at one’s utmost peril to rebel against the social order of the aristocrats, but even more importantly, there was no concept of any social order other than one that was determined by birth into a fixed station of life.
The major duty of all the aristocrats, both males and females, was to give birth to as many legitimate heirs to their title as possible. The Seymour family rose to power because Jane Seymour was able to give Henry VIII a legitimate male heir to the throne. No matter how educated, how beautiful, or how high in the social structure a woman might be, she had nothing unless she could produce legitimate heirs. In a day of high infant mortality and short life spans, the more heirs produced, the better. Sudden death by disease was an ever-present threat to the aristocratic stability. Queen Elizabeth at the height of her youth and beauty was stricken by smallpox, and she came close to death. The facial scars of this disease marked her beautiful, pale complexion, and from the time of her smallpox onward, she wore a white makeup composed in part of crushed eggshells to hide the ravages of the disease.
The Elizabethan period was a crossroads of the heritage of the Middle Ages and the emergence of a new social class that was less dependent on conformity to religion and to the state. A ruling female monarch in and of itself shattered old notions of the social system. Aristocrats began to pride themselves on their learning and knowledge, use of foreign languages and their worldliness. Part of this was a social veneer, but even so, in the process, the classical, timeless outlook of Elizabethan England was a world away from the medieval, feudal, Catholic view of Henry VIII, only a little more than a decade earlier. The Elizabethans translated and absorbed the ancients into their culture and looked abroad to the Italian Renaissance for the latest plays and dramas.
The universities of Cambridge and Oxford were centres of the English Renaissance. The scholars at these universities looked back beyond the teachings of the Catholic Church to the literary and philosophical works of the Greeks and Romans. Professors of Greek and Latin were important positions at these universities. Today, we would regard such professors as quaint scholars of long dead languages, but in Elizabethan society these positions opened a door to reflections on man and society that were not possible in the dogma ridden world of Catholic authority. Soon, the universities began to create the educated class of commoners that entered government service and later trained at London’s Inns of Court. They became the emergent class of lawyers and administrators that occupied the lower rungs of government and, from there, the more talented individuals rose in power and status.
The importance of the ladies of the court should not be underestimated, especially women such as Queen Anne Boleyn and Queen Katherine Parr. Their influence soon extended to the monarchy itself, and especially to Elizabeth, who was the daughter of Anne Boleyn and educated by her stepmother, Queen Katherine Parr. While the male aristocrats might disappear with the changing political winds of the court, the women of the court tended to remain as a more or less cohesive group. Women who were ladies-in-waiting to Anne Boleyn were in turn ladies-in-waiting to the following queens: Jane Seymour, Katherine Parr and Mary Tudor. There has probably never been such a group of educated women who had so much influence on the policy of state as the aristocratic women of the Elizabethan Court; most prominent among these would be Queen Anne Boleyn, Queen Katherine Parr and, eventually, Queen Elizabeth.