Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford and Duke of Ireland (1362–1392). The Rise and Fall of a Royal Favourite. By JamesRoss. The Boydell Press, 2024. xviii + 298pp. £95.00.
Year: 2025
Type: book-review
Abstract: Robert de Vere may not be quite up there with the notorious Piers Gaveston of Edward II's reign in the rogues’ gallery of English royal favourites. In his time, however, he was reviled nearly as much. To the chronicler Thomas Walsingham of St Albans, he was ‘undisciplined’ and ‘a traitor’, ‘made arrogant by high office’, while to Henry Knighton at Leicester, he was ‘a seducer of the king’ and to the Eulogium writer ‘a sycophant’. De Vere's rise and fall were meteoric. A boyhood friend of the young King Richard II, he shot to favour in the early 1380s, yet by 1388, he was gone, a victim of the Appellants’ purge; he died in obscurity, although not in poverty, in exile in 1392. De Vere has been viewed no more favourably by modern writers than he was by contemporaries, generally regarded as someone promoted well beyond his deserts. James Ross’ avowedly revisionist new biography is the first attempt to examine his career in the round. Although not all of his arguments may command acceptance, he has succeeded in presenting a richer, more nuanced picture than any we have had hitherto. In a thoughtful opening section, Ross considers what we understand by the term ‘favourite’, in so doing showing himself well versed in modern historical writing on the topic and arguing that de Vere fails to meet many of the key tests used to identify such a figure. Ross's case is that de Vere did not rise from the dust: he was from an established family; he did not decide policy; nor, contrary to the insinuations of the chroniclers, did he enjoy a sexual relationship with the king. These are all points well made, although it might be objected in reply that insufficient attention is paid both to de Vere's inexperience and the sheer scale of Richard's generosity towards him. In the account of de Vere's career that follows, Ross adopts a chronological approach, taking us from de Vere's childhood and upbringing at court through the frightening experiences that he and the king suffered in the Great Revolt of 1381, and onto the years of power and pomp in the mid-1380s. In a useful revision to current understandings of the chronology of his rise, Ross convincingly shows that he was exercising his powers as chamberlain much earlier than hitherto supposed, by late 1381, not by 1383. He does not believe, however, that de Vere abused his position in office to secure undue personal advantage, nor, he argues, can he be accused of preventing the flow of patronage to others, except perhaps to the king's uncle, Thomas of Woodstock. Ross also exonerates him from the charge of maintenance, that is to say, of manipulating legal process to the benefit either of himself or his associates. Ross ventures onto more controversial territory when he seeks to justify the king's creation of him first as marquess of Dublin in 1385 and then, a year later, as duke of Ireland, with vice-regal powers over the lands from which he took his title. He argues that the authority that Richard granted to his friend represented a creative response to the problem of declining English dominion in the province and that the plan originally conceived of sending a major army there under his command was only frustrated by the denial of funding by parliament. Ross makes the best that he can of his case; he takes insufficient account, however, of Irish expectations of a royally led expedition, of de Vere's inexperience, his lack of a landed base in Ireland and the offence inevitably given to the Mortimer family, the traditional English baronial power-brokers in the province. Some of Ross's most original work is to be found in the chapters that frame the main narrative and deal with the de Vere estates, Earl Robert's financial prospects, and such little as can be said about his domestic household and wider affinity. He firmly counters the suggestion that de Vere was driven to personal advancement by the inadequacy of his landed base, pointing out that the de Vere family were in fact well endowed but that in the earl's lifetime, nearly half of the inheritance was held as a dower portion by his long-lived mother, Countess Maud. If the earl was not poor, however, he can scarcely be said to have made the best use of the lands given to him. As Ross points out, as the years passed, there was an increasing disconnect between his family's traditional landed base and the trajectory of his career, which turned him into a court-based magnate. By early 1388, when he was driven from power, his weakness in precisely those areas where he should have been strong was to deprive him of much needed support in his hour of need. Ross sees de Vere as someone blighted by ill-fortune, paying the price for the military and political failings of his royal master. Ross argues his case powerfully, and he marshals a great deal of evidence in his support. In the end, however, he cannot entirely answer the objections from the other side – that de Vere was a man of poor political judgement and that he showed astonishing insensitivity in divorcing his first wife, a grand-daughter of Edward III, in favour of a dalliance with a mere lady-in-waiting of the queen. If de Vere was by no means the worst English royal favourite of the Middle Ages, and he was certainly not in the same league as Piers Gaveston, it remains the case that there is not a great deal that can be said in his favour.
Source: History
Author: Nigel Saul
Institution: Royal Holloway University of London
Language: English
Subfield: Classics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4407259376