The de Veres: my father's prize

Every family history of the wanting kind carries one claim too grand to check. Ours was a bride: 'Jane Vere', married to Henry Hunte at Gosfield on 2 April 1573, claimed as a daughter of the Hon. Aubrey de Vere, second son of the fifteenth Earl of Oxford. The old heralds put her in quotation marks. Cokayne would allow only that the descent was 'capable of proof'. It looked, structurally, exactly like the Lane claim this research once took apart: a prestige graft on a thin join. It had one odd strength, noted before any document moved: a fabricator reaching for the Earls of Oxford would not have chosen Aubrey, an obscure second son. Fabricators pick heirs.

So it went to trial, cheapest test first. The printed Visitation of Essex turned out to hold the de Veres' own pedigree, recorded from their side of the family, with no Hunt vanity in play, and there she stood: 'Janne uxor Hen. Hunt of Gosfeild in Essex', daughter of Aubrey, second son of the fifteenth Earl. Then came the kill-or-confirm document, bought from the National Archives for the price of a takeaway: the will of John de Vere, sixteenth Earl of Oxford, made in July 1562 and proved in May 1563. In it the Earl remembers the children of 'my brother Awbrey Veer' by name, and leaves 'to either of his other daughters Bridgett and Jane fortie poundes, to be payed to them at the severall dayes of their marriage or full age'. Jane, unmarried in 1562; married at Gosfield in 1573; forty pounds from her uncle the Lord Great Chamberlain of England. A third witness followed, older than both: a 1531 estate pedigree in the Arundell archive at Kresen Kernow, listing Aubrey among the fifteenth Earl's children while he was still a boy. Triple-sourced, from three unconnected archives, across three centuries of paper. Jane's filiation is proven.

And above Jane the ladder simply keeps going, because the Earls of Oxford are among the best-documented families in England. Her grandfather the fifteenth Earl, by Elizabeth Trussell; his grandfather Sir Robert, younger son of Richard de Vere, eleventh Earl of Oxford, Knight of the Garter, a commander at Agincourt, who made his will on the eve of the campaign and lies at Earls Colne; the seventh Earl, who fought at Crecy and Poitiers; the third Earl, one of the twenty-five surety barons of Magna Carta; the first Earl, created 1142; his father Aubrey the Master-Chamberlain, husband of Alice de Clare, slain in a London riot in 1141; and at the very bottom of the ladder Aubrey de Vere the Domesday tenant-in-chief, who was granted the Saxon Wulfwine's lands by the Conqueror and planted the vineyard at Hedingham. On that last rung this family keeps Cokayne's own caution, and will keep it forever: the records of the 1080s may hide 'two, or even three, successive Aubreys'. The line is documented to the riot of 1141; the Domesday step is the good kind of almost.

The bonuses read like invention and are not. Jane's first cousin, remembered in the same will as 'my sonne Edwarde Lorde Bulbeck', grew up to be Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, the man half the world believes wrote Shakespeare; the family takes no view, but enjoys the relation. The Fighting Veres, Sir Francis and Sir Horace, were Jane's first cousins too. And when the earldom was contested in 1626, Lord Chief Justice Crewe delivered over this very family the most famous sentence in peerage law: 'Where is Bohun? Where is Mowbray? Where is Mortimer? Nay, which is more and most of all, where is Plantagenet? They are intombed in the urnes and sepulchres of mortalitie.' The de Veres, he said, came in with the Conqueror. This household is now entitled to read that passage aloud at Christmas.

One thread that stayed loose for centuries has just been tied off: Jane's mother. The old Visitation of Essex gave a daughter of Sir Anthony Gibbon of Norfolk, and Victorian Burke's printed it as fact. But the visitation shows only Aubrey's surviving second wife and hangs all his children under her, the ordinary visitation error, and Aubrey married twice. His own will of 1579/80, in the Essex Record Office, together with the burial of his first wife on 11 July 1562, set beside the sixteenth Earl's will that names all five of the children living that same summer, put Jane and her siblings before the second marriage. Their mother was Aubrey's first wife, Margaret Spring, of the Lavenham clothier family, buried at Castle Hedingham. Bridget Gibbon was the childless second wife, and she keeps her place on the tree as the stepmother she was, because a correction is only worth making if you can still see what it corrected.

My father spent ten years hunting a thousand-year pedigree under the name Damery, and it stayed out of reach; it stays out of reach still, and the wall at the head of the Damery line stands where it stood. But the prize itself, the documented line from the Conquest's own generation down to a family taking its tea in West Cork, arrived after all, up the other side of the tree, through a forty-pound legacy to an unmarried girl in 1562. The rule held the whole way: nothing became true because we wanted it to be. This one was simply true, and had been waiting four and a half centuries for somebody to check.