Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford, Richard II's BFF.

Embarking on another round of research on the history of the administration of the English Royal Court I discovered that T. F. Tout was a fine source of every kind of information. His six thick books of closely packed content, entitled Chapters In The Administrative History Of Mediaeval England, give his subject with gratifying amounts of context.

Of course, I've followed the information on the Earls of Oxford and their sometimes hereditary office of Lord Great Chamberlain with particular interest. That on Robert Vere, the 9^th Earl of Oxford, and Aubrey Vere, his uncle, is so sufficient by itself that I present it here as a stand alone essay.

Tout points out at greater length elsewhere that the hereditary nature of the office created problems. It was actually an office requiring residence at the Royal Court for some centuries. Thus “under chamberlains” were appointed to do the actual daily work. As might be expected, those under chamberlains became the actual office holders. At the point described here, however, young Richard II revived the office and its hereditary assignment for his BFF, Robert.

This kind (and quality) of history is particularly fine-grained. To read Tout's study is to read history at its finest.

...the acting chief-chamberlain, William Beauchamp, gave place to Aubrey Vere, apparently early in December 1380, certainly before January 18, 1381.... The appointment of Vere prepared the way for the active assumption of the hereditary office by his nephew Robert, now approaching his majority and already the inseparable comrade of the king.

Knights and clerks might be instruments of the royal caprice, but they could hardly be the companions and intimates of the young king. Yet there were few young men of high rank to whom Richard could easily give his confidence. The companions of his youth—Henry of Derby and the young Fitzalan—were soon estranged from him by politics. His uncles were too old and too self-centered. His half-brothers, the Hollands, were considerably his seniors, and their violent character involved them in offences which even Richard and their mother could not easily forgive. Queen Anne, a girl some months older than her husband, was beginning to make her power felt; but she was a foreigner, and her Bohemian following, male and female, was not popular. Richard’s loneliness required some friend nearly his own age and sufficiently high in rank to associate with him on terms of equality. Such a friend was found in Robert Vere, five years the king’s senior, and heir to the earldom of Oxford.

Vere had been one of the young nobles knighted by Edward III. on that last St. George’s day of his life, when the heir to the throne was admitted to the Garter. At Richard's accession he was still a minor in the king’s custody. Two of the veterans of the household, Aubrey Vere and Simon Burley, did their best to bring him to Richard’s notice. The house of Vere had had its credit heightened by the recognition lately bestowed by Edward III. on Robert’s father’s claims to the hereditary chamberlainship. The result had been that the hereditary chamberlain became something more than a titular dignitary, though his exalted position required a permanent vice-chamberlain to perform much of the routine work of the office. Earl Thomas’s death, when Robert was a boy of nine, left the senior position unoccupied, but Robert’s claim to the chamberlainship was admitted before Richard’s coronation, at which Robert, then seventeen, was allowed to perform his duties in person.

For ordinary work, however, various court nobles acted as Vere’s deputy until 1382, Sir Aubrey Vere, Robert’s uncle, being among those who often acted for him. Aubrey, like Simon Burley, was an elderly man who had been a trusted retainer of the Black Prince. They had in common a long career of service abroad and a lifelong obligation to their patron’s son, an obligation the more keenly felt since its discharge opened up for them the way to distinction. Anyhow, the deputy of the hereditary chamberlain and the sometime acting chamberlain of the young king had each a definite motive in exalting the chamberlain’s office, and could secure this end by making the hereditary chamberlain the chief friend of the king. Richard yielded at once to the charms of the young earl. He completed Robert’s marriage with Philippa, a granddaughter of Edward III., and procured for the young pair a large share of the English lands of her father, Enguerrand de Coucy, who had renounced his English earldom to resume his French inheritance and nationality. Henceforth Robert was called the “ king’s kinsman,” and before long the king and he were inseparable. Favours were gradually heaped upon him. In 1380, though still styled simply “son and heir of the 5th earl of Oxford,” the grant to him from his father’s lands was increased, as he was “almost of full age and about to sail beyond seas in the king’s service.” At last, in January 1382, he entered upon his inheritance, receiving a confirmation of the famous grant of Henry I. which gave the house of Oxford the grand chamberlainship.

Earl Robert’s personality is little illustrated by the chroniclers. Too much stress must not be laid on the usual charges of gross immorality which were the common lot of royal favourites; but the impression left of him is primarily not so much of vice as of incompetence and folly, which never allowed him to take advantage of his splendid opportunities. His military failures showed that he was no soldier; his whole career suggests lack of definite policy. When his great chance came in Ireland he made no attempt to grasp it, and he succumbed to opposition after barely making a fight. Any ideas underlying the royal policy must be ascribed to Pole or Burley or to the young king himself. Robert Vere was never more than a favourite, whose long descent and dignified status did not prevent his incurring the odium which the name “ favourite ” never failed to inspire.

Source: Tout, T. F. Chapters In The Administrative History Of Mediaeval England (1928). 356-407.

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