Cecil was
not the most powerful commoner, at the time, in England, for nothing. In the wake of the dispute, Anne’s name
occasionally shows up in the Court accounts instructing the staff to provide accommodations
for her during summer progresses and festivities at Court. The accommodations do not mention shared
quarters with her husband.
After many
adventures, the brilliant and unstable Earl of Oxford separated from his wife,
spent lavishly until he was effectively bankrupt and impregnated a
Lady-in-Waiting to the Queen. The Queen
punished her courtiers ferociously if they were discovered to have deflowered
one of her Ladies. His final punishment
was exile from Court until he would return to his wife and exile from the favor
of the Queen for the rest of her life.
Soon after
husband and wife finally established a family home, we learn more about Anne’s
life. In May of 1583, she gave birth to
a son and heir to the Earldom of Oxford.
All during her pregnancy she surely felt that things were turning very
much in favor of her happiness. Perhaps
the child (their second) would be male.
A male heir could only endear her to her husband. The child was indeed a boy and all
indications would seem to be that both parents were thrilled. It is believed that the child probably died
the same day but certainly lived no more than a few days.
Even the children
of nobility died young in large numbers in those days. But not every parent was inured to the fact. Anne wrote poems about her mourning that show
she was devastated at the death. While
the poems were not emotionally raw in any contemporary sense, they were in terms
of the time. I give one here and attach
the others at the end of this essay:
Had with morning the Gods left their
wills undone,
They had not so soon 'herited such a
soul:
Or if the mouth, time, did not glutton
up all,
Nor I, nor the world, were deprived of
my son,
Doth wash with golden tears, inveying
the skies,
And when the water of the Goddess's
eyes,
Makes almost alive, the Marble, of my
Child:
One bids her leave still, her dolor so
extreme,
Telling her it is not her young son
Papheme,
To which she makes answer with a voice
inflamed,
(Feeling therewith her venom, to be
more bitter)
"As I was of Cupid, even so of it
mother:
And a woman's last child, is the most
beloved.
Although the
poems are also not particularly good, they do show an educated mind, trained —
in the Medieval fashion just being shed in England at the time of her youth — to
take examples from classical mythology.
The brief Viscount
Bulbeck being the son of the renowned poet and playwright Edward de Vere, we
might have hoped to have the text of the father’s own memorial poem. As far as traditional literary history is
concerned, no such poem has yet been discovered.
In Shakespeare’s
Sonnets (1609), published shortly after De Vere’s death, however, there is a
sonnet that centuries of commentators have declared is about the “Fair Youth”
of the sonnets and simultaneously exhibits a son/sun imagery. It is generally said to be the first of a
short series of
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