Robert de Vere is best remembered as Richard II’s foppish favourite. The king’s boyhood friend, showered with patronage and the unworthy recipient of high office. The first English marquess (of Dublin) and duke of Ireland. The target of the wrath of the Lords Appellant, castigated and condemned by the Wonderful Parliament (1386), and defeated at the battle of Radcot Bridge (1387).
James Ross offers us something very different from this caricature. His de Vere is not the frivolous incompetent painted for us in primary colours by Anthony Steel, T. F. Tout, and others. Nor is he simply one of Thomas Walsingham’s “knights of Venus rather than Mars,” more suited to the bedchamber than the battlefield. But such a description does highlight one of the problems any biographer faces when dealing with such a subject--the almost uniformly hostile accounts presented by the chroniclers of Richard II’s reign. The difficulties are in some cases exacerbated by the fact that several accounts of the reign were rewritten in an even more condemnatory fashion after the king’s deposition in 1399.
What is needed, of course, is the balance that can be provided by different sorts of evidence. As one would expect from Ross, archival sources have been mined extensively for this book, not merely The National Archives at Kew (London) but repositories throughout England and farther afield including in Scotland, Belgium, and Ireland. In the latter case, the remarkable Virtual Treasury project has clearly been a considerable boon to the author. Such sources allow us to see de Vere in a much more nuanced fashion.
The book is not and, arguably, could not be a conventional narrative biography. The author has faced the difficulties common to all undertaking this sort of study, namely blending thematic discussion with a sense of chronological progress through his subject’s life. The middle sections of the work (Chapters 2-5) do follow a broad narrative, but these are bookended with studies of the “royal favourite” in the later Middle Ages (Chapter 1), and de Vere’s household and local influence (Chapter 6). The structure is not dissimilar to that chosen for Ross’s book on a later member of the same family: John de Vere, Thirteenth Earl of Oxford, 1442-1513: The Foremost Man of the Kingdom (Boydell Press, 2011). This does make for a slightly awkward transition between a discussion of de Vere’s death (in Chapter 5) and his lifestyle (in the final full chapter).
This, though, is nothing more than a “cosmetic” concern. Robert de Vere emerges from this study a much more balanced and understandable figure. The book presents a wealth of new evidence, much of which highlights manorial administration, financial, and legal activities, as well as his political involvement in the 1380s. This allows for a reconstruction of many facets of de Vere’s career. Some lacunae remain, however. As Ross notes, it is hard to judge how closely de Vere was involved in certain governmental decisions between 1383 and 1389 as the records of the royal council are, at best, sparse. It is also difficult to ascertain the composition of de Vere’s household and much to do with his military following. Clearly, he could recruit extensive forces when necessary, but the absence of any muster rolls for his most significant campaigns means that many questions regarding how he recruited and from where must remain unanswered.
Some of this evidence highlights the breadth of de Vere’s territorial interests. This might allow us to think of him as a trans-regional, perhaps trans-national, magnate even if not comparable to, say, the Mortimers. Ross does not describe him in such terms although there is some consideration of the challenges bound up with the management of such a diversity of properties, especially in Chapter 6. Here we are drawn into discussions familiar from various studies of regional affinities, county communities, and aristocratic households of various forms. Many of de Vere’s estates lay in East Anglia, particularly Essex and Suffolk. The obvious contrasts with his Irish estates, properties granted to him in the West Country, and grants of office in Cheshire are noteworthy. The wide distribution of these estates made it difficult for de Vere to be a presence in local society even in those areas where he had considerable territorial influence. What emerges from this is an indication of potential fragility of late medieval noble power and the difficulties that emerged from a demesne with such widely scattered estates. “Perhaps,” Ross argues “a lack of a substantial local following diminished [de Vere’s] stature as a great magnate and may have weakened him politically” (225). It is an indication of the importance of local and regional power even for those operating at the apex of Plantagenet political society.
For this reviewer, some of the most interesting material follows from this, conceptually at least, and concerns de Vere’s involvement in Ireland (dealt with chiefly in Chapter 4). By 1385 de Vere had become the most powerful of those who formed the king’s close circle. This was made manifestly clear in the grant to him of the new title of marquess of Dublin. Richard II’s interest in and concern with Ireland are well known and he would visit the lordship twice in the 1390s. The plan for de Vere may be seen as the king’s first attempt to address the decline of the English lordship in Ireland. Sporadic efforts to counter the “Gaelic revival” over the course of the fourteenth century had only stalled the advance momentarily and there were real concerns by 1385 that the Anglo-Irish position might be fatally compromised if remedial action was not taken. De Vere received extensive powers in his new office: Ross notes that “the grant was of a palatinate in all but name” (120) but he also argues that any suggestions that this was the foundation for a further devolution of authority should be treated with scepticism. In particular, he argues that Richard is most unlikely to have wished to share his royal title with anyone and hence we should discount the proposition that he intended Ireland to become a kingdom either for de Vere or, later, Thomas Holland (d. 1400). Instead, Ross views this as, more probably, an accusation used to attack Richard--that he was willing to devolve and compromise his inheritance and that the king was subject to flattery and could not tell good counsel from bad. Ross is similarly critical of the notion that Richard, at least in this phase of his reign, sought to build up a power base in his western estate or in the Irish Sea region, including Ireland, North Wales, and Cheshire. The author makes a good case for this position although it is possible that Richard was rethinking, even at this stage of his reign, the character and scope of his own royal power and he may have envisaged a paradigm in which he sat above various “lesser kings” in Britain and Ireland. In such circumstances he might also have reconceived the geo-political alignment of the realm.
Such broad questions are never far away when considering the career of Robert de Vere. Ross has provided us with an array of new evidence detailing both the mundanity of estate administration and political activities on the national stage. In so doing he has given us a much more subtle portrait of the man. De Vere emerges from this study not as a favourite in the sense in which the term is traditionally used. He was not an interloper to English elite society, but he was certainly favoured by the king. He received grants and titles of such a size and such a kind that they caused unease, hostility, and jealousy. But he was, by birth, a member of the peerage; he was not catapulted into its ranks like a Gaveston, nor was he "raised from the dust" to high office like a Reginald Bray. Nor did his undoubtedly close relationship with Richard exclude all others--he was no Despenser. Richard did not “create” him even if he greatly enhanced his standing. This, then, is not a biography of a favourite. Rather it is a case study that highlights the varied concerns of the late medieval elite, from the local to the international. As such it makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of political culture in the later Middle Ages.