Edward de Vere & William Shakespeare

this secret relation among the three royals became a crisis in 1601, when Wriothesley took part in the Essex Rebellion to overthrow–his mother. His rash act put his life in danger. Elizabeth did not forgive sedition. The leader of the rebellion Robert Devereaux, Earl of Essex, heard his head thump in a wood bucket. It was only De Vere's pleadings to Elizabeth that saved their son's life. Instead, he was imprisoned in the Tower through the last years of the Queen's reign. When Elizabeth died, James I immediately freed him, because De Vere, 'the Great Oxford' in his words, had opposed the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, James' mother, in 1586-7. De Vere pleaded with Wriothesley too–that he was doing all he could to deliver him, even though as chief of the queen's council he had condemned him to death. That seems to be the import of Sonnet 26. It loomed for a time that if and when Elizabeth died, Henry could be King. That hope collapsed and De Vere's spirit in the next poem, the beginning of the slow minor movement of the work. Thinking that he might fail to assist this sacred ascension, exhausted and seeking rest, and unable to sleep, De Vere writes his son in thought, through Sonnet 27, since he cannot see him in prison. His insomnia continues until he revives in Sonnet 29 and 30. Sonnet 31 contains one of the hidden code phrases embedded in the whole. "And thou–all they–hast all the all of me." takes its meaning from Wriothesley's motto, "All For One", that is, all the love he has ever received focusses now upon his son in a critical hour.

When his execution is commuted as indicated in Sonnet 42, De Vere refers to the Queenly gesture as love, though he himself feels they together "lay on me this cross". Nevertheless, in loving their son he wishes to think she loves and forgives him too.

It was De Vere's fate, constituting a parable of the age, to agonize in the transit between medieval and modern aspiration, to play in his own life a losing role in James I's succession, the first ascension of an English King arranged by the English mercantile elite. Thus ended the Medieval period. That he one of the central participants recorded his perspective in one of literature's great works makes the Sonnets doubly significant.