Robert (1362–1392) [q. v.], the favourite of Richard II, was succeeded by his uncle Aubrey (1340?–1400) [q. v.], to whom the king, in 1392, ‘restitut, done, et grante … le nom, title, estat et honour de Count d'Oxenford,’ with limitation to his heirs male, ‘et luy fist Count d'Oxenford en plein parlement’ (Rot. Parl. iii. 603), the original earldom having been forfeited in 1388. It is remarkable that his grandson and all the successive earls signed themselves ‘Oxenford.’
The twelfth earl, John de Vere (d. 1462), a staunch Lancastrian, who was beheaded, with his eldest son, in 1462, married the heiress of the barony of Plaiz. His younger son and successor, John, thirteenth earl [q. v.], was attainted in 1474, but was restored to all his family honours on the triumph of Henry VII. With his nephew, John, the fourteenth earl, the direct male line came to an end (1526), and the earldom passed to a descendant of the eleventh earl, Richard (1400–1417), who obtained with it the great chamberlainship (as being entailed on heirs male under Richard II), and assumed the other titles of the family. Of his younger sons, Aubrey was grandfather of Robert de Vere, the nineteenth earl, and Geoffrey was father of Sir Francis Vere and Horatio, lord Vere of Tilbury [q. v.] His grandson, Edward, the seventeenth earl (1562–1604) [q. v.], ruined his inheritance, and with his son, Henry de Vere, eighteenth earl [q. v.], the direct male line again came to an end in 1625. Although, a century before, in the same circumstances, the heir male appears to have succeeded to the family honours without question, they were now stubbornly contested by Robert (Bertie), lord Willoughby de Eresby (Collins, pp. 269–75), whose mother was an aunt of the last (eighteenth earl), on the ground that the latter's three sisters were only ‘of the half-blood.’ The House of Lords referred the whole question to the judges, who adjudged the earldom to the heir male—a poor officer, Robert de Vere, nineteenth earl (d. 1632) [see under Vere, Aubrey de, twentieth earl]; the office of great chamberlain (by a bare majority) to Lord Willoughby de Eresby, in whose descendants it is still vested; and the baronies (which had merely been assumed by the family) to the heirs general of Earl John, who died in 1525. Robert's son Aubrey [q. v.], the twentieth and last earl, restored the fortunes of his family by his marriage with Anne Bayning, a great heiress, in 1647. His daughter Diana married the first Duke of St. Albans, whose descendants preserve his memory in the barony of Vere of Hanworth (1750) and the names of ‘Aubrey’ and ‘De Vere.’
Among the religious foundations of the family were the priories of Earl's Colne (their place of sepulture) and Hatfield Broadoak, Essex, and a nunnery at Ickleton, Cambridgeshire. Their ancestral seat was at Castle Hedingham, where the finest rectangular keep in England still testifies to their power. From its resemblance to that of Rochester, it was probably the work of the first great chamberlain. Stephen's queen died there. The cognisance of their house was the blue boar (a pun on verres), and their motto ‘Vero nil verius.’
[Domesday Book; Abingdon Chron. and Red Book of the Exchequer (Rolls Ser.); Rotuli Parliamentorum; Dugdale's Baronage; G. E. C[okayne]'s Complete Peerage; Nichols's Descent of the Earldom of Oxford (Arch. Journ. ix. 17–29); Collins's Historical Precedents; Halsted's Succinct Genealogies; Macaulay's Hist.; Round's Geoffrey de Mandeville; Vere Papers among the Round MSS. in App. ix to 14th Report on Hist. MSS. pp. 276–81. There are fine engravings of Hedingham keep in Vetusta Monumenta.]
VERE, AUBREY de (d. 1141), great chamberlain, was son and successor of Aubrey (Albericus) de Vere ‘senior,’ by Beatrice his wife. He is found in 1125 acting as joint-sheriff of London (Geoffrey de Mandeville, p. 309); and in 1130 he appears, in conjunction with Richard Basset, as holding the shrievalty of eleven counties ‘ut custodes’ for the crown (ib. pp. 297–8). But he was then indebted for an enormous sum to the crown for having allowed a prisoner to escape, and for permission to resign the shrievalty of Essex and Hertfordshire (Rot. Pip. 31 Hen. I, p. 53). In September 1131 he was among the magnates attending the council of Northampton (Sarum Charters, p. 6); and in 1133, on the king leaving England for the last time, Aubrey was given at Farnham the office of great chamberlain for himself and his heirs (Madox, Baronia Anglica, p. 158). He is found at Stephen's court as chamberlain early in 1136 (Geoffrey de Mandeville, pp. 262–3), and was with him at Clarendon not long afterwards (ib. p. 378). When, in 1139, Stephen was called upon to defend before a council his arrest of the bishops, he selected as his advocate Aubrey, whom William of Malmesbury describes as ‘causidicus’ and as practised in (legal) cases (pp. 552–4). He was slain on 9 May 1141 (not, as stated, 1140) in a London riot (Matt. Paris, Chron. Major, ii. 174; Geoffrey de Mandeville, p. 81).
The statement that he was ‘chief justiciar of England,’ for which Foss could find no authority (Judges of England, pp. 89, 138–9),
