The marriage of Edward de Vere and Elizabeth Trentham

Thomas Trentham III was buried at Rocester on 25 May 1587 at the age of fourty-nine. In his will, dated the previous October, he entailed most of the Rocester Abbey estate upon his son and heir ffrancis Trentham I. The rest, he divided between his widow Jane and his other son Thomas Trentham IV, while his eldest daughter Elizabeth was bequeathed £1000. Of his three daughters, Dorothy had married Sir William Cooper, Katherine had married Sir John Stanhope while Elizabeth, living at the very heart of the Queen’s court, remained unmarried.
The Queen was so possessive of her Maids of Honour, she demanded such loyalty from them, that she was often loath to let them marry - holding her own chastity up as an example to follow. I’m sure her maids saw behind the facade, and the record is full of Elizabethan men coming a cropper through their entanglement with the Queen’s ladies - as the Oxford-Vavasour imbroglio so vividly illustrates.

Yet somehow it was all so very different when it came to the Earl of Oxford and Miss Trentham. Elizabeth could have begun her service to the Queen, I suggest, sometime between the ages of fourteen and nineteen. It is often cited that Oxford knew her for ten years before they married in 1591. Elizabeth would have witnessed the great scandal that broke when Anne Vavasour delivered Oxford’s bastard son in her rooms at Court. Elizabeth Trentham was a young woman - and perhaps she learned a cautionary lesson from it. In any case, she maintained her chastity throughout her twenties.

Now, on the one hand, we have Elizabeth Trentham - a loyal and spotless Maid of Honour, in all likelihood one of the Queen’s god-daughters, approaching an age when her fertility was past its peak, together with her brother, ffrancis Trentham I, a wealthy Shire Knight highly skilled in estate management and a minor courtier; and on the other hand, we have Edward de Vere, the noblest of all English Earls and Lord Great Chamberlain of England, classical scholar, adventurer, poet, dramatist, patron of the arts and sciences, and impresario, recently widowed without a male heir and in shockingly poor financial straits. The Queen had done her bit to help support her greatest court poet and chief propogandist in the resurgence of English national pride when, on 26 June 1586, she authorised a Privy Seal warrant granting Oxford £1000 a year.

That the marriage of Edward de Vere and Elizabeth Trentham received Royal blessing cannot be in doubt - that the Queen herself played matchmaker to this union seems, in the circumstances, almost like stating the obvious. Bringing the two families together would bring great honour to the loyal and ‘fair’ Miss Trentham, and the ravaged estate of her Lord Great Chamberlain might recover its health under the stewardship of the bride’s brother ffrancis. Perhaps the reason why no record has yet been found of the marriage itself is that people haven’t been looking in the right place. It may interest Oxfordians to know that ffrancis Trentham I also married in 1591, to Katherine, daughter of Sir Ralph Sheldon and yet, unlike other important Trentham marriages that had gone before, no mention of it is recorded in the Rocester Parish Register. Perhaps Elizabeth and ffrancis Trentham married their spouses in a double wedding in one of the Queen’s chapels.

Whatever the circumstances, the marriage marked an important turning point in the fortunes of both families. While researching information about the last in the Trentham line - the heiress Elizabeth Trentham who married Bryan Cokayne, Lord Viscount Cullen - I uncovered an extraordinary hand-written note in a notebook of one of their ancestors - GE Cokayne, the Victorian author of The Complete Peerage and The Complete Baronetage. It reads, in part,

“Francis Trentham of Rocester Esq was Sheriff for Stafford 35 Eliz 2 9 Jac - His sister Ann [sic - Elizabeth] Trentham, one of 2 Elizabeth’s maids of honour, was 2nd wife to Edwd-Vere Earl of Oxford, to whom this Francis advanced £10,000 on the Earl agreeing that failing his own male issue by this 2nd wife, the said Francis & his heires should succeed to Henningham Castle & other estates in Essex.”

Soon, Edward de Vere and his new Countess would take up residence at King’s Place in Hackney which is where we’ll rejoin them in the second part of this short history of the Trentham family, in the next newsletter.

Copyright 2006 Jeremy Crick.