The Twilight of the de Veres: Politics, Scandal, and the Last Earl of Oxford

The Twilight of the de Veres: Politics, Scandal, and the Last Earl of Oxford 

For five and a half centuries, the earls of Oxford held the most ancient title in England, and for five and a half centuries, they were destroyed by it. The Twilight of the de Veres traces the extraordinary arc of one of England's greatest noble dynasties, from the Norman knight who appeared in the Domesday Book of 1086 to the last English earl who died in a Downing Street house in 1703, the premier earldom extinct for want of a legitimate heir.

At the centre of this story stands Aubrey de Vere, twentieth Earl of Oxford, a man raised in Friesland, forged in the Dutch professional army, returned to a kingdom in civil war, and shaped by decades of royalist conspiracy, Tower imprisonment, Restoration scandal, and constitutional crisis. He built the Oxford Blues. He refused a king's demand on grounds of conscience and paid the price. He chaired the Hungerford conference at the hinge of the Glorious Revolution. He deceived a woman in a chandler's shop with a fraudulent wedding ceremony. He carried the sword of mercy at four coronations and never recovered the hereditary office that was his family's oldest distinction.

Drawing on contemporary sources including the diary of Samuel Pepys, The Twilight of the de Veres is narrative history at its most intimate, the biography of a name that began in conquest and ended in conscience.