The deepest recesses of Oxford's private life over the whole of the 1570s would become the subject of detailed reports composed in December 1580 and January 1581 by three companions who began that decade as Oxford's most intimate friends. The first, Henry Howard, Oxford's elder by ten years, was born on 25 February 1540, the second son of Lady Frances Vere (Oxford's aunt) and of Henry Howard, eldest son of the 3rd Duke of Norfolk, known to posterity as the poet Surrey. In 1540 Henry VIII married Surrey's sister Catherine Howard. Triumph turned to ashes when she went to the block in 1542. A second blow fell in 1547, when Surrey himself was executed for treason. His five children – Thomas, Henry, Jane, Catherine, and Margaret – were billeted upon the Duchess of Richmond, a Protestant aunt. Young Henry was subsequently placed under the tutelage of the avid Protestant John Fox.

The third Duke escaped his son's fate when Henry VIII conveniently died the night before the scheduled execution. The dukedom remained attainted until restored by Mary in 1553. Hereupon Henry, a precocious thirteen-year-old, was deposited in the household of John White, Bishop of Lincoln. Following White to Winchester in 1556, Henry's idyll vanished with the accession of Elizabeth in 1558. Restored in blood in 1559, Henry attended King's College, Cambridge, at the expense of the new Queen.

Thomas Howard became 4th Duke of Norfolk on his father's death in 1554. But while Thomas basked in the quadruple blessings of title, wealth, marriage, and social recognition, Henry survived in relative poverty and obscurity. Never interested in women or marriage, he sponged off rich relations decade after miserable decade until the accession of James in 1603. Academic life proved thoroughly congenial, however, and he ‘charted a career unusual for one of his birth and rank as a scholar and teacher’: