Edward de Vere's mother, Margery, Countess of Oxford, was the daughter of Sir John Golding, of the tiny rural village of Belchamp (pronounced ‘Beecham’) St Paul's, Essex. Sir John's wife, Elizabeth, was the daughter and co-heir of Thomas Tonge of West Malling, and the widow of Reginald Hammond. Elizabeth bore Sir John two sons and two daughters: Thomas, William, Margery, and Elizabeth. Dying on 27 November 1527, she was soon replaced by Ursula Marston, daughter and co-heir of William Marston of Horton, Surrey. Ursula bore Sir John four sons and three daughters: Henry, Arthur, George, Edmond, Mary, Dorothy, and Frances. Thus Golding aunts and uncles would lie thick on the land.

At the time of her marriage in 1548, Margery Golding was twenty-two at the least. Sir John's death the previous year released her from the oversight of both biological parents. Margery must have been very beautiful, very sexy, or both, for – as we will soon discover – the 16th Earl married her under circumstances that imply reckless passion.

Sir John Golding's heir maintained family dignity by securing a knighthood, like his father before him. Sir Thomas would serve as sheriff of both Essex and Hertfordshire in 1563, and of Essex alone in 1569. He and his uterine siblings retained roots in Essex and East Anglia, sustaining or improving their lot by marriage. Margery's half-brother Arthur, born in 1536, would achieve lasting fame as an Elizabethan man of letters, his professed Puritanism well disguised in his sensuous translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses.

Edward's paternal grandmother was Elizabeth née Trussell, daughter of Edward Trussell of Cublesdon, Staffordshire, and Margaret Don (or Done), of the family that would later produce the poet John Donne. Through Margaret, a grand-daughter of Leonard Hastings and Alice Camoys, Edward de Vere was connected to the blood royal, for Alice was the daughter of Elizabeth Mortimer, who was the daughter of Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March, who was the son of Edward III. Thus Edward III was Edward de Vere's father's mother's mother's mother's mother's father's father, or (more simply) his great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. Nevertheless, contention for the English throne lay with the earls of Hertford, Derby, Huntingdon, Westmorland, and Northumberland, but never the earls of Oxford.