Blood of the Dragon, Blood of England:
My de Vere Ancestry
By Janet Kira Lessin, Sasha Alex Lessin, Ph.D. & Claudia Lenore, contributor
There is a name that runs through my ancestry like a golden thread woven through centuries of English history — de Vere. Not borrowed, not claimed by association, not arrived at through admiration for someone else’s research. Mine. Documented. Flowing through both my father’s line and my mother’s line independently, converging in me from two separate directions across seven hundred years of recorded history.
The House of de Vere — the Earls of Oxford, Great Chamberlains of England, Knights of the Garter, Admirals, Constables, companions of kings and queens for over five centuries — is not a footnote in my family tree. It is a trunk from which multiple branches of my ancestry grow. By the time I was born Janet Lynn Thompson in 1954, de Vere blood had been flowing toward me through my father William Robert Thompson and my mother June Alice Shook Thompson through completely separate genealogical pathways, each carrying its own remarkable story.
This is the story of those pathways — the Earls and their ladies, the sheriffs and the baronesses, the women who carried the blood invisibly through generations when the famous surname was lost to marriage, the men who fought at Crécy and Bosworth and compelled King John to seal Magna Carta. This is my inheritance, and I am only beginning to understand what it means.
The House of de Vere: England’s Most Ancient Bloodline
Before tracing my specific lines of descent, it is worth understanding what the House of de Vere actually was — because its historical significance is difficult to overstate. The Victorian historian Lord Macaulay called the de Veres “the longest and most illustrious line of nobles that England has seen,” noting that their pedigree predated the Howards, the Seymours, the Nevilles, the Percys, and even the Plantagenets themselves. When the de Veres arrived in England with William the Conqueror in 1066, the families who would later rival them in power had not yet risen to prominence.
For 561 years — an extraordinary span of time that encompasses the entire arc from Magna Carta to the reign of Elizabeth I — the de Veres maintained an unbroken line of Earls of Oxford. Twenty-one earls in direct succession. Through the Black Death, the Hundred Years War, the Wars of the Roses, the Tudor revolution, and the transformation of medieval England into the early modern world, the de Vere name endured. Their seat was Hedingham Castle in Essex, one of the finest Norman fortresses in England, which still stands today.
Their role was not merely ceremonial. As hereditary Great Chamberlains of England, the de Veres were the closest advisors to the crown across dynasty after dynasty — Norman, Plantagenet, Lancastrian, Yorkist, Tudor. They were present at every turning point in English history. They compelled King John to seal Magna Carta. They fought alongside Edward III at Crécy and Poitiers. They chose sides in the Wars of the Roses and paid with their lives and their freedom. They served Elizabeth I and shaped the cultural flowering of the Elizabethan age. And through it all, their blood flowed forward — into daughters and granddaughters and great-granddaughters who carried it across the Atlantic to the New World, down through colonial America, until it arrived at a girl growing up in a haunted house in Avalon, Pennsylvania.
That girl was me.
My Paternal Line: The Earls of Oxford Through My Father’s Thompson Blood
My father, William Robert Thompson (1920–1999), was a World War II medic who survived three battlefield massacres and came home to marry my mother and raise his family in Avalon, Pennsylvania. He was a quiet, decent man who never spoke of noble ancestry. Yet flowing through his veins, and through mine, was one of the most remarkable documented lineages in English history — a direct line of de Vere Earls of Oxford stretching back thirteen generations to the 12th century.
Aubrey III de Vere, 1st Earl of Oxford (1170–1194) — My 23rd Great-Grandfather
The documented paternal de Vere line begins with Aubrey III de Vere, also known as Alberic, created 1st Earl of Oxford in 1142 by grant of Empress Matilda during the period of English history known as The Anarchy. He served as Great Chamberlain of England — an office the de Veres would hold through generation after generation, becoming synonymous with the position itself. Aubrey III was twenty-three generations before me on my father’s side, yet his blood is my blood, his title the first link in a chain that would eventually reach a WWII medic from western Pennsylvania.
His name Alberic is worth pausing on. In medieval legend, Alberic or Auberon — Oberon — was the fairy king, the ruler of the hidden realm, the sovereign of the magical world that runs parallel to the human one. The de Vere family tradition held that Alberic de Vere was the historical figure behind the Oberon legend. Whether or not one accepts that specific identification, the naming pattern is striking: the first Earl of Oxford bore the name of the fairy king, and the family that descended from him maintained a continuous tradition of what they called the Dragon bloodline — the ancient Scythian inheritance of clear sight and sovereign magic — across eight hundred years.
Robert de Vere, 3rd Earl (1200–1221) — My 22nd Great-Grandfather
My 22nd great-grandfather Robert de Vere, 3rd Earl of Oxford, served as Great Chamberlain of England and Justice of the King’s Bench. He was among the barons who compelled King John to seal Magna Carta in 1215 — one of the foundational acts of constitutional government in Western history. The document that established the principle that no one, not even a king, is above the law, bears the influence of my ancestor. Eight hundred years later that principle still shapes every democratic government on earth.
Hugh de Vere, 4th Earl (1243–1263) — My 21st Great-Grandfather
Hugh de Vere, 4th Earl of Oxford, continued the family’s role as Great Chamberlain of England and served as a Knight of Henry III. His was a quieter chapter in the de Vere story, but a necessary one — the steady transmission of blood and title and tradition through a generation that kept the line intact for what was to come.
Robert de Vere, 5th Earl (1276–1296) — My 20th Great-Grandfather
Robert de Vere, 5th Earl of Oxford, is a pivotal figure in my genealogy — not only as my 20th great-grandfather on my father’s side, but quite possibly as the common ancestor connecting both my paternal and maternal de Vere lines. The same earldom that produced the great military and political figures of the 14th and 15th centuries also produced the cadet branches — the sheriffs and baronesses — through whom my mother’s line descends. Robert the 5th Earl may be the point at which my two de Vere inheritances last shared a common root before diverging for two centuries and then converging again in me.
John de Vere, 7th Earl (1318–1360) — My 18th Great-Grandfather: Crécy and Poitiers
John de Vere, 7th Earl of Oxford, my 18th great-grandfather, was one of the great military commanders of his age. As Great Chamberlain of England, he fought under Edward III at the Battle of Crécy in 1346 and the Battle of Poitiers in 1356 — two of the most celebrated English victories of the Hundred Years War. At Crécy the English longbowmen devastated the French cavalry in what historians consider a turning point in medieval warfare. My ancestor was there, commanding, fighting, surviving.
When I think of my father William Robert Thompson surviving three battlefield massacres in World War II — the last man standing each time, rescued each time, carrying shrapnel in his leg for the rest of his life — I cannot help but see the pattern. The de Vere men survived battlefields. Generation after generation, my ancestors walked onto some of the most violent fields in European history and came home. My father continued that tradition in the fields of France and Germany, six centuries after his de Vere ancestor fought at Crécy in that same country.
John de Vere, 12th Earl (1408–1462) — My 15th Great-Grandfather: Beheaded by Edward IV
Not all de Vere stories end in triumph. John de Vere, 12th Earl of Oxford, my 15th great-grandfather, was a committed Lancastrian loyalist in the Wars of the Roses who paid for his political convictions with his life. In 1462, following the Yorkist victory and the accession of Edward IV, he was beheaded on Tower Hill along with his eldest son. He died for the cause he believed in, leaving his younger son to carry the bloodline forward.
There is a painful irony in my family tree here. The man who ordered my 15th great-grandfather’s execution was Edward IV — whose daughter Cecily of York married Sir John Welles, my 13th great-grandfather through an entirely separate line. The executioner and the executed are both my ancestors. My family tree contains both sides of one of history’s most bitter civil wars.
John de Vere, 13th Earl (1442–1513) — My 14th Great-Grandfather: The Greatest of the Earls
John de Vere, 13th Earl of Oxford, my 14th great-grandfather, is widely regarded as the greatest of all the de Vere earls. His father had been beheaded and his brother had died in the Tower of London, yet he survived, escaped, and became one of the most consequential figures of the late 15th century. He served as Chamberlain of England, Constable of England, and Admiral of England, Ireland, and Aquitaine simultaneously — concentrating more offices of state in one man than almost any figure of his era.
Most significantly, he commanded the Lancastrian vanguard at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 — the battle that ended the Wars of the Roses, killed Richard III, and placed Henry Tudor on the throne as Henry VII. The Tudor dynasty, which would produce Henry VIII and Elizabeth I and reshape England forever, came to power in part because of the military genius of my 14th great-grandfather. He was a Knight of the Garter and a Knight of the Bath. He held Hedingham Castle as his seat. He was, as Lord Macaulay wrote, the noblest subject in England.
Lady Elizabeth Howard de Vere, Countess of Oxford (1410–1475) — My 15th Great-Grandmother
My 15th great-grandmother Lady Elizabeth Howard de Vere, Countess of Oxford and Heiress of Standsted Hall, brought two of England’s greatest noble families together in one marriage — the Howards and the de Veres. She was born a Howard and became a de Vere by marriage, carrying both bloodlines forward into the Oxford earldom. Her son John became the 13th Earl. Through her, I carry Howard blood alongside de Vere blood — two of the most ancient and powerful families in English history, united in my ancestry.
Sir John de Vere, 10th Earl (1500–1526) — My 13th Great-Grandfather
Sir John de Vere, 10th Earl of Oxford, Knight of the Garter, was my 13th great-grandfather and the penultimate de Vere in my direct paternal line before the surname begins its journey through other families toward me. His daughter Lady Frances would carry the de Vere blood forward through marriage, beginning the long transmission through de Parmenter, Partridge, Heath, Bradley, and Thompson that would eventually reach my father William.
Lady Frances Alice de Vere Howard of Hedingham (1521–1592) — My 12th Great-Grandmother
Lady Frances Alice de Vere Howard of Hedingham, Countess de Parmenter, born at Hedingham Castle in 1521, was the daughter of the 10th Earl and the last de Vere in the direct line before the surname changes. She married into the de Parmenter family and her son William de Parmenter continued the bloodline. From that point the de Vere name disappears from my paternal ancestry — but the blood remained, flowing silently through the Partridge family of Plymouth Colony, through generations of New England Bradleys, through Rebecca Lindsay Thompson, through my grandfather and my father, until it reached me.
Lady Frances lived through one of the most turbulent periods in English history — the break with Rome, the dissolution of the monasteries, the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, and the early years of Elizabeth I. She was born the year Henry VIII began his campaign to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. She died four years after the Spanish Armada. Her entire life spanned the transformation of England from a medieval Catholic kingdom into the Protestant nation that would go on to colonize the world. Her descendants would be among those colonists.
Rev. Rodolphus Partridge, Pastor of First Church Plymouth (1579–1655) — My 10th Great-Grandfather
The de Vere blood crossed the Atlantic in the veins of the Partridge family. Rev. Rodolphus ‘Ralph’ Partridge, son of William de Parmenter and grandson of Lady Frances de Vere Howard, became the Pastor of the First Church in Plymouth — the very church founded by the Mayflower community. Here my de Vere ancestry and my Mayflower ancestry intersect in one man: a minister at the spiritual heart of Plymouth Colony, grandson of a daughter of Hedingham Castle, carrying the oldest noble blood in England into the new American world.
Hannah Heath (1673–1761) — My 7th Great-Grandmother: The Dustin Massacre
Carrying de Vere blood through the Partridge and Heath families, my 7th great-grandmother Hannah Heath survived what the records call the Dustin Massacre — one of the violent confrontations between English colonists and Native American peoples that marked the brutal history of early New England. She lived to 88 years old, one of those women of extraordinary resilience who kept the line alive through violence and hardship and loss. Her survival meant that the de Vere blood she carried continued forward through her son Joseph Bradley and the generations of Bradleys that followed, eventually reaching my grandfather William Henry Thompson and my father.
My Maternal Line: The Sheriff’s Branch Through My Mother’s Sprague Blood
My mother June Alice Shook Thompson (1922–1997) was a deeply troubled woman — brilliant but mentally challenged, given to dramatic gestures of despair, a difficult presence in my childhood. Yet she too carried extraordinary ancestry, including her own independent line of de Vere descent that reached her through the Sprague family of New England, and before them through the Botsford family of colonial Connecticut, and before them through the Mordaunt family of England, and before them through a quiet branch of the de Vere family that never held the earldom but carried the blood just as truly.
Isabella Greene de Vere (1434–1492) — My 15th Great-Grandmother
My maternal de Vere line begins with Isabella Greene de Vere, born in 1434, my 15th great-grandmother. She was of the de Vere family — the same House of Oxford, the same bloodline, though through a branch that diverged from the main earldom line. Her son Sir Henry de Vere became Sheriff of Northamptonshire, a position of significant local authority, and her granddaughter Elisabeth de Vere became Baroness Turvey.
Sir Henry de Vere, Sheriff of Northamptonshire (1460–1493) — My 14th Great-Grandfather
Sir Henry de Vere, my 14th great-grandfather, served as Sheriff of Northamptonshire — the chief law enforcement and administrative officer of his county. He was a man of substance and local authority, not a great earl or national figure, but a man who administered justice and kept order in his corner of England while his cousins in the main de Vere line were making history at the national level. His daughter Elisabeth would become Baroness Turvey and carry the de Vere blood forward into the Mordaunt family.
Lady Elisabeth de Vere, Baroness Turvey (1483–1543) — My 13th Great-Grandmother
Lady Elisabeth de Vere, Baroness Turvey, my 13th great-grandmother, was born in 1483 — the same year Richard III took the throne and the Princes in the Tower disappeared. She lived through the entire Tudor revolution, dying in 1543 during the reign of Henry VIII. As Baroness Turvey she held a title in her own right, one of the women of the de Vere family who carried authority as well as blood. Her daughter Anna Elisabeth Mordaunt continued the line.
Lady Elisabeth and the 13th Earl of Oxford — John de Vere, the greatest of the earls, my 14th great-grandfather on my father’s side — were contemporaries. They lived in the same England, shared the same family name, were almost certainly known to one another. The de Vere blood that reached my mother through Lady Elisabeth’s line and the de Vere blood that reached my father through the 13th Earl’s line were already close kin before the two streams began their separate journeys toward their eventual reunion in me.
Through Mordaunt, Botsford and Baldwin to America
From Lady Elisabeth de Vere the maternal line flows through her daughter Lady Anna Elisabeth Mordaunt, then through Lady Agnes Fisher Botsford, and into the Botsford family of colonial Connecticut — Richard Botsford, Edward Botsford, Henry Botsford, Elnathan Botsford, Timothy Botsford, across five generations of a family quietly keeping the de Vere blood alive in the new American world without apparently knowing what they carried. Timothy Botsford’s daughter Alice married into the Baldwin family, and the line then flows through Ira Baldwin, Ira Merritt Baldwin, Rhoda Antoinette Baldwin-Norton, Sarah Norton, and Bessie Electa Sprague to my grandmother and finally to my mother June.
What strikes me about this maternal line is how thoroughly the women carried it. From Lady Elisabeth de Vere to Lady Anna Mordaunt to Lady Agnes Botsford — three generations of women in a row. Then through Alice Botsford Baldwin, Rhoda Baldwin, Sarah Norton, Bessie Sprague, and June Thompson — five more generations of women. The de Vere blood on my mother’s side was transmitted primarily through daughters and granddaughters and great-granddaughters, invisible to history, unrecorded in the chronicles that celebrated the earls and their battles, but real and continuous and arriving intact at me.
A Third de Vere Line: Joan de Vere and the Magna Carta
As if two independent de Vere lines were not remarkable enough, my genealogical research has surfaced a third de Vere connection through my maternal ancestry — this one through Joan de Vere, described in the records as embossed on Magna Carta, daughter of Robert de Vere the 5th Earl of Oxford and my 16th great-grandmother.
Joan de Vere’s connection to Magna Carta — whether as a witness, a signatory, or through her father’s role in compelling King John to seal it — places my ancestry at one of the most consequential moments in the history of human rights. The Great Charter of 1215, which established that no sovereign is above the law and that free people have rights that cannot be arbitrarily revoked, bears the mark of my family. Eight hundred years later I work toward a global direct democracy grounded in do-no-harm principles — the Ahimsa Operating System I have spent years developing. The thread from Magna Carta to my own political philosophy is not metaphorical. It runs through my blood.
Joan de Vere’s line runs through Alice Fitzalan-Arundel and connects to the Beaufort and Stewart royal lines of Scotland, eventually flowing through the Hannay family, the Patton and Patten families of Ireland and Maine, the Sprague family of New England, and arriving at my grandmother Bessie Electa Sprague and my mother June. This third de Vere line joins the maternal stream through a completely different pathway, further deepening the concentration of this ancient blood in my ancestry.
Convergence: What It Means to Carry This Blood
I grew up in Avalon, Pennsylvania. A haunted house on Orchard Avenue. A steel mill across the river on Neville Island — named, as I later discovered, after General John Neville, a man who shares my Neville ancestral blood. I was a strange child, a wise old soul in a tiny body, the little mother to my emotionally challenged mother, negotiating with ghosts by the age of five or six, learning to wait for dawn with my head under the covers when the presences in my bedroom became too intense.
Nobody told me I was the descendant of the Earls of Oxford. Nobody told me that the de Vere family had maintained an eight-hundred-year tradition of what they called the Dragon blood — the inheritance of clear sight, transcendent consciousness, the capacity to perceive what others cannot perceive. Nobody told me that my great-grandmother Ocean had been named for the lost Roanoke Colony of Sir Walter Raleigh, my direct ancestor. Nobody told me that Jacquetta of Luxembourg, my 14th great-grandmother, had stood trial twice for witchcraft and been exonerated, or that Elizabeth Woodville had been accused of using supernatural power to ensnare a king.
But the body knows what the mind has not been told. I grew up knowing things I had no reason to know. I saw what others did not see. I negotiated with presences that others pretended did not exist. I was drawn, inexorably, toward the study of consciousness and contact and the question of what human beings actually are and where we actually come from. And eventually, working as a liaison on a remote classified island in the Pacific Ocean in 1995, I encountered the being at the root of my deepest ancestral line — the Dragon Princess, the Scythian Melusine, the woman my de Vere ancestors traced their own origins to across more than a thousand years.
She recognized me. Of course she did. I was her blood.
I am not writing this to claim superiority or special status. The de Vere tradition at its best — stripped of the aristocratic contempt that characterized some of its later interpreters — was never about domination. The Great Chamberlains who advised kings were servants of the realm, not its masters. The men who compelled King John to seal Magna Carta were fighting for the rights of free people, not for their own privilege. The women who carried this blood invisibly through generations of colonial American families — the Botsfords, the Baldwins, the Bradleys, the Heaths — were ordinary people living ordinary lives, unaware of what they carried.
What I am writing this for is recognition. Not public acclaim but inner recognition — the acknowledgment that the experiences of my life, the things I have seen and known and encountered, did not come from nowhere. They came from a very specific somewhere. They came from eight hundred years of documented English nobility, from a thousand years of the Dragon tradition, from Melusine herself and the Scythian princes and the Anunnaki god-kings who stood at the beginning of the line.
The de Vere motto was Vero Nihil Verius — Nothing truer than truth. I have spent my life in pursuit of exactly that: the truth beneath the official story, the reality behind the accepted narrative, the actual history of humanity that has been suppressed and distorted and denied. My ancestors compelled a king to acknowledge that truth matters more than power. I am still doing the same work.
The Line Continues
My documented de Vere ancestry — three independent lines, flowing through both parents, spanning from the 12th century to the present — is available for verification through standard genealogical records. The paternal line through the Earls of Oxford, the maternal line through the Sheriff’s branch and Baroness Turvey, the third line through Joan de Vere of Magna Carta: all are documented in FamilySearch, Ancestry, and the historical records of English nobility.
DNA research currently underway may provide additional confirmation. My brother, a male Thompson, carries the Y-DNA of the paternal line that flows from the de Vere Earls through Lady Frances and the Partridge and Bradley families. His Y-chromosome test at FamilyTreeDNA may eventually connect to other de Vere descendants already in the database and provide genetic confirmation of what the paper records already show.
Until that confirmation comes — and it may, or it may not, and either outcome is information — the documented record stands on its own. I am the daughter of William Robert Thompson and June Alice Shook Thompson. I grew up in Avalon. I carry the blood of the Earls of Oxford through both my parents independently. I carry the blood of Melusine and Charlemagne and Cecily Neville and Jacquetta of Luxembourg and Bess Throckmorton and Walter Raleigh.
And I am only beginning to understand what that means. Vero Nihil Verius. Nothing truer than truth. The search continues. 🐉
Genealogical Summary: My Documented de Vere Lines
PATERNAL LINE (Father: William Robert Thompson)
Aubrey III de Vere, 1st Earl of Oxford (1170) — 23rd GGF — Created Earl by Empress Matilda, Great Chamberlain
Robert de Vere, 3rd Earl (1200) — 22nd GGF — Great Chamberlain, compelled King John to seal Magna Carta
Hugh de Vere, 4th Earl (1243) — 21st GGF — Great Chamberlain, Knight of Henry III
Robert de Vere, 5th Earl (1276) — 20th GGF
Sir Alphonsus de Vere (1296) — 19th GGF
John de Vere, 7th Earl (1318) — 18th GGF — Great Chamberlain, commanded at Crécy and Poitiers
Aubrey de Vere, 10th Earl (1338) — 17th GGF
Richard de Vere, 11th Earl (1385) — 16th GGF — Knight of the Garter under Henry IV
John de Vere, 12th Earl (1408) — 15th GGF — Lancastrian loyalist, beheaded 1462 by Edward IV
Lady Elizabeth Howard de Vere, Countess of Oxford (1410) — 15th GGM — Heiress of Standsted Hall
John de Vere, 13th Earl (1442) — 14th GGF — Chamberlain, Constable & Admiral of England, KG, KB, commanded at Bosworth
Sir John de Vere, 10th Earl (1500) — 13th GGF — Knight of the Garter
Lady Frances Alice de Vere Howard of Hedingham (1521) — 12th GGM — Countess de Parmenter
→ de Parmenter → Partridge (Plymouth Colony pastor) → Heath (Dustin Massacre survivor) → Bradley → Thompson → William Robert Thompson (Father) → Janet
MATERNAL LINE 1 (Mother: June Alice Shook Thompson, via Sprague/Botsford)
Isabella Greene de Vere (1434) — 15th GGM
Sir Henry de Vere, Sheriff of Northamptonshire (1460) — 14th GGF
Lady Elisabeth de Vere, Baroness Turvey (1483) — 13th GGM
→ Mordaunt → Botsford (colonial Connecticut, 5 generations) → Baldwin → Norton → Sprague → June Alice Shook Thompson (Mother) → Janet
MATERNAL LINE 2 (Mother: June Alice Shook Thompson, via Sprague/Hannay)
Robert de Vere, 5th Earl of Oxford (1485) — 17th GGF
Joan de Vere (1505) — 16th GGM — Embossed on Magna Carta
→ Fitzalan-Arundel → Beaufort → Joan Beaufort Queen of Scotland → Stewart Earls of Atholl → Hannay → Spears → Patton/Patten → Sprague → June Alice Shook Thompson (Mother) → Janet
Vero Nihil Verius — Nothing Truer Than Truth
— Motto of the House of de Vere, Earls of Oxford
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Janet Kira Lessin is co-founder of Aquarian Radio and Aquarian Media Enterprises, author, consciousness researcher, and experiencer. She lives on Maui with her husband Dr. Sasha Alex Lessin.
