By inheritance, he was Lord Great Chamberlain of England, and in June 1520, at the age of twenty, he attended King Henry VIII at the Field of the Cloth of Gold.
The young earl was considered a wastrel: in 1523 the king ordered him to moderate his hunting, to eat and drink less, to give up late nights, and to be less extravagant in his dress.
He fought at the Battle of Barnet on 14 April 1471, and was with his elder brother, John de Vere, 13th Earl of Oxford, when he seized St. Michael's Mount in Cornwall on 30 September 1473.
[8] When John de Vere was only twelve years of age, the 13th Earl had married his nephew and heir presumptive to Anne Howard, a daughter of Thomas Howard, 2nd Duke of Norfolk, by his second wife, Agnes Tilney, a marriage which served the purpose of uniting the families of the two greatest magnates in East Anglia.
In 1523, when he was twenty-four years of age, the King commanded him, through Cardinal Wolsey, to discharge his household and live with his father-in-law, the Duke of Norfolk, and demean himself lovingly towards his wife.
On 11 August 1526, she wrote to Wolsey alleging that the 15th Earl, Sir John Raynsford and their men had on two occasions broken into the park at Lavenham and killed more than one hundred deer.
The Dowager Countess was back in possession during the years 1530–34, when she sent several letters to Thomas Cromwell from Castle Camps, in one of which she complained of a certain Alexander Irlam, parson of Belchamp Otten, "who in my lord my husband's time convented with other to have poisoned me".
[17] The Earl's widow survived him for many years, dying before 22 February 1558/59, when she was buried in the Howard chapel in the Church of St Mary-at-Lambeth.