In the first few years of his life, Nicholas de Vere was raised in the Hertfordshire countryside. At the age of seven, Nicholas’ family moved to the remote outskirts of the Kentish village of Kemsing, and then later to isolated rural settings in Devon and Sussex. Nicholas’ father and mother had contempt for human beings and human society.
Thus, they sought to protect Nicholas from their mediocrity and banality in the sanctuary of the country. Nicholas’ father was a skilled backwoodsman and during these formative years Nicholas was instilled with country knowledge, as well as a deep respect for the natural world and its delicate balances. As he was growing up, Nicholas’ father taught him of the family’s royal Scottish origins and of its involvement with royal witchcraft within the dragon tradition, which had been passed down to Nicholas’ father by his own parents. Nicholas’ father was gifted with the “king’s touch.” His paternal grandmother – a Scottish Gael – was a skilled seer, and his maternal grandmother had spent years as a student of mediumship.
Both of Nicholas’ parents were deeply committed to his broader education, and fostered in him at an early age a love of Homer, the Sagas, classical history and mythology. Nicholas’ father was an ardent admirer of the work of Omar Khayyam. Consequently Nicholas grew and developed in isolation, detached from the vacuity of human culture, enveloped in a world of intellectualism, magic, mysticism and imagination. Nicholas was raised by his father to honor the female highly and, as a result of his father’s teaching, he discovered that the greatest spiritual expression of human relationship is seraphic in nature: the union of the divinity within the male and female. At the age of twelve, Nicholas was magically dedicated to the dragon tradition formally, and at the age of thirteen he first enacted the rite known as “Starfire.” Following this period his mother obtained for him works by Aleister Crowley, and he studied the principals of the Black Arts in earnest, gaining a considerable degree of competence in ritual magic. At the age of fifteen Nicholas underwent the ancient rite of kingship, which, in accordance with archaic Gaelic tradition, bestows the mantle of sovereignty arising from the very Earth itself. By the 1980’s, Nicholas had become intimately conversant with a broad spectrum of magical traditions, and political perspectives. During this period he met and rejected numerous proponents of the Wiccan and New age Movements, considering them to be uninformed, self-deluding and magically incompetent. On Midsummer’s night, 1985 Nicholas’ skill in and knowledge of magic was acknowledged. His family’s hereditary involvement in royal witchcraft and the Dragon tradition was recognized by the Black Country Covenant of the Baphometic Order of the Cubic Stone. He was bestowed with the highest accolade of the covenant: that of Magister Templi. The Order traced its origins back to the Knights Templars and Nicholas was able to use his investiture as an invocational key in the pursuit of deeper, unwritten knowledge. In 1991 Nicholas was invested as a gartered and anointed knight of the Plantagenet Clan Donnachaid by Lord Lir of Orkney, the head of a cousin branch of the House of Vere. During the 1990’s, Nicholas developed a series of associations with university lecturers and post-graduate scholars.
Following the academic exchanges which ensued, Nicholas was encouraged by them to construct the basis for what is now known as The Dragon Legacy. This was further influenced significantly by his experience of seraphism and hierogamy during this period, and by years of commitment to the elven, Dragon tradition – a tradition within which he is recognized as a royal Dragon prince by the House of Vere, and is acknowledged as such by the British Government. Today, Nicholas de Vere is the sovereign of the Dragon Court of the Royal House of Vere. As a proponent and scholar of magic he is unrivalled. He is the original magical prince; the rightful king of witches by familial inheritance whose ancient, royal elven blood lineage is unquestionable. Currently Nicholas lives reclusively as a bachelor in a quiet village in the English countryside, and aside from his magical pursuits, he has a broad range of secular interests including an eclectic taste in music. He is a renaissance man, a polymath. Nicholas is deeply concerned about environmental issues and animal welfare, concerns shared by his immediate family and by the House of Vere in general, whose number include skilled and experienced ecologists. Nicholas has contempt for the blind pursuit of money and power, and values above all things simplicity and transcendence, which he believes are key to the continued existence of life on Earth in the future. Books published by The Book Tree: The Dragon Legacy: The Secret History of an Ancient Bloodline, Introduction by Tracy Twyman. The Dragon Cede: The Holy Grail Descent of the House of Vere, with Michael Hunter.
