Bernard Mordaunt Ward (20 January 1893 – 12 October 1945) was a British author and third-generation soldier most noted for his support of the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship and writing the first documentary biography of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. Biography He was born in Madras, India into a military family, the son of Bernard Rowland Ward (1863–1933) and Jeanie Duffield (d. 1925).<ref>Mosley, Charles, ed. [http://thepeerage.com/p8631.htm#i86309 Burke's Peerage and Baronetage, 106th edition, 2 volumes (Crans, Switzerland: Burke's Peerage (Genealogical Books) Ltd, 1999), vol. I, p. 180.] Accessed 18 November 2011.</ref> At age 18 he entered the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, as a cadet and in 1912 was commissioned as a 2nd lieutenant into the 1st King's Dragoon Guards. He was promoted to first lieutenant at the beginning of the First World War and attained the rank of captain a month before the war ended. He retired in 1927 as a member of the reserves, which he resigned in 1939 due to ill health. He was usually addressed as Captain B. M. Ward for the rest of his life. He never married and died 12 October 1945 at age 52. From 1900 Ward's father was an instructor at the Royal Military College, as well as a respected author on military engineering. He became interested in the Shakespeare authorship question and was the main organizer of the original Shakespeare Fellowship. He was a groupist, with Sir Francis Bacon as the chief editor and organizer, and published several articles and a book about the Shakespeare authorship question. Ward followed his father in his anti-Stratfordian interests, but favoured Oxford as the true author, influenced by J. Thomas Looney's "Shakespeare" Identified in Edward De Vere, the seventeenth earl of Oxford (1920). Ward also became chairman of the Abbotsholme Association, an organization to promote the Abbotsholme School, a private boarding and day school in Rocester, Staffordshire, and in 1934 he wrote a book about the founder, Dr Cecil Reddie, as a way to support him in a dispute over control of the school. Literary authorship theories In 1925 Ward argued that The Arte of English Poesie, usually attributed to George Puttenham, was authored by John Lumley, a noted collector of books and art, based on biographical details gleaned from the work. Ward was refuted "heartlessly" by Willcock and Walker in their 1936 critical edition. Ward published several articles in scholarly journals announcing his