Early Years
Maximilian Rudolph Schele De Vere was born on November 1, 1820, probably in Växjö, Sweden. He may have been the son of Johanna Wilhelmina Eggers von Scheele and Christian Benjamin von Scheele, an officer in the Swedish army whose family was from Pomerania, a Prussian province on the Baltic Sea. According to the
Handbuch des Preussischen Adels (1893), his baptismal name was Rudolf Ludolf Friedrich Karl Maximilian von Scheele. He spent part of his childhood in Silesia, a Prussian province that later became part of Poland, where he learned the Slavic language. He studied at the University of Bonn and at the University of Berlin, from which he received a doctorate in 1841. The University of Greifswald granted him a Doctor of Civil and Canon Law the following year.