When did the Speed of Light become a Law?

To give you an idea of what this category is about, I’ll toss a simple one out at ya… The Universe is supposedly about 15 billion years old. "In the beginning…", so says the modern science to which I subscribe, there was the Big Bang. Within milliseconds, matter was spewing forth to expand the boundaries of what we now call the Universe. Now here are some questions:

1. The universe didn’t "exist" yet until this event. There were no fundamental forces of nature until after this event. So what determined the speed of the matter that was accellerating away from the original singularity?
2. Did the universe simultaneusly determine some arbitrary limit at the same moment that it was being created? If it wasn’t arbitrary, where did this "c" value come from?
3. We now find the background radiation of the universe to be a cold but fairly stable constant. At some point in the past it was undoubted hotter, but to us, now, it’s a constant. Was there also a time when the speed of light was variable until it just settled down – maybe when the universe had time to catch its breath and start thinking about some fundamental laws to follow? :s
4. If the speed of light was a variable, doesn’t that change our notion about how old the universe is?  I’ll follow-up on this in another post.