Warwick the Kingmaker (29 page)

6.2 CAPTAIN OF CALAIS AND THE KEEPER OF THE SEAS

Warwick was valuable to Lord Protector York as a great magnate committed to his cause who brought with him substantial military resources, the resolution and daring to deploy them, and a capacity and willingness for administrative work both at the centre and in the localities that Norfolk, for example, lacked. An additional use was found for the earl during York’s Second Protectorate that launched his career in several different directions. After St Albans it was Warwick who succeeded Somerset as captain of Calais, which led in due course to his appointment as keeper of the seas (1457), to his involvement in continental diplomacy, and, in 1460, to his appointment as warden of the Cinque Ports. Military, naval, diplomatic and international dimensions were developed to his career that were denied, after 1453, to most of his noble contemporaries. Even within England, Warwick’s attention was increasingly focused on the South-East and south coast, far from the centres of his estates. In the short term he was at Calais for much of the time that the government was in Coventry and the Midlands; in the medium term his command of Calais and the navy were crucial in the crises of 1459–61; and, in the longer term, the national and international character of his career after 1461 was established.

Calais was the last remaining English possession in France. The Hundred Years War did not end in 1453 with the final loss of Gascony as the history books say. That was merely when the active campaigning stopped. It ended when the English accepted their expulsion as final, which lay far in the future, perhaps in the reign of Henry VIII. English monarchs continued to title themselves kings and queens of France for another 300 years. Nobody in Warwick’s lifetime undertook a thoroughgoing strategic review of the post-Hundred Years War situation. Neither side saw 1453 as the end. The French expected further counter-attacks and the English feared the besieging of Calais and even the invasion of England itself. As we have seen, Henry VI had neither the financial nor the military means to launch and sustain an assault on France; no English government after 1453 was capable of such an initiative. Yet his rival Charles VII was constantly advised that invasion was imminent and suspected collusion among his new subjects. When the Duke of Alençon was arrested in 1456 and tried for treason in 1458, it was on charges of inviting English intervention. Charles declined to join the Scots in a two-pronged attack on England in January 1457 because his enlarged dominions brought new responsibilities as well as new resources. He now had longer frontiers and coastlines to defend.46 By the time Warwick took up the captaincy neither monarch was going to take the offensive. Each was committed to a defensive strategy. Each would have welcomed a relaxation of tension, a reversion to peacetime establishments, and a reduction in military expenditure. Neither recognized this, however. Minor raids and clashes were interpreted as forerunners of full-scale conflict by councillors and servicemen on the spot, among them Warwick.47 One wonders how far this was deliberate – a means to maintain a high profile and to take priority in supply.

Calais had a symbolic importance quite out of proportion to its military value. It had been a national crisis calling for supreme efforts when it was threatened in 1436. Viewed dispassionately, Calais was a financial burden without compensations, but after the national humiliation of 1449–53, it could not be allowed to fall. Neither Somerset, nor York, nor indeed Warwick dared to lose it. Even in peacetime the Calais garrison was much larger than other English military establishments. It was maintained on a war footing throughout the 1450s and indeed enhanced with a ‘crew’ attendant on the captain about 1451 and a further 300 men when Warwick took office. The colony was a major item of public expenditure and its support was one of the most intractable problems for Henry VI’s embarrassed regime. It remained the principal military command of the English crown.

English Calais consisted of the port itself, about twenty miles of coast, and it extended six miles inland. Calais town had a population of about 5,000, most of whom were either members of the garrison, which fluctuated from about 800 to 1,000, or their dependants. Vestiges of the walls remain, but the castle has disappeared. To the east lay the low-lying districts of Oye and Mark, to the west the hillier county of Guines. None of the other settlements were more than villages. There were garrisons for Calais town and castle, for Rysbank tower, and for the castles of Hammes and Guines. The whole was an enclave within the dominions of the Duke of Burgundy. Border raiding was continuous. Apart from its role as a military outpost, Calais was commercially important as the staple-town of the merchants of the Staple, who had a monopoly of the export in English wool for the Flemish cloth industry. Although the wool trade was in decline, the staplers remained politically influential and still commanded formidable resources. They were committed to the continuance of English Calais and it was only by tapping their resources that its status could be maintained.48

Following the loss of Normandy, Somerset became captain of Calais, then York. Duke Richard however was never able to make his appointment effective and Somerset’s officers remained in command. Henry VI was chronically incapable of paying either the current wages or the outstanding arrears of the garrison, who understandably made satisfaction of their entitlements a condition for York’s admission. Following Warwick’s own appointment in 1455, there were lengthy negotiations to settle the financial issues between the government, the garrison and the staplers, for whom Calais was an essential commercial base and who alone had the interest and resources to provide the funds necessary for a settlement. The wages due were eventually computed at the enormous total of £65,444 16
s
. 9¾
d
. By agreement of February 1456 the whole sum was paid by the Staple, in cash or in wool, on the security of obligations already advanced and of the ‘Calais part’ of the customs; the garrison were pardoned their offences; and Warwick was at last admitted as captain. This was in July 1456: fifteen months after his original appointment and nearly a year since 4 August 1455, when he had indented for the office. He had already been granting licences to fishermen.49

It is no longer historically fashionable to regard the ‘struggle for Calais’ as a power-struggle between Lancaster and York; its importance in that context comes later. York regarded himself as a superior commander to Somerset and hence initially as the best person to occupy England’s premier fortress. By mid-1455 he was willing to surrender his pretensions. He had other offices and responsibilities, as protector and as lieutenant of Ireland, and was seriously embarrassed by debts accrued in France and Ireland and by the thousands of pounds of unrealizable tallies with which the crown had reimbursed him. Now he appreciated how much personal attention the captaincy demanded that a rev-olutionary leader like himself could not spare. York did not need another drain on his financial resources. Moreover a reward and a role was needed for Warwick commensurate with his services. Mere retention of the Warwick inheritance was to be taken for granted. The captaincy of Calais was Warwick’s share of the spoils of war.

We must presume that in 1455 Warwick wanted the captaincy. His acceptance of and presumably his request for the post implies existing military aspirations arising perhaps from a chivalric education and fed in his teens by military action on the northern borders and possibly even in France. When Cade’s Rebellion broke out, Warwick was allegedly bound for foreign service. Warlike inclinations and an appreciation of the political uses of military force are revealed by the formidable retinues that he deployed in 1450, 1452 and 1458, by his aggression in Glamorgan and the North in 1453, and by his decisive intervention at the first battle of St Albans. Most probably he saw the captaincy as a means to military action and distinction and to the profits of war. He is unlikely to have appreciated its essentially defensive role or the sheer commitment in time and money that it demanded.

Compared to his immediate predecessors, Warwick was lucky. He did not find a garrison that was actively mutinous and owed several years of arrears of pay. He did not come to the post heavily indebted and embittered by non-payment. In the absence of other evidence, he appears solvent, with at best short-term cash-flow difficulties that were easily dispelled by warrants to officers with cash in hand.50 His debts to the crown as lessee and custodian and the debts of the government to him as a royal councillor were scarcely significant. Almost uniquely in Henry VI’s regime Warwick received his first quarter’s pay of £1,742 2
s
. 4
d
. in advance and a further £788 13
s
. 4
d
. for the extra 300 men he was to take with him. So too with the garrison. Their arrears were cleared; their future pay was guaranteed by the staplers; and the latter were assured of repayment by strict appropriations of the customs. Perhaps Warwick, the garrison, and the staplers believed this. In practice, inevitably, the government failed to honour the agreement, first selling licences of exemption from the customs and then applying some of the revenues to the royal household. Out of the total wages of £13,550 a year, over £7,000 a year was unpaid by the treasurer of Calais in 1456–7 and 1457–8 and altogether £37,160 was due by 1461. The victualler also received insufficient for his needs.51 Yet this was not directly Warwick’s problem. It was not his job to pay the soldiers. With cash in hand, it took time for them to become mutinous and in the interim he found other sources of finance. Warwick’s piratical exploits may have been primarily a money-raising exercise.

The garrison was pardoned on 1 May 1456 and ‘soon afterwards [writes Harriss] the earl of Warwick, with his strengthened retinue, marched in to take command’.52 If so, he did not stay there long, for he was at the king’s great councils in July, the autumn, and probably the spring of 1457. It was Sir Robert Chamberlain whom the City sent with 500 men to safeguard Calais at its own expense in October 1456. Warwick was at Calais on 1 December 1456. His appointment of William Chamber rector of Olney as receiver-general of all his lands in England and Wales on 20 January 1457 anticipates a protracted stay in Calais.53 Probably it was not until May 1457, after John’s marriage, accompanied by ‘a fayr ffellaushipp’ that he, his countess and Fauconberg took up residence, which none of his immediate predecessors had done.54 Perhaps he was no longer comfortable in Warwick under the eyes of the court. Most probably he saw a potential in Calais that he wished to exploit. A siege of the town was considered imminent. ‘The Erle of Warwyk’, it was reported on 1 May 1457, ‘hath had the folk of Caunterbury and Sandwych before hym, and thanked hem of her gode hertes and vytaillyng of Calix and prayeth hem of contynuance.’55 It was like a royal audience and a royal commendation. Between midsummer 1457 and midsummer 1458 Warwick was at Calais for 267 days. In spite of the king’s great councils and his responsibilities as keeper of the seas, Warwick was absent with one knight and twelve mounted archers from his crew for only ninety-eight days.56

Most captains of Calais were great magnates and most regarded the office as a sinecure, to be performed
in absentia
. Warwick did not. He resided in person, at least initially, and he ran it as directly as possible, delegating some responsibility temporarily, but declining to appoint permanent lieutenants like those of Somerset’s whom he found. Several of these, such as Lords Rivers, Stourton and Welles, and the treasurer Sir Gervase Clifton, were closely committed to Somerset. Clifton was not immediately replaced. Sir Thomas Findern, lieutenant of Guines, and Sir John Marny, lieutenant of Hammes, were retained. Warwick himself kept Calais castle and Rysbank tower nominally under his own control.57 Although not formally appointed, his militarily distinguished uncle Fauconberg was effectively his deputy from at least May 1457; another valued adviser if not officeholder was the Gascon Gailliard Lord Duras. Warwick used York’s councillor Sir Edmund Mulsho as marshal until his death in 1458, when he borrowed Walter Blount of Elvaston (Derbys.) in his stead.58 Most of the next level of officials held patents from the king and remained, such as the victualler, gunners, bailiffs and beadles, master mason, plumber and carpenter. Little can be known of the rank and file of soldiery in the absence of muster rolls and only sparse protections. That a merchant of Southampton, inhabitants of Faversham and Little Wenham (Suff.), and a chandler of Coventry had safe conducts tells us very little.59 The government had assured the garrison that no dismissals were envisaged. Since Warwick was authorized to bring a further 20 mounted men-at-arms, 20 mounted archers, and 260 foot archers in addition to the crew already attendant on him,60 we may guess (but not demonstrate) that he selected them from those he knew and trusted. No wonder that Warwick could take significant numbers for use elsewhere without endangering the colony and that loyalty was felt towards him personally.

There was no siege of Calais in 1457, but considerable conflict in the county of Guines is recorded in the treasurer’s account. Expenditure increased from £263 to £600. Revenue fell sharply because no cranage or cambage could be collected from the vills of Merkyn, Froyton, Arderne and Bonynges because of war damage. Similarly Morlot de Renty on the Burgundian side disbursed compensation for a house destroyed by the daily English raids.61 Such conflict was endemic on all marches and did not result from Warwick’s arrival, although he was to take a more aggressive line that generated profit for the garrison, increased costs for the crown, and irritated Calais’s neighbour Burgundy, with whom England was supposedly at peace. Warwick was expected to prevent conflict and correct infractions of the truce. Resolution of grievances and the cessation of English raids were a high priority for Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, who supposed that the English were incited to raid his territories by France. There was a conference of the marches at Ardre in December 1456 to January 1457. Following Warwick’s arrival, Duke Philip corresponded several times with Warwick in January/February 1457; Warwick responded in February with a gift of an Irish pony to Philip’s heir Charles the Bold, Count of Charolais. In April Henry VI commissioned Warwick to settle disputes. Hence in July 1457 he met Burgundian representatives between Oye and Mark. They were Anthony, Grand Bastard of Burgundy, and John of Burgundy, Count of Estampes. Fearful of treachery from the French, Estampes declined to dismount, so formal overtures were conducted from the saddle, but the Grand Bastard joined Warwick in a splendid banquet. The detailed negotiations were conducted by subordinates. Although the earl laboured hard for peace, so Chastellain reports, the other English diplomats were uncompromising. They declined to remedy the wrongs the English had committed and demanded full compensation for their grievances. When the Burgundians referred back to Duke Philip at Hesdin, he decided that concessions must be made at the next conference at St Omer and Calais in October. The duke’s subjects were sacrificed to prevent any escalation of conflict with England.62 The resultant truce covered conditions on land, not at sea, where Warwick if anything encouraged piracy.