Warwick the Kingmaker (3 page)

An absence of rest can be translated into unruliness and disorder. So thought Thomas Habington, who saw Warwick’s ‘mighty spirite...consumed in his own fire’.19 ‘Nothing more glorious could be said of a private man’, observed Rapin de Thoyras in 1732, ‘if true glory consists in excess of power’.20 The values that Warwick stood for became antique and out of date: pride of lineage was trans-muted into haughty arrogance, liberality into extravagance, and his exceptional ruthlessness was ruthlessly exposed. His generalship, his abilities and his character were considered more critically. Historians more overtly biased towards kings and towards progress took no pride in those who opposed such desirable ends. The Scot David Hume categorized Warwick into ‘the greatest, as well as the last, of those mighty barons who formerly overawed the crown, and rendered the people incapable of any regular system of civil government’.21 For Sharon Turner in 1823, he was a poor general, irascible and splenetic, ambitious and rest-less, ‘too powerful to be a peaceful subject to any sovereign, yet compelled always to remain one’ and hence better off dead.22 Lord Lytton’s three-volume novel
The Last of the Barons
presented Warwick as the end of his type, ‘the old Norman chivalry’,23 at which the new critical and scientific historians rejoiced. ‘He comes hardly within the ken of constitutional history’, Stubbs opined.24 ‘He was the last great feudal nobleman who ever made himself dangerous to the reigning king’, denounced Gairdner. ‘His policy throughout seems to have been selfish and treacherous and his removal was an unquestionable blessing to his country.’25

Most of Gairdner’s twentieth-century successors have followed his lead. Integrating the hostile testimony of Yorkist and Burgundian propaganda and Milanese despatches into balanced assessments has inevitably diluted and detracted from the English eulogies. Warwick became a diplomat subservient and inferior to Kendall’s real hero, the French King Louis XI.26 Thanks to K. B. McFarlane, modern historians are more sympathetic to English magnates and have rediscovered the material bases of aristocratic power that earlier generations of historians took for granted. Rediscovering the ambience and values is more difficult. Modern researchers cannot be content with the mere assertion that Warwick had good qualities and was popular as their predecessors had been, but the sources are lacking to reconstitute these qualities. A full biography is impossible. A fuller one is my attainable end.

This book avoids judging Warwick’s whole career by the
bouleversement
of his last years. It tries to identify the influences that formed him, his actions, and motives at each stage of his career. For any biographer, still more one of a man who died 500 years ago, this is a challenging task. We lack almost all the materials of a modern life and most of those desired by medievalists. Warwick must always be seen through the eyes of others, always partisan, often mistaken or misled by his own propaganda, or deduced from actions capable of more than one interpretation. Though much seems clear enough, his total character is beyond recall.

Though still only forty-two when he died, Warwick is a big subject for a biographer. He was the greatest nobleman of his age, the heir to four great families, their estates, connections and traditions. He was the wealthiest and the most wide-ranging in interests. Bursting full-grown and unexpectedly on to the national scene in 1449, he constantly added geographical interests, new activities, and responsibilities to his portfolio. He ceded none to others. His relentless attention to business demanded an extraordinary energy that we can only marvel at. His ceaseless journeys took place over unmade-up roads, on horseback and sailing ships, and in English weather conditions. He was apparently never ill and never flagged. He is the model rather of the medieval nobility of service and of the all-encompassing chief minister of the future. Pragmatism and ruthlessness went hand in hand with honour. He was a daring subaltern, the boldest and most brilliant of strategists, a consummate logistician, and a pioneer in the tactical use of seapower, combined operations, and field artillery; flawed solely (but fatally) as a battlefield tactician. There was nothing Warwick would not attempt and no obstacle that he would not overcome. He was indomitable, never surrendered, and never failed to recover until the very end. For twenty years he shaped events, his own career, and indeed history itself. An underlying strength of will and determination and an intolerance of opposition and viciousness towards opponents needs to be set against the charm that cajoled, persuaded and won over men of whatever standing. It was this indefinable popularity that made him so much more than the greatest of subjects.

NOTES

1. W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman,
1066 and All That
(1930), 47–8.

2. Kendall,
Warwick
, 7.

3. W. Shakespeare,
Henry VI Part II
, Act I sc. i;
Part III
, I.i, II.iii, III.vi.

4.
Vale’s Bk.
49.

5. Kendall,
Warwick
, 8.

6. L. Visser-Fuchs, ‘Edward IV’s
Memoir on Paper
to Charles, Duke of Burgundy: The so-called “Short Version of the
Arrivall
” ’,
NMS
xxxvi (1992), 170; see also A. Gransden,
Historical Writing in England c.1307 to the Early Sixteenth Century
(1982), 485–7.

7.
Rous Roll
, nos 56, 57.

8.
The Mirror for Magistrates
, ed. L. B. Campbell (1938), 208, 211.

9. ‘The Chronicle of the Rebellion in Lincolnshire’, ed. J. G. Nichols (Camden Misc. i, 1847);
Historie of The Arrivall of Edward IV
, ed. J. Bruce (Camden Soc. i, 1838).

10.
John Major’s History of Greater Britain
(Scottish Hist. Soc., 1892), 390–1; J. Major,
Historia Maioris Britanniae
(Lodoco Badia, 1521), f. cxlv.

11. S. Daniel,
The Ciuill Wares betweene ye howses of Lancaster and York
(1609), 146; D. Hume,
History of England
(8 vols, Oxford, 1826), iii. 160.

12. E.g. F. Biondi,
A History of the Ciuill Warres of England
(1641), esp. 39; W. Dugdale,
Baronage of England
(2 vols, 1675), i. 304; P. Rapin de Thoyras,
History of England
, ed. N. Tindall (2nd edn, 1732), i. 579; Bodl. MS Wood F24, p. 7.

13. BL Add. MS 34352, p. 8 [Gainford’s
Life
].

14. T. Carte,
General History of England
(1750), ii. 741.

15.
Testamenta Eboracensia
, ed. J. Raine (Surtees Soc. xxx, 1834), ii. 242n; Dugdale,
Baronage
, i. 305; Rapin,
History
, i. 579; Bodl. MS Wood F12, f. 136; Campbell,
Mirror
, 209.

16. Daniel,
Ciuill Warres
, 185.

17.
Hall’s Chronicle
, ed. H. Ellis (1809), 232, derived from P. Vergil,
Historia Angliae
1555
(1972 edn), 503;
Three Books of Polydore Vergil’s English History
, ed. H. Ellis (Camden Soc. xxix, 1844), 95.

18.
Mirror
, 211.

19. T. Habington,
A Survey of Worcestershire
, ed. J. Amphlett (2 vols, Worcs. Hist. Soc. i, ii, 1895–9), ii. 111; see also his son William’s
Historie of Edward the Fovrth King of
England
(1640), esp. 85.

20. Rapin,
History
, i. 613.

21. Hume,
History
, iii. 160–1.

22. S. Turner,
History of England during the Middle Ages
(1823), iii. 290, 337.

23. E. G. E. L. Bulwer-Lytton,
The Last of the Barons
(3 vols, London, 1843), esp. i. 8.

24. W. Stubbs,
Constitutional History of England in the Middle Ages
(3 vols, Oxford, 1878), iii. 212.

25. J. Gairdner,
The Houses of Lancaster and York
(1874), 186.

26. Kendall,
Warwick
;
Louis XI
(1971).

2.1: PEDIGREE AND PATRIMONY

Richard Neville, the future Warwick the Kingmaker, was born on St Cecilia’s day (Monday, 22 November) 1428.1 At birth he had nothing whatsoever to do with Warwick. That connection came later with his marriage. Until he became Warwick he will be referred to here as Richard, the baptismal name that he shares with his father. Richard was the eldest son and the third out of the eleven children of Sir Richard Neville and his wife Alice Montagu, who were to be recognized as Earl and Countess of Salisbury in Alice’s right on 7 May 1429.2 From the moment of his birth there was mapped out for him a political and military career as the head of one of the dozen leading English families. Yet only half a dozen facts are recorded about the first twenty years of his life. Very little, in particular, can be known about the upbringing that prepared him for his remarkable career, though we may presume it followed the conventional course sketched out for others of his class. Much more is known about the influences around him that constrained and shaped his subsequent career. It is with these, therefore, that we must commence.

Richard’s mother was the only surviving daughter of Thomas Montagu, Earl of Salisbury, by his first wife Eleanor, one of the six sisters and ultimately four heiresses of Edmund (d. 1408), the last Holland Earl of Kent. From the thirteenth century the Montagus had been outstanding servants of the crown. Several had been stewards of the royal household. William, first Earl of Salisbury (d. 1344), had helped Edward III to overthrow Isabella and Mortimer and had been rewarded with the Isle of Man, subsequently alienated, the castle, honour, borough and hundred of Christchurch Twynham, and other lands in Hampshire, Wiltshire, Somerset and Dorset. John (d. 1400), the poet and third earl, had committed himself to Richard II even beyond his deposition and died a traitor to Henry IV in consequence. His forfeiture for treason was reversed in favour of his son, but the actual sentence of condemnation was revoked by parliament only in 1461 at Richard’s request. Several Montagus were soldiers of renown and knights of the Garter. Thomas himself was a distinguished general, the best of the English commanders in France after Henry V’s death, and his death in 1428 was a grievous blow to the English. The Montagus had been earls for almost a century, barons somewhat longer, and had built up a proud tradition of royal service.

The Montagu lineage is celebrated in the Salisbury Rolls of Arms, which consist of a succession of pairs of stylized portraits of husbands and wives. Two versions now survive: the earlier tentatively dated to 1463 and attributed to Richard and a second one more definitely commissioned for his son-in-law King Richard III.3 Although late, each records traditions apparently preserved and elaborated by Richard and his parents and apparently transmitted to them by earlier rolls that have been lost. They reveal how the Montagu and Neville earls perceived themselves: their self-image, which Richard shared and promulgated.

Clues to what these earlier versions comprised can be detected in those that survive. Both surviving rolls are preoccupied with the family’s royal descent and noble in-laws. Though the Montagus were not themselves royal nor even descended from earlier earls of Salisbury, both rolls include William Longespée, Earl of Salisbury, bastard son of Henry II; interestingly the arms of Longespée were included by the Kingmaker on his seal. Unlike other earlier earls, also unrelated to the Montagus and hence omitted, William was royal. Instead of tracing the Montagus to their origins, the rolls start only with Simon Montagu, heir to Affrica Lady of the Isle of Man. They highlight the first earl’s foundation of the Augustinian priory of Holy Trinity Bisham (Berks.), the spiritual home of the family, where subsequent Montagus and Nevilles – including Richard – were buried. There is an illumination of the priory church. The Montagu line proceeds side by side with that of the Monthermers whose first ancestor, Ralph Earl of Gloucester (d. 1325) and his wife Joan of Acre (d. 1307), daughter of King Edward I and Queen Eleanor of Castile, feature on the roll. The union of the two lines in 1340 on the wedding of John Montagu, father of the third Earl, to Margaret Monthermer, which brought royal blood to their descendants, could have prompted the preparation of a first roll; particularly as the second Earl subsequently alienated the Isle of Man. In the next generation Earl John was to marry the widowed Maud Franceys, daughter of a London alderman: a plebeian marriage that has been made much of by modern historians. This connection is acknowledged but not stressed in later rolls.

A second updated version of the roll may have been prepared by Earl Thomas about 1420. The earliest surviving version records his first wife Eleanor, not the second married by 2 November 1424, and it includes the marriage contracted by 1421 of his daughter Alice to [Richard Neville] ‘son of the Earl of Westmorland’, who died in 1425, but none of their offspring. Strangely it ignored the royal descent both of the Countess Eleanor from Edward I and of the Nevilles from Edward III. Much is made of kin relevant in the 1420s, notably Earl Thomas’s siblings Margaret Lady Ferrers of Chartley, Elizabeth Lady Willoughby, and the much married Anne, eventually Duchess of Exeter. Earl Thomas’s kin were also those of his daughter, his son-in-law Richard Neville Earl of Salisbury, and their son, Richard. Salisbury had dealings with Maud Franceys’s elder son Sir Alan Buxhull, who served under him in France in 1436, acquired land from Buxhull’s son Thomas, and was guardian of Maud’s Hankford grand-daughters in 1431.4 Some collateral lines, such as the Willoughbys, were updated for the 1463 version. If he had no other kin but the Montagus, therefore, Richard inherited a lineage and pride of lineage that was long-standing, noble, and royal, and kinship with many of the leading English families.