Warwick the Kingmaker (4 page)

Richard’s maternal grandmother Eleanor Holland hailed from a family as noble, royal, and much better endowed than his own. Her grandmother, the Fair Maid of Kent, grand-daughter of Edward I, had married the Black Prince and her father was therefore stepbrother of Richard II, who had briefly made dukes of both his half-brothers. Eleanor’s own brothers both died prematurely without legitimate offspring, but three of her sisters married the dukes of York and Clarence, the Earl of Somerset, and the Earl of Westmorland’s eldest son John Neville. The Holland connection also brought Earl Thomas and hence Richard an extensive kindred among the highest nobility.

Eleanor also brought Earl Thomas a fifth share of the Holland inheritance; other portions later accrued to Alice on the deaths of Holland dowagers and a childless aunt. Together her quarter share of the Holland inheritance was worth more than what remained of Thomas’s own patrimony.5 But Eleanor bore Earl Thomas no son to continue the Montagu line, only two daughters: Joanna, who died young, and Alice, who was married to Sir Richard Neville before 12 February 1421, when the bridegroom carved before Queen Katherine of France at her coronation and the bride was also in attendance.6 Following Eleanor’s death, Earl Thomas remarried at once to the widowed heiress Alice Chaucer, grand-daughter of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer, with a view to producing a son to continue the Montagu line and, inevitably, to cut his daughter and new son-in-law out of the Montagu inheritance. This match was barren. Had Earl Thomas survived Orleans and borne a son, the careers of both Richard Nevilles would have been very different. When Earl Thomas died, Alice and Richard succeeded at once to the Holland lands of his first wife and to those lands he had held in fee simple and in tail general. After the death of Thomas’s elderly uncle Sir Richard Montagu in 1429, Richard and Alice were recognized by Henry VI’s minority council as earl and countess of Salisbury: a decision perhaps influenced by Neville’s royal lineage and confirmed by Henry VI in 1443. Finally and with doubtful legality, in 1461, Alice secured all Thomas’s tail male lands too. Only very much later, in 1475, long after the deaths of the earl and countess of Salisbury and even of Richard too, did Alice Chaucer’s West Country jointure finally return to the main line. In 1429 she had settled for complete manors and a pension in lieu of her legal entitlement to scattered thirds of everything. On 10 December 1436 Salisbury also agreed with her new husband to share the proceeds and costs of any of Earl Thomas’s property recovered in France. This husband was William de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk and steward of the royal household, later to be Duke of Suffolk and Henry VI’s most trusted councillor, a kinsman with whom Salisbury was to have future dealings. Mediation was provided by Henry Cardinal Beaufort, kinsman of both parties.7

Sir Richard Neville – or
Salisbury
as we shall henceforth call him – was himself of royal and noble (if somewhat more ambiguous) ancestry. The Nevilles were already significant northern barons in the twelfth century and their fifteenth-century members justifiably believed themselves on the strength of their (largely fictional) family genealogies to have originated with the Norman Conquest. Geoffrey, the earliest Neville, was supposedly William I’s admiral; Ribald, first Lord of Middleham (Yorks.), was bastard brother of Alan the Red of Brittany, the Conqueror’s Earl of Richmond; and Ansketill de Bulmer was first lord of Sheriff Hutton (Yorks.). The Nevilles, however, were not content merely to be associated with the victorious invaders, but claimed descent also from the vanquished Anglo-Saxons. A fourth line was derived from Ughtred son of Earl Waltheof and in some rolls was extended back to King Ethelred II the Unready. These four lines intermarried into one by 1320 that derived from Ughtred, but which adopted the Neville surname. Their four castles of Raby, Brancepeth (Dur.), Sheriff Hutton and Middleham (Yorks.) were first united in the hands of Ralph Lord Neville of Raby (d. 1367). The barons Neville of Raby were wealthier than many an earl and were well able to support the earldom of Westmorland created for Salisbury’s father in 1397.

The Nevilles were distinguished by much more than the length of their pedigree. Successive heirs married well: when not to heiresses, to other notable northern families. There had been two Percy matches before Salisbury’s sister Eleanor married the second Earl of Northumberland. Moreover the Nevilles were a prolific breed who produced half a dozen younger sons and daughters with each generation. They spawned several cadet branches and a whole series of successful churchmen. There was supposedly a Thomas, archdeacon of Durham, before Alexander (d. 1388) Archbishop of York, whose brother was elected, but never consecrated, as Bishop of Ely. Robert (d. 1457) was to be bishop of Durham and George (d. 1476) was another archbishop. As befitted such a great house, the Nevilles patronized the church, founding the Premonstratensian house at Swaynby (later Coverham Abbey), the Franciscan friary of Richmond, a hospital at Welle, chantries at Sheriff Hutton and Durham Cathedral, and presumably the many other churches in which their arms of
gules
a saltire argent
were reportedly displayed. The saltire (St Andrew’s cross) appears prominently on the tomb in Durham cathedral of John Lord Neville (d. 1388), the donor of the Neville screen there. Probably they also shared in the distinctive enthusiasms of the late medieval archdiocese, patronizing hermits like their FitzHugh and Scrope neighbours did. Two of Earl Ralph’s daughters were to join that most enclosed order of nuns, the minoresses. In 1442 Pope Eugenius IV agreed to exempt from residence any of the eight chaplains serving in Salisbury’s household chapel holding cures of souls.8

The Nevilles were major players in the Scottish wars, in which Robert ‘Peacock of the North’ was killed and his brother Ralph (d. 1367) was captured, which Ralph shared in the victory at Neville’s Cross in 1346 when King David Bruce was captured. The next Baron Neville, John (d. 1388), moved beyond his purely northern context. This ‘magnanimous knight and famous baron’ was a knight of the Garter, who distinguished himself in France and was lieutenant of Gascony. It was his son Ralph (d. 1425), that ‘illustrious and most famous of princes’, who was created Earl of Westmorland in 1397 and who was briefly earl marshal. The attendance of attorneys of Westmorland and his cousin Northumberland are registered at Yorkshire parliamentary elections. It is this Ralph who is the culmination – the hero – of the Neville genealogies. Yet although Ralph had a national profile, it is clear that he also saw himself and his family in their local context and in terms of local traditions. He sought to advance himself locally, founding a college at Staindrop near Raby in County Durham, and marrying his offspring into such baronial houses as the Mauleys, Lumleys and Dacres. The senior Neville line, represented by Ralph’s eldest son John, who predeceased him, and the latter’s son Ralph second Earl of Westmorland (d. 1484), remained of regional rather than national importance.

In this context Salisbury was very much a younger son: one of at least twenty-one children of Ralph. There were also two elder half-sisters from his mother’s first marriage. The excellent marriages that they all made, the most remarkable sequence of the fifteenth century, are celebrated in the
Neville Book of Hours
, which shows the earl, countess and their children all kneeling in prayer and identifiable by Robert’s mitre and their coats of arms. No distinction is made in the
Book
between the issue of Westmorland’s first and second consorts. Yet a distinction needs to be made, for it was the earl’s second family – his offspring by Joan Beaufort – who married best and who constituted Richard’s closest relations. In this case the step really mattered.

Amongst Ralph’s second brood, Salisbury was the most senior. He and his siblings of the whole blood were to have a very different, indeed national, des-tiny. Not only were they more numerous – thirteen at the last count! – but they married into the noblest houses in England. Thus Katherine married a Duke of Norfolk, Anne a Duke of Buckingham, Eleanor in turn to Lord Despenser and the Earl of Northumberland, and the youngest, Cecily, to Richard Duke of York. Salisbury, as we have seen, married Alice Montagu and his brothers William, Thomas, George and Edward wed the Fauconberg, St Maur, Beauchamp of Bergavenny, and Beauchamp/Lisle heiresses. Moreover Ralph secured the modest Latimer barony for George and a sixth son Robert rose to become bishop of Salisbury and then, in 1437, bishop of Durham. Only Thomas St Maur died prematurely. During the 1450s, five brothers – Salisbury, Fauconberg, Latimer, Bergavenny and Durham – sat in the house of Lords in company with four brothers-in-law. Similarly Salisbury and Fauconberg, both distinguished soldiers, met with their brothers-in-law the Dukes of York and Buckingham and the Earl of Northumberland at chapters of the most noble order of the Garter.

This remarkable transformation resulted partly from Ralph’s good service to the house of Lancaster, but mostly from his match with Joan Beaufort, one of the four legitimated bastards of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster (d. 1399), son of Edward III, by his mistress and eventual third wife Katherine Swinford. Westmorland and his brother-in-law John Beaufort were both made earls in 1397, when Richard II was promoting other members of the royal family and created six royal dukes, the duketti. After King Richard’s deposition and death the Countess Joan was half-sister of King Henry IV, aunt of Henry V, and great-aunt of Henry VI. Letters patent of Henry IV describe the Earl Ralph as ‘the king’s brother’.9 The deluxe royal genealogies mass-produced in London in the 1430s and 1440s treat the offspring of Ralph and Joan, especially Salisbury and Bishop Robert, as members of the royal house; another such roll, dating from 1455–6, included young Richard, his brothers and sisters.10 The fifteenth century was a time, as treason and sumptuary laws make clear, when royalty was rising in status and in privilege. Such royal connections, which were not shared by the senior Neville line, more than counteracted any inferiority arising from the fact that the junior house of Neville was a cadet line. Both Salisbury and his son Warwick displayed on their seals the arms of Neville with a label, signifying cadetship, throughout their lives. Salisbury, his brothers and sons prided themselves on their birth and certainly did not regard themselves as parvenus. The Countess Joan’s three Beaufort brothers rose to be earl of Somerset, duke of Exeter, and cardinal-bishop of Winchester respectively. Later Beaufort dukes of Somerset and Lady Margaret Beaufort were cousins. Royal and Beaufort kinship was to be of great practical value to Salisbury and Warwick and in particular assisted them at court and in council in their various inheritance disputes.

Ralph reinforced these links, as his family genealogy makes plain, by quashing the Percy uprisings against Henry IV in 1403 and 1405. He thus earned his place in the king’s ‘most secret counsel’.11 He was rewarded with the title of earl marshal, the honour of Richmond for life, the lordship of Penrith (Cumb.) in tail, gifts of forfeited estates, the grant of valuable wardships on favourable terms, and a host of other favours. He was committed inextricably to the Lancastrian king. It was logical for successive Lancastrian kings to entrust him with the wardship and marriage of the heirs of such former traitors as the earls of Norfolk, Cambridge and Gloucester, thus ensuring that the youngsters grew up into loyal members of the royal house. It was equally logical for the heirs of such other erstwhile traitors who wanted to rehabilitate themselves politically to marry Ralph’s daughters and thus into the royal family. Ralph not only helped his new son-in-law Northumberland to recover his family inheritance in 1416; he surrendered those forfeited lands in Cumbria that had been granted to himself, and acted as his feoffee (trustee). Similarly he surrendered the title of earl marshal to John Mowbray when he married his daughter Katherine. It was because Ralph and Joan were brokers of royal favour that they were able to match their offspring so successfully. Salisbury and Richard continued Ralph’s matrimonial strategy on behalf of their own children with very similar success.

Salisbury, as we have seen, had married well and secured Alice Montagu’s earldom and estates. Additionally Ralph had seen in him, rather than his eldest son by his first marriage, his natural successor as the great northern magnate and guardian of the northern borders. Salisbury also saw himself primarily as a northern rather than a West Country magnate. Some royal grants made specifically to Earl Ralph and his second countess and the heirs of both their bodies were to devolve on Salisbury, who was also associated with his father as warden of the West March in his last years. More important yet were those Neville possessions that Ralph transferred to the children of his second marriage from the senior line with the consent, strangely, of his eldest son John.

It was John’s son Ralph, second Earl of Westmorland (d. 1484), who took less kindly to this resettlement. He and his family were alienated from the Salisbury line. They disliked the occupation of much of their inheritance by the Countess Joan even in her own lifetime, objected forcibly in the 1430s, and after her death in 1440 sought to right their wrongs by violent means. Always, however, they were at a disadvantage, both because Salisbury had better connections with the court as royal kinsman and councillor and because he offered much better service both in the borders and in France, where Westmorland never went. The reality of their loss had eventually to be recognized and a compromise was reached in 1443 that left Salisbury in possession of almost everything. Undoubtedly latent ill-feeling persisted – the senior and junior Nevilles were to fight on opposite sides in 1461 – perhaps until 1478, when the Westmorland line was recognized as residual heir to the former Neville lands should the junior line expire.12 This dispute was not, however, everything and did not shape all relations between the two lines on every topic. Westmorland and Salisbury co-operated peaceably enough when sharing out instalments of the Holland inheritance in 1434 and 1442. When resettling two properties in 1449, Salisbury and his whole brothers included a contingent remainder to their half-brother Ralph Neville of Ousley. Sir Thomas Neville of Raby supported the junior line in the Percy–Neville feud in 1453–4, when the royal council feared that Westmorland himself might help the Neville side. It was this Thomas, not Salisbury’s son, who was Bishop Robert’s justice of assize in 1448.13