Warwick the Kingmaker (45 page)

169. C. A. J. Armstrong, ‘The Inauguration Ceremonies of the Yorkist Kings and their Title to the Throne’,
England, France and Burgundy in the Fifteenth Century
(1983), 73ff.

170. Scofield, i. 156.

171.
CSPM
i. 69.

172. J. R. Lander,
Crown and Nobility 1450–1509
(1976), 104.

173. Barron, ‘London and Crown’, 104.

174. Scofield,
Edward IV
, i. 157–62; Goodman,
Wars of the Roses
, 50.

175. Goodman,
Wars of the Roses
, 50.

176. J. du Clercq,
Mémoires de la règne de Philippe le Bon, Duc de Bourgogne
(Brussels, 1835–6), iii. 118. For what follows, see e.g. Liverpool City Art Gallery.

8.1 THE FIRST FAMILY

Apart from the brief period of York’s final protectorate, it had been Warwick who had directed the Yorkist regime from the battle of Northampton until King Edward’s accession. He had relied principally on his own kinsmen and retainers. This pattern continued for the next few years. Although often remote on the Scottish marches, Warwick was widely perceived as the dominant figure of the new regime, by foreigners, East Anglians, suitors and chroniclers alike. Perhaps mistakenly. His actions, utterances and opinions were rapidly reported at the French, Burgundian and even Milanese courts. His brother George, Bishop of Exeter, remained chancellor until 1467. His uncle William Lord Fauconberg, newly created Earl of Kent and lavishly endowed with West Country forfeitures, remained his nephew’s valued lieutenant in the North and at sea until his death in 1463 when Warwick’s third brother John, now lord Montagu, was allowed to take his place. Warwick’s erstwhile brother-in-law John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, was as welcome a recruit to the earl as he was to the king, who appointed him Lord Treasurer in 1461. Many Neville clients secured promotion in royal service. Thus Henry Sotehill and Thomas Colt, both in Warwick’s service since 1449 and still deputizing for him as chamberlain of the exchequer and chief steward of the North Parts, became royal councillor and king’s attorney respectively.1

The key post of king’s chamberlain, which controlled access to the king’s person, went to the new baron William Lord Hastings, whose family had served the house of York over three generations and who may have been a childhood friend of the king. Hastings was soon attached to the Nevilles by his marriage to Warwick’s widowed sister Katherine Bonville; the endowment he received for his barony was supplemented by other forfeitures specifically settled on them jointly that made him the principal magnate in Leicestershire; and the stewardships and constableship of Leicester and Castle Donington that passed to him were more probably surrendered willingly by Warwick than wrested from him. In 1468 Warwick was to appoint Hastings as his own steward in Leicestershire.2 Hastings was one of several royal servants who initially identified themselves with Warwick and the Nevilles, the dominant faction. Others were William Herbert, now Lord Herbert, and Walter Devereux, Lord Ferrers of Chartley, in Wales, both long-standing family retainers as well as retainers of the house of York. Another was Sir Walter Blount, whose elevation to the treasurership of England in 1464 and to the peerage as Lord Mountjoy was agreeable to the earl and perhaps even at his prompting; his replacement as treasurer in 1466 was reportedly to ‘the great secret displeasure of the earl of Warwick and the magnates of the realm’.3 There was no contradiction between service to the king and to the earl.

The pre-eminence of the Nevilles was reflected in their grants. Every Yorkist regime from 1454 had brought rewards to Salisbury and his sons. At first these continued, pending the inevitable review by a usurping king of the patronage of his unreconciled predecessor, and in the event almost all were retained. The king had to be asked, however, and henceforth it was to him that gratitude was due. Warwick remained captain of Calais, keeper of the seas, constable of Dover and warden of the Cinque Ports. He instantly became the king’s lieutenant in the North and admiral of England. On 5 May he secured royal confirmation of all offices and custodies that he had held jointly with his father or brothers, the offices for life and the custodies for twenty years.4 At that stage he is unlikely to have known what they all were except the most important: the great chamberlainship of England, the wardenship of the West March, the chief stewardships of the duchy of Lancaster North and South, other duchy offices, and the custody of Egremont were all comprehended in this grant. When Edward was at Middleham with Warwick and Chancellor Neville on 5–7 May 1461, he approved a shopping list of nine requests including some of those above, but adding the mastership of the royal mews that Salisbury had enjoyed, the custody of Lord Latimer and his lands, the keeping of the lordships of Goodrich and Urchenfield (Heref.) during the minority of the Earl of Shrewsbury, and the offices of steward, master forester, and parker of Feckenham (Warw.) that Duke Henry had possessed. A patent for his new foundation at St William’s College at York was added four days later.5 Perhaps Warwick was requesting at this stage not all that he wanted, but everything of which he was precisely informed. Perhaps also there were limits to what even he could have. Yet more grants followed as rewards for good service, persistence in researching what the king had to give, and frequent requests.

What these early patents demonstrate is the Nevilles’ determination – and Warwick’s in particular – to hang on to whatever they already possessed and to amplify it. Warwick abandoned or downgraded none of his interests, but sought to develop them all. Dover and the Cinque Ports were the logical extension and complement of Calais and the keepership of the seas; the Stafford marcher lordships were complementary and indeed interspersed with Glamorgan, Abergavenny and Elvell that he held in his wife’s right and Monmouth and the Three Castles of which he was steward; and in the North, where he was already warden of all marches and lieutenant, another shopping list filled the gaps in his range of duchy of Lancaster offices. That was in December 1461, when he was pardoned all offences including illegal entries to land, and licensed to enter the whole of his countess’s Despenser inheritance. On 5 April 1462 he re-indented for Calais, Hammes and Guines, for the West Marches, and for the keeping of the seas. On the 27th he secured his first batch of forfeited property. Much of this comprised Percy and Clifford holdings in Yorkshire and Cumberland that were obviously complementary to his own inheritance, but additionally he secured a further manor in Newport Pagnell (Bucks.), More End in Northamptonshire, and two properties in Warwickshire that rounded off his existing holdings.6 Even where he was relatively weak, in the East Midlands, he looked to strengthen himself, and he was prepared to act as good lord everywhere.

The value attached to Warwick’s good lordship emerges most obviously in his much more frequent (and ill-documented) activity as feoffee (trustee), recipient of chattels, executor and arbiter. Any continuing responsibilities as feoffee to Richard Duke of York, Sir Robert Danby, Sir Baldwin Mountford, Sir Henry Bedford, Master John Somerset and Thomas Ferrers endured after 1461, even after death, in certain cases for many years. He was acting additionally for Sibyl Rythe of Alton (Hants) and Brian Brouns of Holburne (Berks.) in 1461, for John Hancocks of Aston Cantelowe (Warw.) in 1465, for Alice Duchess of Suffolk and the Kentishman John Squery junior in 1466, apparently for Stephen Scrope in 1467, for Anna daughter of John Thorpe, and for John atte Wood, Sir Edward Grey of Groby, and Sir William Parre in 1468. Gifts of chattels, most probably a means of escaping liability for debt, were made to the earl by William Bereshyn in 1464, by Thomas Middleton of Middleham, Thomas Scarborough of Knaresborough (Yorks.), and William Groser of London and by the London broker John Bell in 1466, and by William Joce merchant of Bristol in 1467. He was supervisor of the wills of Anne Duchess of Exeter in 1458, John Duke of Norfolk in 1461 and (as my ‘magnificent and most powerful lord’) of Katherine, the widow of Roger Tempest, in 1468. Most probably it was as murderers of Richard Earl of Salisbury that Sir William Plumpton and Sir George Darell were each bound in £1,000 to Alice Countess of Salisbury to abide the award of her and her three sons on 31 May 1461. Warwick was arbiter in the bullion case of Giles Bruyce in 1468, in the Harrington inheritance dispute that same year, and for John Crosby alderman of London in 1471.7 The list is cursory and incomplete and could be much longer. Obviously he was not active in every case or, indeed, ever in the daily grind of administering trusts and executing wills. That was not why he was in demand. That he features so frequently, often for individuals with whom he had little prior contact from areas where he was not a major landholder and who merely wanted his name to deter rivals, is a further mark of his prestige. That was what was sought.

Such roles inevitably required more of his good lordship and drew him into disputes. Inevitably: that was why good lords were sought. It could have degenerated into the undiscriminating support of those with access to him, encouraging self-help, litigiousness, and the maintenance of dubious cases. In 1464 the earl and Lord Hastings accepted enfeoffment from Thomas Foljambe of Walton to protect his lands from Sir William Plumpton. About the same time Warwick was enfeoffed by Edmund Rous with the disputed manor of East Lexham. In or after 1467 the earl, his brother George, and Edward Gower sued in chancery against Thomas Belknap vintner of London as feoffees of Anna Thorpe. In 1465 he ordered Sir William Plumpton to leave Spencers Close in Knaresborough unmolested in the hands of Thomas Scarborough, whose feoffee he was, pending arbitration.8 When Roger Radcliff questioned John Felbridge’s title to certain land, he ‘laboured to me dayly by my lordes commandement off Warwick’, and the earl insisted on the inspection of Felbridge’s title by Chief Baron Illingworth and other of his council. This was a patron worth having! Radcliff defaulted, leaving Felbridge free to sell. Similarly Warwick was satisfied that property at Attlebridge had rightly descended to Roger Taverham clerk, who warned John Paston off, and the widowed Elizabeth Mountford hoped that reliable information on the validity of her title to East Lexham would cause Warwick to withdraw his backing as feoffee from her rival Edmund Rous. She expected Paston to intercede with Warwick, ‘the qwech is your good lord’. ‘I pray yow to gete me his good lordship,’ asked the troubled Thomas Denys, a veteran of the earl’s battles of Northampton and Wakefield, shortly before his murder. In the Pastons’ own Fastolf inheritance dispute it was recommended in May 1461 that the Pastons should persuade Warwick to ‘meve that the Kyng or hym-sylf or my lord Chawmbyrleyn [Hastings] or som othyr wytty men may take a rewle betwexe you and youre adversaryes’. It did not happen. In 1464 it was Warwick who was to persuade the king to grant a licence to found Caister College for the substantial inducement of £100. Again, nothing happened. Nor indeed was the row between Warwick and his brother George with the Duke of Norfolk in the king’s chamber more successful. George did not take up residence as he had threatened in Caister castle and Warwick did not challenge Norfolk on his own ground or resort to force.9

Indeed, he never seems to have done so. Few if any of these connections are adequately documented. Nevertheless Warwick’s notion of good lordship in his client’s just cause, it seems, was to pressurize and seek a solution compatible with the legal title, rather than to support the fraud and violence that he was prepared to use himself. Perhaps he had too many links with both sides, with the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, ever to commit himself wholeheartedly to the Pastons. East Anglia was far from the focus of his interests. It could be the complexity of the issues or the desire to offend neither his retainers Sir James Harrington and Sir John Huddleston nor his brother-in-law Lord Stanley that prevented him making an award on the wardships of Anne and Elizabeth Harrington. What matters is that no award was made.10 Similarly he is to be found supporting both Yorkist grantees and dispossessed Lancastrians. Such conduct makes his exercise of good lordship responsible and restrained. By imposing limitations on his own power and influence, it also rendered him less than overmighty.

Several individuals wanted him to exercise his influence with the king on their behalf; so did monasteries and corporations. Others wanted him to pass information to the king.11 Warwick had unfettered access and seems on occasions capable of persuading Edward against his own preferences. In 1465 Warwick in person presented several provisos of exemption to the act of resumption to the king in his chamber and secured his signature.12 In a handful of cases we know that he secured grants for others: for Geoffrey Walsh in 1461; and in 1463 for Sir Walter Scull, who was granted the next presentation to the deanery of Wallingford jointly with himself that resulted in Leysan Geoffery’s institution by 1469.13 Probably there were many others, for neither patents nor warrants at this time commonly record at whose instance they were granted, a commonplace practice 150 years earlier. Thus the grant of the forfeited manor of Loxton (Som.) to his councillor Edward Grey in 1461 and of twenty oaks from Kenilworth to Warwick herald in 1464 may have been his doing.14 Others came from him directly, such as deputyships of Lancaster and Calais offices, the posts of usher and clerk to the Warwick chamberlain of the exchequer, and duchy leases granted in his capacity as chief steward to Thomas Colt of the tolls of the bridge of Ware (Herts.) and to Sir James Harrington.15 As warden of the West March, keeper of the seas and captain of Calais he had much employment and profit to offer to soldiers, merchants and suppliers that the protections that he authorized allow us only to glimpse. Not demonstrably, but most probably, Warwick was the best avenue to royal favour and royal patronage in the early and mid-1460s. And not just royal favour: on 12 February 1462 he solicited Windsor college for appointment as steward of Richard Lovell, ‘a man right learned and of good fame reputation and hability’ just as he earlier petitioned Dame Elizabeth Woodhill’s hand in marriage for his protégé.16