Warwick the Kingmaker (50 page)

Warwick issued a comprehensive set of ordinances for the colony on 26 July 1466. They promoted ‘the plaisir of god and oure seid sovereigne lord and for the assured governaunce & prosperite of the seid towne & marche in fourme folowyng’ with a view ‘to the sure gode & politique governaunce & defense of the towne’. Most of the nine clauses relate to crime, which covered sanctuarymen and treason, retaining and discipline. It is the fifth ordinance, which is particularly strongly expressed, that offers most insight perhaps into a frontier garrison town and also to Warwick’s own sentiments ‘Where it is to drede the most emynent peryll of the town’ and to the displeasure of God that ‘thabhominable and common adulteries’ of the married and unmarried abound, therefore they must cease, on pain of the stopping of wages for the man and of expulsion of the woman, which all officers were to enforce on pain of answering at the day of judgement in co-operation with the archbishop’s commissary.110 A similar commitment to Calais emerges in the papal licence of 1465 to Warwick and Duras of seven years’ indulgence for those visiting and giving alms to the church of St Nicholas and chapel of Christ Jesus to which they were devoted at Easter and Corpus Christi.111

The wardenship of the Cinque Ports was the natural complement to Calais and the keeping of the sea. Sandwich was the main port for Calais, the route that trade, munitions, supplies and ambassadors normally took, and the base for the English navy. Both the ports themselves and their Kentish hinterland, including the regional capital of Canterbury, provided the necessary manpower, ships and mercantile expertise. Town records contain much Cinque Port business, relatively little about Warwick himself. Normally absent, he appointed deputies. In 1462 his former household steward Otwel Worsley was lieutenant-warden and was resident; John Greenford was steward of Dover castle in 1464; and later the Kentishman Sir John Guildford was lieutenant.112 As warden Warwick was appointed to commissions of array, oyer and terminer, the peace and inquiry in Kent. Presumably he tendered his oath of office at the Shepway Court scheduled for 27 February 1462 and received his 100-mark (£66.66) gift; certainly Sandwich incurred considerable expense on that occasion. In 1464 a special session of the Brodhull asked Warwick’s deputy-constable of Dover to petition the earl to move the king to confirm their charters. Sandwich spent £5 4
s
. 7½
d
. on victuals, including thirty-four gallons of wine and the spices to make hypocras, and two dozen capons for the earl and his entourage on two occasions in 1465–6, and a further £1 8
d
. on the earl and his entourage on two later occasions.113 Their gifts also chart his movements in 1469.

Meantime Warwick was maintaining and developing his own private fleet. His ‘great ship’ was with Thomas Anger at Beverley in April 1461 and ‘bribers’ were recorded to be illicitly requisitioning ships and supplies at Yarmouth under the pretext they were for him. On 11 July 1461 the exchequer was ordered to pay him £1,956 10
s
. for keeping the sea and in August his men were refitting the
Grace Dieu
, which supported the Welsh campaign that autumn. Warwick’s formal commission as keeper of the seas was for three years from November 1461 at £1,000 a year,114 but it was his uncle Kent who commanded the raids on Conquet and Île de Rhé, which caused extensive damage and raised substantial ransoms. He also captured fifty of a combined French, Breton and Spanish fleet of sixty sail, including twelve great ships. Warwick’s ships the
Trinity
and
Mary
Grace
were in the van.115

For further expeditions in 1462–4 Warwick provided the following ships:

The
Jesus Warwick
, master John Ball, was recorded carrying wine at Fowey in 1465–6. On the basis of the stated tunnages of 2,170 for nine of these eleven ships, Dr Scammell assessed Warwick’s total tunnages at 2,300, second only among contemporary ship-owners to the 3,000 tons of William Canynges of Bristol. The capital value, at £1 5
s
. ton, would be £2,900.116 Doubtless they required refitting and supplying just as much as the
Grace Dieu
notoriously did. Ship-owning and privateering were expensive and risky. Warwick’s own
Trinity
and
Mary Clift
were seriously damaged in 1462, and the
Trinity
was captured by St Malo pirates in 1465, though possibly returned on Louis XI’s command because under safe conduct and carrying supplies to Calais for Warwick’s embassy to France.117 A new
Trinity
was ceremoniously commissioned on 12 June 1469 at Sandwich and based at Southampton. It may have been the ship that was built and fitted out for the earl at Newport by John Colt and Richard Port the purser sometime before 22 November 1469.118 Warwick also drew on his own officials and therefore presumably his estates to munition and provision in 1461, when the familiar names of John Otter and his estate officials Daniel Sheldon, Walter Mymmes and John Luthington were employed.119 Though only the
Jesus Warwick
occurs in customs accounts, others were also used for trading. Warwick’s commission expired in November 1464 and there were long truces before then. On 30 August 1464 the earl, John Otter and William Kelsy were licensed to send stated tunnages to trade at Bordeaux; Otter had also secured another such licence to help him pay his 9½-month ransom from Normandy. Next year the same three, Henry Auger and Nicholas Faunt of Canterbury were licensed to ship merchan-dise to France, Normandy and Acquitaine for fourteen months, subject to payment of customs. Again on 3 August 1466 Warwick, Robert Pudsey and John Defford were licensed to trade to France and Spain with the
Mary Clift
.120 Warwick persisted with privateering: in 1468 the mayor of Canterbury paid £4 ‘to conduct soldiers to the assistance of the earl of Warwick against the great fleet of France, being in the sea called the Downs by Sandwich’, and in 1468–9, perhaps on the same occasion, the corporation of Sandwich assisted the earl in capturing a French ship called
Columbes
near the Downs.121 His fleet remained a potent and committed force in 1470–1, when the
Margaret
and
Ellen
are also recorded.122

Warwick’s bastard feudal connection is obscure. We can hardly glimpse the largest concentrations of manpower: in his household, though some were paid from Warwick in 1451–2 and Middleham in 1465–6; at Calais, though one muster roll for Rysbank survives;123 or in the Carlisle garrison. Very few estate accounts survive. It is apparent that he had not one such connection, but several rooted in different areas, with those he trusted most superimposed on top. If Whetehill, Duras and Faunt were prominent in the South-East, the Throckmortons, Hugfords, Mountfords and Burdets in the West Midlands, the Conyers, Huddlestons and Metcalfes in the North, and Wenlock, Colt and Whetehill in diplomacy, few of these were included among the household, council or feoffees who co-ordinated his affairs. The ten men named as Warwick’s feoffees in 1463, who ought also probably to be regarded as his executors, had a pronounced northern character;124 however several had undertaken their service for him since 1449 outside their region of origin. There were only two peers, only one cleric – his brother Bishop Neville – and one magnate, his ex-brother-in-law Worcester. His other brother Montagu and his other brothers-in-law Arundel, Oxford, Hastings, Stanley and FitzHugh were omitted. Strangely, since demonstrably they were on good terms with Warwick and were deployed by him in positions of trust. Stanley, for example, resided for thirteen days at Middleham in 1465–6 and FitzHugh was Warwick’s lieutenant of the West March.125 Two other feoffees, Sir James Strangways and Thomas Witham, were long-standing Neville retainers and executors of his father.126 There were two judges: Sir Robert Danby, to whom Warwick had been a feoffee in 1453, and Sir John Markham. The three knights were Strangways, Blount, in turn Warwick’s marshal and treasurer of Calais, and Sir Walter Wrottesley of Wrottesley (Staffs.), already undersheriff of Worcestershire in 1451, sheriff of Glamorgan in the 1460s, and to be Warwick chamberlain of the exchequer from 1467.127 The four esquires – Colt, who died in 1467, Sotehill, Witham and Kelsy – were long-standing administrators of northern extraction. Warwick’s choice of secretary after Master Richard Fisher’s death was his distant cousin Robert Neville from the West Riding.128 The three councillors despatched to Glamorgan in 1469 were Wrottesley, the Ferrers of Groby cadet Sir Edward Grey of Astley (Warw.), and the veteran Sir Walter Scull of Holt (Heref.), whose service dated back to the 1430s and who was estates steward in Worcestershire.129

Warwick deployed such people widely. William Kelsy was renewing rentals from Canford (Dors.) to Hanley Castle (Worcs.) in the 1460s; Otwel Worsley served in his household, the Cinque Ports and Calais; and John Otter, ultimately from Uskelf in Yorkshire and Warwick usher of the exchequer from 1451, cited seven aliases in his pardon of 1471.130 The West Midlander Thomas Throckmorton was receiver-general of Glamorgan in 1469 where the Geordie John Colt was building the ship.131 Both the Colts, Otter, Wrottesley, Blount and Gate served the earl at Calais, which was perhaps the earl’s principal source of salaried employment and required a constant inflow of genteel soldiers. Other Nevilles and Otters, West Midlanders and Kentishmen feature among the thirty-four geographically diverse members of the garrison pardoned in 1471.132

These were the foundations for a change of focus after 1464, after the pacification of the North and in the light of the king’s marriage. No longer lieutenant of the North, he remained warden of the West March. Middleham remained his favourite residence and northerners were among his most valued retainers. Henceforth, however, he was as often in Warwick, London and Calais, and for the next two years it was diplomacy that occupied much of his time.

Throughout the summer of 1464, Warwick had been intending to attend a conference with Louis XI and Duke Philip and was still expected into October, but the king’s marriage required revision of the objectives of English foreign policy, so he did not come. Warwick visited the Cinque Ports in November 1464, when the corporation of Sandwich feasted him, Kelsy and company at Deal, and journeyed thence to Warwick by 22 November. Four days later he was at York proroguing parliament with his brother Northumberland and Greystoke. Back at Coventry on 10 January 1465 and acting as a feoffee, he attended the parliamentary session at Westminster commencing on the 16th, and delivered provisos signed with the king’s hand in his chamber to the clerk in the parliament chamber on 14 and 16 March. He left London for Calais on 11 May, conducted negotiations with Burgundy at Boulogne and the French at Calais, and returned to London on 22 July.133 Two days later he met those escorting the captured Henry VI at Islington, had his feet humiliatingly tied under his horse, and brought him with maximum publicity through Cheapside to the Tower.134 There could be no better demonstration of the completeness of the Yorkist victory and the shame attached to Lancastrianism. Two days later he sealed his new ordinances regulating the garrison of Calais. Still in London on 31 July, on 14, 17 and 31 August he was holding judicial sessions at Warwick. The offerings made at St Mary’s Warwick by the earl and countess, his brothers-in-law Hastings and FitzHugh, and the king’s brother Richard Duke of Gloucester who was living in his household probably date from September, shortly before all proceeded to Cawood for Archbishop Neville’s enthronement at which he was steward. He was at Topcliffe on 19 September and on 12 December he was at Newcastle negotiating with the Scots.135

When Edward IV’s first child and heiress presumptive was born on 11 February, Warwick was her godfather. Probably he was also the most powerful earl whom the Hungarian Leo Rozmital saw presiding over the churching of the queen.136 On 6 May payment was ordered to cover six weeks’ negotiations overseas, spent in Calais, St Omer and Boulogne. At Warwick on 30 July, he was continually at Middleham until at least 14 October, when he appointed FitzHugh to be lieutenant of the West March. He was at London with 300 horse on 6 November and spent Christmas 1466 at Coventry.137

1467 was another arduous diplomatic year. At Westminster on 17 February 1467, he negotiated with ambassadors from France first in London and then in France. He and an entourage of 200 embarked with them for Honfleur from Sandwich on 28 May. He was received with great honour, Louis sparing no pains and expense to impress and win over the English envoys. As he proceeded up the Seine, the towns along the way presented him with their keys, and Louis himself, with great condescension, came five leagues to meet him at La Bouille on 6 June. They made a grand entry to Rouen via the Quai St Eloy, proceeding through the streets accompanied by the crosses and banners of every parish and all the city clergy clad in copes to Notre-Dame cathedral, where the earl made offerings. Warwick was lodged in the Dominican friary. Whereas Warwick had brought English dogs as gifts, Louis responded with gold and silver plate, bestowing a gold cup worth 2,000 livres on the earl, showering money on his steward, herald, trumpeters, and even his grooms and pages. The English were allowed a free choice of fine Rouen textiles and all their expenses were paid.138 Never had the earl encountered such respect and munificence!