Warwick the Kingmaker (52 page)

103. Somerville, i. 524.

104. DL 37/32/79; DL 37/33/45.

105. Rainey, ‘Defense of Calais’, 91n, 92; Goodman,
Wars of the Roses
, 56 & n3.

106. E 101/71/5/941–5.

107. E 101/96/2 mm. 31–2; E 101/196/8 esp. f. 114-v; E 404/72/1/107;
CPR 1467–77
, 290; SC 1/57/104.

108.
Paston L & P
ii. 287.

109.
Mercers’ Company Acts
, 284.

110. C 76/149 m. 14, transcribed in Rainey, ‘Defense of Calais’, appx. 2.

111.
CPL 1458–71
, 403.

112.
Cinque Port Books
, 44, 51.

113. Ibid. 44, 59; Maidstone, Centre for Kentish Studies, Sa F/At 5 mm. 6–7.

114.
Paston L & P
i. 520;
CPR 1461–7
, 38;
Foedera
xi. 488–9; E 404/72/1/15.

115.
Paston L & P
ii. 286.

116.
CPR 1461–7
, 204, 302; E 122/144/3 rot. 2 m. 2; C 81/1378/16; Scammell, ‘Shipowning in England’, 110–11.

117.
Paston L & P
ii. 286–7; Vaesen,
Lettres de Louis XI
, ii. 195; Calmette and Perinelle, 56n.

118.
Stone’s Chron.
, 109–10; Warwicks. RO CR 1998/J2/177.

119.
CPR 1461–7
, 38.

120. C 76/148 m. 6; C 76/147 m. 15; C 76/150 m. 17.

121. ‘Interim Report on Work carried out in 1988 by the Canterbury Archaeological Trust’,
Archaeologia Cantiana
cvi (1988), 158; HMC
9th Rep.
i. 141.

122.
CPR 1467–77
, 250.

123. BL Add. Roll 46555; Warwicks. RO Warwick Castle MS 491 m. 6; SC 6/1085/20.

124.
CPR 1461–7
, 270.

125. Jones and Walker, ‘Private Contracts’, 156–7,
Testamenta Eboracensia
ii. 242–3; J. S. Roskell, ‘Sir James Strangways of West Harlsey and Whorlton’,
Parliament and Politics
(3 vols, 1981–3), i. 12.279–306.

126. SC 6/1085/20; Bodl. MS Dodsworth 18, f. 41.

127. CP 25(1)/83/56/74;
CPR 1452–61
, 49; Wedgwood,
Hist. Parl. Biographies
, 974.

128. Calmette and Perinelle, 64; Wedgwood,
Hist. Parl Biog.
627.

129. Wedgwood,
Hist. Parl. Biog.
773–4; Stratford, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, DR 5/2870 m. 2; BRL 422751; Warwicks CR 1998/J2/177.

130. DL 29/644/19445 mm. 1–d, 2;
CPR 1467–77
, 291; Warwick RO CR 1998/J2/177. Warwick remitted all actions to Otter 1 Feb. 1465, BL Add. Ch. 74449.

131. Warwicks. CR 1998/J2/177.

132.
CPR 1467–77
, 290–2.

133. Centre for Kentish Studies, SA/At 5 m. 6;
RP
v. 315; C 49/55/32; C 49/60/2; C 49/58/16;
Selected List of the Charters and Evidence Belonging to the Corporation of
Coventry
(1871), 13.

134. E 404/73/1/69;
Annales
, 785.

135. KB 9/334/123, 124; KB 9/313/26; Warwicks. RO CR 26/4 f. 69; Devon,
Issues
, 490; SC 6/1085/20 m. 11;
Plumpton L & P
37;
Foedera
v.ii. 136.

136.
Annales
, 785;
Travels of Leo Rozmital
, ed. M. Letts (Hakluyt Soc. 2nd ser. cviii, 1957), 46–7.

137. KB 9/334/118–19; G. M. Coles, ‘The Lordship of Middleham’, Liverpool MA thesis 1961, 290; Bodl. MS Dugdale 18, f. 41.

138.
Plumpton L & P
38; Waurin-Dupont, iii. 190;
Plumpton Correspondence
, 17.

139. PSO 1/71/56; Scofield, i. 413–15;
Annales
, 787; J. de Roye,
Journal
, ed. B. de Mandrot (SHF cclxx, 1894), i. 170–2.

9.1 GROWING APART

The Nevilles’ pacification of the North was a major achievement that secured Edward’s throne. Henceforth defence was no longer the priority. Ironically the Nevilles’ victory made them dispensable. Not at once, however. For several years Warwick was to be as busy as an ambassador and his brother as chancellor as before. If the archbishop’s dismissal was a turning point, it need not have generated the conflict that was to follow. It was not without bitterness and malice on the king’s side, perhaps because the Nevilles had presumed too much, had taken him for granted, had even thwarted and overriden his wishes. Nor was it accepted as decisive or irreversible by the Nevilles. To locate the breach in 1467 does not tell us when it originated or why.

Edward was always king, Warwick his subordinate. Hence the deferential submission in his letters to Edward’s right to decide and to disregard his own advice.1 Although Edward was frequently prepared to direct his own campaigns, he never did, because his subordinates managed alone, because he had other distractions, and once because he was ill. Edward was a good delegator and allowed his officers to attract the applause. Warwick was credited with the pacification of the North and Warwick was the man with whom outsiders thought they had to deal. The king grappled with depleted finances, matching ends to means, and strove to meet the bills in an
ad hoc
manner akin to Henry VI. It was therefore Edward also in 1469 who was held responsible for the failure of his first reign to improve radically on that of his Lancastrian predecessor.

That Warwick was in charge was widely believed. To Bishop Kennedy he was the ‘conduiseur’ of the kingdom of England under King Edward; Warwick, observed an Italian, ‘seems to be everything in this kingdom’, and for Louis XI in 1467 he was ‘le plus grant et puissant seigneur dudit royne d’Angleterre’. It was believed even by Warwick’s own entourage: ‘there are at present two chiefs in England, of which Monsieur de Warwick is one, and they forget the name of the other’.2 The joke was not wholly a joke. Similarly it was Hastings of all people, the king’s own chamberlain, who applauded Warwick’s victory in 1463 and reported that the king was busy hunting.3 Though writing for diplomatic effect, his letter conforms with Edward’s secret and irresponsible marriage in 1464, when Warwick and Montagu were engaged in the North, and which even Hastings did not suspect. If Hastings underestimated his master, it is no wonder than continental diplomats and chroniclers did likewise and that Commines painted the portrait of licentious indolence that was accepted until quite recently!4

Warwick could obtain from the king whatever he wanted. So it appears from the succession of patents for himself, his brothers and clients, his preference at the exchequer of an impoverished king, and his share in the dispersal of the forfeited estates that Edward had hoped to retain as a source of income. That Edward’s first patent roll was the largest of the reign does not reflect excessive liberality so much as the number of vacancies to be filled after a contested dynastic revolution. Nor was it initially lavish. Much remained to be given away at the end of 1461. It was only from 1464 that the combination of over-generous provisions for his two brothers and his new family of in-laws exhausted the fund of forfeitures and forced Edward to alienate parts of the duchy of Lancaster and even the county of Chester to endow his queen and the royal dukes. Even more years were to pass before the aspirations of his new favourites came into conflict with the old. Warwick, it seems, could persuade the king. That the royal visit to Middleham on 5–7 May 1461 produced such a flurry of grants suggests that Warwick could persuade the king to give him whatever he pleased. But four days later on 11 May, though still exposed to the earl’s powerful presence and that of his brother, but no longer a guest in his baronial hall, Edward changed his mind. Though Warwick was to retain most of what he sought, the custody of the lordship at Newport was transferred to Herbert, who also on 7 September was appointed steward of all the other Stafford lordships of which Warwick theoret-ically remained custodian. Herbert had already supplanted Warwick as steward elsewhere.5 Edward had determined that it was Herbert who was to pacify Wales. Though undoubtedly disappointing to Warwick, to say that this ‘action sparked off eight years rivalry between the two men’ is grossly to overstate.6 At this stage Warwick was infinitely the more eminent, powerful, and more influential at court. Though he still had aspirations in Wales and still had a role there, he never found the time. There is no evidence that he ever visited any of his marcher lordships or offices again. Edward’s priorities were Warwick’s too.

Nor is this all. When totting up the Nevilles’ rewards and finding Warwick ‘excessively greedy’,7 Professor Ross underplayed the number that merely continued from the previous reign and how long Warwick had to wait, for example, for any forfeitures. The king’s two brothers were endowed before the earl and much more generously. First Gloucester and then Clarence were given the honour of Richmond, overlord of Middleham, which the Nevilles had coveted for so long; it was Clarence also who was granted the Percy estates in Craven and in Northumberland, admittedly nominally.8 Warwick’s uncle Kent received more lands than Warwick in 1461 and so later from 1464 did his brother of Northumberland, the new queen and her kin. The grants of land to Warwick, though substantial, were not excessive, either in comparison to what others received or in relation to his services. The earl still had to approach his acquisitions piecemeal, step by step, from custody to grant to enlargement, just as his forebears had done.

Moreover, there were disappointments. The rule of Wales has been discussed. The earl was indeed highly honoured, appointed at once to the rule of the North with the unprecedented title of lieutenant, and he always styled himself in his letters both great chamberlain of England and captain of Calais. In 1461 and 1465 he acted as steward of England, supplanting the king’s own brother-in-law John Duke of Suffolk, who had officiated at the coronation.9 But Warwick was not the duke he probably wished to be. Nor was he admiral of England as again he wished to be. Exeter, the hereditary admiral, was a committed Lancastrian who forfeited the office. Probably Warwick was appointed to succeed him by word of mouth, not formal patent, since he used the title and the admiralty court was held in his name, but in February 1462 he indented only as keeper of seas for a fixed term that expired in 1464. It was his uncle William Earl of Kent who was appointed Lord Admiral on 30 July 1462 during pleasure and the king’s brother Richard Duke of Gloucester who instantly supplanted him on 12 August following. In 1468 it was the queen’s brother Anthony Lord Scales who was appointed keeper of the seas. Only in 1470 was Warwick again required and only in 1471 did he become Lord Admiral.10

Of course, there were frictions. There are in any relationship. But these occurred in a context where the king’s interests were also those of the Nevilles and where many of the Nevilles’ interests were those of the king. In retrospect, the Nevilles always had more to gain from working with the king and submitting to his authority, as was their duty as loyal subjects, rather than seeking to overawe and oppose him. The ways parted because Edward developed his own policies and found the regal authority to assert himself. In this context, his chosen advisers, those who shared his ends and helped achieve them, were not the Nevilles, but the Wydevilles.

It is often said stated that Warwick objected to the advancement of the Wydevilles because they had been Lancastrian in 1461. So they had been: the queen’s first husband, Sir John Grey, had indeed fallen in the field against Warwick at the second battle of St Albans. This may be a factor in Warwick’s disapproval. More certainly in 1460 he had regarded Rivers and his son Anthony Wydeville as parvenus, socially inferior to him, and hence also to the king, but he was not a diehard anti-Lancastrian. If on occasion he insisted on the attainder and execution of enemies such as Browne and requested their possessions, yet he also saved some like Plumpton from forfeiture, allowed others like Somerset to make their peace on generous terms, and enabled yet more to be fully restored. Just as Durham priory wanted repayment of debts due from some Lancastrians11 and London creditors were tied unwillingly to others, so too Warwick was bound inescapably to them as surety, feoffee and kinsman. It was his pressing interest as surety ultimately liable for the refund of the loans contracted in 1458 to pay the ransom of Robert Lord Hungerford and Moleyns, still due after the latter’s forfeiture, that forced him to support the latter’s grandmother in her struggle to save the family inheritance from such trusted Yorkists as Dynham and Gloucester. Similarly it was a distant kinship to Anne Hankford, a niece of Thomas Earl of Salisbury, that prompted the earl and chancellor to act as custodians of her lands on 14 May 1463 during the life of her attainted husband Thomas Ormond.12 As in previous generations, it was a Neville marriage – to Warwick’s sister Margaret! – that probably averted the forfeiture of the de Vere inheritance, again to Gloucester’s potential loss.