Warwick the Kingmaker (7 page)

In 1436 Warwick was assessed for tax on £3,116, far above the corresponding figures for Salisbury (£1,238) and the Countess Joan (£667) combined. If Salisbury still had expectations, so too had Beauchamp, whose anticipated income in a valor of his last years was £5,471.50 Scattered across England and Wales, from Elvell in Powys to Barnard Castle, Warwick’s estates were concentrated in the Midlands, especially in Worcestershire and Warwickshire, where he exercised a regional hegemony.51 By his second marriage to Isabel Despenser, which added the marcher lordships of Ewyas Lacy and Glamorgan to those of Elvell and Abergavenny, he was also a principal lord in the marches of South Wales and Gloucestershire. Barring the Lisle inheritance of his first wife and elder daughters, the whole was scheduled to pass to Beauchamp’s only son Henry, his heir presumptive. It was that inheritance that Salisbury secured for his daughter and her issue as he presumably intended. We do not know what jointure was settled on Henry and Cecily. The second match, between Richard Neville and Anne Beauchamp, gave Richard a spouse of appropriate status, but not the heiress he could doubtless have secured elsewhere and which Neville heirs traditionally espoused. Richard was the most attractive bridegroom among Salisbury’s four sons. Should Henry die prematurely or without issue, Richard would acquire a stake in Henry’s inheritances. This, Salisbury must have calculated, as Warwick himself anticipated in his wills of 1437 and 1439,52 would comprise a quarter share of the Beauchamp inheritance when split four ways between Warwick’s four daughters and half of the Despenser inheritance shared between Isabel’s two. Perhaps Salisbury discounted the possibility that further sons would be born to the ageing earl as the latter still hoped in his will. Richard and Anne’s share should then have been worth over fifteen hundred pounds a year – more than either the Montagu or Neville inheritances – and might well have included the Beauchamp lordship of Barnard Castle in County Durham that Salisbury leased and coveted. Salisbury cannot have overlooked such contingencies, but in 1436, when the marriages were contracted, Cecily rather than Richard was the intended beneficiary.

Ostensibly these transactions were attractive to both parties and had been, as the papal dispensation shows, under consideration for several years. The marriage of one’s daughter to the other’s heir was an excellent match. There was little need, one might suppose, for a marriage portion. Actually, however, Salisbury agreed to pay Warwick 4,700 marks (£3,233.66):53 one of the largest portions known. Evidently Salisbury wanted the matches more than Warwick and the portion was what persuaded Warwick to comply. Surely Warwick did not object to the marriage of Anne to Richard: a more advantageous match than any arranged for his elder daughters? It follows, therefore, that it was the second pairing that was so expensive: Henry Beauchamp, the greatest heir of his time, could have done much better, married an heiress as his father himself had twice done, and forged new ties rather than merely reinforcing the old. Hence it seems the portion was what persuaded Warwick to eschew an heiress. That, in turn, implies that Warwick wanted the money, which is understandable: the crown owed him substantial sums for earlier service in France, some of which he remitted for immediate payment of £1,000 in 1437, when taking up the lieutenant-generalship and governorship of Normandy and France.54 Though Professor Ross interprets the deficits of £2,643 in 1420–1 and £1,672 as mere book-keeping errors, Porthaleyn’s account of 1435–6 also points to chronic over-spending.55 Warwick really needed the money in 1436: hence the marriage. Salisbury had agreed in parliament in December 1435 to serve in France with Warwick on conditions that the royal council acceded to on 7–11 March 1436. Warwick consented to accept in part payment and the crown agreed to pay £700 due to Salisbury as the down-payment ‘on the day of the espousals of their children’. Probably the balance was secured by instalments from the enfeoffed Montagu lands. Shortly beforehand Salisbury gave up his wardenship. Salisbury’s departure was calculated in other ways: the council intervened in the Neville–Neville dispute, binding his nephew Westmorland with sureties and curtailing his aggression, and it guaranteed Salisbury immediate admission to his Neville inheritance should his mother Joan Beaufort die during his absence abroad. He was also licensed to do what he had already done in 1431, to settle substantial Montagu lands on feoffees. War itself was not without risk and the tide had turned against the English. Should Salisbury be killed, he had already arranged an advantageous match for young Richard, who would be spared the matrimonial whims of crown or grantees; that most of his lands would be immune from waste because enfeoffed or held by his countess in her own right, jointure and dower; and that resources were available to fulfil his will. Young Richard’s marriage, in short, was an element in the strategic planning of Salisbury in the mid-1430s and of Warwick also, who had similar concerns.

In case our Richard died without inheriting and to provide for his wife and any offspring, jointure was settled on Richard and Anne in 1436: only the outlying manor of Swainstown, Isle of Wight, which was de-enfeoffed, can be identified.56 It was surely not until the mid-1440s that Richard and Anne started to live together as man and wife and their first child was not born until 1451. We do not know whether they lived with Salisbury or had a separate establishment: they were certainly not living at Swainstown! Richard was already a knight by 6 August 1445: as his parents met Queen Margaret at Rouen on 22 March, he was most probably dubbed at her coronation on 22 April.57 We do not know what were the intimate services that he had rendered that were referred to in a grant of 1449.58

Salisbury planned for young Richard’s succession to his Neville lands, royal offices, and influence in the North. Thus in 1446 he secured the reversion for a further twenty years of the wardenship of the West March from the end of his current ten-year term (in 1453) for Richard and himself jointly; in 1445 he had also the master forestership of Blackburn and Bowland (Lancs.) and the stewardship of the Duchy of Lancaster lordship of Pontefract (Yorks.) regranted to himself, Richard and Thomas jointly.59 Allegedly Richard had rendered good service at his own expense in the Scottish war of 1448–9,60 when a Percy defeat in the West March was reversed by Salisbury himself. He received his first royal grant on 5 April 1449, when he was leased the manor of Deighton in Yorkshire and a third of the lordship of Egremont in Cumberland, which Salisbury had just surrendered for further concessions in Richmondshire.61 The Nevilles had no intention of actually giving up anything that they had once held! His sureties were two promising northerners, both Neville clients, both probably lawyers, and both with distinguished careers in royal service under the Yorkists lying ahead: Thomas Colt of Middleham, past escheator and current JP for Cumberland and future MP of Carlisle; and Henry Sotehill of Sotehill (Yorks.). Now Richard was almost of age and the succession of an adult heir was virtually assured, he could be more useful to his father, and his career as a northern magnate could commence.

On 3 June 1449,62 however, his niece Anne Beauchamp died. Within a week Richard was an earl, not of Salisbury, but of Warwick. Henceforth he was Warwick to contemporaries and will be called
Warwick
in this book. His succession to the earldom fundamentally changed his life and diverted his career into channels quite different from that which Salisbury had planned. For the next twelve years, for the rest of Salisbury’s life and beyond, Warwick was interested in the borders and the Nevilles’ northern affairs, but he was not directly involved. Instead his attention moved to the Midlands and Wales, to Calais and the keeping of the seas: all areas that had concerned neither Salisbury nor any previous Neville. He became a major figure in national politics in his own right and even overshadowed his own father. Moreover the Warwick Inheritance, as it can be collectively called, embroiled the Nevilles in national politics, provoked a rift with the Lancastrian house with which they had hitherto identified, and determined the stance that they all adopted during the Wars of the Roses.

NOTES

1.
Rous Roll
, no. 57. Unless otherwise stated, genealogical information in this chapter is from
GEC passim
.

2.
POPC
iii. 324–5.

3. A. Payne, ‘The Salisbury Roll of Arms, c. 1463’,
England in the Fifteenth Century
, ed. D. Williams (Woodbridge, 1987), 187–98, esp. 181–91; BL MS Loan 90, ff. 176–225. These are the source of the next two paras.

4.
CCR 1422–9
, 116; E 326/ B5455, B9266; Devon RO Chanter MS 722 f. 2.

5. Hicks,
Richard III
, 357.

6.
The Brut or The Chronicles of England
, ed. F. W. D. Brie (Early English Text Soc. cxxxvi, 1908), ii. 445-6. Clavering (Essex) was apparently part of their jointure, see SC 6/839/16 rot. 1 m. 2, but see also E 315/32/92; E 315/36/53.

7. Hicks,
Richard III
, 356;
Catalogue of Ancient Deeds
iv. A6166. The rest of this section is based on ‘Neville Pedigree’; J. R. Lander, ‘Marriage and Politics in the Fifteenth Century: The Nevilles and the Wydevilles’,
Crown and Nobility 1450–1509
(London, 1976), 95–7; M. A. Hicks, ‘Cement or Solvent? Kinship and Politics in Late Medieval England: The Case of the Nevilles’,
History
83 (1998), 31–46.

8.
CPL 1434–47
, 34; see also J. Hughes,
Pastors & Visionaries
(1988), 16.

9.
CPR 1401–5
, 227.

10.
Handbook to the Maude Roll
, ed. A. Wall (Auckland, 1919); BL Harley Roll T12; Lansdowne Roll 2; MS Sloane 2722A.

11. ‘Neville Pedigree’, 109.

12. Storey,
Lancaster
, 113–14; CP 25(1)/281/164/32.

13. Hicks,
Richard III
, 357;
CPR 1446–52
, 281; Griffiths,
King & Country
, 342–3;
DKR
34 (1873), 192.

14. W. Dugdale,
Monasticon Anglicanum
, ed. W. Dunstable (6 vols, 1821), vi. 921; see also Hughes,
Pastors & Visionaries
, 15–18.

15. ‘Neville Pedigree’,
passim
;
Visitations of the North 1480–1500
, ed. C. H. H. Blair (Surtees Soc. xli, 1930), 23–9.

16. ‘Neville Pedigree’,
passim
;
Visitations of the North
, 26–7.

17. BL MS Harley 2096, f. 261 [which had lately belonged to John Ld. Latimer of Snape (d. 1577)].

18. The pedigree in BL MS Add. 5530 terminates with the Clervaux–Vavasour marriage of 1442.

19.
Registrum Honoris de Richmond
, ed. R. Gale (1722), which reprints BL MS Cotton Faustina BVII. Gale did not print it exactly as the original, which was rearranged by Sir Robert Cotton,
Summary Catalogue of the Lyell Manuscripts
, ed. A. de la Mare (1971); Bodl. MS Lyell 22.

20. Hughes,
Pastors & Visionaries
, 17; BL Cotton Ch. xiii, no. 32; C 47/9/13; BL Add. MS 6046, f. 75.

21. ‘Neville Pedigree’, 31–2.

22. A. J. Pollard, ‘The Richmondshire Community of Gentry during the Wars of the Roses’,
Patronage, Pedigree and Power in Later Medieval England
, ed. C. D. Ross (Gloucester, 1979), 37–59, esp. 48; ‘Lord FitzHugh’s Rising in 1470’,
BIHR
lii (1979), 171–5.

23.
CPR 1391–4
, 492;
1392–6
, 586;
1396–9
, 13;
1399–1401
, 24;
1408–13
, 407; ‘Neville Pedigree’, 121.

24.
CPR 1413–16
, 259–60.

25.
CPR 1429–36
, 510;
1436–41
, 96;
1441–6
, 409, 429;
1446–52
, 281–2.

26. R. L. Storey, ‘The Wardens of the Marches of England towards Scotland 1377–1489’,
EHR
lxxii (1957), 593–605; for this para., see also Storey,
Lancaster
, ch. 7.

27.
CPR 1441–6
, 540.

28. Storey, ‘Wardens’, 604–5, 613;
CPR 1446–52
, 566.

29. E 159/207 rec. Trin. 9 Hen. VI m. 1; E 159/227 brevia Easter 28 Hen. VI m. 7; brevia Mich. 28 Hen. VI m. 8d; E 159/230 brevia Mich. 32 Hen. VI m. 17; E 326/B9374; T. Madox,
Formulare Anglicanum
(Oxford, 1702), 144, 331; Ellis,
Original Letters
, ii. i. 116–17;
CPR 1429–36
, 122–3;
Testamenta Eboracensia
ii, ed. J. Raine (Surtees Soc. xxx, 1855), 246; F. W. Bragg, ‘An Indenture in English’,
TCWAS
n.s. ix (1909), 283–4; A. J. Pollard, ‘The Northern Retainers of Richard Nevill, Earl of Salisbury’,
Northern History
xi (1976), 52–69; Pollard, ‘Richmondshire Gentry’, 45; ‘Private Contracts for Life Service in Peace and War 1278–1476’, ed. M. Jones and S. Walker,
Camden Miscellany
5th ser. iii (1994), 126–7, 147, 150–1, 156–8, 162–3. Hotoft’s indenture (no. 117) is dated at Ware (Herts.) not Warwick, E 315/40/154.

30. Hicks,
Richard III
, 357–8.

31. M. V. Clin-Meyes, ‘Le Registre des Comptes de Richard Beauchamp Conte de Warwick 14 Mars 1431–15 Mars 1432’ (unpub. diploma at Warwickshire RO), 188, 244 quoting Warwicks. RO CR 1618/W1915.

32. See below p. 29.

33. This section is based on ‘Neville Pedigree’, 110–11.

34. BL Add. MS Harl. 1807, f. 75v; but see proof of age of George Neville locating birth and baptism at Guildford (Surrey) C 139/162/17/2.

35.
CCR 1422–9
, 159.

36.
CPR 1429–36
, 123.

37. G. I. Keir, ‘The Ecclesiastical Career of George Neville 1432–76’, Oxford BLitt (1970), 6; R. B. Dobson,
Church and Society in the Medieval North of England
(1996), 7n.