Warwick the Kingmaker (8 page)

38.
Biographical Register of the University of Oxford to
AD
1500
, ed. A. B. Emden (3 vols, Oxford, 1957–9), ii. 1347.

39.
CPR 1436–41
, 194, 224.

40. Emden,
Biographical Register
, ii. 1347; Keir, ‘George Neville’, 26–7.

41. For Thomas and John, see below pp.87–8, 130–1; for Eleanor, see
Calendar of Deeds & Documents
, iii,
The Hawarden Deeds
, ed. F. Green (Aberystwyth, 1931), 14, 16. All were married or contracted by 10 May 1459,
Testamenta Eboracensia
ii. 243–4.

42.M. A. Hicks, ‘What Might Have Been: George Neville, Duke of Bedford’, in
Richard
III
, 292, 296.

43. R. A. Griffiths, ‘The Sense of Dynasty in the Reign of Henry VI’,
King & Country
, 89–93.

44. M. W. Warner and K. Lacey, ‘Neville vs. Percy: a Precedence Dispute
circa
1442’,
HR
lxix (1996), 211–17.

45. Hicks, Richard III, 359.

46.
Monasticon
, ii. 63;
CPL 1431–47
, 251, 508.

47.
CPR 1429–36
, 516; BL Egerton Roll 8775 m. 8; Griffiths,
Henry VI
, 204.

48.
CFR 1430–7
, 267; C 81/76/9107.

49.
Wills and Inventories of the Northern Counties of England
(Surtees Soc. ii, 1835), ii. 71–2;
GEC
i. 27.

50.
Glamorgan County History
iii, ed. T. B. Pugh (1971), 190; H. L. Gray, ‘Incomes from Land in England in 1436’,
EHR
xlix (1936), 614–15; C. D. Ross,
The Estates and Finances
of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick
(Dugdale Soc. occas. paper xii, 1956), 17.

51. M. C. Carpenter, ‘The Beauchamp Affinity: A Study of Bastard Feudalism at work’,
EHR
xcv (1980), 514–32.

52. Earl Richard’s deathbed will of 1439 (DL 26/5) differs only in omitting Lord Cromwell from the executors: it was never proved.

53. W. Dugdale,
Antiquities of Warwickshire
, ed. W. Thomas (1730), i. 410–11, 414.

54. Ross,
Estates
, 16–17; BL Egerton Roll 8775 m. 7.

55.
CPR 1429–36
, 516.

56.
CPR 1429–36
, 598.

57.
GEC
xii. ii. 385;
Chronique de Mathieu d’Escouchy
, ed. G. du Fresne de Beaucourt, i (SHF cxviii, 1863), 86–7.

58.
CPR 1446–52
, 235.

59. Storey, ‘Wardens’, 605–6, 614; R. Somerville,
History of the Duchy of Lancaster
, i (1953), 507, 513–14, 518.

60.
CPR 1446–52
, 225; H. Summerson,
Medieval Carlisle
(2 vols, Cumberland & Westmorland Arch. Soc. extra ser. xxv, 1993), ii. 434–5. The sack of Dumfries, if it occurred, cannot have been in June 1449, when Salisbury was at parliament.

61.
CPR 1446–52
, 281–2;
CFR 1445–52
, 131.

62. Dugdale’s date of 3 January,
Baronage
, i. 248, followed by
GEC
, is a mistranscrip-tion of the inquisitions, C 139/135, which are unanimous about 3 June.

3.1 WARWICK INHERITANCE UPDATE

At the time of the two Beauchamp–Neville marriages in 1436, Earl Richard Beauchamp was in his mid-fifties and, by contemporary standards, well-advanced in years. His death in 1439 was no surprise. Though twenty years younger, his countess was also in ill health and died the following December. Their son Henry succeeded them, duly came of age, served in France, and was elevated first to premier earl in 1444 and then to duke of Warwick in 1445. He was a close friend of the king. Duke Henry liked honours: his signet letters dubbed him ‘Prime Count of England’, which conferred precedence over other earls and the right to wear a gold circlet; as duke he had a precedence dispute with the Duke of Buckingham.1 Grants were made in reversion to enlarge his inheritance with: the Channel Isles; the forest of Feckenham (Worcs.); and the castle of St Briavels and the forest of Dean (Gloucs.), which complemented and connected his possessions in Gloucestershire and his Welsh marcher lordships. In 1444 he was even granted in tail male the principal offices in the king’s Lancaster honours of Tutbury (Staffs.) and Duffield and lordship of High Peak (Derbys.) on the death of Buckingham, the current holder.2 On St Valentine’s Day (14 February) 1444 there was born to Henry and Cecily a daughter, another Anne Beauchamp.3 More children, especially sons, were confidently expected – indeed the duchess thought herself pregnant again4 – when Duke Henry died, on 11 June 1446.

The infant Anne, now countess of Warwick, was the greatest heiress of her day. Her wardship and marriage, first granted to the queen, was soon diverted to the most powerful man about the king: William de la Pole, husband of Alice Chaucer, shortly to be duke of Suffolk. He designated young Anne as spouse for his own heir.5 Her death on 3 June 1449 frustrated his hopes; whilst some surprise to the Nevilles – for the death of so young an heiress cannot have been a wholly unforeseen eventuality! – it occurred at a moment particularly fortunate for the prospects of young Richard Neville.

Though Earl Richard Beauchamp had died in debt, he left an elaborate will that took over forty years to execute. The costs of building the Beauchamp Chapel at Warwick College, at Guyscliff, and of chantries at Warwick and Tewkesbury Abbey were borne from lands worth £325 a year earmarked for the purpose.6 In contrast the wills of his countess and son were relatively modest and easy to execute. Countess Isabel Despenser had already constructed her chapel at Tewkesbury Abbey and had interred her first husband in it. Its endowment, the priory of Goldcliff, was conveyed to it in 1442. The resettlement of most of her lands on trustees should have enabled her executors to clear any debts quite quickly. Her son Duke Henry had little time to build up debts. Though no will survives, he too ordered the Despenser trustees to found a chantry for him at Tewkesbury, which was endowed in 1450. There was no separate chapel. The original objectives of the Despenser trust therefore seem to have been fulfilled by 1450.

There had been other changes in the identity and status of the Warwick heirs since 1436. The three elder sisters duly succeeded to their mother’s Lisle estate in 14397 and continued the Berkeley–Lisle dispute with James Lord Berkeley. Margaret’s eldest son John Talbot (III) assumed the style of Lord Lisle. Margaret’s husband John Talbot (I) had been created earl of Shrewsbury in 1442;
his
heir was not Lisle, but another John Talbot (II), his eldest son by his first wife. Eleanor was now a duchess, following the creation of her husband Edmund Beaufort as duke of Somerset in 1448; her heir was her son by her first marriage Thomas Lord Roos. In the longer term, it was greatly to our Richard’s advantage that only the current earl of Shrewsbury and current duke of Somerset had an interest in the Beauchamp inheritance.

Isabel Despenser’s other daughter Elizabeth Lady Bergavenny had died by 1448, leaving her husband Edward Neville a widower and her son George a minor. The Duchess Cecily remarried soon after 3 April 1449 to John Lord Tiptoft,8 who was shortly advanced to the earldom of Worcester. And finally Richard’s wife Anne Beauchamp was elevated from being the youngest daughter of Earl Richard Beauchamp and Countess Isabel to being the sole sister of the whole-blood –
whole sister
– of Duke Henry and arguably therefore the senior sister: a quite crucial alteration.

The Beauchamp and Despenser heirs were fortunate that their inheritance was in such good order. An inheritance that had suffered two minorities in the past decade might well be expected to be in disorder: exploited and wasted by the crown and other predators. It has also been argued that the West Midlands hegemony of Earl Richard Beauchamp had been eroded and overthrown by rivals, most notably Humphrey Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, and that its shattered ruins needed to be reconstituted. This view is mistaken.9

As usual, it was not the high-ranking executors of Earl Richard Beauchamp who fulfilled his will, but more humble administrators and councillors: John Throckmorton of Coughton Court (Worcs.), Nicholas Rody (d. 1458), Master William Berkeswell (d. 1470) and Thomas Hugford of Emscote (Warw.), the last survivor, who died in 1469. All were local men with twenty years’ service: Throckmorton and Hugford followed in their fathers’ footsteps. Throckmorton was Earl Richard’s undersheriff of Worcestershire in 1416–17 and later Warwick chamberlain of the exchequer. Rody, the son of a Warwick goldsmith, was master of the household of the Countess Isabel in 1431–2 and undersheriff of Worcestershire in 1437–8. By 1423 Berkeswell was already in the service of the earl, who presented him in turn to the chantry at Guyscliff in 1430, to St Michael’s hospital at Warwick in 1435, and to a prebend at Warwick College in 1438. Hugford was the earl’s councillor by 1417, receiver-general from 1432, undersheriff in 1435, and was receiver and steward of Glamorgan at the earl’s death.10 All except Throckmorton, who died in 1445, continued to serve Duke Henry, his duchess and daughter and Earl Richard Neville. These executors and Hugford’s son exercised this trust for almost fifty years.11

When the earl died in 1439, King Henry felt grateful to his erstwhile tutor and succumbed to the blandishments of the countess on her deathbed. What Beauchamp lands had not been enfeoffed by the earl in his own life were granted on 18 June 1439 to eight custodians chosen by the countess. They were headed by the Duke of York, Earl of Salisbury, Warwick’s extremely distant cousin Sir John (later Lord) Beauchamp of Powicke and Sir William ap Thomas, father of William Herbert and lord of Raglan Castle in the marcher lordship of Usk. There were four trusted retainers and administrators: Throckmorton and Hugford, whom we have already encountered, John Norris and John Vampage.12 Rival claims were fended off. Salisbury quickly rebuffed the designs of his brother Robert Bishop of Durham as overlord on Barnard Castle, which local ministers resisted by force.13 Another of Salisbury’s brothers Edward Lord Bergavenny seized Abergavenny itself. One of the Beauchamp custodians, Richard Duke of York, was commissioned to put the occupiers out: they were ordered to desist on their allegiance on pain of being reputed as rebels. This was by signet letter dated 15 October, probably in 1443 or 1444. York was later pardoned as occupier and Bergavenny later admitted to being forcibly excluded.14 During Duke Henry’s minority the custodians answered for the revenues to the exchequer and then to the king’s uncle Humphrey Duke of Gloucester.

Before her own death in December 1439, Isabel was allowed to settle most of her own lands ‘at the king’s command’ on her own eight feoffees for the fulfilment of her will. Five were already Beauchamp custodians and four administered the trust until at least 1457. These latter included two rising courtiers – Ralph, the future Lord Sudeley, and John, later Lord Beauchamp of Powicke – and two estate administrators, Norris and the Cornishman John Nanfan.15 Nanfan was particularly close to the late earl, whom he served in France and attended at his deathbed; already in his service by 1427, when he was undersheriff of Worcestershire, he was master forester of Glamorgan to Isabel and subsequently served her son, grand-daughter, and son-in-law Earl Richard Neville.16