Warwick the Kingmaker (13 page)

Warwick was also the spiritual home of the earldom. The Beauchamp earls and their families were religious, some exceptionally so. Thomas II, Rous tells us, was a great almsgiver, who visited the bedridden in person, and Richard was inspired in his patronage by the advice received and sought from Dame Emma Raughton, anchoress of North Street, York. In 1421 his receiver accounted for the costs of fetching a recluse from Winchester to London by William (? Berkeswell) chaplain of Guyscliff. Allegedly his daughter Margaret tolerated no blasphemy in her household and his son Henry confessed and recited the psalter daily and forbade oppression by his staff. Warwick’s religious houses, hospitals and churches were tangible evidence of their piety. Pensions were paid annually to some religious institutions. Pride of place belongs to the college of St Mary’s, originally founded by the Beaumont earls for a dean and canons, whose livings remained amongst the most attractive in the gift of later earls. St Mary’s Church stood in a precinct then much larger than the present churchyard that also contained a chapter house, treasury, deanery, houses for the canons and a hall for the vicars choral. Large and cruciform with a western tower, St Mary’s was a low-lying Norman structure, of which only the crypt now survives. Whereas Earl Guy was buried at Bordesley Abbey (Warw.) in 1315, his son Thomas I selected St Mary’s for his burial place. He was responsible for discontinuing divine service in all churches in Warwick except St Mary’s and St Nicholas’s, to which henceforth all residents were to resort, and it was he who began the building of the choir in a loftier, more delicate, and altogether more fashionable style. His table tomb stands in the centre. His son Thomas II, who finished the choir, is commemorated by a splendid brass. It was the latter’s son Richard who commissioned the three-bay Beauchamp Chapel to the south, on the site of the old deanery, which cost £2,200 over nearly fifty years to erect and equip. Walls, vaults and stained glass are covered with coats of arms, muzzled bears, and family portraits. In the centre stands his own splendid alabaster tomb with his brass effigy. Richard and Anne are among the miniature brazen mourners along the sides. There also lie Sir Henry Neville of Latimer and Oliver Dudley, killed at Edgecote on the Kingmaker’s behalf in 1469.

An inventory of 1465 records the great store of vestments, service books, and plate accumulated by the college, some given by past earls and countesses, but much also by prebendaries, by such Warwick retainers as Watkin Power, by residents and tenants of Warwick, like William father of John Rous. Items had been given by Earl Thomas II and his Countess Margaret Ferrers of Groby (hence the intertwined initials T and M) and by Earl Richard and Countess Isabel. Hence the plethora of bears and ragged staves, the arms of Warwick, Beauchamp, Elmeley Castle, Ferrers and Spencer. Our Richard’s consort Anne ‘now countess of Warwick’ had given two rich copes, the orfrais set with her father’s arms, the body of purple velvet and cloth of gold, with a hood of fine embroidered work set with a little scutcheon of the Despenser arms.85 More, doubtless, would follow on their deaths. Earl Richard Neville had borrowed a fine mass book from the sacrist – just as his consort had earlier borrowed her parents’ dispensation from the college archives: both were returned.86 The college was no mere resting place of the comital family, where they were assured of prayers, it was also the religious centre of the town where dependants of all kinds worshipped and adorned. It was also a conspicuous testimony to their rank, wealth and power that nobody present at the services could overlook. And if the college commemorated earls, the Beauchamp Chapel was nothing short of princely.

Important though their regional base was to them, the Beauchamps were no mere provincial notables. They had played their full part in national and even international affairs: as Lords Ordainer and Lords Appellant, as knights of the Garter, as crusaders, conquerors of Gower from the Welsh, and in foreign and civil war. None more so than Richard, a hero and a legend in his own lifetime. Knight, jouster, diplomat, statesman, general and tutor of the young Henry VI, who attended the General Council of the Church at Constance and visited the Holy Land, he was dubbed by the Emperor Sigismund father of courtesy, ‘ffor and all curtsy were lost...hyt myght haue be found in his person’. Yet amidst all this glory, he remembered his roots, jousting with a lord of Germany first in the arms of Warwick, secondly in those of Elmeley Castle (Worcs.), and thirdly as baron of Hanslope (Bucks.). The arms of Tosny also featured. His crest was invariably the bear and ragged staff. Always, however, he was the local magnate who fostered the interests of his town of Warwick.

The well-known eulogies of about 1483 in the rolls of John Rous cantarist of Guyscliff and in the anonymous
Pageant of Richard Beauchamp Earl of Warwick
are prefigured in the lost reminiscences of his own receiver-general John Brewster. Besides his master’s achievements in war and peace, Brewster recorded his building works at Warwick, at Hanley and Elmeley Castles (Worcs.), at Drayton Basset (Staffs.), Baginton, Sutton Coldfield and Berkeswell (Warw.), at Caversham (Berks.) and at Hanslope (Bucks.). Brewster’s son was still living in his father’s rent-free cottage at Warwick in 1449, presumably with John Brewster’s book. There survive love poems attributed to Earl Richard and a description supposedly of his funeral service. The
Rous Roll
presumes the existence of such raw material. For earlier earls, too, Rous needed other sources: perhaps genealogies like those of the Nevilles, Montagus or FitzHughs. And it is no accident that accounts of Richard’s funeral and executors were preserved locally for several centuries.

The Beauchamps, perhaps especially Earl Richard, were proud of their lineage, their name and their title: the
Rous Roll
and the Beauchamp Chapel proudly record their quarterings. At least three earls on four occasions sought to preserve their line, name and title. When remarrying Earl Richard refounded the chapel at Guyscliff near Warwick on the advice of a York recluse ‘that he might have eyres male’; later he enjoined his son Duke Henry never to change his title from Warwick.

Many legends of the Beauchamp’s ancestors were already current in the fourteenth century. The thirteenth-century Tosnys traced their line from the Swan knight; the ceremonial gold cup of the Swan passed via their Beauchamp descendants to Earl Richard Neville and beyond. The famous badge of the bear and ragged staff brought together the Beauchamp bear, probably derived from Urse d’Abitot, and the ragged staff of Sir Guy of Warwick. Guy was a legendary giant, whose story was recounted in a romance that Mason dates to the Warwick–Oilly marriage of 1205 which was greatly elaborated by Rous. ‘The flour and honour of knyghthode’ and heroic conqueror of Colbrond at Winchester, Guy retired to live as a hermit in the cave of Guyscliff by Warwick and was supposedly ancestor to future earls of Warwick. Hence when Earl William Beauchamp inherited the earldom, he identified with Guy, giving the name to his son and successor. A new tower was called Guy’s Tower and Earl Thomas I named two of his own sons Guy and Reinbrun after the giant and his son. ‘In changing their patterns of nomenclature, the Beauchamps indicated that they truly identified with the honour to which they had fortuitously succeeded’: a model followed by our Warwick and his sons-in-law Clarence and Gloucester. Earl Thomas I also acquired the cave from St Sepulchre’s priory, and ‘new bylt hit the mansion undre the chapell and namyd hit Gyclif in memory of sir Gy’. Perhaps it was also he who hewed the eight-foot statue of Guy from the rock. Inspired by the anchoress Emma Raughton, Earl Richard replaced the hermit with a chantry for two priests, ‘which in process of time’ (observed an over-optimistic eulogist!) ‘shall growe to a place of great worship oon of the best made in England’. The two-aisled chapel was physically reconstructed and partly carved out of the rock by his executors. It was at Guyscliff that Dean Berkeswell was cantarist before becoming dean of Warwick College and that Rous himself served out his life.87 The fan-vaulted tower was erected by the executors in 1449–50, Richard Neville’s first year as earl of Warwick.

The Despensers can also be traced back to the thirteenth century, but the core of their inheritance – Glamorgan and Tewkesbury – goes back much further, to Robert FitzHamo. Around 1100 he refounded Tewkesbury Abbey, to which he gave the rectory of St Mary’s at his new borough of Cardiff. His daughter Mabel carried them first to Henry I’s bastard Robert of Gloucester and thence to the de Clare Earls of Gloucester and Hertford. A second royal line was introduced by the marriage of Earl Gilbert to Edward I’s daughter Joan of Acre, whose second family by Ralph Monthermer were ancestors of the Montagu earls of Salisbury. Following the death of the last de Clare earl at Bannockburn in 1314, the inheritance was divided among their three daughters, among them Eleanor wife of Edward II’s favourite Hugh Despenser the Younger. Despenser’s share included the lordship of Glamorgan in the marches of South Wales. Hard though he tried, he was unable to recreate the earldom of Gloucester, which was held only briefly in 1397–9 by his great-grandson Thomas. Even alone, Glamorgan was the greatest and most valuable of all the marcher lordships.

If Wales was no longer a war zone, the Welsh were not altogether subdued: witness the prolonged rebellion of Owen Glendower, that had caused damage even in Cardiff. The marcher lords retained their privileged status, free from royal interference and entitled to their own sheriffs, chancellors and exchequers. None had a tradition of independence greater than the lords of Glamorgan. Hence too the host of castles that were maintained in defensible condition: Caerphilly, with its concentric tower-studded walls and water-defences, rivalled both Edward I’s North Welsh castles and John of Gaunt’s Kenilworth. There were several seigneurial boroughs – Neath, Kenfig, Cowbridge and Cardiff itself; a cathedral at Llandaff; and the two Cistercian abbeys of Neath and Margam.

The largest town in Glamorgan, perhaps in Wales, was the port of Cardiff. Walled, with several gates and towers, Cardiff may have had a thousand inhabitants in the early sixteenth century and had probably changed little by the time of Speed’s map of 1611. Cardiff stood on the right bank of, and partly encircled by, the River Taff (since diverted), over which there was a strategically important bridge. The parish church at the south end of the broad main street was appropriated to Tewkesbury Abbey; the tithes were farmed by Thomas Porthaleyn. At the north end stood the stone-built castle. Twelfth century in origin, with a large motte surmounted by a shell keep and encircled by a ditch, it had two wards and included the surviving lofty tower constructed by Earl Richard Beauchamp. Cardiff Castle was the seat of seigneurial government, of the chancery and exchequer; it was where Warwick himself resided. The constable was also mayor of Cardiff: the aldermen and officers swore oaths to him. Apparently the citizens had only just finished the town wall, gates and towers at great cost to themselves and allegedly to the service of the new earl on 12 March 1451, when Warwick confirmed their existing liberties and granted them new privileges. Henceforth all cases except felonies wherever committed by residents of Cardiff could be tried only in the constable’s hundred court.88 Warwick also granted new charters to the borough of Cowbridge and to the abbeys of Margam, Neath and Tewkesbury.89 He acted like previous lords, operated within traditional expectations, and was accepted as such: hence the impressive lists of witnesses to his charters.

Tewkesbury Abbey, seven miles north of Gloucester at a strategically important crossing of the Severn, was the spiritual home of the de Clares and the Despensers. It was via Tewkesbury that Warwick regularly proceeded from Warwick to Abergavenny, Cardiff and back. Tewkesbury was perhaps the most important Benedictine house not in royal patronage; its abbot was the last to be summoned to the House of Lords after the patronage passed to the crown. The nave retains the colossal Norman columns of the original design, but the choir was lavishly remodelled in the Decorated style by the Younger Despenser and his wife. Their models were apparently Westminster Abbey and Hailes Abbey (Gloucs.), the masterpieces of Henry III and his brother Richard King of the Romans, and apparently Despenser’s intention was to create a mausoleum to outshine theirs. ‘Though lacking blue-blood and the title of Gloucester, Despenser was the peer (and more) of any nobleman living or deceased, and the rightful successor of his forerunners at Tewkesbury.’ The vault of the whole church traces the life of Christ from his birth in the west to his heavenly glory in the east, where the Despenser mausoleum is to be found. The eastern apse, with its chevet of chapels, includes one dedicated to St Margaret of Scotland, significantly an ancestress of the Despensers. Seven clerestorey windows were glazed soon after 1340 with imposing portraits of armoured men identifiable by their surcoats as, among others, Despensers, de Clares, Robert of Gloucester and the founder Robert FitzHamo. Long after FitzHamo’s death, in 1397, his body was transferred by Abbot Parkares to a chantry chapel of the stone cage type in the north choir arcade. His de Clare successors lie beneath the choir floor before the altar. The Younger Despenser himself rests immediately south of the altar, his son Hugh (d. 1349) immediately to the north, and the kneeling effigy of his grandson Edward (d. 1375) prays atop his chantry chapel to the south. The opposite bay on the north side was appropriated for the most splendid chantry of all: that of Richard Earl of Worcester (d. 1422), completed in 1438, which his countess chose as her own resting place in preference to her second husband’s college at Warwick. Three empty niches may once have contained figures of herself and her two husbands.90 Her son Duke Henry, formerly Lord Despenser, lies buried somewhere at Tewkesbury, and her grand-daughter Isabel the Duchess and her husband George the Duke of Clarence selected a site behind the altar for their sepulchre. In Tewkesbury, Richard and Anne were as much parts of an ongoing tradition as at Warwick.