Warwick the Kingmaker (19 page)

Both Neville earls were well rewarded for their ‘faithful and diligent service’ at Dartford. Warwick was paid £300. He and his countess were pardoned for entries without licence to her inheritance and custodies; so were her Beauchamp sisters. He secured royal confirmations of charters for Welsh tenants. On 7 May he was appointed to the commission of the peace for Warwickshire for the first time and on 28 June to the commission of oyer and terminer to try some of York’s offending adherents. On 26 March 1452 both earls were rewarded by the renewal of leases at increased rents of their Yorkshire and Cumbrian properties and, most crucially, of George Neville’s half of the Despenser inheritance.45 Warwick did not recover the Channel Isles, for which John Nanfan remained governor for the king,46 nor the reversion of Feckenham.

The Nevilles did suffer from Henry VI’s decision to recognize his two Tudor half-brothers, the sons of his late mother Queen Katherine of France by Owen Tudor, and to promote them earls: the very least that he could do. Actually the king had considerable difficulty in endowing them each with the 1,000 marks (£666 13
s
. 4
d
.) that was the minimum for an earl. Jasper’s earldom and lordship of Pembroke had been resumed from the young duke of Suffolk, whose betrothal to the heiress Margaret Beaufort was broken off to permit her marriage to Edmund. Other properties were resumed from York. Edmund Tudor was created earl of Richmond and received the castle, honour, overlordship of feudal tenants, and feefarm that the Nevilles had so long coveted and that Salisbury had thought he had secured by exchange in 1449. Salisbury was permitted to keep other grants to him from the honour made before 1422. Apparently the new earl appointed Salisbury to some at least of the key offices, for in 1459 he was bailiff of the wapentakes of Hang East and Hang West, but it was still a substantial blow and likely to be permanent. Though Edmund died in 1456, there was a posthumous son Henry to succeed him. Edmund was also granted the lordship of Kendal (Cumb.), for which he retained Salisbury as steward.47

For Warwick, as premier earl, there was another blow, for the newcomers were granted precedence over any other earls and indeed marquises too. Warwick as premier earl now ranked third: an undated attendance list of the House of Lords from 1453–4 shows Warwick seated after the two Tudor earls. It was no compensation that Warwick was nominated to the Garter by Viscount Bourchier at the Garter chapter held on 7 May in the king’s bedchamber at Westminster but not elected.48 He must also have been worried about the ill-health and childbearing that on 7 July prompted a papal licence for his countess to eat meat and eggs during Lent.49

The parliament that opened at Reading in March 1453 and sat at Westminster from April to July was the first at which Warwick was a trier of petitions.50 It also, in Professor Griffiths’ words, ‘marked the zenith of recovery’ for the king.51

Shrewsbury had achieved victories abroad to match the discomfiture of York at home. The king’s constant progresses, assiduous attendance at judicial sessions and executions, and his firm punishment of even favoured magnates involved in violent feuding had proved his genuine commitment to the restoration of order. The anarchic public disorders of 1450 were past. No more attempts were made to murder ministers and courtiers. The only two violent quarrels among magnates, the Berkeley–Lisle and Courtenay–Bonville feuds, had been firmly (if somewhat partially) quelled and the principal offenders were in prison. The king had even held judicial sessions in August 1452 at York’s heartland of Ludlow to punish participants in the Dartford disaster. Somerset, as the man behind the throne, was as vigorous in enforcing law and order as York had been in demanding it. Further royal judicial progresses were promised on 2 July 1453, the last day of the second session, though Henry cannot have appreciated the scale of the disturbances to be encountered. At once he demonstrated his resolve by salutary (if brief) imprisonment of Lord Cromwell, Lord Grey of Ruthin, and the Duke of Exeter, the three principal contestants in the Ampthill dispute. Even elder statesmen and dukes were subject to royal discipline. The policy that the king enforced was that no ‘escalation of private feuds’ was allowed.52

Understandably impressed, the Commons now elected in Thomas Thorpe a reliable exchequer official as Speaker and voted a substantial tax towards the war in Gascony. Now at last Henry had the parliament to attaint Jack Cade, to revoke the indictments of 1450 against courtiers, and to repeal the act excluding favourites from his company. Grants to those with York at Dartford were resumed and Sir William Oldhall, the former Speaker and York’s right-hand man, was attainted. The creation of the king’s brothers was confirmed, to the loss of Salisbury and York. It must already have been apparent that Queen Margaret was to provide him with an heir of his own body. The king’s triumph sealed York’s defeat: it was at this point that he lost the two important offices of lieutenant of Ireland and chief justice of the southern forests. The lieutenantcy went to the Earl of Wiltshire. Unable to protect his servants and bereft of the most important, York had been politically invisible for a year and had little future politically beyond the normal role of a great magnate, sulking on his estates, unless Somerset overstepped himself. Now supremely confident, it was Somerset himself who took the chief justiciarship of southern forests from York on 2 July 1453,53 the last day of the second session. It was also on Somerset that on 15 June the custody of George Neville’s half of Glamorgan was bestowed. Warwick’s territorial position had also been threatened in April by two licences to enter Abergavenny and Mereworth to Bergavenny and by the farming of Ewyas Lacy by the exchequer.

It was Somerset’s intention to make the division of the Despenser inheritance into a reality. Perhaps he hoped to raise the stakes in his own Beauchamp dispute. Perhaps he wished to build up his power in an area where he had a long-standing interest as steward of the adjoining Lancaster lordships of Kidwelly to the west and Monmouth and Three Castles to the north-east. Warwick’s tactic, as before, was to ignore such patents and hold on to what he had. But this was no mere court-based paper exercise. Somerset was now ready to make his title good, by force if necessary, and was backed by the authority of the crown. Presumably an initial peaceful approach from Somerset was rebuffed. Next, in force and anticipating resistance, Somerset’s men entered the lordship and were resisted. Reports reached the royal council by 19 July, when the sheriff of Glamorgan William Herbert and eight others were summoned to explain themselves. On 21 July both Somerset and Warwick were cited to appear, Somerset being present at the time. Perhaps it was now that Warwick intervened in person: recording as passing through Coventry from Warwick towards Wales in July, he was at Ross on Wye on 2 August:54 coming or going? By 27 July ‘diverse variances and controversies’ had reached the council’s ears at Westminster.

the which caused diverse in the countrys ther grete gatherynges congre-gacions & assembles unlaweful & the towne of Cardieff withe the Castele & towne of Coubryge kept with grete strength as it were in land of war [to] our grete displeasure and grete trouble...

Cowbridge, in west Glamorgan, was close to Kidwelly. By ‘the feythe & liegeaunce that ye owe unto us’, Warwick was ordered to desist from such manoeuvrings, to disband any assemblies already assembled, and to surrender the castles to the courtier Lord Dudley pending the council’s decision on the rule and governance.55 It is surely evidence of the council’s alarm (and perhaps Somerset’s too) that Glamorgan was confided first to a third party, even if the duke, who was present at the meeting, expected the ultimate decision to be in his favour. Removing Warwick’s grasp from Glamorgan was a victory for Somerset and half the battle won.

This same poorly attended meeting of council wrote equally vigorously to Warwick’s father Salisbury and Northumberland and commanded them to suspend their feuding in Yorkshire.56 That same day King Henry left Westminster on judicial progress, first stop Clarendon in Wiltshire,57 that was obviously destined to take him to Wales ahead of the North. Warwick could not resist the king. Perhaps reinforcements from Somerset arrived at Cowbridge first. At Tewkesbury on 20 August, Warwick was at Cardiff on the 24th.58 But the threat to Warwick’s allegiance did not happen, for King Henry proceeded no further; Somerset stayed at court; Warwick did not surrender Glamorgan to Dudley and indeed crushed his opponents with the aid of a contingent from Staffordshire. Fulk Stafford of Clent (Staffs.), who was feed from Walsall, was paid for his costs and expenses on divers occasions whilst at Cardiff at the time of the rebellion there by authority of a signet warrant of the lord earl dated at Cardiff on 24 August. Henry Flaxhale, some relative of Warwick’s bailiff at Walsall, was granted an annuity of £2 and he and his fellows were paid £5 in expenses for riding from Walsall to Cardiff to the earl at the time of the afore-said rebellion, staying there, and returning. Evidently they had returned by 6 September, the date of the earl’s warrant. By then Warwick was again at Tewkesbury,59 and could turn his attention to other matters. His control was not to be endangered again.

4.3 TIME FOR DECISION

Many issues, public and private, served to divide the peerage in 1450–3, even when apparently most united against York’s Dartford
putsch
, but they had not caused any firm taking of sides. The Nevilles suffered the advancement of the Tudor brothers and did not come to blows with other contenders for the Warwick inheritance. In the summer of 1453, that changed. Actions against their interests by the court placed them logically in the opposition and the fortuitous madness of the king made York into the avenue for them to achieve their aims. There is no need to postulate a conversion to notions of reform for the common good. It was self-interest that drove them to ally with York. It was an alliance that was to last and to shape Warwick’s whole subsequent career.

As parliament dispersed on 2 July 1453, three violent quarrels among noblemen demanded royal attention: Somerset’s attempted takeover in Glamorgan; Exeter v. Cromwell over Ampthill (Beds.); and the Percy–Neville feud in Yorkshire. All involved Warwick or his family and became interlocked.

Like so many noble quarrels, the Percy–Neville feud took place within the family. The second Earl of Northumberland, the head of the Percies, was married to Salisbury’s sister Eleanor and the offspring of both earls were therefore first cousins. Northumberland had owed his restoration in 1416 to Salisbury’s father and the two families had co-operated amicably over the years, for example in the Scottish war of 1448–9, and had stood aside from one another’s quarrels. The situation was stable. Neville aggrandizement had ceased: indeed ground had been lost through resumption and the creation of a potential rival in both their principal domains in Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond, lord of Kendal and Wyresdale. It is not at all obvious that ‘without any shadow of doubt by 1453 the Nevilles were the stronger and their strength was still growing’.60 They had reached and perhaps passed their peak. The marriages that Salisbury was to arrange for his daughters with other northern noblemen, whilst worthy enough, signal a retreat from the national stage, where dilute Beaufort blood no longer worked wonders, to the provincial pattern that had prevailed before Earl Ralph’s second brood.

The feud, therefore, was not a long-standing dispute: it seems to have arisen abruptly in the summer of 1453.61 Nor was it an inheritance dispute. Perhaps, therefore, as modern historians have argued, it arose from local rivalries. The respective domains of the two families were different: Richmondshire, Barnard Castle, Cumbria and the West March for the Nevilles, the East Riding, Craven, Northumberland and the East March for the Percies. Nothing was changing here. Admittedly their spheres overlapped in Cumbria, whence Northumberland’s son Thomas Lord Egremont took his title and where another son William was newly Bishop of Carlisle. Near Thirsk in the North Riding only a few miles separated the Percies’ Topcliffe and the Nevilles’ Sowerby. Their interests also coincided at York, the provincial capital. It is unclear how significant was the geography. Certainly the Egremont title was irrelevant, for it was Northumberland, not his son, who held only one-third of the lordship as a coheir of the Multons, and Egremont had no estate anywhere of his own. Neither earl was much in favour at court and each was having difficulty in providing for his younger children, especially the younger sons, who took the lead in this quarrel. Ties of kinship did not cause holds to be barred, as the Percies sought to murder and the Nevilles to bankrupt their cousins. Possibly competitive power-seeking was the cause; perhaps rivalry between their younger sons, who took the lead, and for whom cousinage understandably counted for less than ties between siblings. The records of the prosecution of the Percies by allies of the Nevilles the following year provide copious data about events, but regrettably little explanation. It is far from obvious that the Percies were at fault.62

What first reached the ears of the royal council were the actions of Northumberland’s son Egremont before 8 June 1453, when he was summoned to answer before them. He did not appear and indeed persisted in his behaviour, provoking further summonses on 26 June and 7 July, when he was urged to serve in Gascony.63 Whatever he was doing was omitted from the later indictments. Evidently it offended Salisbury’s son Sir John Neville, who was summoned on 26 June and who on the 29th attacked the Percy castle of Topcliffe, only to find Egremont was not there.64 Probably it was the news of this that prompted the issuing of an authoritative commission of oyer and terminer on 12 July for the North Riding alone on which both earls, three other peers, and thirteen others were named. Griffiths describes this as biased towards the Nevilles and certainly Salisbury was attending council, as he had not for three years, up to 22 July.65 On 25 July the commission was reissued: then apparently rescinded, perhaps as the council realized that the principal offenders were not acting independently of their fathers, that they could not sit together, and that disturbances were more widespread. On 27 July more drastic action was taken. The two earls were urged to control their sons, rioters were identified and ordered to submit, and a new commission was appointed to inquire into riots, routs and congregations throughout the northern counties and to take security from offenders. Gone were the magnates, to be replaced by the councillor Sir William Lucy and three judges.66 That nine Percy retainers summoned on 10 August were from the West March reveals that the feud had developed, either into Cumbria or more probably by the importation of Cumbrian manpower into a Yorkshire dispute.67 And on 24 August, in a further escalation, there was a skirmish at Heworth just outside York, where Egremont, allegedly with 5,000 men (710 known by name), encountered a Neville cavalcade apparently en route for Sheriff Hutton that included Salisbury himself and his countess, their sons Thomas and John, and Thomas’s wife. There was little bloodshed.