Warwick the Kingmaker (27 page)

This ‘rash and despotic queen...carried him [Henry VI] off’ to the Midlands about 17 August.6 She and the prince had been there since May. Henceforth Henry resided at the Lancaster castles of Kenilworth (Warw.) or Leicester or at local religious houses, seldom ventured south, abandoned the regularization of his finances, lived from hand to mouth, and left much of his kingdom to itself. For Dr Wolffe, Henry’s move ‘marked the end of normal political life’.7 The ministry inherited from the protectorate was replaced at the Coventry great council of September/October 1456, when Waynflete and Shrewsbury succeeded the Bourchier brothers as chancellor and treasurer. Using her dominance over king, prince and her own dower, Margaret constructed a regional hegemony in North Wales, the palatinates of Lancaster and Chester, and the North Midlands. Her connection of the white swan reveals her ‘prepared, if not eager, for war’. By the autumn of 1456, observes Professor Griffiths, there was a committed regime:8 committed to the Lancastrian dynasty at its most narrow interpretation, to its sectional benefits rather than the realm as a whole. Margaret could count on the support of such lesser royals as the king’s half-brothers, Somerset, Exeter, and even Devon, whose victory over Bonville was allowed to stand and whose heir married the queen’s cousin Marie of Maine in 1458.9

Such an interpretation made the eventual civil war inevitable.10 But such judgements depend unduly on hindsight, on the knowledge that civil war
did
eventually break out, and interpret each earlier friction as heightening the tension that exploded into conflict. It follows those chroniclers, predominantly Yorkists, who read back into 1456–8 the circumstances of 1459, when the Yorkist lords were indeed excluded, and of 1461, when Margaret did indeed take charge. Her role in these years should not be interpreted in terms of Stodeley’s observation of 1454 without rather more contemporary substantiation than Thomas Gascoigne, whose brief comment is demonstrably wrong in detail.11 The politics of 1456–9 need not be seen in this way. For two years at least both king and Yorkists were determined to resist any escalation in political conflict. If there were differences, they were resolved or were not allowed to colour the whole political climate. If King Henry did in practice spend much of his time in the Midlands, that was the result not his intention. In September 1457 he returned to Westminster to hold a series of politically charged great councils. He did not remove to the Midlands because London was too turbulent for him to remain – indeed he remained in the London area when problems became acute – and there is no proof at this point that he avoided parliament because it might be hijacked by York. If Margaret was a partisan force in politics, she was not in control. The king was always more than a mere figurehead, more than a puppet, and he was capable of decisive interventions. If he held no parliament, he met regularly with his Lords at a series of great councils. He was not personally hostile to the Yorkists and remained temperamentally inclined towards peace and reconciliation. For tensions and crises to arise there needed to be appropriate occasions. Old grievances revived and new ones emerged.

Old grievances were the backcloth to political events. It had been one of York’s considerable successes to quell private feuds, but his achievement was not permanent because his settlements were one-sided and self-interested. Neither the Beauchamp sisters nor George Neville of Bergavenny accepted Warwick’s right to the whole of the Beauchamp and Despenser inheritances. Margaret, the second Beauchamp sister, was occupying Drayton Basset on 19 December 1456, when she promised to save harmless Henry Skernard who had delivered £160 ‘receyued of the lyuelode of the Erldome of Warrewyk the whiche we the said Countesse and our coparcioners claymen to be departed as our enheritances’.12 Roos, eldest son of her sister Eleanor, was among those who sought to seize Warwick by force.13 It was to Warwick’s advantage that his own brother Thomas held the other chamberlainship of the exchequer with Cromwell’s other coheir.14 Warwick clung on to all the Despenser lands even after George proved his age on 25 July 1457 and his consequent licence to enter on the 30th.15 The resentment of the Percies and their retainers at their sentences, especially Egremont’s punitive fines, were fed by the slow process that brought them all eventually to the court of King’s Bench. Egremont himself escaped from prison in November 1456 and remained at large, presumably harboured by his Percy kinsfolk. Such differences may lie behind some of the sporadic violence of these years. They remained latent and were revived in 1459, when opportunity offered.

Far more dangerous were the new grievances that the Yorkists themselves had created. The king may have forgiven them and parliament whitewashed them for St Albans, but others had not and were not to be denied vengeance. The Yorkist victory cost the lives of Somerset, Northumberland and Clifford. The Yorkists denied responsibility, as was necessary to acquit themselves of the imputation of treason, and their attribution of blame dishonoured Somerset and the other victims. Friendly overtures by the Yorkists to the late peers’ heirs and to others such as Wiltshire had been rebuffed. The heirs of the dead lords, the new Duke of Somerset, Earl of Northumberland, and Lord Clifford, now wanted revenge for their fathers’ deaths. They were not particular whether by constitutional trial or by assassination. They were especially hostile to Warwick. They ignored those Yorkist adherents who had not fought or were not known to have fought in the battle, such as the Bourchiers and Grey of Powys. If York and the Neville earls had wished to pursue their separate political ways, to dissolve what had begun as a temporary alliance of mutual self-interest now it had outlasted its usefulness, their vendetta with the victims of St Albans prevented them. At least until the formal reconciliation of 1458, self-defence preserved the alliance of York, Salisbury and Warwick and served to make it permanent. It was this feud that made normal politics increasingly impossible. And significantly the avengers allied themselves to the court.

A clash between Warwick and Beaumont in May 1456 was probably merely a rumour. More substantial were disturbances in Wales inspired by York during the summer. As protector he had countered the disorders of the notorious Gruffydd ap Nicholas by appointing himself constable of Carmarthen and Aberystwyth in the southern principality. He had been unable to take possession, but had not been officially replaced when Richmond, evidently with royal cognizance, took the offensive against Gruffydd. A private army was despatched from Herefordshire on 10 August 1456 to enforce York’s right. It seized Richmond himself, both castles, their archives, and the seal of the chamberlain of South Wales. The commanders were York’s long-standing retainers Devereux and Herbert, who now commissioned themselves to hold the great sessions in South Wales: an action which went rather beyond the widest interpretation of York’s legal rights. Their subsequent offences extended into the marches. Obviously York was implicated.16 That the government once again blamed York’s agents rather than the duke himself explains the resentful but obscure verses attached to the five dead dogs left outside York’s London residence on the night of 19 September.17

It may be that it was actually this insurrection immediately preceding it that prompted Henry’s departure to the Midlands. No government could ignore a private war on such a scale or in such defiance of its own wishes. Action was taken at the next great council at Coventry in late September and early October. It was this assembly that witnessed the replacement of the Bourchier brothers as chancellor and treasurer by Waynflete and Shrewsbury. There is no supporting evidence that it was the queen who ‘made’ Shrewsbury or ‘inserted’ Lawrence Bothe as keeper of the privy seal.18 Warwick attended, apparently commuting from nearby Warwick, where he was on 30 October and 16 November, and where he received the king, who joined him and his countess in making offerings at St Mary’s.19 Perhaps they visited the temporary tomb of the king’s late governor the countess’s father and must certainly have witnessed the progress of the Beauchamp Chapel. York’s relations with the king were reportedly friendly, those with the queen rather less so, and those with others unnamed decidedly hostile. The latter wished to ‘distress’ the duke at his departure, but were prevented by Buckingham.20

Warwick was not preoccupied by high politics. He attended the wedding of his brother John to Isabel Ingoldsthorpe at Canterbury on 25 April 1457. Archbishop Bourchier was the celebrant. Sole daughter of the late Sir Edmund Ingoldsthorpe and hence a modest heiress, Isabel was potentially coheiress through her mother Joyce Tiptoft of the earldom of Worcester; hence Worcester himself ‘broght about the marriage’. Although Isabel was over fourteen and hence of age, the queen insisted on payment for her marriage, subject to any subsequent ruling that adjudged it unnecessary. The down payment is not known: John bound himself to £1,000 in ten instalments and his parents settled eight Montagu manors on them in jointure in 1458.21

John’s marriage immediately preceded Warwick’s departure for Calais, where he was to spend much of the next two years. He remained joint warden of the West March at a salary of £1,250. Unlike their unfortunate counterparts in the East, who built up enormous arrears, the Nevilles’ salaries were appropriated to feefarms and other sources that ensured regular payment and were not due from the exchequer. Fortunately, since what little was due there was seldom paid. Some of these revenues were actually assigned to Warwick’s brother Sir Thomas Neville as their lieutenant on 1 September 1457 to pay his annual salary of 500 marks (£333.33),22 which left them considerably in credit. It was not strictly profit since such unknown other costs as fortifications and retaining were not borne by the lieutenant.

In the spring Henry presided in person over sessions of oyer and terminer at Hereford that once again imposed exemplary retribution on York’s retainers in his heartland. Herbert and Devereux again suffered brief periods of imprisonment. York was compensated with an annuity for dismissal from his constableships.23 Such treatment was not unreasonable. It did not justify the Yorkists absenting themselves from the council. ‘The gret princes of the lond wer nat called to Counceil bot sett A-Parte,’ observed one contemporary chronicle.24 Actually, all seem to have been assiduous in attending great councils and were not excluded from any before autumn 1459. Virtually nothing is known of attendance at the regular council in these years and Warwick had good reason to be absent in Calais for much of the time. Hence his absence from the extraordinary commissions in fourteen southern and midland counties appointed in July 1457. That York and Salisbury were also omitted is indicative of royal displeasure, but this is a relative term. It was a very mild disfavour that did not prevent the renewal of York’s patent as lieutenant of Ireland at the same time, six months before the expiry of his previous term. Nor did it prevent the king and council from turning to Warwick to command a naval force in October following the French raid on Sandwich and developing it in December into a three-year appointment as keeper of the seas. Warwick was the regime’s front line against France.

If not excluded from political influence or self-advancement, this was a bad time for the Nevilles. Following the death of Edmund Tudor and the succession of his infant son as earl of Richmond, the stewardship of Richmondshire that Salisbury had coveted was granted to Humphrey Neville of Brancepeth (Dur.), a cadet of the senior, Westmorland, line. Similarly on 8 July Warwick’s uncle Robert Neville Bishop of Durham died. His successor was to be the queen’s client and keeper of the privy seal, Lawrence Bothe, who was to prefer the senior house of Neville as officeholders to the junior branch. Moreover Warwick’s loss of the Channel Isles was again confirmed on 8 October 1457 with the ten-year appointment as governor of John Nanfan, admittedly Warwick’s own chosen deputy.25

It was the ‘grutche and wrath’ of the victims of St Albans against the victors that was the cause of the ‘grave and dangerous dissension’ that paralysed political life and preoccupied the government in the autumn and winter of 1457–8. Hence the great council that met at Westminster from 12 October to 29 November 1457 ‘to set aside such variances as be betwixt divers lords’ and which both York and Salisbury attended. Nothing is known of the proceedings, which do not seem to have been very successful: in November Exeter, Somerset, Shrewsbury and Roos tried to seize Warwick, but found him well-accompanied and ‘durst [not] countre with him for he was named and taken in all places for the moost corageous and manliest knight lyvyng’. Hence presumably the deploy-ment of royal troops around London, at Whetstone and Hornsey Park to the north, Hounslow to the west, and Southwark to the south. In December there may have been another attempt on the life of York himself at Coventry.26 No wonder the king decided on a supreme effort at reconciliation the following year. ‘And sith it is soo that as yet we have not fully concluded’, the summons runs, so that our people remain in jeopardy, the lords were summoned to a further council on 26 January ‘to sette apon such variaunce as been betwixt divers lordes of this our reame’.27

Once again the auguries were not favourable. All the principal parties did eventually appear, but they were as prepared for war as peace. So alarmingly large were their retinues that there was a real danger of conflict if mediation faltered or opportunity arose. Hence the Lord Mayor kept a force of 5,000 men in readi-ness to maintain the peace. Accounts differ on precise numbers, but not on the scale of the retinues. Exeter and Somerset brought 800 men and Northumberland, Egremont and Clifford another 1,500, who were accommodated between Temple Bar and Westminster, to the west of the City, from which the mayor excluded them ‘because they came agaynst the pease’ and intending to fight York. The Yorkists in contrast were allowed to lodge in their usual residences within the City: York at Baynards Castle, Salisbury at le Erber, and Warwick at Greyfriars. York may have brought as many as 400 men including 140 horsemen, and Salisbury 500 including 80 knights and squires, which were somewhat unconvincingly claimed by sympathizers to be their normal households and ‘thinking none harme’. Warwick was reported to be held up by contrary winds on 4 February and arrived from Calais only on the 14th. He made an impressive and rather expensive show with a company of 600 men clad in red jackets with ragged staves embroidered on chest and back. No more than a fraction can have been members of his Calais crews.28 Warwick’s arrival signalled the start of serious negotiations.