Warwick the Kingmaker (40 page)

The debacle at Ludford may have left its mark. With that experience, York’s Welsh retainers, Salisbury’s northerners, and Warwick’s West Midlanders might reasonably refuse another insurrection against the king. They may have needed to be reassured of the loyalty and legality of their cause before turning out for their lords again. As in 1456 and 1459, the Yorkists were backed by only a handful of the Lords, most of whom were staunchly loyal if also, it appears, out of touch with popular sentiment. Instead the Yorkists sought to exploit the long-standing Kentish grievances expressed by Jack Cade, repressed but not forgotten, and the apparently unquenched if unjustifiable hostility of the populace to successive royal governments, on both of which Warwick was updated through his contacts with the Cinque Ports. They also enlisted the Londoners, both oligarchs and populace, who approved of Warwick’s support of English trade and admired his attacks on foreign shipping. They secured the support of the Church. They appealed to English patriotism. And they made a more sustained effort to present themselves as champions of the common good. The Yorkist campaign of 1460 was a popular uprising focused and directed by the great nobility.

The chosen strategy carried high risks. Warwick was required to meta-morphose from great magnate into popular demagogue. He had to allow popular violence and revenge without prejudicing public order or alienating the propertied majority. Of course, the strategy worked, in the South-East. It does not appear to have had any impact elsewhere. The popularity of the Yorkists may have been only regional in scope: the North, the West Country and the Midlands were unsubdued. In the autumn the Yorkists were to whip up southern fears of the wild northerners against Queen Margaret. At the end of the year it was the northern commons who hated Salisbury enough to lynch him.

The Yorkists mobilized their target audience by carefully focused propaganda. It did not have to be true, as the Lancastrian speaker in the
Somnium
shrewdly observed.96 We know that the Yorkists corresponded with England from abroad, though we do not have what they wrote or know for certain what it said. We may also deduce that they heard the government’s replies and had incorporated their own ripostes in their manifestos. Some elements of propaganda in the chronicles do not derive from any surviving Yorkist poems and manifestos. Rumour and innuendo were rife. How much of this was fostered by the Yorkists? Were they behind smears too dangerous to acknowledge? Even before the Yorkists invoked the threat of a French invasion in their manifesto, the government feared it and diverted precious resources to obstruct it, for example by preparing Caister Castle in Norfolk:97 was this because of disinformation from the Yorkists, as in 1458–9? Foreign threats had been invoked by the Yorkist apologist in the
Somnium Vigilantis
and were to be again against Queen Margaret,98 admittedly with some justification. If the kingdom was in a dreadful state, as the Yorkists again alleged, surely it was not because the queen ruled all – a treasonable allegation which the Yorkists never specifically made – with the support of covetous evil councillors? Queen Margaret was said to be an adulteress and her son Prince Edward, the heir apparent, was not the king’s son, but a bastard. The Yorkist verses posted on the gates at Canterbury referred, not too opaquely, to ‘fals wedlock’ and ‘fals heyres’.99 It was thus possible to separate allegiance to the king from commitment to his line.

The Yorkist lords were amazingly successful in evading the treason of which they stood convicted. Nowhere did they admit their disloyalty or rebellion, the justice of the verdict against them or the legitimacy of the Coventry parliament. They had been condemned unjustly and the first act of their new Yorkist parliament was to declare its predecessor illegitimate and void. It was the losing argument of the Yorkist apologist in the
Somnium Vigilantis
that prevailed, not the winning Lancastrian case. In the
Somnium
their uprising in 1459 had been justified because directed to the common good, to the reform of the government, and to ‘the perempsion of such persones the whiche were odious to God and to the peple for thaire mysreule’. Far from deserving punishment, the Yorkist lords merited thanks and reward.100 When they invaded in 1460, they claimed that it was ‘for the rizt of England’ that they ‘haue sufferd moche wo’ and ‘alle Englonde is be-holden to them’. York was compared to God’s unworthy servant Job, ‘whom Sathan not cesethe to be sette at care and disdeyne’. Warwick was reported to have complained to the king at Northampton that ‘we haue be put in gret hevynesse’. They had ‘never entendid to be otherwyse than feythfull and trew liege men to the king’; nor had York himself,

Whom treason ne falshod neuer dyd shame,

But euer obedient to his sovereigne;

Falsehod euer-more put hym in blame,

And lay awayte hym to have sleigne.

They had been constantly summoned, denied access and then destroyed. Their punishment had not been approved by the king.101 The sentence against them was unusual, cruel and exceptional: one chronicle harked on the novel word
atteyntid
.102 Evidently the new doctrine of attainder took time to catch on and did not easily overcome existing belief in the sanctity of inheritance. Sympathy for them may have attracted other lords to their camp. It certainly explains the adherence of Bergavenny to his brothers Salisbury and Fauconberg and nephew Warwick. At such times shared lineage counted for more than inheritance disputes, such as the Despenser one between Bergavenny’s son and Warwick. Similarly the government’s repression of treason in Ludlow and at Newbury, the latter the result of judicial sessions, were inflated into tyrannical reigns of terror. Not only does the 1460 manifesto allude to Newbury and to James Earl of Wiltshire, the principal commissioner, but the story found its way into the chronicles including that of the Burgundian Waurin.103 A kingdom divided against itself, a poet observed, ‘shall be desolate’.104 Poets eulogized the Yorkist lords. England really needed them back at the political helm.

As captain of Calais, keeper of the seas, and on the march from Calais to the Midlands via London, Warwick had rediscovered and revived a crucial feature to his advantage: the popularity of the Yorkist lords and especially of the earl himself with the sailors and traders of the Cinque Ports and London. They were ‘suche as stoden gretely in the fauuoure of the peple’, asserted the Yorkist speaker in the
Somnium Vigilantis
, which his Lancastrian counterpart belittled rather than denied directly.105 The chroniclers need to be treated with caution because they were biased towards the Yorkists and were influenced by the massive support that the earls actually secured. ‘For it was sayde that alle Kent favoured and supported them and sothe it was’, remarks the
English Chronicle
.106 Yet it has a point. When Somerset landed at Guines, it was not pure accident that three of his ships entered Calais harbour and surrendered to Warwick. The crews favoured the earl. He let them go free. The men of Sandwich kept Warwick informed of the progress of countermeasures against him. Three times seamen deserted the king to join him. Londoners supplied him with munitions. Men crossed from England to join him at Calais.107 As
The Brut
repeatedly observes, they all acted of their own ‘fre wil’.108 Warwick was able to receive complaints from England and incorporated them in his manifesto. And it was presumably Kentish sympathizers who supplied him with a copy of Jack Cade’s own manifesto.

The ground had been prepared for a popular appeal and there were receptive minds close at hand when the Yorkists invaded. The Yorkists issued several bills, of which two are known to us directly; there are also several propagandist poems which surely emanated from them as well. Altogether we have eight pieces which, in their present forms, were designed for different audiences at different times; they may well have been reissued and adapted to other unknown occasions as well. They are unlikely to be all that once existed. These are:

1. the Yorkist apology in the
Somnium Vigilantis
of November 1459, which anticipates much later Yorkist propaganda;109

2. certainly antedating the Yorkist invasion, the 72 lines that Sir Frederick Madden dubbed
Verses on the Yorkist Lords
;110

3. the letter of the Yorkist earls to the papal nuncio Coppini, 25 June 1460;111

4. a recycled manifesto of Jack Cade, which obviously corresponded to Kentish grievances current a decade before, and of use primarily at the landing in Kent;112

5. eleven stanzas totalling 88 lines addressed to the ‘To the ryghte Worshypfulle Cite of Caunterbury’ and attached to the gates ahead of the arrival of the Yorkist lords;113

6. a wholly new manifesto addressed to Archbishop Bourchier, who was known to be in London, and the commons, dated about 3 July 1460;114

7. ‘A Poem on the Battle of Northampton’ of 20 stanzas of 160 lines, composed after the death of Lord Scales on 18 July: Warwick features as the Bear and March as the Bearward;115

8. rumours against northerners disseminated by Richard Duke of York in the South which Queen Margaret and Prince Edward sought to rebut to the City of London in December 1460.116

All were loyal protestations that declared the rebels’ commitment to the king. The
Verses on the Yorkist Lords
declares their objective to be to

Destroy treson, & make a tryalle,

Of hem that be fauty, & hurten fulle sore,

For the wylle of [Henry], kyng most ryalle,

That is the most purpose that we labor for.117

Cade’s manifesto looks to remedies from the king. The City of Canterbury verses seek the advancement of:

Harry oure souerayne and most Crystyne kyng.118

The new manifesto praises Henry VI and invokes Henry V, ‘your fader of precious memory’ with approval, whilst the Northampton stanzas stress the loyalty of the victors to the king.119

All Yorkist propaganda promoted the common good. The earliest verses were directed against treason and its perpetrators. The reissued Cade manifesto was not one of the early ones that dealt with sectional Kentish grievances, such as the jurisdiction of the lieutenant of Dover, but one that had recast Kentish ills into general complaints of wider appeal. England was no longer the kingdom of God, the Canterbury verses complain, but the realm of Satan, where false wedlock, perjury, heresies, unjust disinheritance, falsehood and treason abounded and where the king was impoverished. The new manifesto envisaged a king who favours God’s church, who can maintain an honourable household and live honourably and worthily like other Christian princes, who dispenses good justice,
and
who leaves a proper livelihood for his subjects.

Inevitably it is the manifestos that go into most detail. Both are much more wide-ranging and general than that of 1459, which was a model known to the new author, who reshaped its conclusion, but was otherwise deliberately rejected. Both are in the third person rather than the first person plural. Gone are the topical and personal elements of 1459, such as the damage to trade and free access to the royal council; and other current issues of more general application are substituted, such as new taxes and compulsory military service. The core remains the clauses on law and order, royal finance, evil counsel, and the ignorance of the king. There are no significant changes here in what were evidently perennial beliefs. The new manifesto makes more explicit the demand that the king should live of his own; topical references to new tallages are added and the evil counsellors are accused of peculating them. Shrewsbury, Wiltshire and Beaumont had despoiled the king to their own profit and now ‘procede to the hangyng and drawyng of men by tyranny’: surely a reference to Newbury? Most significantly the manifesto takes a longer timespan. It brings the issue of the treasonable loss of France up to date by relating it to attempts to suborn the wild Irish and continental princes against Yorkist Ireland and Calais. It even accuses the king’s counsellors of intending a sell-out of England altogether. Back comes Duke Humphrey, that model of loyal and maltreated service represented in 1460 by York, Salisbury and Warwick. These additions and the reference to Ireland betray the role as draughtsman of York himself, who redeployed old charges still current to new effect. Nothing has got better since 1450. The issues of 1450 and Cade’s old manifesto remained current. York’s repeated ‘unquieting’ of the realm complained of at Coventry the previous year was justified by the continuation of the evils against which he had complained. The tables had been turned on his critics.120

Both manifestos are as unreasonable and deliberately misleading as Warwick’s the previous year. Many of the strictures made above against the 1459 manifesto apply equally to these. Everywhere is the presumption that the king’s undeniable poverty was due to profiteering by his favourites. The new tallages, peculation of fines by the treasurer, and acquisitions of forfeited property complained of are almost invisible to modern historians and pale beside the salaries and offices that York and his allies awarded themselves. If Henry VI needed extra money, compulsory military service and foreign co-operation, was it not because of the rebellion of the Yorkists and were they not necessary? Had they not destabilized the kingdom? The attainder at Coventry was enacted by common assent of parliament and the tribunal at Newbury had proceeded by strict legal form. The Yorkists themselves were much more ruthless towards their opponents. The new manifesto depicted things as they were or appeared to observers to be. Its skill as always – and this is a particularly adroit example of the genre – was to feed on justifiable dissatisfactions with the state of the commonwealth and to focus them in the desired direction. The fault was with the king’s evil counsellors. Again, as Paul Johnson remarked, is it credible that there were so many evil counsellors, so that new ones always replaced each old one? Where did Henry find them? The remedy for all these evils lay with the Yorkist lords. This time, more wisely, there were no protestations of what
they
would and would not do.