Warwick the Kingmaker (5 page)

Under the unequal compromise of 1443, the earls of Westmorland had received less of the family patrimony than that enjoyed by the fourteenth-century barons Neville of Raby, though they were spared from actual poverty by the fortunate marriage of Ralph’s eldest son John to yet another of the Holland heiresses. Westmorland kept Raby and Brancepeth in County Durham, whilst Salisbury retained the much more valuable lordships of Middleham, Sheriff Hutton and Penrith. Salisbury’s share was much more lucrative – Middleham alone was worth more than a thousand pounds a year – and was more valuable than Alice’s southern inheritance. He succeeded also to Ralph’s powerful local connection of gentry, to his regional hegemony, commitments and aspirations. This was ultimately his son Richard’s inheritance too.

Richard was heir to several lines: the Montagus, Monthermers, Hollands, who feature surprisingly little, and the Nevilles. The Salisbury Roll of 1463 records Richard and Alice, Countess of Salisbury, with their banners: the fusils of Montagu and the eagle of Monthermer quarterly and the Neville saltire with a label of cadency. This was also the arrangement on Salisbury’s seal. As a younger son, Salisbury gave priority to his wife’s arms, Montagu and Monthermer, in quarters 1 and 4, reserving 2 and 3 for the arms of Neville, which, noticeably, are quartered with those of no other family. Yet, as we shall see, it was the northern Neville associations that shaped Salisbury’s career.

2.2 NORTHERN ROOTS

The Neville–Neville dispute, as it has been called, was settled in 1443 and assured Salisbury’s family of their patrimony and influence in northern England. Perhaps it was for the ceremonies of settlement or the more private celebrations of Salisbury’s family that genealogies of the Nevilles were prepared. There had been earlier ones: an outline pedigree up to the early fourteenth century belonged to the abbey of St Mary York.14 Indeed it is hard to see how so much data could have been preserved without previous exemplars. There are two mid-fifteenth-century versions: one recording all four lines from the Norman Conquest and including no collaterals, and another that focuses merely on the direct line.15 The direct version contains a Latin commentary that reads as though written at Coverham Abbey and certainly uses records from Coverham; significantly perhaps it omits grants to nearby Jervaulx. Monasteries were expected to keep records of coats of arms and family histories. The commentary focuses on Middleham and the junior house of Neville, includes the death of Countess Joan, and ends with the expectation of future praises for Salisbury. The inclusion of Joan’s death in 1440 and the omission of the elevation of two daughters to duchess in 1444 (Buckingham) and 1445 (Warwick) dates the commentary to 1440 x 1444. It appropriates to the junior house of Neville all the achievements of the Nevilles since the Norman Conquest. Two additional paragraphs added to this version, of particular interest to Coverham Abbey,16 are included in the four-line version too. The earliest exemplar belonged to Sir Henry Neville of Latimer, killed at Edgecote in 1469. A Clervaux variant may be even earlier.17 Thereafter the basic material was updated, selected from, and elaborated by different lines, so that the Tudor and Stuart heralds recorded many alternatives, most obviously with Westmorland, Latimer and Abergavenny preoccupations.

If not quite the greatest in title, wealth, or power, Richard’s family was acknowledged to be of the blood royal and enjoyed the favour of king and council that royal cousinage conferred. The dukes of Gloucester, Suffolk and Somerset, in turn most influential with the king, were his relatives. His kinship network was excessively extensive and defies diagrammatic delineation as a whole: he was related directly or indirectly to almost every contemporary nobleman, to some several times over. Westmorland was his cousin twice over, through the Neville and Holland lines; his uncles Latimer and Bergavenny were also his brothers-in-law; and his future brother-in-law John Earl of Shrewsbury (d. 1453) had been stepson to his own great-great-uncle Thomas Lord Furnival (d. 1407). Since noblemen were formally instructed in their pedigrees, Richard should have known of and acknowledged these ties, as indeed he did, which is not to say that all or even most were significant politically or otherwise. On the Neville side, his great-grandfather, grandfather and father had made themselves national figures and royal councillors. Yet his roots were local. Salisbury remained primarily a northerner who sought to maintain and reinforce his family as predominantly a northern dynasty. Only Northumberland rivalled him as a northern landholder and there was no John of Gaunt to take priority. Yet Salisbury never possessed northern lands as extensive as either his father or his son nor did he ever exercise undisputed sway throughout the region. His was never ‘a comprehensive influence in the North approaching that of Richard of Gloucester in the 1470s’.18

Salisbury’s principal seat at Middleham in Wensleydale consisted of a substantial Norman keep that had been extended across the centuries into a square castle of two wards. The inner curtain wall, towers and chapel date from the thirteenth century, the machicolated gatehouse from the fourteenth, and in the fifteenth century stone offices and lodgings were added on every side, so that scarcely any courtyard remained. On to a relatively small site, the residential requirements of the greatest magnate had been packed. The raising of the keep, to create a two-storeyed hall and great chamber lit by huge windows from above, created the most modern and imposing accommodation out of the ancient fabric. Whose work it was – Salisbury’s, Warwick’s or Gloucester’s – we unfortunately cannot tell. To the castle and borough at Middleham, a later fifteenth-century lord was to add a college and fairs.

Middleham can only ever have been a small market town, with a population of hundreds, and is no more than a village today. Richmondshire was dominated by Richmond. Richmond castle, with its massive Norman keep and two wards, high on a cliff over the River Swale, was the caput of Richmond honour. Richmond was also the principal town. If no metropolis, Richmond – unlike Middleham – is clearly a town, and still has an impressive market-place. Richmond honour itself extended to Lincolnshire, East Anglia and elsewhere. Supposedly the honour was granted to Earl Alan the Red by William I; fifteenth-century copies of the honorial register depict the apocryphal presentation of the sealed charter to Earl Alan by King William with an audience of knights behind. Another illumination depicts the earl and his knightly tenants. The register records the Breton earls of Richmond down to 1341, extracts from Domesday, Kirkby’s Quest and other information about knights fees, the charter of liberties, and castleguard obligations. A third illumination of the castle itself indicates these. The latest item is an account of the feodary of the honour in 1410–11 when Earl Ralph was lord: it is not unreasonable to suggest that the register in its present form was composed on his behalf.19 No Neville copy exists, although a future lord had access to some of the material, but two copies survive. That such material remained useful indicates that the honour remained a reality unusually late.

By the fifteenth century five noblemen held substantial estates in Richmondshire – the Nevilles themselves, assessed at £1,903 in 1436, and four barons: FitzHugh of Ravensworth (£484), Latimer of Snape and Welle (£175), Scrope of Bolton (£557) and Scrope of Masham. There were besides many gentry, ranging from those of county-wide to purely parochial importance. All were tenants of the honour, directly or indirectly, and shared in its history. The major mesne tenants traced their tenure from the Norman Conquest. Others beside the Nevilles could resort to family pedigrees or chronicles: there survives a FitzHugh chronicle and genealogy, a Clervaux genealogy, and several monastic accounts of the Scropes. Supposedly the FitzHughs were descended from Bardolf, bastard brother of Earl Alan, the first Scrope came with John Gant, and Sir Hamo de Clervaux was another of the Conqueror’s army.20 The Nevilles claimed descent from Earl Alan’s brother Ribald. They thought that Earl Alan had granted him Middleham, Earl Stephen had confirmed it, and Earl Conan had added the forest of Wensleydale.21 The shared obligations of honorial tenants and their common history were a further source of honorial unity. Professor Pollard has noted how inward-looking the local aristocracy were, intermarrying with one another rather than with elsewhere even within Yorkshire. ‘In the later fifteenth century’, observes Professor Pollard, ‘a member of the gentry of Richmondshire could count practically all the gentry of the district among his cousins.’22 Such ties help explain why, from the reign of John to Henry IV, from the Wars of the Roses to the Pilgrimage of Grace, the Richmondshire tenantry formed such a cohesive and politically potent connection.

The political beneficiaries of Richmondshire’s distinctive cohesion in the fifteenth century were the Nevilles. Ralph’s sisters married a Lumley and a Scrope, his own daughters were wed to Lords Maulay, Dacre and Scrope of Bolton, and two sons held Yorkshire baronies by marriage. Through them he was connected to the Scropes of Masham, FitzHughs and Greystokes. Looking ahead to the 1450s and 1460s, Ralph’s three Fauconberg grand-daughters, three of his Salisbury grand-daughters, and Warwick’s own bastard daughter married into leading local families. Latimer and Clervaux were probably not alone in cherishing Neville genealogies culminating in themselves. Yet it was only from the late fourteenth century, if then, that the Nevilles emerge as the predominant family. Was it as earl of Richmond that John of Gaunt had first recruited the future Earl Ralph into his service? After the restoration of the Breton earl in 1372 and a further forfeiture, it was to Lord FitzHugh that Queen Anne granted the custody of the honour; her executors could lease only the reversion to Earl Ralph, who secured FitzHugh’s surrender in 1396, and in 1399 secured a grant from Henry IV of the whole honour for life. In 1413 he was granted the manor of Bainbridge in tail.23 If Ralph hoped to make his life estate hereditary, he was disappointed, for in 1414 Henry V granted the reversion to his brother John Duke of Bedford.24 All was not lost, however, for Salisbury remained steward and master forester to the duke, continued in office after Bedford’s death in 1435 and skilfully exchanged dubious trifles with the crown for the Yorkshire rights and possessions of the honour. Bedford’s young widow Jacquetta retained her third share throughout. In 1445 the advowson and one acre at Ringwood (Hants), of little value to him, were granted to Henry VI’s new college at Eton in return for the sheriff’s tourns, other liberties, the bailiwick of Hang West wapentake, two-thirds of Richmond feefarm, of three manors and the knights fees, and the reversion of the remaining thirds on Jacquetta’s death. Again in 1449 two manors (which were immediately leased back), some annuities and reversions were exchanged for all the liberties in Yorkshire and the four Richmond wapentakes.25 The 1445 properties were to be held of the Montagu inheritance and those of 1449 of the Neville patrimony, a discrepancy which could have created problems later; in the short run what mattered was that the title was hereditary. If never earl of Richmond, nor indeed holder of all its possessions in Yorkshire, Salisbury was no longer a mere mesne tenant, but effectively lord and could thus use honorial authority to reinforce his effective predominance in Richmondshire.

Whereas fourteenth-century Nevilles fought the Scots as subordinates, Ralph was the first to be warden of the West March just as his cousin Northumberland became the first Percy warden of the East March.26 If the simultaneous elevation of both families recognized their growing estates and wealth, it was achieved initially as the trusted instruments of the house of Lancaster. It was thirty years or more after the Lancastrian succession before its connection ceased to be a force and that the Percies and Nevilles could emerge fully from its shadow. Westmorland’s wardenship, the West March, constituted that part of the Scottish borders in Cumberland and Westmorland. As warden he was expected to defend the march, raising sufficient troops at his own expense, to command the local levies against the Scots, and to exercise marcher law over the English borders. For this he was paid a substantial annual salary, larger in war than peace. The wardenship could be a source of profit and of influence. As Salisbury was lord only of Penrith, he had to draw on manpower from Yorkshire and Durham, but his office enabled him to dominate such better endowed families as the Percys of Cockermouth and the Cliffords of Brougham. He was constable of Carlisle, military commander of the march, and exercised martial law within it. Ralph and subsequent wardens sought to monopolize royal possessions in Cumbria, leasing fisheries, closes within Inglewood and even the forest itself. Salisbury drew annuities of £70 from the barony of Kendal after Bedford’s death, to which he added in 1443–5 the stewardship, the farm of two-thirds of the land, and the reversion of the rest on the death of the dowager-duchess.27 The logical culmination was the palatinate created in 1483.

Salisbury had succeeded his father as warden in his own lifetime, but surrendered the office in 1435 on a plea of poverty. It seems unlikely that he was genuinely poor: whilst certainly he had not been paid all he was owed, the full salary considerably exceeded the normal peacetime costs. His resignation freed him to serve in France and thus assert a moral advantage over his nephew Westmorland. Northumberland did likewise, surrendering the East March in 1434. One wonders whether both earls relinquished office in the hope of driving a tougher bargain with the crown for continuing? If so, the ploy failed in the short term, for in 1436 Marmaduke Lumley, Bishop of Carlisle, the cadet of a northern baronial family, took on the West March at lower wages. Salisbury’s dissatisfaction with this new arrangement resulted in his successful bid in 1439 for the reversion of the wardenship from 1443 for yet lower wages, £983 6
s
. 8
d
., admittedly now securely assigned on local revenues; he was also appointed chief justice of the northern forests and of Inglewood. Northumberland also resumed office in 1440, but on less favourable terms. That Salisbury saw the permanent tenure of the wardenship as an essential component of his family power-base is suggested by a further grant in 1445 of the reversion jointly to himself and his son Richard; he also sought to keep the wardenship of the northern forests, which he held in tail male.28