Warwick the Kingmaker (6 page)

The Neville kinship network was densest at local level and inclined its members to serve the lord of Middleham. Many of the Neville marriages can be seen as extending the earl’s influence, including those of his daughters to the northern barons FitzHugh, Stanley and Harrington; so too several contracts sought to bind to him important individuals of rank or domicile naturally beyond his ambit, such as those with Ralph Lord Greystoke, who was freed from Barnard Castle (1447), Sir Thomas Dacre (1435), and the Cumbrian knights Henry Threlkeld (1431) and Walter Strickland (1448). Two lawyers were formally retained of counsel, Thomas Stokdale from Pishiobury (Herts.) and John Hotoft from Ware (Herts.) in 1429. Stokdale in particular features as mainpernor, feoffee and trusted man of business in many contexts along with John Quyxley, William Frank, John Tunstall, Thomas Witham, from 1435 Thomas Colt, Robert Danby, Richard Weltden and John Middleton. Somewhat higher in rank were such leading gentry as Sir Christopher Conyers, Sir James Strangways, Sir Robert Constable and Richard Musgrave, who acted as receivers, Boyntons, Scargills, Vavasours, Rouclifs and Fulthorps. In 1459 Salisbury’s executors included three senior retainers in Conyers, Strangways and Danby, by then a royal justice, and three lesser officials in Witham, Middleton and John Ireland.

How inadequate such evidence of association and service can be emerges from the glimpse of reality afforded by the surviving fragment of the Middleham account of 1456–9, when 20 per cent of the lordship’s revenues was spent on fees and annuities.29 The same may be true of other northern lordships then and, indeed, earlier; the southern estates were reservoirs of cash.30 Many of these men, whether powerful gentry or professional officials, also served his son, sometimes from his succession to the earldom of Warwick in 1449, more often after Salisbury’s own death in 1460.

2.3 SHAPING THE FUTURE

These were the families and the traditions to which Richard was the culmination. He was heir to them all and the long-term future rested with him. He was particularly valuable to his parents as their eldest son and stood out amongst his siblings as their eldest brother. He was the key to continuity for his kindred, dependants and neighbours. What this meant in practice can only be guessed, for there is almost nothing to illuminate his early life and all the more promising lines of inquiry have produced only blanks. There is no conclusive evidence that he was one of the noble heirs who was brought up with the somewhat older King Henry VI as the minority council had decreed. It is likeliest that he resided with his parents in the North, encountering and familiarizing himself with his father’s household, his neighbours and retainers. Richard ought to have been well-acquainted with the three northern cathedral cities: Durham, his uncle Robert’s see, where Salisbury was confrater from 1431; Carlisle; and York, where in 1461 he was to be joint founder of a college for the minister’s chantry priests. We are probably right to envisage him living in his father’s draughty northern castles, albeit substantially modernized (Middleham) or recently constructed (Penrith), where the halls were thronged with people, the walls hung with tapestries, and plate and jewels were prominently displayed. Maybe he also visited London, residing at the Neville mansion of le Erber whilst Salisbury attended parliament or council. Perhaps he accompanied the earl as a toddler to France in 1431 for Henry VI’s coronation in Paris, when Salisbury dined several times with Richard’s future father-in-law Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick;31 as a boy on the campaign of 1436; or perhaps later was an unrecorded esquire or knight in somebody else’s retinue. Most probably, though unrecorded, he joined his parents at Rouen in 1445 to receive the new Queen Margaret of Anjou.32 He was still only sixteen. It would be nice if he already knew the French realm, language and people before they bulked so large in his later life. He may be one of the few major political figures in the 1450s who was wholly without direct experience of the war in France. By then his high promise and abilities were already apparent. Richard’s later accomplishments do permit us to presume with confidence that he enjoyed a conventional aristocratic education in horsemanship and arms, in heraldry and genealogy, letters and the faith. But again there is and can be no direct evidence.

What we can discern through the Neville genealogies is the slow evolution of Richard’s family.33 Three of his four grandparents died before he was born: the fourth, the Neville matriarch Joan Beaufort, potentially so influential, lived on until 1440, when Richard was twelve, apparently mainly at Raby and Sheriff Hutton, where her Bergavenny grandchildren and Richard’s cousins were born34 and where the Middleham Nevilles could easily have visited her. Perhaps wisely in view of the Neville–Neville dispute, Joan chose not to be buried with Ralph at Staindrop College, but beside her mother in Lincoln Cathedral. Perhaps Richard was at the funeral. Although Richard’s parents had married in or by 1421, their children and especially the sons they desired were initially slow in coming. Thereafter they came thick and fast. Eventually there were twelve. The first was born before 2 November 1424.35 Probably it was Joan. Certainly the two eldest were daughters, Joan and Cecily, most probably named after their grandmother Joan Beaufort and their aunt Cecily, the so-called ‘Rose of Raby’ and Duchess of York. Both were presumably toddlers at the birth of Richard, the eldest son, in 1428; unless of course Cecily took her name from her day of birth and was his twin. Richard took his father’s name. Then followed in rapid succession three further sons – Thomas, John and George – making four boys no more than four years apart. Their co-operation later in life suggests that they were close as children and that Richard was always the leader to whom the others deferred. By 14 May 1431 Salisbury had three sons and two daughters.36 George, the fourth son to reach maturity, was born in 1432; John Wessington, prior of Durham, was a godfather.37 Thomas and John were always destined for secular careers; George, perhaps godson of Salisbury’s brother George Lord Latimer, was dedicated by 1442, if not before, to a career in the Church.38 By then, or at least by the earliest surviving genealogy, there were a further three daughters – Alice, Eleanor and Katherine – and two shortlived sons, Ralph and Robert, buried respectively (and presumably born) at Sheriff Hutton and Middleham.39 Finally Margaret completed the brood.

The family did not merely grow, of course: it also ebbed as marriage carried its members away, perhaps even before all of Salisbury’s own brothers had been bestowed. The first to marry were Cecily and Richard himself, who married another pair of brothers and sisters, Henry and Anne Beauchamp, respectively the son and heir and the youngest daughter of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick. That was in 1436. Probably Cecily took up residence with her father-in-law and husband at once. Although the eldest of Salisbury’s children, Joan was the third to marry, after 17 August 1438, when Salisbury bought the marriage of her bridegroom William Earl of Arundel from the king:39 Joan does not seem to have had many further dealings with Richard. There was then a long delay, as the famed Neville matrimonial machine faltered in the provision of heirs and heiresses for child brides and grooms. Actually it was George, the youngest surviving son, who was next to be financially independent, accumulating a succession of lucrative livings including the golden prebend of Masham in Richmondshire, and who was next to leave home, moving about 1448 to Balliol College, Oxford, to study and to feast.40 It was fifteen years from Joan’s wedding to the next one: until 1453, when Richard’s next brother Thomas, a knight already in his twenties, married the young widow and heiress Maud Stanhope, Lady Willoughby. Eleanor probably married Thomas, the future Lord Stanley, about 17 December 1454, when Hawarden Castle in Flintshire was resettled. John had to wait until April 1457 for Isabel Ingoldsthorpe. Whether Alice and Katherine had to wait even longer or were already contracted to Lords FitzHugh and Harrington we cannot be sure.41 A respectable collection of matches, if not comparable to those celebrated in the
Neville Hours
, and perhaps a harking back to the earlier era when the Nevilles had operated within the more restricted northern marriage market.

Such an impression would be mistaken, for these later marriages offered more than appears at first sight. Already modest heiresses, both Maud Stanhope and Isabel Ingoldsthorpe promised much more, Maud as one of the two coheiresses of the wealthy Lord Cromwell in 1456 and Isabel as potential heiress to the Tiptoft earldom of Worcester, which eventually materialized for her daughters.42 No mere northern baron, Stanley was already set to dominate Lancashire and Cheshire, and Harrington’s modest northern estate was set to merge with his grandfather’s West Country Bonville barony. Such matches were carefully calculated with an eye to the future.

Yet Salisbury would surely have preferred to match his offspring earlier to spouses already endowed with title and fortune rather than speculating on uncertain futures. Why had he not? It was surely because he sought not respectable and advantageous matches but great ones and they, as always, were in short supply. The very success of earlier Neville marriages left few potential spouses not related within the prohibited degrees. Such problems were obstacles to be overcome by papal dispensations rather than insuperable barriers. More significant, perhaps, were the other priorities of the greatest magnates of the 1440s. Whereas the Nevilles were unquestionably of royal blood, it was derived through a junior, female, and illegitimate route that offered no title to the crown. The matches contracted between the royal dukes of York, Exeter, Somerset and Buckingham, Professor Griffiths has persuasively argued, were designed to tie them ever closer to whichever of them made good his title to the crown should the house of Lancaster end with Henry VI.43 In that context, Salisbury had nothing to offer. His status as king’s kinsman and councillor carried less influence with Henry VI himself and therefore with others than his father had enjoyed thirty years before. After 1438 Salisbury won no plum wardships: nothing comparable to those of Anne Beauchamp and Margaret Beaufort awarded to the king’s favourite Suffolk in the 1440s and to his half-brother Edmund Tudor in the 1450s. Salisbury qualified for no higher precedence and remained well down the list of earls, though he did successfully deflect a suit from his brother-in-law Northumberland.44 Even Cardinal Beaufort bequeathed the escheated Montagu manor of Canford (Dors.) not to Salisbury, who coveted it, but to another nephew Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset.45 As the kinship ties with the Beauforts and Lancastrian kings widened with the generations, from the king’s brother to second cousin, so Salisbury became merely one of many magnates whose influence depended on good service rather than royal blood. The same evidently applied to our Richard.

After Richard’s birth, the next important event known about his life is the marriage mentioned above. It is difficult to be absolutely sure of the date. The two earls received a papal dispensation for the marriage of their unnamed children in 1434 and the Tewkesbury Chronicle baldly states 1434,46 which is too early; many of the chronicle’s dates are wrong. The marriage was agreed by 9 March 1436 but not yet concluded. The account of Thomas Porthaleyn, keeper of Warwick’s household, actually precedes both the possible dates for the wedding, but records £152 in expenses of the earl, countess, Henry and Anne riding to [Leic]ester to conclude the marriage contract and a further £40 for the marriage itself at Abergavenny. Whilst the wedding could have been in late July/August, when other transactions at Abergavenny were recorded, it seems to be somewhat earlier, on or about 4 May 1436, when Warwick himself was at Abergavenny. After the marriage, the account states, the Earl of Warwick proceeded from Abergavenny to Warwick, where he spent twelve days recruiting his retinue of war for the relief of Calais,47 where he campaigned under Humphrey Duke of Gloucester in late July and August. Salisbury, who is not explicitly mentioned in the account, sailed in May with Richard Duke of York to Normandy and was campaigning in Caux until at least August. Hence May 1436 seems the more likely.

We cannot tell whether Richard was married in the castle chapel or, more probably, in the church of the Benedictine priory, formerly a cell of St Vincent Abbey at Le Mans and now the parish church, where the furnishings of the choir are substantially unchanged. Porthaleyn’s expenses suggest a modest affair. It is understandable that Richard later preferred to call himself lord of Abergavenny rather than of any of his other lordships and fought to hang on to the lordship with such vigour. Holding the wedding at Abergavenny was convenient to Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick. The lordship had been held by William Beauchamp, Lord Bergavenny (d. 1411) and then by his long-lived wife Joan until her death on 14 November 1435. It then devolved under an entail by William of 1395 on the male heirs of the comital Beauchamp line, which was represented in 1435 by Warwick himself. However it was contested by Salisbury’s brother Edward Neville, who had married William and Joan’s grand-daughter Elizabeth. Henceforth Edward used the title Lord Bergavenny. He later claimed to have entered the lordship and to have been put out.48 Warwick’s visit and the marriage was an assertion of Warwick’s control. It was the occasion for Warwick to discomfort Salisbury’s brother and young Richard’s uncle. It is unfortunate that Porthaleyn’s account does not reveal whether Richard accompanied his new father-in-law to Warwick Castle, Hanslope Castle (Bucks.), Salwarpe (Worcs.) and Cardiff Castle during the next five months. Probably he went at least to Warwick: stayed at the castle, saw the town, and offered at the college and at Guyscliff.

Since these were matches between four children, the oldest at most 13 and the youngest, our Richard, aged 7, we need not ponder about romantic love. These were marriages arranged by the two fathers primarily in their own interests. The partners were Richard, his elder sister Cecily, and Warwick’s two children by his second marriage to Isabel Despenser: his heir Henry Lord Despenser (b. 1425) and his youngest daughter Anne (b. 1426). Warwick also had three elder daughters by his first marriage: indeed it had been to obtain a male heir to continue the line of Beauchamp and Warwick title that he (like Earl Thomas Montagu) had remarried. The eldest daughter, Margaret, was wife of John Lord Talbot; the second, Eleanor, was married in turn to Thomas Lord Roos (d. 1430) and to Edmund Beaufort, Count of Mortain; and Elizabeth, the youngest, aged 22 and more in 1439, was wed to Salisbury’s brother and Richard’s uncle, George Lord Latimer. George and Elizabeth’s wedding cannot be dated precisely: surely it had preceded that of his nephew and her younger sister in 1436; most probably it had happened a decade before. The Countess Isabel had also been married previously, to another Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Worcester (d. 1422), and had a daughter, another Elizabeth Beauchamp, who had been married by 1424 to Salisbury’s youngest brother Edward Lord Bergavenny.49 The double marriage of 1436 was thus an alliance between close kindred, certainly within the prohibited degrees: hence the papal dispensation of 1434.