Warwick the Kingmaker (9 page)

Of all Earl Richard Beauchamp’s lands, therefore, only the Lisle lands were lost and only a handful of Despenser properties passed to the crown. When Duke Henry came of age, he entered only into those lands that had not been enfeoffed or were held by the Beauchamp custodians. He made a host of new appointments and grants of annuities.17 The feoffees of the Beauchamp and Despenser trusts accepted him as the beneficiary and residual heir. They deferred to his wishes over appointments, presentations to church livings, and payment of bills.18 Some lands were even conveyed to him in fee simple (e.g. Mereworth in Kent) and a Warwickshire manor was exchanged for lands in Cornwall.19 In 1450 the Despenser feoffees conveyed the advowson of Sherston (Wilts.) to Tewkesbury Abbey for a chantry in fulfilment of his will.20 Short though his majority was, it was crucial for the future succession of his whole sister Anne.

At his premature death Henry was seised of the Beauchamp lands held by custodians in 1439–45, which were thus threatened with wardship and with exploitation by a host of predatory royal servants. Much was assigned in dower to the Duchess Cecily, who was committed to her daughter’s interests; another, older dowager, Salisbury’s sister Eleanor Countess of Northumberland, widow of Isabel’s brother Richard Lord Despenser (d. 1414), wisely had her dower reassigned.21 What came into royal hands was land valued at a little over £800 a year: a very substantial amount, more than enough to endow an earl, but a mere fraction, perhaps a quarter or a fifth, of the total inheritance.

At this point Lord Beauchamp of Powicke claimed the whole Beauchamp inheritance as heir general of Earl William (d. 1298), first of the Beauchamp earls.22 As almost everything had been resettled in tail on the heirs of subsequent earls, it is not surprising that he was unsuccessful, despite his excellent connections at court. Once again it appears that Edward Lord Bergavenny claimed the lordship of Abergavenny from which his title derived and Mereworth in Kent. Mereworth had been settled by William Lord Bergavenny (d. 1411) in jointure on his son Richard Beauchamp Earl of Worcester and Isabel Despenser and should have reverted to their daughter Elizabeth Lady Bergavenny rather than her son Duke Henry. The marcher lordship of Abergavenny, as we have already seen, was entailed by William on his heirs male, who died out in 1421, on the heirs male of the Warwick line, who died out in 1446, and Edward felt that they should then revert to his wife Elizabeth, William’s grand-daughter, rather than on his great-great-niece. Without the original entail, we cannot tell whether he was right. Anyway his claim was again rejected. Bergavenny resorted to self-help, perhaps by seizing Abergavenny and certainly by presenting to a living there in his wife’s right.23 Even without these lordships, Bergavenny was a formidable opponent, for through her grandmother Joan Lord Bergavenny (d. 1435) his first wife was one of the three and ultimately two heirs general of Thomas Earl of Arundel and Warenne (d. 1417). Hence his income of £667 in 1436. Hence perhaps the twenty-one annuities totalling £111 13
s
. 4
d
. paid out from Abergavenny by the custodians to twenty-one gentry in 1446–7, the largest single fee being the 20 marks (£13 6
s
. 8
d
.) paid to Sir Walter Devereux.24

With two claims to dower of the Duchess Cecily and Countess Eleanor, Bergavenny’s designs on Abergavenny, and a horde of courtiers seizing what they could get, the integrity of the inheritance was certainly at risk. Not all contenders carried equal standing at court, where a disproportionate and indeed overwhelming influence was exercised by the king’s favourites and above all by Suffolk. On 16 September 1446, two such courtiers who were also trusted Beauchamp feoffees, Sudeley and Beauchamp of Powicke, respectively Lord Treasurer and steward of the royal household, joined with Suffolk and Salisbury, who as the young countess of Warwick’s grandfather ‘would therefore be more friendly and favourable to Anne than any other person’.25 Salisbury was also father of the dowager duchess, father of Richard and brother of Lords Latimer and Bergavenny, who were husbands of three of the next heiresses should the infant Anne die. Given that he was no longer part of the inner court circle and hence lacked much say nationally – he attended only 3 out of 57 meetings of the much weakened royal council in 1447–926 – Salisbury was fortunate to have such a say. Suffolk secured the young countess’s wardship and marriage and all four shared the administration of her estates. Most of the royal patentees were dismissed. Suffolk, Salisbury, Sudeley and Beauchamp of Powicke controlled the estate and its archive, running it from London with the collaboration of the family administrators in Warwick.27 Also Earl Richard Beauchamp’s executors acted for the new custodians,28 as they were later to do for young Richard as the new earl. There was no interruption of estate administration. Fees and annuities continued to be paid to retainers. The Beauchamp retinue remained intact and continued to dominate the region unchallenged by Buckingham or anyone else. A going concern was available for the next heirs: Richard was fortunate that his father and his kinsman Suffolk were those running it.

3.2 GATHERING THE SPOILS

Fourteen forty-nine was the year of crisis that ushered in the tense decade culminating in the Wars of the Roses. The French war that Henry V and Bedford had conducted so successfully had turned into a stubborn defence of English conquests until, in 1444, a breathing space was offered by the truce of Tours. Garrisons were immediately run down and expenditure was reduced to more acceptable peacetime levels. Apart from conceding Henry VI’s hand in marriage, the English surrendered Anjou and Maine, thus exposing Normandy itself to future attack. This followed when an English force attacked Fougères on 24 March 1449, as it now appears on the instructions of the home government and in order to pressurize Brittany. English protests that their
coup de main
was not a breach of truce were rejected and offered the French a pretext for a full-scale invasion of Normandy, to which the English offered only very ineffective defence. Charges of negligence and even treachery were later laid against the English commander, Warwick’s brother-in-law Edmund Beaufort Duke of Somerset by his uncle Richard Duke of York. On 9 May Pont L’Arche fell and Salisbury’s brother Lord Fauconberg was captured. Rouen itself capitulated in November. Among those engaged in the Norman campaign were several directly interested in the Beauchamp and Despenser inheritances: Shrewsbury, husband of Margaret, the eldest Beauchamp sister; Somerset, husband of Eleanor, the second sister, and Roos, her son and heir by her first husband; and Salisbury’s brother Bergavenny, widower of the other Despenser heir, and his son George Neville. Young George, Roos and Shrewsbury were among those surrendered as hostages on terms that were not kept and thus had to be ransomed, which took some years and great expense.29 Salisbury’s brothers Fauconberg and Bergavenny had grounds for resentment: against Somerset?

Hence Shrewsbury, Somerset, Roos, Bergavenny and his son were removed from the English political scene at the crucial moment when the fate of the Warwick inheritance was decided, in June 1449: Shrewsbury until after his release as a hostage on 11 July 1450 and actually until 20 December 1450; Somerset until late July 1450;30 and George into the 1460s. However, this was less of a disadvantage than might be supposed: all parties, as we shall see, secured royal patents favourable to their claims within a few weeks of young Anne’s death and were able to obtain others at intervals. After the initial moves in June 1449, it may actually have been to the advantage of the Beauchamp sisters that their husbands were together and thus able to act in concert: something that they were already accustomed to in the Berkeley–Lisle dispute. Strangely, perhaps, they did not make common cause with Bergavenny against their common enemy, the new earl. Influence at court proved to be very different from power in the localities. The Beauchamp sisters found it more difficult to obtain favourable verdicts in inquisitions than to secure royal licences and still more so to achieve actual possession of disputed lands. Here the absence of their husbands may have been decisive.

The resumption of hostilities in France, as yet not particularly serious, was the backcloth to the third session of the 1449 parliament at Winchester from 16 June to 16 July 1449. Somerset, Roos, Shrewsbury and Bergavenny, as we have seen, were absent; Suffolk, Salisbury and his son Richard, Tiptoft, Sudeley and Beauchamp of Powicke were all there. Anne Beauchamp died on 3 June 1449 at Ewelme, Suffolk’s Oxfordshire seat.31 The news was brought to Winchester at once: the very next day, 4 June, writs of
diem clausit extremum
were issued ordering inquisitions
post mortem
in London and other counties. Only a week after her death, on 10 June 1449, Dowager-Duchess Cecily and her new husband Tiptoft were granted the custody of George Neville’s Despenser lands during his minority even though his father Bergavenny was alive. It was perhaps because he controlled the duchess’s substantial dower and half the Despenser inheritance that Tiptoft was now created earl of Worcester. Eleanor Countess of Northumberland as dowager-lady Despenser wisely secured the reassignment of her dower on 19 July.32 Already the division of the Despenser inheritance between the representatives of the Countess Isabel’s two daughters had been agreed: a principle that was enshrined in the later inquisitions
post mortem
and which was initially accepted by the founder’s chronicle of the Despenser abbey of Tewkesbury. Had the same principle been accepted for the Beauchamp inheritance, as the three elder sisters wished, there would have been no dispute at all. Richard Neville first sought the earldom and Warwick itself as well as his share and subsequently all the rest as well: with complete legal justification, it must be stressed.

Young Anne Beauchamp died on 3 June, Worcester secured the Despenser custody on 10 June, and on 19 June, only three days into the parliamentary session, Richard Neville attended the Lords as earl of Warwick in right of his wife Anne.33 The letter patent that formalized Richard’s recognition as earl of Warwick is dated only to 23 July. In support of his promotion it refers to his kinship and intimate service to the king and to his good service against the king’s enemies the Scots at his own costs:34 service that all his brothers-in-law could certainly have matched and capped! Had they been present, more might have been made of the fact noted in the patent that Richard was a minor, who would not come of age until November; his wife Anne was at least 22 years of age. For the youngest sister of four to be given preference can only have been because she was the only
whole
sister of the late Duke Henry: it implies the application of the common law principle that ‘possession of the brother in the whole blood makes the sister heir’. For the moment the exclusion of the half-blood was applied only to the earldom. There was no licence issued to Richard and Anne alone to enter any of the lands of the earldom. Indeed no such licence was ever issued.

What the new earl and countess of Warwick thought this meant is revealed by the lawsuit that they immediately initiated on the quindene of Trinity (22 June) against Thomas Colt and Henry Sotehill, both Neville servants from the North, with a view to a final concord resettling their share of the lands on themselves jointly and their heirs. Had Anne died prematurely and without offspring, this might have given our Richard a life-estate in her inheritance. A fine to agree was paid at once in the exchequer by Colt, probably as Warwick chamberlain of the exchequer, though actually the final concord was not executed at this time. The draft concord settled Warwick and seven other Warwickshire properties – the heartlands of the earldom – and quarters of many other properties and reversions in thirteen other counties, Wales and the Channel Isles on Richard and Anne and her heirs.35 It invites three immediate observations. Firstly, the list of lands was incomplete and paid no attention to the entails by which the lands had hitherto been held, to whether they were held in dower by the Duchess Cecily, or to the titles that were to be recognized by the infant Anne’s inquisitions
post
mortem
. The grant of the earldom was also defective. The claim to the lands and the fine was evidently initiated well before even Richard, whose father was one of those in control of the Beauchamp archives, could carry out the necessary research and seek the appropriate legal opinion; as we shall also see, the other sisters also lacked access to this information. Secondly, the reservation of the Warwickshire lands implies the application of the whole-blood principle that operated with the earldom to those lands and only those lands: a distinction that made no legal sense. Thirdly, the quarters show that the rights of all four sisters as coheirs were acknowledged at this stage.

It is astonishing how rapidly such controversial decisions affecting so many important noblemen were reached and implemented. It indicates that Richard (or more probably Salisbury) and Worcester exploited the absence of potential rivals in France. To achieve it, they surely required the assistance of Suffolk and also perhaps of Sudeley, now steward of the royal household. This time, in contrast to 1446, rigid control was exercised and only a couple of royal grants were made to suppliant courtiers.36 Yet the verdict was not that Richard and Anne received everything, but a compromise, whereby they obtained half the Despenser inheritance, a quarter of the Beauchamp lands, plus the earldom and Warwick itself. If Anne were to die childless, everything would remain to her sisters except Warwick, Sutton Coldfield, and Brailes (Warw.), which would revert to Margaret Countess of Shrewsbury as senior sister, the heirs of her body, and, failing them, to the right heirs of Earl Richard Beauchamp. So runs the final text of the fine in 1466: whilst we cannot be certain of intentions in 1449, it is striking that similar remainders were applied to the earldom itself in 1450.37 Since the draft fine was voluntary and not forced on Richard and Anne, it suggests that they were happy to settle with this compromise: a position that they later changed. Some concessions
could
have been forced on Richard and Anne by parliament. That, however, would have taken time, as arbitration typically involved full consideration of the cases and evidence of all parties that clearly did not happen, as the issue was decided almost at once. More probably, therefore, the compromise enshrined in the draft fine and the division of the Despenser inheritance was proposed from Richard’s side and accepted by parliament as unexceptional.