Warwick the Kingmaker (12 page)

For Warwick’s tenure of his wife’s midland estates was not uncontested. He had rivals in her Beauchamp half-sisters, who found at least some limited support among the family retinue. John Brome of Baddesley Clinton, the pretender to the Warwick chamberlainship of the exchequer, was apparently one such. Certainly a retainer of Duke Henry, he apparently committed himself to the Countess Margaret and was an executor of her husband Shrewsbury in 1452. Brome was ousted from the chamberlainship. His Warwickshire properties were attacked in July and August 1450 by the men of Warwick and apparently the earl’s stable headed by Robert Commander, the town bailiff, and Richard Clapham, almost certainly, as Dr Carpenter has argued, at Warwick’s behest. Brome’s property was raided twice more in 1451. It was not until 16 July 1453, when Somerset was supreme, that a commission was issued against the offenders, to no effect.77

It is not this dispute that has caused modern commentators to question the effectiveness of Warwick’s takeover of his father-in-law’s hegemony, but the dispute that supposedly set him against Humphrey Duke of Buckingham. Warwick was strong in the south of Warwickshire, Buckinghamshire in the north, and a struggle for supremacy occurred. So runs the argument.78 Actually the only direct evidence for disagreement between Buckingham and Warwick, the latter’s failure to pay rents due in 1450–8 from Drayton Basset (Staffs.), arises because Warwick did not hold it: it had already been seized by his sister-in-law and rival Margaret Countess of Shrewsbury.79 Warwickshire was not a county in which violent feuding demanded royal attention. Its supposed divisions and this so-called dispute alike arise from a rather perverse reading of the evidence.

Of course there were quarrels among the landholders and gentry as there were everywhere, that resulted in riots and lawsuits in the common law courts, but nothing directly implicates either magnate. Inevitably members of Warwick’s connection, such as Beauchamp of Powicke and Sudeley, enjoyed direct relations with Buckingham, but there is no evidence that the duke suborned them from their service to Warwick on which their local standing principally depended. Duke and earl co-existed peaceably: they had no cause for friction, since Warwick looked south from Warwick and Buckingham north from Maxstoke. Warwick has recently been shown not to have been involved in Derbyshire affairs;80 he appears equally uninterested in Staffordshire and north Warwickshire. His axis was Warwick–Tewkesbury–Cardiff. Duke and earl co-operated in restraining potentially disruptive quarrels among the gentry. When the Warwick retainer Sir Thomas Malory went off the rails and indulged in the attacks on Buckingham and Combe Abbey that are still inexplicable, those aggrieved associated the earl with the duke as commissioners of arrest. The commission was actually executed by Buckingham, whose sixty Staffordshire men sufficed to deal with Malory (but hardly with Warwick), and Malory was indicted at Nuneaton and imprisoned at Coleshill, not the more usual Warwick. Such facts do not demonstrate Malory’s conduct to be part of a Stafford–Neville feud. Warwick was in Wales. He was willing to leave matters to Buckingham and to Mountford, a sheriff who was both his retainer and a Despenser feoffee. Mountford’s decision to transfer his estates from his elder son Baldwin to his younger son Edmund and to make Buckingham a feoffee may well have preceded Warwick’s succession. That Warwick feed Baldwin need not demonstrate a breach with William and Edmund or their desertion of his service for that of Buckingham. An arbitration award that was surely imposed during the first protectorate with Warwick’s assent actually divided the estates between the two brothers; it is more likely that Baldwin and his son Simon rather than Edmund broke it. Warwick’s reactions are unknown. Warwick cannot be shown to have intervened in the Stafford–Harcourt dispute or to have backed the Harcourts; the reverse is more probable. Buckingham did indeed take Edmund Mountford’s side from 1456, but evidence that he and Warwick were at loggerheads dates only from 1459.81

Warwick’s effective control is best measured by its fruits. Before his succession, as we have seen, the new earl had no significant estates or resources of his own. He is not recorded as attending parliament, council or anywhere else with a significant entourage. Thereafter his impressive company was frequently remarked: presumably it originated from his estates. The single surviving bailiff’s account for Warwick in 1451–2 reveals how substantial were the households both of himself and his countess. Repeatedly he called out his West Midlanders and Welshmen arrayed for war. The men of Stafford of Grafton and Ferrers of Chartley served alongside his own. The company that he took to Abergavenny in 1449 probably imposed order there. Armed men were maintained in Glamorgan. The 400 men ‘and moo’ from the West Midlands and probably Wales that he took to the Leicester parliament in 1450 may have been earmarked for foreign service. The West Midlands retinue turned out again against Jack Cade in June, late in November to overawe parliament, to parade through London on 3 December, when he and the Duke of Buckingham together led 3,000 men, and to suppress York’s uprising at Dartford early in 1452. Warwick was able to mobilize the resources of the earldom. The comments of observers and royal gratitude imply that his success was already remarkable. Warwick already perceived the political and moral advantages of an impressive turnout and display of force: not just in battle, but to cow opponents and earn royal gratitude. The resources for this came from his wife’s inheritance: which therefore he had to keep intact and protect against rivals. The aggression he brought with him.

After paying expenses, which included the dower of the Countess Eleanor and annuities to retainers, the Beauchamp custodians accounted for a surplus of £828 in 1448. This was considerably more than the qualifying income for an earl. Warwick held these lands and revenues. Additionally he controlled the income of the Beauchamp trust and may have enjoyed the use of it; there, as on the Despenser trust, he exercised both the patronage and political influence. The reversion of the dower of his sister Cecily in 1450 substantially augmented both income and West Midlands estates. Only an approximation of his income can be calculated. Taking McFarlane’s calculations as a base, his income may have been £3,900; after deducting the Countess Eleanor’s dower and rent due from George Neville’s half share of the Despenser estate, a total of £3,000 a year seems possible.82 Whilst this was well short of two uncles, the dukes of York and Buckingham, it compared with his father and his uncle of Northumberland, and comfortably outstripped such minor earls as Devon, Wiltshire and the king’s Tudor half-brothers.

3.4 THE WARWICK TRADITIONS

Very extensive, spread across twenty counties, Warwick’s estate was concentrated in the West Midlands and the Welsh marches, far from his Neville and Montagu origins. It was a source of revenue, of manpower, and hence of power, both locally and on the national stage. As great landholder and lord of retainers, Earl Richard Beauchamp had been the dominant figure in the West Midlands, in Warwickshire and probably Worcestershire too, where he had most lands and the hereditary office of sheriff. Such attributes had also made the de Clare Earls of Gloucester, the Despensers, and their heirs the most powerful marcher lords of southern Wales. Yet this was no mere assembly of disparate possessions, but two estates of comital importance united and shaped over many generations by the two ancient families of Beauchamp and Despenser and only recently combined. What cemented the Warwick inheritance together was not merely the accident of common tenure, but long association over time, traditions and loyalties that were inherited and shared, and which magnified the more material benefits several times over. As substantial and pervasive, perhaps more so, as the Montagu, Neville and Richmondshire traditions with which Warwick was imbued as he grew up, the Beauchamp, Warwick and Despenser histories and legends demanded Warwick’s respect and were his to exploit: although an outsider, he was – through his wife – the heir and representative to lands, connection, loyalties and traditions, and had the most pressing reasons to foster and maintain them.

The earldom of Warwick created by William the Conqueror for Henry de Beaumont in 1088 passed via his descendants (the Newburghs) and Walter Mauduit to the Beauchamps of Elmeley Castle (Worcs.) in 1268. The six Beauchamp earls added to the original core the estates of the Mauduits, the Beauchamps and d’Abitots, the Tosnys, the Bassets of Drayton, and ultimately the Despensers. The earls and their ancestors had been founders of monasteries as far away as Shouldham Priory in Suffolk and Westacre Priory in Norfolk and had patronized Markyate Priory and Oseney Abbey (Oxon.). Thus they were founders of Warmington nunnery in Warwickshire, the Worcester Greyfriars, and the chantry college in their castle of Elmeley (Worcs.), and benefactors of Coleshill Priory and Bordesley Abbey, where Earl Guy (d. 1315) lay buried. They had many residences on their estates: apart from the castles of Warwick, Hanley and Elmeley (Worcs.), Barnard, and in the Welsh marches, they maintained residences or lodges in at least eight other places in Staffordshire, Warwickshire, Gloucestershire, Berkshire and Buckinghamshire.83

The centre of the earldom – its
caput
– was Warwick itself. This was a town of moderate size, with a population only of about 2,000 even in the early sixteenth century, and unfavourably situated by an unnavigable river, the Avon, off all the principal routes. It was overshadowed commercially by its near neighbour Coventry, eight miles up the road, which was several times as large, the seat of a bishop and a cathedral priory, a walled city and from 1451 a county borough. Warwick stood on a hill-top site and its streets were constrained by the surrounding ditch and rampart, surmounted in part by walls, which were pierced by three gates, those to east and west with chapels on top, each with its extra-mural suburb. There was a market, a booth hall, and, to the south, a bridge across the Avon maintained by the gild of the Trinity and the Virgin. Although after 1367 there were only two parish churches, St Nicholas and the collegiate church of St Mary, there were additionally St Sepulchre’s Priory of canons regular, a house of Dominican friars, the three hospitals of St Michael, St John and St Lawrence, a hermitage on the site of the former Templar house, and, to the north by the Avon, the hermitage, chapel and chantry of Guyscliff. Warwick, in short, had many of the distinguishing features of a much larger centre, which it owed to its lords the earls of Warwick, whose principal seat was Warwick Castle and whose revenues were largely disbursed within the town. Although merely a seigneurial borough, subject to the earl’s direction and generally returning his men to parliament, Warwick was also the county town: control of Warwick could bestow a disproportionate local influence.

The antiquary John Rous and indeed the earls themselves saw Warwick as
their
town and fostered its interests, as disinterested ‘good lords’ and as potential beneficiaries of any commercial success. Rous noted carefully their efforts to improve town, castle and church. Warwick Castle stood on a cliff above the River Avon and the town. The ancient motte and shell keep remained at the west end, but the east, south and then the north sides were remodelled along the latest lines. The fourteenth-century work has a decidedly French appearance. The walls and gates, according to Rous, were the handiwork of Thomas I. Certainly it was he who erected Caesar’s Tower at the south-east corner above the river. Immensely lofty, 147 feet tall, it is encircled by a machicolated wall-walk one storey below the crenellated top. A formidable gatehouse with barbican in front connects on the north-east corner with Guy’s Tower. Twelve-sided, 128 feet tall, vaulted on each floor and with two spiral staircases, Guy’s Tower cost Earl Thomas II £394 5
s
. 2
d
. Though out of proportion to any potential military threat, it compared not unfavourably with Kenilworth Castle five miles to the north: a massive concentric castle with elaborate water defences that was being re-furbished with little regard for cost about the same time by the richest medieval English nobleman, John of Gaunt. At Warwick self-contained luxury to the highest contemporary standards was provided by the suites of one large and two small chambers each with fireplaces and separate access on each floor of Guy’s Tower; the gatehouse and Caesar’s Tower were also residential. If this vertical arrangement was inconvenient, it may be that better-connected accommodation was provided on the south side when Earl Richard Beauchamp ‘rebuilt the south side...with a splendid new tower and various domestic offices’. Embedded in the modern house are the medieval hall, chamber-blocks, undercrofts and the chapel of All Saints, once scheduled to become collegiate. To the north side the Clarence and Bear Towers, it is generally agreed, are the unfinished corner turrets of another massive tower, perhaps begun by Earl Richard Neville, certainly under construction by his son-in-law Clarence, possibly briefly continued by Richard III. Somewhere there was the treasury or audit where records were filed and audited and Earl Richard Beauchamp’s splendid ‘stable of great size’ costing 500 marks (£333 13
s
. 4
d
.) for the destriers that were bred at the Warwick stud. There was hunting at Wedgenock Park and at other parks at Claverdon, six miles westwards, at Sutton Coldfield, eight miles north-west, and at Berkeswell, where there were lodges that Earl Richard rebuilt almost from scratch.84 By 1449 Warwick was both a palatial residence worthy of the greatest of noblemen and far more than a purely decorative fortress.

The Beauchamp earls had also improved the town. Thomas I erected the booth hall, Thomas II set up the Trinity gild, Richard St Bartholomew’s fair, and Henry planned a larger common and new maces for the bailiffs. Richard, indeed, had more far-reaching plans for the town’s commercial development, intending, so Rous tells us, to wall the town, channel the river, widen the bridge arches, and clear mills from the river as far as Tewkesbury, with a view to making the Avon navigable and fostering trade from Warwick via Tewkesbury as far as Bristol and the sea. Had it been undertaken, this would have been a river improvement worthy of two centuries later and a strain even for the deepest purse. Tewkesbury belonged to his wife. In patronizing her foundations, building at her houses, and fostering Tewkesbury’s trade, the earl anticipated the permanent union of their inheritances.