Warwick the Kingmaker (46 page)

Important though such influence was to Warwick, valuable in enhancing both his authority and his income, it was supplementary to the hereditary estates that underpinned his power. Even disregarding his attainder in 1459, these were not altogether secure. Lawrence Bothe, Bishop of Durham, was to renew his challenge to the earl’s tenure of Barnard Castle, for which he had a good case, even daring to plead it against the earl and before the king in 1462. The service of an earl of Warwick, as always, outweighed that of the bishop, particularly such a redoubtable earl and a bishop of such dubious antecedents and loyalty, so Warwick’s tenure was confirmed.17

More serious, perhaps, was the challenge of his countess’s half-sisters to the Beauchamp inheritance. All four still occasionally presented to livings together.18 Once again he was decidedly in the ascendant and they were in retreat. Eleanor Duchess of Somerset, the second sister, was not allowed control even of her own estates lest she should help her sons Roos and Somerset, still committed Lancastrians. The third sister, Elizabeth Lady Latimer, was still stymied by the madness of her husband and by Warwick’s custody of his person and his lands. Margaret Countess of Shrewsbury, the eldest, also widowed, was politically isolated. Eventually, in 1466, they settled for eight scattered manors, a price that Warwick willingly paid for security from challenge for his daughters after his death. No agreement was reached about the Beauchamp trust, whose lands were contested by the coheirs in 1478–85. Warwick’s final concord of 1449 was at last completed: failing his issue, it recognized that Margaret’s senior line should have Warwick itself and other Warwickshire estates.19 This provision was fulfilled by the succession in 1547 of Margaret’s great-great-grandson John Dudley as earl of Warwick. The splendid tombs of John’s sons Ambrose Earl of Warwick and Robert Earl of Leicester are in the Beauchamp Chapel of Margaret’s father.

The challenge to the Despenser inheritance was more acute, since Warwick’s cousin George Neville of Bergavenny was indisputably of age, well-connected, and already a substantial magnate in his own right. An act of the 1461 parliament revoking the forfeiture of Thomas Lord Despenser (d. 1400) set aside the inquisitions under which George claimed and entitled Warwick’s countess to the whole inheritance as sole sister of the whole blood of Duke Henry. A proviso of exemption in favour of George, which Warwick himself had exemplified on 30 January 1462, merely reserved the former’s title should Anne’s line die out. The Countess Anne was licensed to enter the whole inheritance on 12 December 1461.20 The act also confirmed Warwick’s tenure of the fee simple Despenser lands held under a patent of 1414 that should have escheated on Duke Henry’s death in 1446 as Warwick had evidently realized, but nobody else had. Henceforth, therefore, Warwick was assured of the whole of his wife’s two inheritances, though George did not forget his Despenser aspirations and indeed revived them both in 1470 and in 1484.

Actually justice was done to Warwick by the parliamentary resettlement of the Despenser inheritance since, as we have seen, George should not have been found to be coheir in the inquisitions of 1450–1. Whether Lords and Commons realized what they were doing is doubtful, for the act purported to reverse the sentence of forfeiture for treason against the king’s grandfather Richard Earl of Cambridge in 1415. His promotion of the Mortimer claim, henceforth to be seen as rightful rather than treasonable, was also extended at Warwick’s request to his wife’s grandfather Thomas Lord Despenser and his own great-grandfather John Earl of Salisbury, the rebels of 1400. In each case it was claimed that the lands had been lost to their heirs by forfeiture, but in neither case was this strictly true. The concealed impact of the Despenser reversal has already been discussed. In the Salisbury instance, it not only strengthened the Nevilles’ right to the earldom, which should really have escheated in 1428–9, but enabled them to recover properties in Wiltshire, Somerset and Dorset that had actually escheated then. The manors of Amesbury, Winterbourne Earls and Canford (Dors.) had been bought by Cardinal Beaufort, Canford had passed to his nephew Somerset, and the remainder had been used to endow his enlargement of the hospital of noble poverty of St Cross near Winchester. This act enabled Warwick to recover these estates, worth several hundred pounds a year, and forced the hospital sharply and permanently to curtail the number of Beaufort brothers at his great-uncle’s foundation. An uneasy conscience is suggested by his supposed, unfulfilled, intention to endow a similar almshouse at Guyscliff with the proceeds.21

The Montagu–Holland inheritance belonged to Warwick’s mother the Dowager-Countess Alice, who was licensed on 5 July 1461 to enter all the estates of her father to which she was heiress, all those she held jointly with her late husband (principally Sheriff Hutton), and any other lands held in fee simple. These only passed to Warwick on her death, some time before 9 December 1462, when Warwick was licensed to enter her lands and after which he described himself as Earl of Warwick
and Salisbury
.22 Few others did. They still called him Warwick and so usually did he, signing himself ‘R. Warrewyk’ and employing a Warwick rather than a Salisbury herald. It was Warwick not Salisbury that was the premier earldom and that gave him precedence over all other earls. From this point on and allowing for a thousand pounds of forfeited lands a year, Warwick’s estates alone may have been worth up to £7,000 a year, which was certainly much more than any contemporary subject. There were besides his royal offices, which the Frenchman Philippe de Commines guesstimated at 80,000 crowns (about £16,500) a year.23 Whilst undoubtedly an exaggeration and ignoring the salaries of deputies and other overheads, a quarter of that sum would have given the earl a ceiling of £12,000 in total. That is about twice those of York and Buckingham, the richest magnates of the previous decade, and over half of that of John of Gaunt. Where York and Buckingham, moreoever, had financial difficulties, living above their income and owed large sums by the crown, Warwick appears not to have had such problems. Without accounts, we have to guess; a few unpaid debts are known, most notably his failure to pay the instalments due on Collyweston to Cromwell’s executors, but we have no evidence of financial embarrassments.

Warwick’s finances enabled him to cut a figure on the European stage where the great continental feudatories generally commanded far larger resources than their English counterparts. He could afford to captain Calais, keep the seas, guard the West March, and go on embassy with little expectation of immediate payment by an impoverished king. Large sums could be raised when needed. He did not stint on splendour when on embassy, he developed and maintained his own ordnance and navy, he patronized the church. Had we the evidence, he might be shown to have been spending on building, jewelry, books and furnishings like his contemporaries. We know relatively little of his retaining, except that it was remarkable. Of Henry Duke of Buckingham in 1483, John Rous observed that ‘so many men had not worn the same badge since the time of Richard Neville, earl of Warwick’.24 We have no lists of members of his household, no ordinances nor accounts, yet his lavish housekeeping was legendary:

The which Erle was evyr hadd In Grete ffavour of the commonys of thys land, By Reson of the excedyng howsold which he dayly kepid In alle Cuntrees where evyr he sojournyd or laye; and when he cam to london he held such a howse that vj Oxyn were etyn at a Brekefast, and every tavern was fful of his mete, ffor whoo had any acqueyntaunce In that hows, he shuld have hadd as moch sodyn & Rost as he myght cary upon a long daggar...25

If not exaggerated, such conspicuous consumption was not mere vain display, but was calculated to impress, to maintain and indeed stimulate the popular support that Warwick prized and might have a use for again. Perhaps it did: however the degree of public support for him again in 1469–71 cannot be explained purely by his hospitality. Nobody, however rich, could have been so open-handed everywhere or without ulterior motive. There were three celebrations of the Nevilles’ pre-eminence.

The Countess Alice was buried in the Salisbury mausoleum of Bisham Priory in Buckinghamshire. It had been there, beside previous earls of Salisbury, that her husband wished to be buried, in a certain place already agreed with the prior.26 Salisbury and his son Thomas, both victims of Wakefield, were re-interred with her in the priory with ceremonial so magnificent that it was recorded by heralds as the model for the funeral of an earl. The author may have been John Waters, Chester herald and formerly Warwick herald, who participated in the proceedings. The remains of Salisbury and Sir Thomas had been removed from the gates of York after Towton. Now they were placed in coffins on a chariot drawn by six horses, one with trappings of the arms of St George and the others draped in black. On Monday 14 February 1463 the cortège was joined by Warwick himself, who rode behind with Montagu to his right and Latimer’s son Henry on his left, sixteen knights and squires on either side. Received at the west front by Bishop Neville, the Bishop of St Asaph, and two mitred abbots, the coffins were carried to the choir in a procession that included the dukes of Clarence and Suffolk, the earls of Warwick and Worcester, lords Montagu, Hastings and FitzHugh, their spouses, many other knights and squires. Alice’s coffin was already in the sanctuary lying on a hearse, both it and the adjoining parclose screens being draped in white. Salisbury’s coffin was placed above and Thomas’s below on a second hearse to the west, both hearse and screens being hung with a black cloth. The service for the dead was held. Garter and Clarenceux Kings-of-Arms, Windsor, Chester and many other heralds were in attendance. Next morning there was a high mass, followed by presentation of the earl’s arms, shield, sword, helm, and even his war-horse, which was brought through the nave to the entrance of the choir, by offerings of money and baldekine cloth, and by the actual interment. We cannot tell whether the tomb was already surmounted by the earl’s alabaster monument, now defaced and displaced at Burghclere.27

The significance of the event is somewhat ambiguous. On the one hand it was the funeral of an earl of Salisbury and the last of the Montagus among their ancestors. That aspect is celebrated in the first surviving version of the Salisbury Roll most probably revised for this occasion. It contains a view of Bisham Priory. From Richard I and Affrica Lady of Man it depicts fifty figures splendid with their coats of arms, often husbands and wives in pairs, culminating appropriately in the earls and countesses of Salisbury and Warwick, Sir Thomas Neville and Lady Willoughby. An interest in heraldry, lineage and ceremonial that unites the Roll with the funeral narrative surely derives from the patron of both, presumably Warwick himself. Some of the oddities of the Roll, the inclusion of obsolete collateral branches and the omission of Warwick’s own sisters, all peer-esses, perhaps indicate hasty preparation following Alice’s death and the absence of her sons on military duty in the North. If complete, the Roll appears merely to update an earlier exemplar, distinguished though the illuminator may have been.28

The narrative, in contrast, depicts both a Neville and a national reunion. Sir Henry Neville of Latimer, so prominent in proceedings, had no Montagu or Salisbury ancestry, but he was currently the Neville male heir after Montagu and was Warwick’s constable at Middleham. Incidentally he was also son of Elizabeth, the third Beauchamp coheir. Warwick was heir to all his father’s arms. It was his father’s membership of the Garter, the arms of St George, that was singled out and it was the royal dukes of Clarence and Suffolk, neither Nevilles nor Montagus, who took precedence. If the intention was to emphasize the family’s national importance, the attendance was somewhat disappointing, for none of the most desirable constituencies were present in force. Where was the king, the late earl’s sisters of Buckingham, Norfolk, Northumberland and York, where his sons-in-law Arundel and Stanley, where his daughter-in-law Maud Lady Willoughby, Warwick’s own countess and daughters? But such disappointments were relative. Even the king could not indulge his father’s memory on a comparable scale for another thirteen years.

Next year, as we shall see, a grateful king elevated Montagu to an earldom and promoted Bishop Neville to the archbishopric of York. It was a mark of his personal pride and that of his family that his enthronement feast was also the most splendid of those recorded and, like Salisbury’s reinterment, has become legendary. Held in September 1465 at the archbishop’s palace at York, it was attended by over 2,000 people who were regaled on the most lavish scale. They included 8 bishops, 18 heads of religious houses, the royal dukes of Suffolk and Gloucester, 6 earls, 7 barons, 18 knights, 69 esquires, and 33 judges, serjeants, and lawyers. The dean and chapter of York Minster, the mayor of the Calais Staple, and the mayor and aldermen of York were included. Warwick was steward, his brother Northumberland was treasurer, Hastings was controller, Lord Willoughby was carver, the late duke of Buckingham’s son John Stafford was cupbearer, and Lords Greystoke and Neville were keepers of the cupboard. Three prominent retainers, Fauconberg’s son-in-law Sir Richard Strangways, Sir Walter Wrottesley, and Sir John Malliverer were respectively sewer, marshal and pantler. Apart from thirteen tables in the hall, chief, second and great chambers, 412 lesser men were fed in the lower hall and 400 servants in the gallery. Warwick’s family were prominent. Apart from his mother’s stepmother Alice Duchess of Suffolk, his two brothers, his sisters of Oxford, FitzHugh, Stanley and Hastings with their husbands, his countess was in the second chamber and his two daughters in the great chamber. Apart from his brother of Northumberland and brothers-in-law of FitzHugh and Stanley, the northern peerage was represented by the Earl of Westmorland, Lords Scrope, Dacre and Ogle. Though very much a Neville celebration, the enthronement of the archbishop was an occasion that attracted all northerners, regardless of faction.29