Warwick the Kingmaker (58 page)

For that, Edward needed evidence of treason beyond that found inadequate by the autumn council. This was provided by the Lincolnshire rebellion of Sir Robert Welles of spring 1470. Was this rebellion fostered or even fomented by Edward in order to destroy his enemies as has recently been suggested?8 It is hardly likely. After Edgecote, Edward must have doubted his own support and been wary of Warwick’s. To encourage Warwick to recruit in his home country on the authority of a commission of array risked raising an uprising that he could not quell. How could Edward have anticipated that Warwick’s own retainers would reject even a royal commission as evidence of the earl’s legitimate intentions? There was greater security in denying the commission and seizing Clarence whilst he was in his power, just as he was to arrest Lord Welles. Originating as a private feud like others lately consumated at Caister (Norf.) and Nibley Green (Gloucs.), Welles’s uprising apparently lacked a national dimension and occurred in a county from which Warwick was conspicuously absent. Whilst admitting our dependence on sources generated by the crown, such as the official
Chronicle
, royal proclamations and
The Confession of Sir Robert Welles
, which are indeed interrelated, we must reject the new conspiracy theory as over-subtle.

All the contemporary sources accept the involvement of Warwick and Clarence (especially Clarence) in the rebellion. Their participation within four months of making peace shows their reconciliation to have been insincere. There are striking resemblances with events in the summer of 1459. The rebellion took the familiar form of a popular uprising led by a ‘great captain’ (like Robin of Redesdale) that did not require their direct involvement and might have permitted their disengagement in the event of defeat. If the rebellion succeeded, Warwick could reap the benefits, and, if not, he could escape the consequences. He could also hope for royal authority to raise forces against the crown which were not forthcoming for avowed treason. The objective, as indicated by Sir Robert Welles’s confession and the
Chronicle
, was surely to substitute Clarence, whom Warwick could manage, as king in place of Edward. Making his son-in-law into a king and his daughter Isabel into a queen was obviously attractive to Warwick, but it was surely the use that was to be made of control of government and fears of the alternative that impelled him into this momentous step. The bills hostile to him and Clarence posted in London in early February, perhaps by royal courtiers, were further causes for apprehension. Both duke and earl were also omitted from commissions of array on 2 March.9

As lord of the honour of Richmond, Clarence was a significant landholder in and around Boston. Some of his men were involved both in the rebellion and in the earlier riot at Gainsborough in which the house of Thomas Burgh, a royal favourite, was demolished. Significantly, in Sir Thomas Dymmock and Sir Thomas Delalaunde, they included two brothers-in-law of Richard Lord Welles and Willoughby.10 He was related to Warwick, and features on the Salisbury Roll; they may have had direct dealings in the 1450s when Warwick’s brother Thomas was married to Maud, Dowager-Lady Willoughby and Lady Welles’s stepmother. Welles was carver at Archbishop Neville’s enthronement feast.11 It was Lord Welles and his son Sir Robert who were prime movers in the Lincolnshire Rebellion. They had been recently restored (by Warwick’s agency?) to the two baronies that they had forfeited as Lancastrians. It is tempting to see the riot as originating in the barring by Burgh of the Welles’ return to their natural local ascendancy. Whether the riot occurred before or after 2 February and whether or not Warwick and Clarence were involved from the start has been much debated and is insoluble in the current state of the evidence. Certainly it caused King Edward to proceed on progress to Lincolnshire and enabled Sir Robert to play on popular fears about the king’s intentions to enlist support. The Lincolnshire insurrection provided a focus for another many-sided rebellion, in which Warwick and Clarence intended deploying their West and North Midlanders, the men of Middleham and Lancashire. Warwick, it appears, counted for support on his brothers-in-law Stanley and FitzHugh.12 He, Clarence and Clarence’s friend Shrewsbury were to raise the West and North Midlands. Apparently Wales, Kent and Calais were not to be involved this time. Such multi-pronged uprisings were difficult to co-ordinate. What caused them to fail in this case was not merely Edward’s fortunate interception of messengers and his decisive countermeasures, but Sir Robert’s decision to fight ahead of meeting up with Warwick, the latter’s difficulty in recruiting, and the unwillingness of the northerners to join him after his initial failure.13

Such factors nullified the success of the camouflage that initially concealed the real character and objectives of the uprising from the king. If Edward did not provoke the insurrection to expose Warwick, which seems incredible but true, we must accept that he did not recognize it for what it really was. Our principal sources give us the advantage of hindsight that contemporaries lacked. Whilst Edward knew of the Welles–Burgh feud, the actual uprising had the character-istics of the genuine popular rebellion with which he was familiar. Compared with his reaction to Robin of Redesdale the previous year, about which he was doubtless sensitive, Edward rather overinsured, going in person with many magnates and a large force. Doubtless he was relieved to accept assistance from Warwick and Clarence.

Most probably Warwick spent Christmas at Warwick, where he was on 16 January 1470, but he was at Westminster by the 20th, when he shared in the exoneration of the Duchess Jacquetta of sorcery.14 In or before early March he returned to Warwick, where he was on the 10th, having agreed in advance to bring his retinue to join Edward at an agreed (but unknown) time and place.15 Lord Welles meantime was at Hellowe (Lincs.), whence on 22 February he was summoned to London and pardoned on 6 March. Clarence meantime was in London, where he liaised with Welles and met up with the king (4–6 March), whose departure he thus delayed, whom he persuaded of his loyalty, and from whom he secured commissions of array against the Lincolnshire rebels for himself and Warwick. Unfortunately these covered only Warwickshire and Worcestershire, where even Warwick’s retainers doubted his intentions, and thus neither Clarence’s Tutbury estates nor Warwick’s Yorkshire connection. The commissions secured, Clarence joined the earl at Warwick. As Edward’s impressive entourage was more than a match for Welles’s popular levies, their plan was to deter the king from attacking Welles’s forces as they drifted westwards until he joined up with them near Leicester at which point, crucially, Edward could be surprised by Welles and themselves. They wrote both to Welles and to the king with this object in mind. But Edward learnt of Sir Robert’s participation and threatened to execute his father, so that the former attacked on his own. Inevitably he was defeated at Empingham (Losecote Field) on 12 March. Once captured, he revealed the involvement of duke and earl, which, if the
Lincolnshire Chronicle
is to be believed, had already been revealed by cries of ‘À Clarence! À Clarence! À Warrewik!’, by the participation of men in Clarence’s livery, and by the discovery of a casket of incriminating papers ‘redy to be shewed’. The king’s instruction next day to Warwick and Clarence to disband and come to him ‘with convenient nombre for thaire astates’ was thus designed to bring them into his power rather than indicating the naive ignorance of their role depicted in the
Chronicle
.

Still too weak to fight on their own and indeed still at Coventry, Warwick and Clarence promised to do as he asked, but proceeded instead via Burton-on-Trent and Derby, through Clarence’s Tutbury and Duffield estates, to Warwick’s town of Chesterfield and Shrewsbury’s Sheffield, recruiting all the time and intending to join up with Warwick’s North Yorkshiremen. Though they sent [John] Rufford and Henry Wrottesley to assure the king of their loyal intentions, Edward sent them a sterner summons on 17 March on pain of their allegiance and threatened military action against them. Recording their illegal recruitment, ‘noo mencion made of us’, which he was inclined to forget, he wrote of activities ‘contrarie to naturall kyndenes and dutie of allegiance...of grete poise’ committed against him.

And that is to calle you to your declaracion on the same, and to receyve you therunto, if ye wolle com as fittethe a liege man to com to his soveraigne lorde in humble wise. And if ye soo doo, indifference and equite shall [be] by us remembred, and soo as no resonable man goodly disposed shall mowe thinke but that we shall entrete you according to your nyghenes of oure blood and oure lawez.

They might bring fitting escorts to put their case and to receive their just deserts. In so far as Warwick and Clarence were prepared to temporize, they wanted safe conducts secured by mutual oaths – thus impugning the king’s honesty and honour! – and pardons for their men. Securely ascendant, affronted by their dishonesty and presumption, and backed by his own council of war, Edward insisted on them submitting without preconditions. Whilst he wished them to have proved their innocence, yet should they be unable to do so, he would take account of their close kinship, ‘his old love and affeccion’ towards them, and temper ‘rightwisseness with favour and pite’. No doubt Edward considered this as far as he could go. For Warwick and Clarence, execution and attainder remained possibilities which they would not risk. So deep had their distrust become! After looking first to the North-West, where Stanley and others declined to join a losing cause, they fled southwards: to Bristol; to Exeter (3 April), which they relieved from a siege by the Courtenays of Bocannoc; and to Clarence’s town of Dartmouth (9 April), whence many of Warwick’s shipmen came. There they embarked for exile.16 Edward had won: in the short term.

When Warwick turned northwards, he still intended to fight. When he turned southwards, he knew that he would not be strong enough and already had flight overseas in mind. He chose not to make a stand at Warwick, where he would have been starved out, he declined to raise Wales, and neither he nor Clarence were particularly strong in the far west. Rumours that Clarence was to proceed to Ireland proved groundless. Their flight was not precipitate, but deliberate. Warwick was accompanied by his artillery as far as Bristol. He picked up his countess and daughter on the way. Flight was not his sole thought. Already, it appears, Warwick was planning to repeat his success of 1459–60, to retire to Calais, mobilize his fleet and diplomatic contacts, with a view to future invasions or more probably negotiation from strength. Edward, his fellow rebel of a decade earlier, realized this and was able to send his own agents to thwart the earl both at Calais and at Southampton. But he was unable to deny Warwick his fleet or his diplomatic contacts, and in England the earl’s bastard feudal connection remained almost intact. Among over sixty partisans whose arrest Edward ordered, most of them Clarence’s or Welles’s men, a mere handful were Warwick’s adherents. Among them were his three councillors Sir Walter Wrottesley, Sir Edward Grey and Sir Geoffrey Gate; the Midlanders Thomas Stafford of Grafton and Richard Clapham; the northerners Robert Strangways, John Conyers, two Huddlestons and three Otters.17 The rest remained untouched. Whilst Edward was constitutionally correct in his summonses to Warwick and had good cause to doubt whether the earl could ever be trusted again, he was unwise to be so unyielding. At this juncture, might not Warwick have given up even the wardenship of the West March, captaincy of Calais, and the keeping of the seas for life and lands? Instead he was to demonstrate again just how dangerous he was.

10.2 WARWICK AS KINGMAKER

In 1470 Warwick had no need to borrow to buy a balinger. His departure from Dartmouth was more deliberate. He took several ships and quickly added numerous prizes. If his followers were few, at the least they ran into scores and perhaps into hundreds. His plan seems to have been the same as in 1459: to retrieve his fleet, base himself in Calais, and launch an invasion from there on England, presumably through Kent. Unfortunately Edward’s memories of that earlier triumph reminded him how to frustrate any repetition. He denied Warwick the breathing space of a decade earlier. Edward prepared seaward defences, ordered the seizure of Warwick’s ships, and sent orders to the Cinque Ports, Calais and Southampton to oppose the earl. One of his agents wiped out the humiliations suffered on that previous occasion. Warwick deputed his councillor Sir Geoffrey Gate, formerly governor of the Isle of Wight, to remove the earl’s own ship the
Trinity
from Southampton. Anthony Earl Rivers was ready for him. The cutting-out party was more than repelled. Gate lost ships, men, and his own liberty. More than twenty captives were tried as traitors and condemned to death by the Earl of Worcester as Lord Constable, of whom Richard Clapham and some lesser men were executed. At Worcester’s initiative, they were also impaled. Gate himself was spared. Moving on to Calais with about thirty ships, Warwick found not only that Edward’s messenger had preceded him, but that the marshal, Lord Duras, already an exile from his original Gascon homeland, was determined to obey Edward’s orders. Calais Castle may have adhered to Warwick. The earl was driven away by gunfire and his first grandson was born and died at sea. Even though Wenlock was more sympathetic, sending wine out to the duchess, Warwick could not gain admittance. Soon after he was joined by his nephew Thomas Neville, bastard of his late uncle Fauconberg, who commanded some of the earl’s own ships and was joint commander of Edward’s fleet. They preyed on neutral shipping, whether Spanish, Dutch, English or Hanseatic, and on 20 April captured about forty Burgundian and some Breton merchantmen. ‘In the memory of man, the people of the Low Countries had never suffered such a disaster from pirates.’ Some of these were subsequently lost to Edward’s other commander Lord Howard and another fourteen to Rivers and Hans Voetken in a lively conflict in which 500–600 mariners were slain. Vanquished once again, if yet unbowed, Warwick took refuge with eighty ships about 1 May in the Seine estuary at Honfleur and Harfleur.18 From this nadir, Warwick was to return in triumph, as Kingmaker to Henry VI, who resumed his reign or Readeption from Michaelmas (29 September) 1470.