Warwick the Kingmaker (64 page)

83. Vaesen,
Lettres de Louis XI
, iv. 123–5; Champollion-Figeac,
Lettres
, ii. 488–91; L. Visser-Fuchs, ‘Edward IV’s
Memoir on Paper
to Charles Duke of Burgundy: The So-called “Short Version of
The Arrivall
” ’,
NMS
xxxvi (1992), 168–70; see also the observation of Basin,
Louis XI
, i. 24–7.

84. Plancher,
Bourgogne
, cccii; Basin,
Louis XI
, ii. 24n–9.

85. Waurin-Dupont, iii. 196–204; Commines,
Mémoires
, ed. Fresnoy, iii. 68–71, 154–5.

86. Calmette and Perinelle, 323–5; Scofield, i. 560–2; Myers,
Eng. Hist. Docs.
, 307, transl. from A. R. Myers,
Crown, Household, and Parliament in Fifteenth-Century England
(1985), 320.

87.
DKR
xlv (1884), 333; xlviii (1887), 448; C 76/144 m. 30.

88. Myers,
Crown, Household & Parliament
, 320;
Coventry Leet Bk.
362; Rainey, ‘Defense of Calais’, 97, 103.

89. Ross,
Edward IV
, 159; Commines,
Mémoires
, ed. Calmette and Durville, 210.

90. BN MS 3887, f. 100; it is unlikely that England’s military contribution was more than nominal.

91. Ross,
Edward IV
, 160n.

92.
The Arrivall
, 2–9; Visser-Fuchs, ‘Edward IV’s
Memoir
’, 210–13.

93.
HMC Rutland
, i. 3–4.

94.
The Arrivall
, 9; Wright,
Political Poems
, ii. 273; Chastellain,
Oeuvres
, v. 465.

95.
The Arrivall
, 9–13.

96. Ibid. 9.

97. Ibid. 12.

98.
Hanserecesse
, ii. 416.

Man proposes, oftimes in veyn,

But God disposes, the boke telleth pleyn.1

Edward’s victory was God-given. It was also a surprise, as the ballad after Barnet, even before Tewkesbury, authentically records. Edward had won against the odds, in defiance of public opinion: ‘Turn again, ye commons, & drede your king’ was the refrain. Warwick had blown it. Warwick died not as a power-hungry and turbulent baron seeking only his own advancement, but representing public opinion. He stood for the expression of popular grievances and for a popular mood that was larger and more enduring than himself. He was still trusted by the commons to deliver the remedy. Warwick was the man in the ballad who proposed. In control and with the majority behind him, he had contrived to lose. However militarily brilliant in other contexts, Warwick was not Edward’s equal on the field of battle.

Defeat did not make Warwick wrong. Edward’s second reign, like his first, commenced with his victory over the majority. That Edward was to die peacefully in his bed twelve years later cannot conceal that ten weeks only were needed to overthrow his heir. The successful usurper attacked the record of Edward’s second regime in terms reminiscent of 1469–70 and found a receptive chord. If Warwick was Richard III’s model, as has been suggested, it was a recipe that worked because the problems of the 1450s and the 1460s remained unresolved, at least in the eyes of the commons. The Wars of the Roses did not end in 1471, still less on the battlefield of Barnet.

Edward’s Barnet ballad is more than a celebration. It is an appeal, to unity, to allegiance. For ‘right many wer and [still are] towardes him [Warwick], and for that entent returnyd and waged with hym’, explains
The Arrivall
.2 For the commons and many others, there was no longer a cause to fight for:

Conuertimini
[Turn again], and leue your opinion,

And sey
Credo
[I believe], hy woll noon other-wyse be;

For he ys gon that louyd dyuision [obviously Warwick]

Mortuus est
[He is dead], ther can noman hym se...

Return to your allegiance in the interests of reconciliation. It is God’s will. That was the ballad’s message. Some listened. Some of Warwick’s supporters did make their peace after Barnet. Their loyalty was to Warwick, not Henry VI. Others did not. Wenlock fought and died at Tewkesbury. Oxford was still at arms in 1473. The Bastard of Fauconberg, Warwick’s shipmen, Nicholas Faunt of Canterbury and the Kentishmen fought on even after Tewkesbury and tried to carry London with them. The Richmondshire connection considered a further uprising.

For Barnet was not the end of the Readeption. It was a stunning blow, but not in itself conclusive. Another four weeks were to pass until the Lancastrian cause was finally destroyed at Tewkesbury, where Warwick’s second son-in-law Prince Edward was slain. Henry VI died soon after and Margaret languished as a prisoner and exile for the rest of her days. Yet fourteen years on, it was Edward’s own dynasty that was supplanted.

‘Allas!’ may he syng that causyd all thys...

Barnet ended Warwick’s life. It was not the end of his line. It was his other son-in-law Clarence, husband of his daughter Isabel, who was allowed to enter her inheritance immediately after the battle. Clarence’s son was to become earl of Warwick and his daughter countess of Salisbury. Subsequently Warwick’s widowed daughter Anne remarried the king’s other brother Richard Duke of Gloucester. Warwick’s ambition of ducal status for them was achieved; for Anne, a crown followed. Nor was it the end of Warwick’s retainers. They were a prize that was coveted. When the two dukes divided his estates, they divided also his connection, which they nurtured as the basis of their own power. Both followed Warwick as overmighty subjects, and the younger, Richard, usurped the crown, with the same disastrous consequences as Warwick’s own kingmaking. It was his northern, Neville, Middleham connection on which he relied as king. Barnet was admittedly a disaster for Warwick’s countess, who lost her husband, her inheritance and her independence. Whatever their rights, none of the junior house of Neville – John’s son George, later the Latimer and Bergavenny lines – were ever to recover their northern patrimony.

Hume and Lytton were wrong. Warwick was not the last of the barons. There were to be further overmighty subjects and idols of the multitude for whom he may have been an inspiration. Warwick was also an innovator in many ways, some without a sequel. If no future magnate was to deploy seapower or to commit the Calais garrison in domestic power politics, it was because Warwick’s example was remembered, feared, and guarded against. Others were to appeal directly to public opinion and to peddle public grievances as the cloak for their own private ends. Moreover Barnet was not the end of the Warwick legend. We have already remarked the admiring place surprisingly reserved for Warwick in so many subsequent histories. If never revived as the focus for future revolts or canonized, Warwick remains a household name: much more so than either of his kings.

NOTES

1. Robbins,
Hist. Poems
, 226–7. This is the source of this section.

2.
The Arrivall
, 21.

Plate 1

The Neville
matriarch Joan Beaufort
Countess of Westmorland
and daughters at prayer,
from the Neville Hours.
The daughters, who
include three duchesses,
are identifiable from the
coats of arms beneath.
(
Paris, Bibliothèque
Nationale, MS Latin
1158, f.28v
)

Plate 2

Warwick’s parents Richard Neville and Alice Montagu as Earl and Countess of Salisbury. Note the Neville saltire with a label of cadency. (
British Library, MS Loan
90, p.221 / in the collection of the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry, KT
)

Plate 3

Richmond Castle. The banners identify those tenants responsible for guarding particular defences. The Neville saltire appears on the great tower to the right.
(
British Library, MS Cotton Faustina BVIII, f.85v
)

Plate 4

Bear and ragged staff from a gold ring supposedly taken from Warwick’s body at Barnet. (
Geoffrey Wheeler)