by Hugh Bicheno
Ralph and Joan also arranged brilliant marriages for their daughters: Katherine to the Duke of Buckingham, Anne to the Duke of Norfolk and, as we have seen, Cecily to the Duke of York. Eleanor, the eldest of their children, was married to Hotspur’s son Henry. Joan designed the marriage as a means to reconcile the Percys with Henry V, who in 1416 restored Henry Percy to his grandfather’s attainted title, to the wardenship of the East March and to those of the Percy estates not previously awarded to others, principally to Ralph Neville himself.
Of all these unions, the prize was the marriage in 1420 of Richard, the eldest, to Alice, heiress of Thomas Montacute, 4th Earl of Salisbury, Alice Chaucer’s second husband. Richard became a regional magnate when he inherited his father’s lands and offices; but when Montacute was killed at the siege of Orléans in late 1428, he became one of the richest peers in England. The Salisbury inheritance included the huge manor of Bisham in eastern Berkshire and a broad spread of estates from Somerset through Wiltshire and Dorset to Hampshire.
We know very little about the man who became, by marriage, 5th Earl of Salisbury. The only surviving likeness is a figurine of him as one of the ‘mourners’ around the magnificent tomb of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, in the Church of St Mary, Warwick. It makes him look like a benevolent priest, which is hard to square with his harsh reputation. On the other hand, although he was 20 when he married Alice Montacute, seven years his junior, he had the decency to wait a few years before consummating the union. Between 1423 and 1444 she bore him many children, ten of whom survived infancy.
Other than that we really only know he was supremely blessed by good fortune and much favoured by the king’s Council. This naturally bred envious resentment, not least among Ralph’s first family. The new Earl of Westmorland tried to obtain a modification of the lop-sided settlement agreed by his father, but could not prevail in the face of Salisbury’s power. Many years later the dispossessed Nevilles were to eat the dish of revenge very cold indeed.
Contrary to what most histories allege the feud that developed between Salisbury and the Percys took a long time to gestate. Despite the Nevilles having grown so greatly at his family’s expense, until 1453 the Earl of Northumberland combined with Salisbury against Scots incursions, and the two frequently worked together on royal commissions and in other regional legal capacities. There was, however, no doubt which of the two was the dominant partner.
Northumberland itself remained a solidly Percy fief, but in every other northern county the ‘good lordship’ of Salisbury predominated, and most of the lesser local peers were drawn into his gravitational field. Two who looked instead to Percy for leadership were the intermarried families of Lord Clifford and Ralph Dacre of Naworth, in Cumberland. Among the reasons why they resisted Salisbury’s hegemony must have been Dacre’s marriage with one of the daughters of Ralph Neville’s first marriage.*1
The cascade of royal favour for the Earl of Salisbury continued after Henry VI assumed personal kingship, with the promise of the lands (but not the title) of the earldom of Richmond in heredity, and the lifetime grant of the West March wardenship for himself and his eldest son, as well as the remaining stewardships of the duchy of Lancaster in Yorkshire.
Suffolk, the king’s chief minister, did not view Salisbury’s growing power with equanimity. Towards the end of the 1440s he directed royal favour towards the long-neglected Percys in an effort to balance the Nevilles. In November 1447, Northumberland’s second son, Thomas Percy, was granted the recreated title and the meagre lands of the barony of Egremont, to part of which Salisbury had laid claim. Suffolk also put the payments due to Northumberland as warden of the East March on a par with those due to Salisbury for the West March.
By this time Northumberland had become a more assiduous courtier. He really did not have the means to maintain a suitably grand presence in London, but had learned he must try to do so. He also spent a much higher proportion of his relatively modest income on maintaining his remaining influence in Cumberland and Yorkshire, as otherwise he could not hope to recover the assets lost by his family following the 1405 attainder.
It was, therefore, a crushing blow to Northumberland’s hopes – as well as those of quite a few others – when in 1448 the Nevilles won the matrimonial lottery yet again. It began in 1435, when Salisbury and the Welsh Marcher magnate Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, agreed a double matrimonial alliance, with Salisbury’s daughter Cecily (aged 10) betrothed to Warwick’s heir Henry (9), and his eldest son Richard (6) to Warwick’s daughter Anne (8).
When both Beauchamp and his wife died in 1439, Salisbury became the lead administrator of his estates on behalf of Henry and Anne, until Henry was granted his majority in 1444. Because his father had been the tutor chosen by Henry V for his infant son, Henry Beauchamp had been Henry VI’s closest friend since childhood. In 1445, the king made him Duke of Warwick and also declared him King of the Isle of Wight, in order to put him on a more equal standing. It was a terrible blow to him when Henry died, aged only 21, the following year.
Not long before his death Henry and Cecily had a baby daughter, named Anne after her aunt, Henry’s sister and the younger Richard Neville’s wife. When Henry died the baby became Countess of Warwick by right, but three years later, in 1449, she also died. Salisbury was perfectly placed to ensure that Anne, his daughter-in-law and the sole full blood heir, secured as much as possible of an enormous inheritance.
At the age of 21 the younger Richard Neville became Earl of Warwick by marriage and inherited, through Anne, lands that rivalled his father’s in acreage, although poorer. Apart from Barnard Castle in Durham and one or two other scattered holdings, the Beauchamp estate was concentrated in Wales and the South March, in Gloucestershire, and in Warwickshire itself.*2 The new Earl of Warwick’s aunt Cecily did him one last favour by dying in 1450, with the reversion of her dower lands to the estate.
Another timely death – for Warwick – was that of his wife’s half-sister in 1448, which in 1450 enabled him to gain control of the lands of the barony of Bergavenny on behalf of her minor son, supplanting her widower, his uncle Edward. Salisbury also ceded to him the guardianship of George, Baron Latimer, another uncle, who had been declared mentally incompetent in 1447, which gave him control of the lands of the youngest of the daughters from Richard Beauchamp’s first marriage.
He was also outstandingly fortunate in the timing of the Beauchamp succession. The claims of the eldest daughters of Richard Beauchamp’s first marriage were swept aside more easily because their husbands, the Duke of Somerset and Earl of Shrewsbury, who would have violently resisted Warwick’s takeover, were so deeply involved in the Normandy debacle.
Another key factor in Warwick’s rise and rise was the fall of Suffolk, who viewed the union of the Salisbury and Warwick earldoms as highly undesirable and might have restrained Henry VI, who regarded the new earl as a close friend. Warwick had been in attendance at court alongside Henry Beauchamp, and some of the glow of his double brother-in-law’s lifelong friendship with the king rubbed off on him. Overwhelmed by the crisis of 1449–50 and by his growing fear that York was plotting to overthrow him, the king gave Warwick’s succession his unreserved blessing.
What sort of a man was the new Earl of Warwick, this sudden meteor in the English political firmament? Like Salisbury, his father, the only likeness we have of him is one of the figurines around the funerary monument of Richard Beauchamp, his father-in-law. Since he oversaw the construction of the tomb, we must assume he thought it portrayed him to best advantage. If so, he must have been strikingly ugly in real life – although we should not, perhaps, read too much into the strange face, which makes him look like a discontented cat.
As with all medieval biography, we must pick and choose among hagiographic and hostile commentaries. Two characteristics are common to both: even by the standard of his age, Warwick was extremely ruthless, and he was also highly charismatic. The Greek root of the word charisma means ‘gift of grace’, and
it is not much of a leap of imagination to assume he saw the hand of fate in the improbable sequence of events that thrust greatness upon him at such an early age. His history bears the mark of a man convinced he was destiny’s child, with no need to compromise with those who opposed him.
*1 Ralph Dacre was not in the direct line of succession to the Dacre barony, which in 1458 went by marriage to Richard Fiennes of Herstmonceux Castle in Sussex. To avoid confusion Ralph was known as Dacre of the North after he was made a baron in his own right in 1459.
*2 For a fuller appreciation of this hotly contested succession, see Appendix D: The Beauchamp Inheritance.
IX
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Marguerite
In The Treasure of the City of Ladies, written in about 1405, the Venetian-French writer Christine de Pisan sought to buttress what she saw as an erosion of respect for the role of women as mediators and peacemakers between their husbands and the rest of the world. Their supportive role, she wrote, was to advocate chastity, charity, patience and humility, to which end rhetorical skill (her own forte) was an indispensable attribute. However, she also argued that a noble lady must play an active role during her husband’s absences, not only employing her well-honed administrative skills but also, if necessary, as a military leader.
Marguerite of Anjou was a queen straight out of The Treasure of the City of Ladies until circumstances obliged her to take hold of the reins falling from her husband’s hands. It was his failure that forced her to ‘act like a man’. Although she was just 20 years old in 1450, Marguerite handled the moral collapse of her 28-year-old husband with remarkable maturity and aplomb. She had received a thorough education on how to rule through weak men from her mother and grandmother, and that training now paid off.
Henry VI had grown up crushed by knowledge that he could not possibly live up to the idealized example of his father, the alpha male of a warrior aristocracy in which natural selection had distilled an abundance of testosterone. Deficient in that respect, he had willingly surrendered his institutional power to Suffolk, twenty-five years older and a distinguished veteran of the Normandy conquest. Now, with Suffolk and Ayscough brutally murdered, his carefree cocoon ripped away and his entourage behaving like the proverbial headless chicken, he desperately needed someone to supply parental guidance. Who better than his wife, who had acted so bravely and decisively to defuse Cade’s Rebellion?
The evidence points to Somerset being the queen’s choice to replace Buckingham as Constable of England and as the new chief minister. Marguerite was probably not immune to his charm – few women were – but his principal attraction to her was that he owed everything to the crown. Without royal protection he would be hounded to death by York and the vengeful Anglo-Normans, and following his losses in Normandy and the Acts of Resumption, without royal favour he could not sustain the standard required of a duke.*1
The collapse of the peace policy she symbolized made it all the more important for Marguerite to adopt a low profile, for which she needed a front man. Although she had been as much wrapped in Suffolk’s cocoon as Henry, she would have been better informed about the true state of his realm through ladies-in-waiting such as Jacquetta and Alice Chaucer, and the other noblewomen who attended her court. They would have functioned as an intelligence service at a time when Henry’s retinue was feeding him panic-inducing rumours.
We may also infer there was considerable scope for women to play a major, if informal, role in government if they could persuade their men to keep their testosterone under control. While we should not presume aristocratic women were any less ruthlessly ambitious than their male kin, their instincts would oppose a drift towards combat. The marital alliances in the list of ‘Protagonists and Marriages’ and the family trees do not, unfortunately, give us any indication of how effective they were, of who were the strong women and who the weak. What they do show, however, is that in less fraught times Marguerite might have made herself the hub of a powerful sorority working for compromise.
The immediate task was to see off the threat from York, and he was firmly put back in his box during 1451−2. We have seen how little the support of the Commons mattered once the Lords realized their interest was best served by opposing the cause of reform espoused by York. Somerset required no encouragement from Marguerite to go after the man who wanted to destroy him and, not surprisingly for a man far more accustomed to warfare than to government, he chose to run the political equivalent of a chevauchée against him.
York was far too eminent for someone like Somerset, admired by few and lacking the means to buy followers, to attack directly. Instead, he set out to erode York’s prestige and popularity by showing he could not protect his own people. In June 1451, following the vehement rejection of his petition to recognize York as heir presumptive, Thomas Young and other Yorkist councillors were sent to the Tower. In July, Somerset turned his guns on William Oldhall, York’s chamberlain and Speaker of the Commons. The arrest for sedition of the vicar and others of Standon, a Hertfordshire manor held by Oldhall from York, was the first shot. In November Oldhall took sanctuary in St Martins-le-Grand in London.
Even though there was credible evidence Oldhall had conspired against him, the king was outraged when, in January 1452, Somerset had him dragged out, and ordered him returned to sanctuary. It was an unheeded warning that Somerset’s impatience could bring royal authority into further disrepute. The king was right to overrule him, not only because the violation of sanctuary was impious, but also because it was unnecessary. Oldhall no longer posed a threat. Even so he was impeached, and on 22 June found guilty of treason, outlawed and attainted. He remained in sanctuary under close supervision until 1455.
Adding to the sense of crisis, in September 1451 the dormant feud between the Earl of Devon and the recently created Baron Bonville erupted into open warfare. It is not entirely clear why it did so, but there must be a strong assumption the main culprit was Bonville, if only because he was now allied with the restless James Butler, Earl of Wiltshire. Devon was now supported by the hot-headed Lord Moleyns, whose arbitrary actions against the Paston family we reviewed in Chapter 5, and by Edward Brooke, Baron Cobham. After failing to capture Wiltshire at Bristol, they ran Bonville to earth at Taunton Castle in Somerset.
A short while previously the Berkeley–Lisle feud*2 had also burst into flames when John Talbot, Lord Lisle, seized Berkeley Castle and kidnapped Berkeley’s wife. York intervened against Lisle, and then took 2,000 men south to separate the combatants at Taunton. Devon had been one of his few aristocratic supporters, while Bonville and Wiltshire were strongly associated with the court party. By taking Bonville into custody he saved Devon from being tainted by murder, and by submitting the dispute to royal arbitration he demonstrated that he could keep the king’s peace where Somerset could not.
Fed false reports that York’s people were responsible for outbreaks of unrest in East Anglia, the king reacted angrily to the actions taken in his name by York in the West Country. Marguerite’s imperfect understanding of how England was governed may have led her to see a parallel with her cousin Charles VII’s humbling of his over-mighty nobles in France. For whatever reasons, the royal couple accepted uncritically Somerset’s interpretation of York’s actions as a usurpation of the king’s prerogative, when most would have seen it as the justified exercise of regional lordship to restore law and order.
Although Lisle had plainly been in the wrong at Berkeley Castle, he was created a viscount. York was also insultingly cast as a party to the Courtenay–Bonville feud when the king summoned all involved to court. Moleyns, Cobham, Bonville and Wiltshire obeyed and were briefly detained, separately, in the queen’s castles at Berkhamsted and Wallingford. Devon and York ignored the summons, and it was probably because the king refused to pursue the matter any further that Somerset vented his frustration on Oldhall.
By January 1452 York was sufficiently alarmed by reports of the king’s anger towards him to send a grovelling declaration of l
oyalty, and took the further step of publicly swearing to it in the presence of the Bishop of Hereford and the Earl of Shrewsbury. Then came Somerset’s violation of sanctuary, after which York became convinced his enemy would stop at nothing to destroy him. Accordingly, he summoned his tenantry from all over England to join him in a march on London. A manifesto dated 3 February recited the now tired accusation against Somerset for the loss of Normandy, and continued:
After my coming out of Ireland, as the king’s true liegeman and servant (as I ever shall be to my life’s end), I brought to his royal majesty’s attention certain articles concerning the well-being and safeguard both of his most royal person and the tranquillity and conservation of all this his realm. These terms of advice... were laid aside, to have no effect, through the envy, malice and untruth of the Duke of Somerset [who]... labours continually about the king’s highness for my undoing, and to corrupt my blood, and to disinherit me and my heirs and such persons as are about me.
Since Somerset ‘ever prevails and rules about the king’s person’, York announced his intention to proceed ‘in all haste against him’, and called on his kinsmen and friends to join him. For all the protestations of loyalty to the king this was a call to armed rebellion, and seen as such even by peers such as Norfolk, who had hitherto supported York against Somerset. Such an extraordinary misjudgement must have been the product of obsession, nurtured by York’s isolation at Ludlow with men who could see their own fate in Oldhall’s.