Battle Royal

by Hugh Bicheno

  First, there was the continuing defiance of royal authority by Warwick’s refusal to surrender Cardiff and Cowbridge. The issue was taken off the boil because, in the face of Kemp’s disapproval and without the king’s warrant, Somerset could not push his spurious claims any further. His ambition to undo the Beauchamp settlement had, anyway, been dealt a severe blow by the deaths of Shrewsbury and Lisle at Castillon. Had they returned in triumph from Guyenne they would undoubtedly have supported him against Warwick, in arms if necessary, with every possibility of success.

  Secondly, and potentially more threatening to royal authority, the tinder of conflict in the North between the houses of Percy and Neville began to smoulder. It was a generational thing. Sixty-year-old Henry Percy, restored to the earldom of Northumberland in 1416 through the good offices of Joan née Beaufort, Countess of Westmorland, and married to her eldest daughter, had to accept that he must play second fiddle to 53-year-old Salisbury, his much wealthier and better connected brother-in-law.

  His sons, however, yearned for the days when the Percys were ‘Kings of the North’, and chafed at Neville supremacy. The spark to the tinder was the marriage in August 1453 between Thomas Neville, Salisbury’s youngest son, and Maud Stanhope, niece and joint heir of Lord Cromwell. Cromwell’s many estates included Burwell in Lincolnshire and Wressle in south-east Yorkshire, both previously owned by Thomas Percy, Earl of Worcester, who had been beheaded and attainted in 1403 after the failure of his nephew Hotspur’s rebellion.

  Wressle, where Worcester had built a splendid castle-mansion, was among the properties the Percys most wanted to recover, and Northumberland’s second son (also Thomas Percy) believed the Stanhope–Neville marriage would lead to the permanent loss of the castle and manor. Bearing in mind how Thomas Percy had been created Baron Egremont over the objections of Salisbury in the last flourish of Suffolk’s ascendancy, and that the title brought with it very little land, it is possible some assurance about Wressle had been given to Thomas. He certainly reacted as though he had been robbed after the king gave consent to the Neville–Stanhope marriage.

  Egremont issued his livery to a gang of hard cases recruited in York and, joined by his younger brother Richard, began to maraud Neville lands, ignoring orders from the king to desist and to take his men to Guyenne. Salisbury’s second son, John Neville, retaliated by riding through the Percy manor of Topcliffe with a column of armed retainers.

  Egremont’s anger over Wressle is usually seen as the culmination of growing tension between the two families, but he had a genuine and specific grievance. Apart from Ampthill, which we reviewed in Chapter 5, Lord Cromwell was a party to a number of other disputes, and when he died in 1456, his executors returned lands worth £5,500 [£3.5 million] to illegally dispossessed owners. Probably he and the Nevilles were indeed planning some chicanery over Wressle, although it was a royal manor only granted to him for life. Common hostility towards Cromwell later brought together the younger Percys and the 23-year-old Duke of Exeter, making them enemies of York as well.

  On 24 August Egremont and Richard Percy, joined by John Clifford, the eldest son of Thomas, Baron Clifford, waylaid the Neville–Stanhope wedding party, which included Salisbury himself, at Heworth, outside York. Although there was much shouting and jostling, no blood was spilt – but the affront to Salisbury brought the fathers openly into the dispute. They called out their retainers, and on 20 October the two armies came into dangerous proximity 4 miles north of Topcliffe. The younger men may have been champing at the bit, but Salisbury and Northumberland sought the mediation of Archbishop William Booth of York, and disbanded their forces for the winter.

  Even though blood did not flow, the salient political fact was that both parties had ignored repeated injunctions and indictments issued under the Great Seal, just when Marguerite played the top dynastic trump card by giving birth to a healthy baby boy. Ironically, by taking the issue of York’s possible succession off the table, it made him more acceptable as the champion of good governance he had always claimed to be. An orderly realm might be governed by a council – as it had been during Henry’s minority. However, one where great lords were circling each other with fur bristling required a firmer hand than even a council guided by Kemp could provide.

  *1 In 1454 Pope Nicholas V took advantage of the paralysis of English government to appoint William Grey, one of his own officials.

  XI

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  Richard

  In November 1454 York rode into London accomp-nied by the king’s Tudor half-brothers, the Earls of Richmond and Pembroke. What makes this doubly significant is that no other peers wished to be publicly identified with the duke. Furthermore, although Somerset had tried to prevent it, York had come because members of the royal household and bishops closely associated with the regime had voted to include him in a summons to a Great Council, which was to decide on governance during the king’s incapacity.

  It is possible, indeed probable, that the queen had in mind the creation of a royal ‘centre’, above faction, a project which remained viable until the king emerged from catatonia around Christmas 1454. Discarding Somerset was the price she had to pay to bring York on board, and there is no reason to believe she hesitated to pay it. Somerset had become a political liability, and a distraction from the serious business of deciding how to cope with the constitutional conundrum of a living king who was unable to rule.

  York had almost ruined himself pursuing the Anglo-Norman vendetta against Somerset, and would not have wanted to expend any of his diminished political capital in reopening old wounds. It was Norfolk, with his own axe to grind, who formally accused Somerset of treason. Although York took advantage of Norfolk’s accusation to argue that Oldhall’s conviction for treason should be set aside, he did not pursue the matter after Kemp ruled the Council lacked the legal authority to do so. The Chancellor did, however, agree that York’s councillors had been unlawfully purged from the Commons.

  Somerset was sent to the Tower to await the preparation of the terms of impeachment, which Norfolk insisted should be by English law only for abuses of power as the king’s chief minister. His alleged treasonous dealings with the King of France were to be judged by Norman law, which would have put his fate in the hands of nobles who had lost their French estates. We cannot know whether this was a genuine effort to see him punished for the loss of Normandy, or a ploy to drag out the proceedings indefinitely. Somerset’s retainers took up residence around the Tower, and there he remained for the next fourteen months. York may have had few lords on his side, but Somerset had even fewer. He was neutralized.

  By the end of November 1453 some forty-six lords had obeyed the summons to the Great Council. They all solemnly swore to abstain from and to suppress lawlessness, but evaded discussion of the constitutional crisis. On 5 December a mere fourteen peers put their names to a minimal agreement that the Council should act when required to maintain ‘politic rule and governance’. The first such action, supported by York and voted the next day, was to make provision for the on-going functioning of the king’s household.

  York would not have subscribed to this if he believed the household was hostile to him. He and his wife certainly must have paid their respects to Marguerite and her baby after she emerged from confinement, so either face-to-face at that time or indirectly later he may have received the queen’s assurance that she wanted to work with him. This would explain a number of things, not least why he did not pursue the impeachment of Somerset during 1454.

  More intriguing is that York made no attempt to bring forward discussion of constitutional matters, the very reason why the Great Council had been summoned. The reason for his reticence was to avoid a clash with Kemp, who was determined to delay any such discussion for as long as possible. To make sure the Council did not try to grant itself royal prerogatives, Kemp kept Privy Seal, his man Lisieux, away from Westminster, thus maintaining a veto for the Great Seal.

  The only move to fill the political void w
as an astonishing proposal circulated in mid-January that has Kemp’s fingerprints all over it. Evidence of it is limited to a single report from one of Norfolk’s informants in London, but it is plausible:

  The Queen hath made a bill of five articles, desiring those articles be granted; whereof the first is that she desireth the whole rule of this land; the second is that she may make the Chancellor, the Treasurer, the Privy Seal, and all other officers of this land, with sheriffs and all other officers that the King should make; the third is that she may give all the bishoprics of this land, and all the other benefices belonging to the King’s gift; the fourth is that she may have sufficient livelihood assigned her for the King, and the Prince and herself. But as for the fifth article, I cannot yet know what it is.*1

  Marguerite and Kemp must have known that a Council reluctant to address substantive matters of governance would be hostile to the constitutional novelty they were proposing. They were setting out a strong negotiating position, designed to pre-empt any discussion of a regency unless it were hers. Some of the lords will have understood this, but it would have added to their resentment of a chancellor who was exceeding his traditional authority, and an emerging consensus in favour of York.

  On 13 February, the day before Parliament convened, Kemp moved that the Council should decide ‘to whom the king’s power should be committed’, with the Council retaining the right to prorogue and dissolve Parliament. The councillors overrode him and included the right ‘to dissolve the said parliament and to do all things that shall be necessary thereto or to any of the premises’ when they nominated York. Undeterred, Kemp altered the wording back to what he had originally proposed before affixing the Great Seal.

  At about the same time York made a shrewd legal thrust to ensure the neutrality of the Commons. One of the charges brought against Oldhall to depose him as Speaker had been that he stole property worth about £2,000 [£1.27 million] from Somerset. York now obtained a judgement against Somerset’s man Thorpe, who had replaced Oldhall, for stealing property to the same value from him, and had him consigned to the Fleet prison. When Parliament convened, the Commons sent a delegation to the Lords to protest, but accepted York’s argument (which Kemp might perhaps have ruled invalid, but did not) that since Thorpe’s arrest had taken place during the recess, it did not infringe on parliamentary privilege.

  The new Speaker, one of the royal household MPs, made no advocacy for Thorpe or Somerset. York also obtained the acquittal of the Earl of Devon of the charge of high treason pending since Dartford. In a quid pro quo, he then led the lords in reciting an oath of allegiance as ‘true and faithful Liegemen to the King our Sovereign Lord’, and the next day subscribed to the Act by which 5-month-old Edward was created Prince of Wales.

  Simultaneously with these developments, on 19 March 1454 the Commons refused a request from the Chancellor for a grant of £40,000 [£24.44 million]. They argued that they had been generous already and had not received in return the ‘sad and substantial council’ promised several times since the king first agreed to it in 1450. It is quite possible Kemp had made the request to provoke an excuse to dissolve a Parliament now unresponsive to his will, and to return power to a Council he could override; but whatever he intended to do became moot when he dropped dead on the 22nd.

  The next day the Lords sent a deputation led by Buckingham to visit the king at Windsor, and, after they reported that he remained catatonic, the political log-jam constructed by Kemp was washed away. On the 27th, the Lords elected York Protector of the Realm and Chief Councillor. He obtained an Act of Parliament to confirm the appointment, which cited the example of the arrangements made after the death of Henry V in 1422. That is, he was to receive all lawful and reasonable assistance in the service of the public good, but the Council reserved the right to define the public good. His only specifically defined duty was to defend the realm against foreign or domestic enemies.

  The true novelty was the election on 28 March of Richard Neville, Earl of Salisbury, as the first secular Lord Chancellor since 1412, when Henry IV appointed his half-brother Thomas Beaufort as a shot across the bow of a politically activist episcopate. The same consideration applied in 1454: the election of Salisbury was retaliation by the secular lords for Kemp’s frustration of the Great Council. Salisbury was, however, a most inappropriate choice for the senior legal officer of the kingdom. He had very recently defied royal authority in his family’s squabble with the Percys, and he was also a party to other on-going disputes in the Midlands, and through his son in south Wales.

  We can only speculate how this appointment, which led to the fateful alignment of the Nevilles with York, came about. It was certainly not due to York’s influence, as he had barely managed to achieve a highly circumscribed authority for himself. It was most likely the result of wholesale bribery by Salisbury and Warwick, who wanted to ensure that those seeking to challenge their supremacy should have no legal recourse and would resort to arms, for which they could be condemned for rebellion.

  Even though they were brothers-in-law, Salisbury had not previously shown any indication of sympathy with York, and it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the queen could have instructed her party to vote for him, to balance York. Likewise the promotion from Ely to Canterbury of Bishop Thomas Bourchier, the Duke of Buckingham’s maternal half-brother, may have been a move towards the creation of a ‘centre’ in which the country’s greatest magnates were in equilibrium.

  If so, it constitutes evidence of a political project too sophisticated to have been the product of the rather dull minds of the household sycophants. It may have been a policy legacy from the wily Kemp, but its continuation must have been driven by Marguerite, advised by Laurence Booth, her own chancellor and holder of the sinecure archdeaconry of Richmond. Further evidence of a carefully planned project is that Booth’s brother William, Archbishop of York, did not to seek his own promotion to Canterbury, the more normal progression.

  York’s most immediate challenge was the captaincy of Calais, held by Somerset since 1451. With the support of the garrison, which had not even received payment on account since July 1453, Somerset’s deputy, Lord Rivers, and his subordinate captains Lords Welles and Stourton, refused to admit York as the new captain. We shall discuss this in greater detail in a later chapter. For now let it suffice to say that York delegated negotiations to his brother-in-law Henry, Viscount Bourchier, who was acquainted with the problems from his own service as governor-general of Picardy during York’s lieutenancy of Normandy.

  York treated the king’s appointment of Wiltshire to replace him as lieutenant in Ireland as though it had never been made. Although the Council refused to rule between the two claimants, York asserted his right under the unrevoked terms of his own 1448 patent, appointed his own officials and collected the salary. Wiltshire was infuriated by the affront, which must have involved the complicity of John Tiptoft, the new Lord Treasurer. Previously a king’s man and as such created Earl of Gloucester in 1449, Tiptoft had become a member of the Neville affinity through his love-match in 1450 to Salisbury’s daughter Cecily, the dowager Duchess of Warwick, tragically cut short by her early death.

  In the North, Egremont obliged the Nevilles by embarking on a new round of depredations, in which the Duke of Exeter joined him. That the two men found themselves in such perfect harmony suggests Egremont’s hold on sanity was also not too firm. Their cunning plan was for Exeter to assert his superior right by blood to challenge York’s protectorship, and to claim the duchy of Lancaster. When Richard of York came north with a light escort in mid-May 1454, he had to retreat from York itself after learning of a plot to assassinate him. He gathered forces from his own estates and returned in mid-June to hold assizes, which condemned the two rebels and their supporters as traitors.

  Consistent with his opinion of his own importance, Exeter had meanwhile obeyed a summons to appear before the Great Council. Finding the councillors did not share his opinion, he sought sanctuary in Westmin
ster Abbey. When York returned to London on 8 July, he had his son-in-law snatched from the abbey and sent him north for imprisonment at Pontefract, a royal castle administered by Salisbury. To have put Exeter in the Tower with Somerset would have been folly, but the choice of Pontefract, where the deposed Richard II was starved to death, may have been intended as a reminder that royal blood did not confer immunity.

  Reality caught up with Egremont and his brother Richard Percy when they ventured once too often into the concentration of Neville manors north-east of York. On 31 October, their small band of raiders was surrounded at Stamford Bridge by Neville retainers led by Thomas and John Neville, and after a brief struggle they were captured. Held first at Middleham in Richmondshire, they were sent to London to face trial for criminal trespass. Found guilty and unable to pay impossibly large fines, they were imprisoned as common debtors in Newgate.

  The reason why no action was taken on their earlier conviction as traitors seems to have been a deal made among Salisbury, Northumberland, Clifford and York. Clifford was brought on board by appointing him to investigate and punish Egremont’s accomplices, in the certain knowledge that he was one of them, while York promised to support Percy’s petitions to recover estates held by the crown since the 1405 attainder. Meanwhile York obtained payment, equal to the amount he received as Protector, for each of the two Wardens of the Marches and promised to pay the arrears due to Percy. Salisbury also obtained recognition of his claim to Hawarden Castle in Flint, but overall York’s even-handedness took the heat out of the Percy–Neville conflict.

  York showed the same diplomatic skill in handling the void in command of naval matters created by Exeter’s escapade. He did not seek to replace him as Lord Admiral, which would have required a vote by the Council. Instead, under his authority as Protector, on 3 April 1454 he appointed six keepers of the sea for three years, for which he obtained the necessary funds from the Commons. The eastern approaches, including Calais, were assigned to Warwick, the Channel to Lord Treasurer Gloucester, and the Irish Sea to John Talbot’s namesake son, now Earl of Shrewsbury, also Earl of Waterford and hereditary Lord High Steward of Ireland.