by Charles Ross
Meanwhile, similar methods were being used, presumably under pressure from the queen, to provide an endowment, chiefly in the West Country, for her two sons by her first marriage, Thomas Grey, who became marquis of Dorset in 1475, and Richard Grey. Her efforts to find Thomas a wealthy heiress in the 1460s proved abortive, for the young lady, Anne Holland, daughter of the attainted Lancastrian duke of Exeter and his wife, the king’s sister, Anne, died young and without issue.2 In 1474 the queen procured a second wealthy bride for Thomas. With the king’s help, William, Lord Hastings, was persuaded to part with the marriage of his stepdaughter, Cecily, then aged thirteen: she was ultimate heiress of the Bonville and Harrington families, and had extensive estates in Somerset and Devon. If Thomas died before the marriage was consummated, she was to marry his young brother, Richard, and all this was confirmed by act of parliament.3 After the death of Clarence, Dorset was given, for a payment of £2,000, the custody and marriage of his heir, Edward, earl of Salisbury, and the wardship of a substantial slice of his estates, mainly in Hampshire, Wiltshire and Gloucestershire.4 But the queen had not abandoned hope of laying hands on the inheritance of the Hollands, dukes of Exeter. In 1472, after being allowed to divorce the duke, Duchess Anne had married her lover, Sir Thomas St Leger. Their infant daughter, also called Anne, was then contracted in marriage to Dorset’s son and heir by Cecily Bonville, Thomas Grey, and in 1483 the young Anne was declared heiress to all the Exeter estates. An act of parliament passed to legalize this unscrupulous arrangement also provided that part of the Holland inheritance, valued at 500 marks yearly, was to be set aside for the queen’s second son, Richard Grey. For this substantial inheritance (again chiefly in western England) the queen paid the king the very modest sum of 5,000 marks. No regard was paid to the interests of the surviving descendants of the Holland family, chiefly Ralph, Lord Nevill, heir of the earl of Westmorland, who became an early and trusted supporter of Richard III.1 Such repeated interference with the laws of inheritance for the benefit of the royal family gave several English magnates £a vested interest in the downfall of the children of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville’.2 In general also the concentration of royal patronage on members of his own family, and chosen lords within the court circle, tended to widen the gap between the smallish circle of peers who had close and rewarding connections with the king, and the much larger element of ‘country’ peers who were largely divorced from politics and government. That they respected and perhaps even feared the king is probable; that they admired the stable government he brought in the latter half of the reign is equally likely; but few had benefited personally from his rule after 1471 or had much direct stake in his regime. It may be that, after twenty years of civil war and rebellion, deaths in battle and execution, many of them believed with John Blount, Lord Mountjoy, that it was unwise ‘to be great about princes, for it is dangerous’.3 In 1483 few of them were prepared to risk involvement in the heady perils of the succession crisis which followed Edward’s premature death.
Edward’s attitude towards his nobles had certain important consequences for the government of the realm as a whole. Since he chose to place ‘the rule of the shires’ in the hands of noblemen whom he could trust, it follows that he was unlikely to do anything to erode or undermine their local influence. In Professor Dunham’s words, ‘Edward banked upon the allegiance of his own baronial clients and through them upon the fidelity of their retainers’, to administer county government and provide troops when needed.1 This meant in turn that the legislation and proclamations of the reign against the abuses of the system of bastard feudalism were little more than pious verbiage so far as the aristocracy was concerned, and however much he might wish to present himself as the administrator of impartial justice, impartiality received short shrift when it ran counter to the interests of one of the king’s great men.2 The consequences for law and order could sometimes be serious, and there was little hope of redress at law against those who held the favour of the king. A further consequence of the king’s indulgent attitude to the powers and privileges of the peerage as a class was that the programme devised in the later years of the reign to exploit certain aspects of the Crown’s feudal rights lacked teeth in the enforcement, for Edward did not choose to enforce it against men whose goodwill he wished to retain. Recent research has shown that he often failed to employ existing powers to prevent tenants-in-chief evading royal rights of wardship, that in 1475 he had to allow his nobility almost complete freedom to settle the future of their estates (at the king’s expense) before they would accompany him to France, and that his tentative effort to legislate against the practice of enfeoffments to use, which cost the Crown much in lost revenue, was emasculated before it reached the statute book. Admittedly, however, the problem of uses was difficult and intractable, as both Henry VII and Henry VIII were to discover when they in turn tried to attack this aspect of landowning privilege.3
Edward IV’s reliance upon the local authority and influence of the baronage in the government of the different regions of his realm was only partly a matter of political necessity. It was also a matter of choice. That a less indulgent attitude was possible is strikingly revealed by the far more aggressive policies which Henry VII came to adopt. His notorious campaign to exploit royal rights of wardship and other feudal prerogatives of the Crown became not only a huge source of profit but also proved a means of humbling and disciplining the mighty of his realm.4 He made effective and extensive use, too, of other and even more arbitrary devices to cow and coerce the nobility. The manipulation of what may be called suspended sentences of attainder, and the extraction of bonds and recognizances in punitive sums of money, were erected into what Professor Lander has rightly called a ‘terrifying system’ whereby ‘a majority of the peerage were legally and financially in the king’s power and at his mercy’, and his prime motive for doing so was not profit but to ensure political obedience and control.1 The recently-discovered ‘Petition’ of Henry’s chief agent of extortion, Edmund Dudley, drawn up just before he died, reflects the harshness with which King Henry treated his noblemen: ‘Item the lord Dudley paid £1,000 upon a light surmise … Item the earl of Derby was oftentymes hardly entreated and too sore, … Item Richard [Lord] Hastings paid too much for the marriage of his wife.’ There is ample evidence to support Dudley’s claim that ‘the king’s purpose was to have many persons in his danger at his pleasure’.2 The same could never have been said of Edward IV.
This marked contrast between Yorkist and early Tudor policy towards the nobility can be well illustrated in their approach towards the problem of the north in general, and the wardenships of the Marches towards Scotland in particular. Before 1461 it had become customary to grant the wardenship of the Marches to local magnates – usually the Percies in the east and the Nevills in the west – and these appointments were made for long terms and at generous salaries which enabled the wardens to maintain private armies at the king’s expense: their troops were even allowed to wear their lords’ private badges.3 Edward continued this policy, and with the fall of the Percies, the Nevills came to dominate both Marches. But the destruction of the Nevills in 1471 gave the king an opportunity to pursue an alternative policy had he wished. Instead he carried the older system to extremes in his patronage of Gloucester, ending with granting him the wardenship of the West March on hereditary terms in 1482, and restoring the Percies to the East March. The wardenships remained appendages of private power, the prizes of the most powerful lords of the region. In sharp contrast, Henry VII placed the West March under the control of a minor local peer, Thomas, Lord Dacre, who was allowed no security of tenure: his appointment was during pleasure only, and his commissions of appointment were renewed no fewer than six times in nine years. His salary was drastically reduced to a mere £100, in contrast to the £1,000 in wartime and £800 in peacetime which Gloucester had enjoyed in 1480. His obedience was further ensured by his being compelled to enter into no fewer than twelve bonds and sureties in large sums of money
.1 On the East March Henry had little alternative but to employ the earl of Northumberland, but even this mighty northern magnate was made to feel that his tenure was precarious and dependent on the king’s goodwill, and he too was saddled with an enormous fine, respited as a condition of his good behaviour. The local influence of the Percies was checked and challenged: the power of the Crown became ‘an active presence in the midst of the northern gentry communities … which it would be perilous to ignore’.2
It has recently been argued that the early Tudor kings, like the Yorkists, had to rely heavily on the nobility in government, and that in consequence the magnate had to be given a fairly free hand in his own locality.3 It would be rash to deny that either Edward IV or Henry VII did not depend on baronial cooperation, however grudgingly given, but there are important differences in the spirit and the methods with which they approached the problem. It was Henry rather than Edward who began to ‘break the teeth of the sinners’, and who rejected their claim to special favour. No longer would the Crown admit that their loyalty must be purchased with lavish rewards. Rather the boot tended to be on the other foot – the nobility had to buy royal patronage by good service and proof of loyalty. For Edward, however, the dictum expressed by Bishop Russell in 1483 held good, that ‘the politic rule of every region well ordained standeth in the nobles’.4 He had done nothing to reduce the excessive local influence of the aristocracy. By the end of his reign, it is true, some at legist of the more important magnate interests were those of his own family or of men whom he had raised to magnate status. Yet this placing of old wine in new bottles did little to reduce the political importance of the nobility or limit their capacity to cause political disruption, as the disorders which followed his death were to reveal.
(ii) The King and the Commons in Parliament
The reign of Edward IV has traditionally been regarded as one of the least constructive and inspiring phases in the history of the English parliament. If we employ the equally traditional yardstick – the degree of initiative and activity shown by the commons – this remains largely true. Parliaments were infrequent; the volume and importance of the legislation they produced dwindled noticeably; and a greater share of it was initiated by the government rather than by the commons as had been usual under the Lancastrian kings. The centre of gravity in government swings back to the Crown and parliament plays a comparatively minor role. The commons admitted the dominance of the king, and made little effort to oppose his will or criticize his administration.1 Yet this very tractability has been seen recently by some scholars as a sign of the restoration of confidence between king and commons, and even as an indication that Yorkist government was in some sense ‘popular’. Edward is said to have deliberately sought the cooperation of his people, and, by raising the status of the commons, made a great contribution to the unity of parliament. ‘Perhaps for the first time here was a king more at ease with the Lower than the Upper House of Parliament.’2 Such views do not carry conviction. The commons’ docility seems to owe more to royal attempts to influence the composition of their house and to his skilful use of the arts of management rather than to any overt policy of cooperation. An overall impression emerges of a king who expected the commons to do his will without cavil, and was very much the dominant element in their relationship. This is not to deny that Edward did not make considerable efforts to sell himself and his policies to the commons of the realm ‘comen to this my court of Parliament’. In his first parliament in November 1461 he made a gracious speech from the throne, thanking the commons for their ‘true hearts and tender considerations’, and their assistance in restoring him to his right and title, and promising that he would be their Very rightwise and loving liege lord’. In response, the speaker, Sir James Strangways – a close connection of the Nevills, who was to be paid for his services as speaker – did what was expected of him and presented a congratulatory address to the king which was the longest recorded speech of any medieval speaker.1 We are fortunate in possessing for this parliament a unique record, part of an incomplete Lords’ Journal, the only one of its kind to survive until the series begins regularly in 1510. This suggests that the king was personally present at the lords’ meetings for each of the eight days’ business recorded in the journal, and on at least one occasion ‘he put in a bill with his own hand’.2 In June 1467 he again addressed the commons in person to assure them of his purpose to ‘live of his own’, and that he did not intend to charge his subjects except in ‘great and urgent causes, concerning more the weal of themselves, rather than mine own pleasure’, and again he thanked them for their goodwill and kindness towards him.3
Projecting the royal personality was not the only means of procuring a docile commons house. Modern historians have doubted whether the king or the lords were much concerned to influence or manipulate elections: it was not often necessary, it has been claimed, for ‘no great political issue faced the electors at most elections’, and Professor Dunham’s researches suggested that even a powerful councillor like Lord Hastings did not usually bother to return his own men to parliament although able to do so if he chose; but these opinions have not gone unchallenged.4 Certainly there is considerable evidence that Edward IV was very much concerned to influence the composition of the commons by installing royal servants in both shire and borough seats, and that at least on important occasions he expected his lords to support him with their own followers.
The clearest evidence of a deliberate attempt to secure a docile lower house is provided by the parliament of 1478, summoned to bring about the attainder of the duke of Clarence. Of its 291 known members, no fewer than 57 – about 20 per cent of the whole house – had close connections with the central government, and thus supplied the highest proportion of what has been called ‘the Westminster crowd’ of the entire fifteenth century.1 Of these, at least 43 were active members of the royal household, including its treasurer and controller, the keeper of the wardrobe, and the treasurer of the chamber, together with 17 knights or esquires of the body or of the chamber. 24 of these household men sat for the counties, making a substantial proportion of the 74 shire-knights, whose wealth and standing made them more influential than many of the parliamentary burgesses. Of the 37 English shires represented in parliament, no fewer than 23 drew one or both of their members from the staff of the king’s household. Modern historians have mostly been at pains to stress that freedom of election in the shires was a reality in the fifteenth century;2 but these figures show how much influence the Crown could exert on shire representation when it chose. Nor do these figures make allowance for king’s servants whose connection with the Crown was local rather than central, though these sat chiefly for borough seats. It is well known that the changing character of borough representation in the half-century before 1478 had made possible the intrusion of many ‘outsiders’ into borough seats, especially in the smaller towns.3 This development was often to the advantage of the Crown, for many boroughs were largely controlled by the king in one capacity or another. Thus the representation of Dover was often influenced by the warden of the Cinque Ports, then the earl of Arundel: in 1478 it returned Roger Appleton, royal surveyor of Eltham manor and counsel to the lieutenant of Dover Castle, and Thomas Hextall, clerk of Dover Castle and receiver of the duke of Gloucester. Cornwall was, like Wiltshire and Surrey and Sussex, grossly over-represented, and most of its borough seats were usually at the disposal of the Duchy of Cornwall officials. Here, in 1478, there is evidence not of mere influence or manipulation of elections, but of wholesale direct interference, all the returns having been blatantly tampered with. Not a single member dwelling in the Duchy was returned. Among the M.P.s for the Cornish boroughs, nearly all from Kent and the midlands, were a royal customs officer, an exchequer auditor, a legal counsel for the Duchy of Lancaster, and the keeper of the Common Bench writs, who was also joint chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.1
There are also clear indications that the king’s great noblemen exerted themselves to secur
e the return of trustworthy men to this same parliament. No fewer than seven, and perhaps as many as ten, were followers of William, Lord Hastings. In East Anglia the influence of John, Lord Howard, seems likely to have been behind the election of his son, Thomas, for Norfolk county, and of his son-in-law, John Timperley, and his chief man-of-business, James Hobart. One of the M.P.s for the borough of Maldon, Essex, Robert Plomer, was a servant of the earl of Essex, and so, probably, was the other, William Tendring. One of the knights of the shire for Westmorland, Sir Richard Redman, was a close connection of the duke of Gloucester; his second son, Edmund, sat for Carlisle, a borough normally controlled by the duke as warden of the West March, and he was afterwards to become a prominent servant of Richard as king.2 As Professor Dunham has observed, in connection with Hastings’s men in this parliament, ‘if a dozen peers, in league with king and court, contributed a like number of M.P.s’, this would have been sufficient ‘to direct, and probably carry through the government’s policies’.3