Aristocrats: Power, Grace, and Decadence: Britain's Great Ruling Classes from 1066 to the Present

by Lawrence James

  At home, retainers were vital for the maintenance of a decentralised regional administration and the enforcement of legal disciplines. Every magnate had a semi-viceregal role in the area where his lands were concentrated and was expected to serve as a conduit for the authority of the Crown. His prestige, his estates and the knowledge that he was the king’s man-on-the-spot commanded obedience and deference. This dispensation of power in the provinces was bluntly explained in 1452 by John Mowbray, third Duke of Norfolk, in an open letter to the inhabitants of that county. ‘We let you know that next [to] the King our sovereign lord, by his good grace and licence, we will have the principal rule and governance throughout the shire, of which we bear our name.’ He named local lawbreakers and warned them that ‘though our person be not here daily, they shall find our power at all time’. The Duke’s retainers and servants were his visible and vigilant presence.

  Such men exercised power as sheriffs, under-sheriffs, justices of the peace and assessors and collectors of taxes. The names of local aristocrats headed the lists of knights and squires commissioned by the Crown to investigate matters such as flood defences and the state of the roads. A lord might not be present during the proceedings, but what mattered was the prestige of his name. Serious problems required direct intervention by noblemen; in 1414 Henry V ordered his cousin Edward, Duke of York, to preside in person over an enquiry into chronic lawlessness in Shropshire.4 As a general rule, areas furthest away from London were the most prone to disorder.

  The devolution of royal power reinforced that of the nobility by giving its members virtual control over local government. The system worked so long as royal supervision was thorough and peers respected (and feared) the king. Absolute honesty and impartiality were unattainable because an aristocrat’s status and personal honour compelled him to defend his own and his dependants’ interests with vigour. A willingness to concede or compromise were signs of irresolution which harmed a peer’s local standing. Compliant sheriffs packed juries and rigged parliamentary elections. The system encouraged corruption, but it worked after a fashion and was better than none at all.

  Local ascendancy strengthened a peer’s national political power. Between 1386 and 1401, seven out of the eleven MPs for Warwickshire had close links with the Beauchamp Earls of Warwick who dominated the West Midlands. One of these Members was Thomas de Crewe, a country squire and retainer of the Beauchamps since 1387, when he appeared under their banner in an army raised by Thomas de Beauchamp to resist forces raised by Richard II’s favourite, Robert de Vere. Crewe was a bureaucrat with some legal training rather than a warrior, and so he served the Beauchamps as an adviser and estate manager. Efficient and trustworthy, he served many times as a justice and under-sheriff. De Crewe was so proud of his service to the Beauchamps that he had their arms set on his magnificent brass in Wixford church, which, ironically, equalled in scale that of his former employer Thomas Beauchamp in nearby Warwick.

  De Crewe had been one link in a chain of authority which stretched upwards through the earls of Warwick to the Crown. Just as kings needed the assistance of the nobility, they, in their turn relied upon professionals like de Crewe to manage their business affairs and fulfil their public responsibilities. Yet, it is worth remembering that de Crewe was willing to risk his life for his master when he challenged Richard II.

  The number, physique and dress of a lord’s retainers and servants were public advertisements of his status. In 1471 John de la Pole, second Duke of Suffolk, declared that it was beneath his dignity to ride from his seat at Ewelme in Oxfordshire with just twelve servants, all that were then available.5 The frame and stature of these outriders were also important. One servant was recommended to a peer’s household because he was ‘a very tall gentleman and has good conditions [i.e. features]’.6

  Sturdy, well clad and sometimes armed and armoured, servants riding in cavalcades behind their lords were the visible expression of the political and social dispensation of medieval England. In a country where the bulk of the population lived in small towns of fewer than five hundred inhabitants or villages, the local nobleman or his agents were the representatives of the state and most people’s only contact with it. In a fourteenth-century version of the romance of the legendary Guy of Warwick, the hero meets an earl on a pilgrimage, who announces:

  I was a knight of rich lands

  And castles and towers in my hands.

  Of goods, I have great plenty

  All that land had dread of me.

  Kings, too, had to cosset such creatures or else risk their thrones. A contented aristocracy was a biddable and cooperative partner in government. Its happiness depended on royal patronage in the forms of gifts of land, offices and favours not only for individual peers, but their strings of kinsmen and women and retainers. Vanity as well as greed had to be satisfied and peers had to be entertained in the grand style. A magnificent court with lavish feasts, tournaments and hunting in well-stocked royal parks won hearts.

  Charismatic warrior kings Edward I and Edward III knew exactly how to satisfy their noblemen through patronage and entertainment, although it helped that the former was a frightening man with a ferocious temper. Both monarchs appealed to the aristocratic imagination by deliberately projecting themselves as second Arthurs who would restore the chivalric dreamworld of Camelot. The message was clear: there was peace and harmony in Camelot only so long as the King and his lords kept faith with each other and gladly performed their reciprocal obligations for the benefit of all.

  2

  Manners with Virtue:

  The Cult of Chivalry

  and the Culture of

  the Aristocracy

  Chivalry explains the mind of the medieval aristocrat. It was a blend of moral truths, theology and romantic, chiefly Arthurian, legends. Together they constituted an ideal to which all knights aspired, and chivalric precepts governed their relations with each other and the rest of the world. Above all, chivalry was the touchstone of honour, that abstraction which both guided the knight and set him apart from lesser beings.

  All the ideological strands of chivalry are drawn together in the spectacular chapel built to contain the tomb and effigy of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick (see plate XX). Secular and religious imagery combine to reveal the nature of the universe Warwick inhabited and justify his exalted place within it. The onlooker is confronted with a visual celebration of the power and self-confidence not just of one nobleman, but of the aristocracy as a whole at a moment in its history when its influence had reached an unprecedented peak.

  Richard died aged fifty-seven in 1439 after a career of service to the Crown as general, diplomat and administrator. Chivalry had been the driving force of his life, as it had been that of Chaucer’s knight. According to his epitaph, Warwick was ‘one of the most worshipful knights of his days’ and a model of ‘manhood and cunning [i.e. intelligence]’. His devotion to the ideals of knighthood share equal prominence with the list of high offices he had held, including the lieutenant governorship of Normandy, where he had overseen the trial and execution of Joan of Arc.

  The essence of knightly perfection is conveyed by Warwick’s copper-gilt effigy. He wears a suit of armour in the latest Milanese fashion, which combined function with elegance. His features are handsome and may possibly be a portrait since a surgeon and a painter were consulted when the tomb was being designed. Whether or not a likeness, the Earl’s figure indicates an athletic, well-proportioned man with long, delicate fingers.

  In death the medieval aristocracy were always depicted as a physical elite and many were in life. A modern autopsy on the skeleton of Sir Bartholomew de Burghersh, who died in 1369 in his sixties after a lifetime of campaigning, revealed a sturdy man of nearly six foot with strong, muscular limbs. His physique was the result of regular exercise and a diet rich in protein, although his teeth were eroded by the grainy bread he had eaten. By contrast, analyses of the bones of the mass of the population reflect stunted growth and infirmities cause
d by inadequate diet and back-breaking labour.

  Knights were not just taller and stronger than their inferiors. Popular chivalric romances constantly drew attention to the fine features and fair complexions of noble heroes and heroines. Fiction often reflected reality. Sir Thomas More described Arthur Plantagenet, Viscount Lisle (an illegitimate son of Edward IV), as ‘princely to behold, of visage lovely, of body mighty and strong; and clean made’. His contemporary Edward Stafford, third Duke of Buckingham, was likened to ‘a Paris and Hector of Troy’ as he performed in the tiltyard. Aristocratic manners would have been impeccable, their movements graceful and their speech fluent. In 1483, when Buckingham’s father tried to persuade Londoners to accept Richard III as king, his unconvinced audience noted that his words were ‘well and eloquently uttered with so angelic a countenance’.1

  War was integral to Warwick’s life. As a young man he fought for Henry IV at the Battle of Shrewsbury in 1403 against Harry Hotspur and against Owain Glyndr’s Welsh rebels. In middle age the Earl had commanded armies and fleets during Henry V’s conquest of Normandy and, in the final years of his life, he helped resist the French counter-offensives. Warwick’s courage, fighting skills and horsemanship were assayed many times in tournaments in England and on the Continent. He jousted with French, Italian and German knights and gained many victories which enhanced his prestige and honour. Chivalry was an international brotherhood bonded by common values and such shared pastimes as jousting and hunting.

  Prowess on the battlefield or tiltyard were the traditional accomplishments of the knightly order, one of the three so-called ‘estates’ of the feudal society which had emerged in Europe in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The terrestrial social dispensation was a mirror of the Heavenly, and Paradise was an absolute monarchy with God ruling over a layered hierarchy of angels whose rank and function were denoted by their apparel and crowns. This was a paradigm for human society, where princes ruled by God’s grace and power flowed downwards through a stratified society. It had three inter-dependent orders or estates: the knights who defended society and the Church, whose clergy provided salvation through prayers and ministering the sacraments, and the peasantry who laboured to sustain warriors and priests.

  Theologians and secular writers on chivalry agreed that the knights were the earthly equivalent of angels. It was a highly flattering conceit which appears on the sides of the Warwick monument, where angels alternate with figures of the Earl’s noble kinsfolk.2 One, his son-in-law Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick (‘the Kingmaker’), became a byword for grasping ambition and perfidy.

  Above Warwick’s tomb the divine and earthly paradigms are represented in stained glass by angels playing musical instruments and creating harmony. This orchestra is a reminder that by discharging their worldly and largely political responsibilities men of Warwick’s rank were fulfilling God’s purpose. It was a point repeatedly made by preachers and theologians, many of whom used chivalry to reinforce their arguments. Indeed, the cult of chivalry had its roots in the eleventh-century Church’s attempts to persuade knights to undertake their sacred duties.

  It had been a difficult task, for it had first required knights to suppress their predatory instincts which had so often led to outbreaks of anarchy in which peasants, their homes, crops and livestock were killed and destroyed. Chivalry taught knights to abhor wanton violence and fulfil their hallowed obligation to protect the poor and weak. It was the catalyst which gradually transformed muscular raptorial knighthood into muscular Christian knighthood. In 1096 the Church had produced its masterstroke: the crusading movement. The crusader was Christ’s own knight, fighting to recapture the saviour’s land from Muslim infidels, and so qualifying himself for Paradise. The idea captured the imagination of knights and enhanced the spiritual status of knighthood.

  Christianity and chivalry were welded together to raise the self-esteem of the knightly estate and convince them that they were truly an elect chosen by God. Knights of the Order of the Bath were reminded of their sacred vocation by a vigil of prayer and symbolic cleansing before they were knights. Theologians contrived a version of history which stressed the importance of knights in the unravelling of God’s purpose: the establishment of Christian Europe, and at every stage in its development, knights or their counterparts had been unconscious agents of divine Providence. Christianity had spread through the Roman Empire thanks to the order imposed by Roman ‘knights’. Commanded by the Emperor Vespasian, pagan Roman knights were the unwitting instruments of God’s will when they avenged Christ’s crucifixion by the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70.3

  God always needed his knights. Outstanding faith and devotion to the ideals of chivalry combined in the legend of St George. According to an early sixteenth-century life of this martyr, he was an exemplary knight who:

  . . . had manners with virtue,

  Noblesse, courage, wisdom and policy.

  The same qualities were accredited to Warwick in his epitaph.

  The Earl’s moral forebears included classical heroes such as Hector and Alexander, reinvented by the authors of popular romantic fiction as proto-knights who had lived by the codes of chivalry. Classical antiquity validated knighthood in an age when Greece and Rome were revered as unrivalled sources of knowledge, wisdom and examples of correctness in every area of human affairs. An heir in spirit to the heroes of the ancient world, Warwick could also claim a direct and illustrious pedigree which linked him with the paladins of chivalric legend.

  Warwick’s feet rest on a muzzled bear, the badge of the Beauchamps, which, according to legend, had been worn by one of Arthur’s knights. On the Earl’s helmet is his crest of a white swan, a device which shows his descent from the Knight of the Swan. His legend was first related in tenth-century Germany and underwent many variations, all of which were immensely popular. In essence it was the story of an enchanted knight who appears from nowhere in a boat towed by swans. He rescues a widowed duchess and her daughter from an overbearing lord and marries the girl, by whom he has a child, Ida. He vanishes and his daughter marries Eustace, Count of Boulogne.

  Fairy story and fact became entwined. Every variant of the legend of the Knight of the Swan provides him with historical descendants, most famously Godfrey de Bouillon, one of the commanders of the crusading army which captured Jerusalem in 1099. The blood of the Knight of the Swan, and with it an atavistic propensity for honour, flowed through the veins of a select body of European knights. In England, the Beauchamps shared this distant ancestor with the de Bohuns and the Staffords, and each family boasted the connection by displaying swans on their tombs, heraldry, seals and the badges worn by their servants.

  The supposed blood of the Knight of the Swan had made Richard Beauchamp genetically predisposed to virtue and courage. Honour was transmitted across generations: a poet reciting the deeds of Sir Ralph de Tony (an ancestor of Warwick’s) during the siege of Caerlaverock in 1300 insisted that he fought with astonishing valour because he was descended from the Knight of the Swan.4 Warwick would have understood this and all that it implied for his own conduct. He was also acutely aware of another legendary ancestor of outstanding bravery, Guy of Warwick. His father had added a tower to Warwick Castle in Guy’s honour and hung his great chamber with tapestries depicting his ancestor’s exploits. Amazingly, while on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1408, Richard Beauchamp encountered ‘Sir Baltirdam, a noble lord’ in the service of the Egyptian Sultan who was acquainted with the legends of Guy of Warwick and anxious to meet his descendant. He entertained Richard, who repaid his hospitality – chivalry could cross even the boundaries of faith.5

  Richard Beauchamp’s ancestors and living family are represented on his tomb by their coats of arms. Ferocious beasts like the de Bohun and Plantagenet lions, the Monthermer eagle and, of course, the Beauchamp bear reveal how heavily the heraldic imagination relied on images of feral strength and savagery. All are appropriate to a caste whose origins were warlike and whose members were expected to displ
ay fearlessness and ferocity in battle.

  Heraldry was the cipher of ancestry. It said who you were, where you came from and with whom you were connected by blood and marriage. The coat of arms was the insignia of gentle birth and it could be assumed by anyone who considered themselves qualified and felt confident that their pretensions would be accepted by the world at large. Faked pedigrees were sometimes produced as evidence of gentleness, and so at the close of the fifteenth century the whole business was placed in the hands of a semi-official body, the College of Arms, whose heralds decided who was or was not a gentleman and issued coats of arms accordingly. Their principal criterion was an applicant’s ability to pay their fees. The colours and images of the coat of arms were described in an archaic Anglo-Norman vocabulary (gules [red], sable [black], vair [a stylised representation of fur]) which implied antiquity and ancient blood.

  A family’s coat of arms also charted that family’s economic fortunes. Nearly all the shields on the Warwick tomb are quartered, evidence of marriages to heiresses and the acquisition of their lands. Between 1300 and 1500 one in four aristocratic families failed in the male line, their estates passing either to daughters or collateral heirs [nephews, nieces and cousins], a process which meant that many accumulations of land were broken up.6 Infertility and infant deaths thus acted as a natural brake on any one dynasty’s engrossment of land, and with it, political muscle. Warwick’s only male heir died in 1446, some seven years after his father’s death, leaving a daughter who died three years later. The Beauchamp inheritance was split between Richard’s four daughters and their respective husbands.