E-text prepared by Graeme Mackreth and the Online Distributed Proofreading
Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by
Internet Archive (https://archive.org)
Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
file which includes the original illustration.
See 57164-h.htm or 57164-h.zip:
(https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/57164/pg57164-images.html)
or
(https://www.gutenberg.org/files/57164/57164-h.zip)
Images of the original pages are available through
Internet Archive. See
https://archive.org/details/warwickkingmaker00oman
English Men of Action
WARWICK THE KINGMAKER
[Illustration: Publisher's logo]
Copyright
First Edition 1891. Reprinted 1893, 1899, 1905
(Prize Library Edition) 1903, 1909, 1916
[Illustration: WARWICK
From the Rous Roll]
WARWICK THE KINGMAKER
by
CHARLES W. OMAN
Macmillan and Co., Limited
St. Martin's Street, London
1916
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
PAGE
The Days of the Kingmaker 1
CHAPTER II
The House of Neville 12
CHAPTER III
Richard of Salisbury 19
CHAPTER IV
The Kingmaker's Youth 29
CHAPTER V
The Cause of York 38
CHAPTER VI
The Beginning of the Civil War: St. Albans 47
CHAPTER VII
Warwick Captain of Calais and Admiral 60
CHAPTER VIII
Warwick in Exile 79
CHAPTER IX
Victory and Disaster--Northampton and St.
Albans 93
CHAPTER X
Towton Field 107
CHAPTER XI
The Triumph of King Edward 128
CHAPTER XII
The Pacification of the North 137
CHAPTER XIII
The Quarrel of Warwick and King Edward 159
CHAPTER XIV
Playing with Treason 175
CHAPTER XV
Warwick for King Henry 193
CHAPTER XVI
The Return of King Edward 208
CHAPTER XVII
Barnet 228
CHAPTER I
THE DAYS OF THE KINGMAKER
Of all the great men of action who since the Conquest have guided the
course of English policy, it is probable that none is less known to the
reader of history than Richard Neville Earl of Warwick and Salisbury.
The only man of anything approaching his eminence who has been treated
with an equal neglect is Thomas Cromwell, and of late years the great
minister of Henry the Eighth is beginning to receive some of the
attention that is his due. But for the Kingmaker, the man who for ten
years was the first subject of the English Crown, and whose figure
looms out with a vague grandeur even through the misty annals of the
Wars of the Roses, no writer has spared a monograph. Every one, it is
true, knows his name, but his personal identity is quite ungrasped.
Nine persons out of ten if asked to sketch his character would find, to
their own surprise, that they were falling back for their information
to Lord Lytton's _Last of the Barons_ or Shakespeare's _Henry the
Sixth_.
An attempt, therefore, even an inadequate attempt, to trace out
with accuracy his career and his habits of mind from the original
authorities cannot fail to be of some use to the general reader as well
as to the student of history. The result will perhaps appear meagre
to those who are accustomed to the biographies of the men of later
centuries. We are curiously ignorant of many of the facts that should
aid us to build up a picture of the man. No trustworthy representation
of his bodily form exists. The day of portraits was not yet come; his
monument in Bisham Abbey has long been swept away; no writer has even
deigned to describe his personal appearance--we know not if he was dark
or fair, stout or slim. At most we may gather from the vague phrases
of the chroniclers, and from his quaint armed figure in the Rous Roll,
that he was of great stature and breadth of limb. But perhaps the good
Rous was thinking of his fame rather than his body, when he sketched
the Earl in that quaint pictorial pedigree over-topping all his race
save his cousin and king and enemy, Edward the Fourth.
But Warwick has only shared the fate of all his contemporaries. The
men of the fifteenth century are far less well known to us than are
their grandfathers or their grandsons. In the fourteenth century the
chroniclers were still working on their old scale; in the sixteenth
the literary spirit had descended on the whole nation, and great men
and small were writing hard at history as at every other branch of
knowledge. But in the days of Lancaster and York the old fountains
had run dry, and the new flood of the Renaissance had not risen. The
materials for reconstructing history are both scanty and hard to
handle. We dare not swallow Hall and Hollingshead whole, as was the
custom for two hundred years, or take their annals, coloured from
end to end with Tudor sympathies, as good authority for the doings of
the previous century. Yet when we have put aside their fascinating,
if somewhat untrustworthy, volumes, we find ourselves wandering in a
very dreary waste of fragments and scraps of history, strung together
on the meagre thread of two or three dry and jejune compilations of
annals. To have to take William of Worcester or good Abbot Whethamsted
as the groundwork of a continuous account of the times is absolutely
maddening. Hence it comes to pass that Warwick has failed to receive
his dues.
Of all the men of Warwick's century there are only two whose characters
we seem thoroughly to grasp--the best and the worst products of the
age--Henry the Fifth and Richard the Third. The achievements of the one
stirred even the feeble writers of that day into a fulness of detail in
which they indulge for no other hero; the other served as the text for
so many invectives under the Tudors that we imagine that we see a real
man in the gloomy portrait that is set up before us. Yet we may fairly
ask whether our impression is not drawn, either at first or at second
hand, almost entirely from Sir Thomas More's famous biography of the
usurper, a work whose literary merits have caused it to be received as
the only serious source for Richard's history. If we had not that work,
Richard of Gloucester would seem a vaguely-defined monster of iniquity,
as great a puzzle to the student of history as are the other shadowy
forms which move on through those evil times to fall, one after the
other, into the bloody grave which was the common lot of all.
In spite, however, of the dearth of good chronicles, and of the
absolute non-existence of any contemporary writers of literary merit,
there are authorities enough of one sort and another to make it both
possible and profitable to build up a detailed picture of Warwick and
his times. First and foremost, of course, come the invaluable Paston
Letters, covering the whole period, and often supplying the vivid
touches of detail in which the more formal documents are so lamentably
deficient. If but half a dozen families, as constant in letter-writing
as John and Margery Paston, had transmitted their correspondence
to posterity, there would be little need to grumble at our lack of
information. Other letters too exist, scattered in collections, such
as the interesting scrawl from Warwick himself, in his dire extremity
before Barnet fight, to Henry Vernon, which was turned up a year ago
among the lumber at Belvoir Castle. Much can be gathered from rolls and
inquests--for example, the all-important information as to centres and
sources of local power can be traced out with perfect accuracy from the
columns of the Escheats Roll, where each peer or knight's lands are
carefully set forth at the moment of his decease. Joining one authority
to another, we may fairly build up the England of the fifteenth century
before our eyes with some approach to completeness.
The whole picture of the times is very depressing on the moral if not
on the material side. There are few more pitiful episodes in history
than the whole tale of the reign of Henry the Sixth, the most unselfish
and well-intentioned king that ever sat upon the English throne--a man
of whom not even his enemies and oppressors could find an evil word to
say; the troubles came, as they confessed, "all because of his false
lords, and never of him." We feel that there must have been something
wrong with the heart of a nation that could see unmoved the meek and
holy King torn from wife and child, sent to wander in disguise up and
down the kingdom for which he had done his poor best, and finally
doomed to pine for five years a prisoner in the fortress where he had
so long held his royal Court. Nor is our first impression concerning
the demoralisation of England wrong. Every line that we read bears home
to us more and more the fact that the nation had fallen on evil times.
First and foremost among the causes of its moral deterioration was
the wretched French War, a war begun in the pure spirit of greed and
ambition,--there was not even the poor excuse that had existed in the
time of Edward the Third--carried on by the aid of hordes of debauched
foreign mercenaries (after Henry the Fifth's death the native English
seldom formed more than a third of any host that took the field in
France), and persisted in long after it had become hopeless, partly
from misplaced national pride, partly because of the personal interests
of the ruling classes. Thirty-five years of a war that was as unjust as
it was unfortunate had both soured and demoralised the nation. England
was full of disbanded soldiers of fortune; of knights who had lost
the ill-gotten lands across the Channel, where they had maintained a
precarious lordship in the days of better fortune; of castellans and
governors whose occupation was gone; of hangers-on of all sorts who had
once maintained themselves on the spoils of Normandy and Guienne. Year
after year men and money had been lavished on the war to no effect;
and when the final catastrophe came, and the fights of Formigny and
Chatillon ended the chapter of our disasters, the nation began to
cast about for a scapegoat on whom to lay the burden of its failures.
The real blame lay on the nation itself, not on any individual; and
the real fault that had been committed was not the mismanagement of an
enterprise which presented any hopes of success, but a wrong-headed
persistence in an attempt to conquer a country which was too strong
to be held down. However, the majority of the English people chose to
assume firstly that the war with France might have been conducted to
a prosperous issue, and secondly that certain particular persons were
responsible for its having come to the opposite conclusion. At first
the unfortunate Suffolk and Somerset had the responsibility laid upon
them. A little later the outcry became more bold and fixed upon the
Lancastrian dynasty itself as being to blame not only for disaster
abroad, but for the "want of governance" at home. If King Henry had
understood the charge, and possessed the wit to answer it, he might
fairly have replied that his subjects must fit the burden upon their
own backs, not upon his. The war had been weakly conducted, it was
true; but weakly because the men and money for it were grudged. The
England that could put one hundred thousand men into the field in a
civil broil at Towton sent four thousand to fight the decisive battle
at Formigny that settled our fate in Normandy. At home the bulwarks of
social order seemed crumbling away. Private wars, riot, open highway
robbery, murder, abduction, armed resistance to the law, prevailed on
a scale that had been unknown since the troublous times of Edward the
Second--we might almost say since the evil days of Stephen. But it was
not the Crown alone that should have been blamed for the state of the
realm. The nation had chosen to impose over-stringent constitutional
checks on the kingly power before it was ripe for self-government, and
the Lancastrian house sat on the throne because it had agreed to submit
to those checks. If the result of the experiment was disastrous, both
parties to the contract had to bear their share of the responsibility.
But a nation seldom allows that it has been wrong; and Henry of Windsor
had to serve as scapegoat for all the misfortunes of the realm, because
Henry of Bolingbroke had committed his descendants to the unhappy
compact.
Want of a strong central government was undoubtedly the complaint under
which England was labouring in the middle of the fifteenth century, and
all the grievances against which outcry was made were but symptoms of
one latent disease.
Ever since the death of Henry the Fifth the internal government of
the country had been steadily going from bad to worse. The mischief
had begun in the young King's earliest years. The Council of Regency
that ruled in his name had from the first proved unable to make its
authority felt as a single individual ruler might have done. With
the burden of the interminable French War weighing upon their backs,
and the divisions caused by the quarrels of Beaufort and Gloucester
dividing them into factions, the councillors had not enough attention
to spare for home government. As early as 1428 we find them, when
confronted by the outbreak of a private war in the north, endeavouring
to patch up the quarrel by arbitration, instead of punishing the
offenders on each side. Accounts of riotous assemblages in all parts
of the country, of armed violence at parliamentary elections, of
party fights in London at Parliament time--like that which won for the
meeting of 1426 the name of the Parliament of Bats (bludgeons)--grow
more and more common. We even find treasonable insurrection appearing
in the strange obscure rising of the political Lollards under Jack
Sharp in 1431, an incident which shows how England was on the verge of
bloodshed twenty years before the final outbreak of civil war was to
take place.
But all these public troubles would have been of comparatively small
importance if the heart of the nation had been sound. The phenomenon
which makes the time so depressing is the terrible decay in private
morals since the previous century. A steady deterioration is going
on through the whole period, till at its end we find hardly a single
individual in whom it is possible to interest ourselves, save an
occasional Colet or Caxton, who belongs in spirit, if not date, to the
oncoming renascence of the next century. There is no class or caste in
England which comes well out of the scrutiny. The Church, which had
served as the conscience of the nation in better times, had become
dead to spiritual things; it no longer produced either men of saintly
life or learned theologians or patriotic statesmen. In its corporate
capacity it had grown inertly orthodox. Destitute of any pretence of
spiritual energy, yet showing a spirit of persecution such as it had
never displayed in earlier centuries, its sole activity consisted in
hunting to the stake the few men who displayed any symptoms of thinking
for themselves in matters of religion. So great was the deadness of the
Church that it was possible to fall into trouble, like Bishop Pecock,
not for defending Lollardry, but for showing too much originality
in attacking it. Individually the leading churchmen of the day were
politicians and nothing more, nor were they as a rule politicians of
the better sort; for one like Beaufort, who was at any rate consistent
and steadfast, there are many Bourchiers and George Nevilles and
Beauchamps, who merely sailed with the wind and intrigued for their own
fortunes or those of their families.
Of the English baronage of the fifteenth century we shall have
so much to say in future chapters that we need not here enlarge
on its characteristics. Grown too few and too powerful, divided
into a few rival groups, whose political attitude was settled by a
consideration of family grudges and interests rather than by any
grounds of principle, or patriotism, or loyalty, they were as unlike
their ancestors of the days of John or Edward the First as their
ecclesiastical contemporaries were unlike Langton or even Winchelsey.
The baronage of England had often been unruly, but it had never before
developed the two vices which distinguished it in the times of the
Two Roses--a taste for indiscriminate bloodshed and a turn for rapid
political apostasy. To put prisoners to death by torture as did Tiptoft
Earl of Worcester, to desert to the enemy in the midst of battle
like Lord Grey de Ruthyn at Northampton, or Stanley at Bosworth, had
never before been the custom of England. It is impossible not to
recognise in such traits the results of the French War. Twenty years
spent in contact with French factions, and in command of the godless
mercenaries who formed the bulk of the English armies, had taught our
nobles lessons of cruelty and faithlessness such as they had not before
imbibed. Their demoralisation had been displayed in France long ere
the outbreak of civil war caused it to manifest itself at home.
But if the Church was effete and the baronage demoralised, it might
have been thought that England should have found salvation in the
soundheartedness of her gentry and her burgesses. Unfortunately such
was not to be the case. Both of these classes were growing in strength
and importance during the century, but when the times of trouble came
they gave no signs of aspiring to direct the destinies of the nation.
The House of Commons which should, as representing those classes, have
gone on developing its privileges, was, on the contrary, thrice as
important in the reign of Henry the Fourth as in that of Edward the
Fourth. The knights and squires showed on a smaller scale all of the
vices of the nobility. Instead of holding together and maintaining a
united loyalty to the Crown, they bound themselves by solemn sealed
bonds and the reception of "liveries" each to the baron whom he
preferred. This fatal system, by which the smaller landholder agreed on
behalf of himself and his tenants to follow his greater neighbour in
peace and war, had ruined the military system of England, and was quite
as dangerous as the ancient feudalism. The salutary old usage, by which
all freemen who were not tenants of a lord served under the sheriff in
war, and not under the banner of any of the baronage, had long been
forgotten. Now, if all the gentry of a county were bound by these
voluntary indentures to serve some great lord, there was no national
force in that county on which the Crown could count, for the yeoman
followed the knight as the knight followed the baron. If the gentry
constituted themselves the voluntary followers of the baronage, and
aided their employers to keep England unhappy, the class of citizens
and burgesses took a very different line of conduct. If not actively
mischievous, they were sordidly inert. They refused to entangle
themselves in politics at all. They submitted impassively to each ruler
in turn, when they had ascertained that their own persons and property
were not endangered by so doing. A town, it has been remarked, seldom
or never stood a siege during the Wars of the Roses, for no town ever
refused to open its gates to any commander with an adequate force who
asked for entrance. If we find a few exceptions to the rule, we almost
always learn that entrance was denied not by the citizens, but by some
garrison of the opposite side which was already within the walls.
Loyalty seems to have been as wanting among the citizens as among the
barons of England. If they generally showed some slight preference for
York rather than for Lancaster, it was not on any moral or sentimental
ground, but because the house of Lancaster was known by experience
to be weak in enforcing "good governance," and the house of York was
pledged to restore the strength of the Crown and to secure better times
for trade than its rival.
Warwick was a strong man, born at the commencement of Henry the
Sixth's unhappy minority, whose coming of age coincided with the
outburst of national rage caused by the end of the disastrous French
War, whose birth placed him at the head of one of the great factions
in the nobility, whose strength of body and mind enabled him to turn
that headship to full account. How he dealt with the problems which
inevitable necessity laid before him we shall endeavour to relate.