THE HOUSE OF NEVILLE
Of all the great houses of mediæval England, the Nevilles of Raby were
incontestably the toughest and the most prolific. From the reign of
John to the reign of Elizabeth their heritage never once passed into
the female line, and in all the fourteen generations which lived and
died between 1210 and 1600 there was only one occasion on which the
succession passed from uncle to nephew, and not from father to son or
grandson. The vitality of the Neville tribe was sufficient to bear them
through repeated marriages with those only daughters and heiresses
whose wedlock so often forebodes the extinction of an ancient house. Of
four successive heads of the family between 1250 and 1350, all married
ladies who were the last representatives of old baronial houses; but
the Nevilles only grew more numerous, and spread into more and more
branches, extending their possessions farther and farther from their
original seat on the Durham moors till all the counties of the north
were full of their manors.
The original source of the family was a certain Robert Fitz-Maldred,
lord of Raby, who, in the reign of John, married Isabella de Neville,
heiress of his neighbour Geoffrey de Neville of Brancepeth. Robert's
son Geoffrey, who united the Teesdale lands of his father with his
mother's heritage hard by the gates of Durham, took the name of
Neville, and that of Fitz-Maldred was never again heard in the family.
The lords of Raby did not at first distinguish themselves in any way
above the rest of the barons of the North Country. We find them from
time to time going forth to the King's Scotch or French wars, serving
in Simon de Montfort's rebel army, wrangling with their feudal superior
the Bishop of Durham, slaying an occasional sheriff, and founding an
occasional chantry, and otherwise conducting themselves after the
manner of their kind. It was one of the house who led the English
van against the Scots at the great victory of 1346, and erected the
graceful monument which gave to the battlefield the name of Neville's
Cross.
Only two characteristics marked these Nevilles of the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries; the largeness of their families--three
successive lords of Raby boasted respectively of ten, eleven, and nine
children--and their never-ending success in laying field by field
and manor by manor. Robert Neville, who in the time of Henry the
Third married Ida Mitford, added to his Durham lands his wife's broad
Northumbrian barony in the valley of the Wansbeck. His son of the same
name made Neville one of the greatest names in Yorkshire, when he
wedded Mary of Middleham, and became in her right lord of Middleham
Castle and all the manors dependent on it, reaching for a dozen miles
along the Ure and running up to the farthest bounds of the forest of
Coverdale. Robert the younger's heir, Ralph, emulated the good fortune
of his father and grandfather by securing as his wife Euphemia, heiress
of Clavering, who brought him not only the half-hundred of Clavering in
Essex, but the less remote and more valuable lands of Warkworth on the
Northumbrian coast. Ralph's son John, though he married as his first
wife a younger daughter of the house of Percy, secured as his second
Elizabeth Latimer, heiress of an old baronial house whose domains lay
scattered about Bucks and Bedfordshire.
Four generations of wealthy marriages had made the Nevilles the
greatest lords in all the North Country. Even their neighbours, the
Percies of Northumberland, were not so strong. The "saltire argent on
the field gules," and the dun bull, the two Neville badges, were borne
by hosts of retainers. Three hundred men-at-arms, of whom fourteen
were knights and three hundred archers, followed the lord of Raby even
when he went so far afield as Brittany. For home service against the
Scots he could muster thrice as many. More than seventy manors were in
his hands, some spread far and wide in Essex, Norfolk, Bedfordshire,
and Buckinghamshire, but the great bulk of them lying massed in North
Yorkshire and South Durham, around Raby and Middleham, the two strong
castles which were the centres of his influence. Hence it was not
surprising that King Richard the Second, when he lavished titles and
honours broadcast on the nobility after his surprising _coup d'état_ of
1397, should have singled out the head of the Nevilles for conciliation
and preferment. Accordingly, Ralph Neville, then in the thirty-fourth
year of his age, was raised to the dignity of an earl. Curiously
enough, he could not be given the designation of either of the counties
where the bulk of his broad lands lay. The earldom of Durham was, now
as always, in the hands of its bishop, _comes palatinus_ of the county
since the days of William the Conqueror. The titles of York and of
Richmondshire, wherein lay the other great stretch of Neville land,
were vested in members of the royal house. The Percies had twenty years
before received the title of Northumberland, the third county where
the Nevilles held considerable property. Hence Ralph of Raby had to
be put off with the title of Westmoreland, though in that county he
seems, curiously enough, not to have held a single manor. The gift of
the earldom was accompanied with the more tangible present of the royal
honour of Penrith.
All these favours, however, did not buy the loyalty of Ralph Neville.
He was married to one of John of Gaunt's daughters by Katherine
Swinford, and was at heart a strong partisan of the house of Lancaster.
Accordingly, when Henry of Bolingbroke landed at Ravenspur in July
1399, Westmoreland was one of the first to join him; he rode with him
to Flint, saw the surrender of King Richard, and bore the royal sceptre
at the usurper's coronation at Westminster. Henry rewarded his services
by making him Earl Marshal in place of the exiled Duke of Norfolk.
Earl Ralph went on in a prosperous career, aided King Henry against
the rising of the Percies in 1403, and committed himself more firmly
than ever to the cause of the house of Lancaster by putting down the
insurrection which Scrope, Mowbray, and the aged Northumberland had
raised in 1405. Twice he served King Henry as ambassador to treat with
the Scots, and twice the custody of the Border was committed to him as
warden. When Bolingbroke died, and Henry of Monmouth succeeded him,
Earl Ralph was no less firm and faithful. At the famous Parliament of
Leicester in 1414, when the glorious but fatal war with France was
resolved upon, he was one of the few who withstood the arguments of
Archbishop Chicheley and the appeals of the Duke of Exeter and gave
their voices against the expedition. He besought the King that, if he
must needs make war, he should attack Scotland rather than France, the
English title to that crown being as good, the enterprise more hopeful,
and the result more likely to bring permanent profit, while--quoting an
old popular rhyme--he ended by saying that
He that wolde France win, must with Scotland first begin.
But all men cried "War! War! France! France!" The ambitious young King
had his will; and the next spring there sailed from Southampton the
first of those many gallant hosts of Englishmen who were to win so
many fruitless battles to their country's final loss, and leave their
bones behind to moulder in French soil, in the trenches of Harfleur and
Orleans or on the fields of Beaugé and Patay.
Every reader of Shakespeare has met Earl Ralph in the English camp on
the eve of the battle of Agincourt, remembers his downhearted wish for
a few thousands of the "gentlemen of England now abed," and can repeat
by heart the young King's stirring reply to his uncle's forebodings.
But, in fact, Earl Ralph was not at Agincourt, nor did he even cross
the sea. He had been left behind with Lord Scrope and the Baron of
Greystock to keep the Scottish March, and was far away at Carlisle
when Henry's little band of English were waiting for the dawn on that
eventful St. Crispin's day. Unless tradition errs, it was really Walter
of Hungerford who made the speech that drew down his master's chiding.
Ralph was now growing an old man as the men of the fifteenth century
reckoned old age; and while the brilliant campaigns of Henry the Fifth
were in progress abode at home, busied with statecraft rather than
with war. But his sons, and they were a numerous tribe, were one after
another sent across the seas to join their royal cousin. John, the heir
of Westmoreland, was serving all through the campaigns of 1417-18, and
was made governor of Verneuil and other places in its neighbourhood,
after having held the trenches opposite the Porte de Normandie during
the long siege of Rouen, and assisted also at the leaguer of Caen.
Ralph, Richard, William, and George are found following in their elder
brother's footsteps as each of them arrived at the years of manhood,
and all earned their knighthood by services done in France.
Meanwhile Earl Ralph, after surviving his royal nephew some three
years, and serving for a few months as one of the Privy Council that
governed in the name of the infant Henry the Sixth, died on October
21st, 1425, at the age of sixty-two, and was buried in the beautiful
collegiate church which he had founded at Staindrop, hard by the gates
of his ancestral castle of Raby. There his monument still remains,
escaped by good fortune from the vandalism of Edwardian and Cromwellian
Protestants. He lies in full armour, wearing the peaked basinet
that was customary in his younger days, though it had gone out of
fashion ere his death. His regular features have little trace of real
portraiture, and show no signs of his advancing years, so that we may
conclude that the sculptor had never been acquainted with the man he
was representing. Only the short twisted moustache, curling over the
mail of the Earl's camail, has something of individuality, and must
have corresponded to the life; for by 1425 all the men of the younger
generation were close shaven, like King Henry the Fifth. On Earl
Ralph's right hand, as befitted a princess of the blood royal, lies his
second wife Joan of Beaufort; on his left Margaret Stafford, the bride
of his youth and the mother of his heir.