RICHARD OF SALISBURY
Earl Ralph, surpassing all his keen and prolific ancestors not
only in the success with which he pushed his fortunes, but in the
enormous family which he reared, had become the father of no less than
twenty-three children by his two wives. Nine were the offspring of
Margaret of Stafford, fourteen of Joan of Beaufort. John, the heir of
Westmoreland, had died a few years before his father, and the earldom
passed to his son, Ralph the second, now a lad of about eighteen. But
the greater number of the other twenty-two children still survived,
and their fortunes influenced the after history both of the house of
Neville and the kingdom of England to such an extent that they need
careful statement.
The old Earl had turned all his energies into negotiating the marriages
of his children, and partly by the favour of the two Henries, partly
by judicious buying up of wardships in accordance with the practice
of the fifteenth century, partly by playing on the desire of his
neighbours to be allied to the greatest house of the North Country, he
had succeeded in establishing a compact family group, which was already
by 1425 one of the factors to be reckoned with in English politics.
The most important of these connections by far was the wedding of his
youngest daughter Cecily to Richard Duke of York--a marriage brought
about by royal favour shortly before the Earl's death, while both the
contracting parties were mere children; the Duke some eleven years old,
the little bride about nine.[1] By this union Ralph of Westmoreland
was destined to become the ancestor of a score of kings and queens of
England. It bound the house of Neville to the Yorkist cause, and led
away the children of Ralph from that loyalty to Lancaster which had
been the cause of their father's greatness. But at the time when the
marriage was brought about no one could well have foreseen the Wars of
the Roses, and we may acquit the Earl of any design greater than that
of increasing the prosperity of his house by another marriage with a
younger branch of the royal stock. His own union with Joan of Beaufort
had served him so well, that he could desire nothing better for the
next generation. The elder brothers and sisters of Cecily of York, if
their alliances were less exalted than hers, were yet wedded, almost
without exception, to the most important members of the baronage.
Of the elder family, the offspring of Earl Ralph by Margaret of
Stafford, the second son Ralph Neville of Biwell married the co-heiress
of Ferrers. One sister died young, another became a nun, but four
of the remaining five were married to the heirs of the houses of
Mauley, Dacre, Scrope of Bolton, and Kyme. The younger family, the
children of Joan of Beaufort, made even more fortunate marriages. Of
the daughters, the youngest, as we have stated above, wedded Richard
of York. Her elder sisters were united respectively to John Mowbray
Duke of Norfolk, Humphrey Stafford Duke of Buckingham, and Henry Percy
Earl of Northumberland--the grandson of Earl Ralph's old enemy and
the son of Hotspur. Of the six sons of Joan of Beaufort, Richard the
eldest married Alice Montacute, heiress of the earldom of Salisbury,
and became by her the father of the Kingmaker; with him we shall have
much to do. William, the second son, won the heiress of Fauconbridge.
George, the third son, was made the heir of his half-uncle John Lord
Latimer, and by special grant succeeded to his uncle's barony. Robert
entered the Church, and by judicious family backing became Bishop
of Salisbury before he had reached his twenty-fifth year, only to
be transplanted ten years later to Durham, the most powerful of the
English bishoprics, whose palatine rights he could thus turn to the use
of his numerous kindred. Finally, Edward, the youngest brother, secured
Elizabeth Beauchamp, heiress of Abergavenny.
The numbers of the English baronage had been rapidly decreasing since
the reign of the third Edward, and in the early years of Henry the
Sixth the total number of peers summoned to a Parliament never exceeded
thirty-five. Among this small muster could be counted one grandson,
three sons, and five sons-in-law of Earl Ralph.[2] A little later,
one son and one grandson more were added to the peers of the Neville
kindred, and it seemed probable that by the marriages of the next
generation half the English House of Lords would be found to descend
from the prolific stock of Raby.
In the first twenty years of the reign of Henry of Windsor, while the
young King's personal weakness was not yet known, while his uncle of
Bedford and his great-uncle of Winchester stood beside the throne, and
while the war in France--though the balance had long turned against
England--was still far from its disastrous end, the confederacies of
the great baronial houses were of comparatively little importance. The
fatal question of the succession to the Crown was still asleep, for the
young King was only just nearing manhood, and might, for all that men
knew, be the parent of as many war-like sons as his grandfather. It was
not till Henry's nine years of barren wedlock, from 1445 to 1454, set
the minds of his nobles running on the problem of the succession, that
the peace of England was really endangered.
Richard Neville, the eldest of the sons of Earl Ralph's second
marriage, was born in 1399. He was too young to follow King Henry to
the siege of Harfleur and the fight of Agincourt, but a few years
later he accompanied his half-brother John, the heir of Westmoreland,
to the wars of France. It was not in France, however, that the years
of his early manhood were to be spent, but on the Scotch Border in
the company of his father. When he came of age and was knighted in
1420 he was made the colleague of the old Earl in the wardenship of
the Western Marches. This office he retained for several years, and
was in consequence much mixed up with Scotch affairs, twice acting
as commissioner to treat with the Regent of Scotland, and escorting
James the First to the border of his kingdom when the English Council
released him from his long captivity. We hear of him occasionally at
Court, as when, for example, he acted as carver at the Coronation
Banquet of the newly-wed Queen Catherine, a ceremony which, according
to Monstrelet, "was performed with such splendid magnificence that the
like had never been seen since the time of that noble knight Arthur,
King of the English and Bretons."
Richard had reached the age of twenty-six when, in 1425, he married
Alice, the only child of Thomas Montacute Earl of Salisbury, who
had just reached her eighteenth year. The Montacutes were not among
the wealthiest of the English earls--for his faithful adherence to
Richard the Second the last head of the house had lost his life and
his estates; and although his son had been restored in blood, and had
received back many of the Montacute lands, yet the list of his manors
in the Escheats Roll reads poorly enough beside those of the Earls of
Norfolk and Devon, March and Arundell. Earl Thomas, in spite of his
father's fate, had consented to serve the house of Lancaster.
In 1425, as we have already mentioned, the old Earl, Ralph of
Westmoreland, died. In his will, which has been preserved, we find that
he left his son Richard little enough--"two chargers, twelve dishes,
and a great ewer and basin of silver, a bed of Arras, with red, white,
and green hangings, and four untrained horses, the best that should
be found in his stable." Evidently he thought that he need do nothing
for this son on whom the earldom of Salisbury was bound to devolve. It
was only to Ralph and Edward, the two among his surviving sons who had
not yet inherited land from their wives, that the old Earl demised the
baronies of Biwell and Winlayton, two of his outlying estates.
But in another respect the will of Earl Ralph was destined to prove a
source of many heart-burnings in the house of Neville, and fated to
break up the strict family alliance which made its strength. While
he left the Durham lands of Neville, round his ancestral castle of
Raby, to his grandson and heir, Ralph the second, he made over the
larger part of his Yorkshire possessions not to the young Earl, but
as jointure to his widow, Joan of Beaufort, the mother of Richard and
the other thirteen children of his second family. The Countess, once
mistress of Sherif Hoton Castle and the other North-Riding lands of
Neville, had no thought of letting them pass away from her own sons to
the descendants of her husband's first wife. They were destined to be
diverted from the elder to the younger family. Here lay the source of
many future troubles, but while the young Earl Ralph was still a minor
the matter did not come to a head.
Three years after he lost his father, Richard Neville heard of the
death of his father-in-law. The Earl of Salisbury had been appointed by
John of Bedford Captain-General of all the English forces in France,
and gathering together ten thousand men, all that the Regent could
spare, had marched to the fatal siege of Orleans. There in the early
days of the leaguer, six months before Joan the Maid came to the rescue
of the garrison, he had met his death. As he watched the walls from the
tower on the bridge over the Loire, a stone shot had torn away half
his face; he died in a few days, exhorting his officers with his last
breath to persevere in the attack.
Thus Richard Neville became by the death of his father-in-law Earl
of Salisbury and master of the lands of Montacute. They lay, for the
most part, on the borders of Wiltshire and Hampshire, between Ringwood
and Amesbury, in the valleys of the Bourn and Avon. The castles of
Christchurch and Trowbridge were the most important part of the
heritage from the military point of view. Some scattered manors in
Berkshire, Dorset, and Somerset served to swell its value. Richard,
now become a considerable South Country baron, at once did homage for
his wife's lands, and was summoned as Earl of Salisbury to the next
Parliament, that of 1429. At the same meeting at which he took his seat
his nephew, Ralph the younger of Westmoreland, also appeared for the
first time, having now passed his minority and entered into possession
of such of the Neville lands as had not been left to his step-mother.
It was beyond doubt the alienation of these lands which led to the
estrangement between the younger and the elder Nevilles which we
soon after find taking visible form in troubles in the North. Ralph,
marrying a sister of Henry Earl of Northumberland, became the firm
friend and ally of that house of Percy which his grandfather had done
so much to humble. Richard kept up the old feud, and was always found
on the opposite side from his nephew. Presently (the exact year of the
commencement of the quarrel is uncertain, but it was at its height in
1435) we find them at actual blows in a manner which brings out the
fact that the "good and strong governance," which Parliament after
Parliament sighed for in the reign of Henry the Sixth, had already
become a hopeless dream. Plaints come down from the North to the Lord
Chancellor that "owing to the grievous differences which have arisen
between Ralph Earl of Westmoreland, and his brothers John and Thomas
on the one hand, and Joan Dowager-Countess of Westmoreland and her son
Richard Earl of Salisbury, on the other hand, have of late assembled,
by manner of war and insurrection, great routs and companies upon
the field, which have done all manner of great offences as well in
slaughter and destruction of the King's lieges as otherwise, which
things are greatly against the estate and weal and peace of this
Royaume of England."
Of the details of this local war in Yorkshire we know nothing. Some
sort of accommodation was patched up, by three arbitrators named by
the Privy Council, for the moment between uncle and nephew; but the
grudge rankled, and if ever England should be rent by civil war, it
took no prophet to foretell that the two Neville earls would be found
in opposite camps.
The old Countess Joan of Westmoreland died in 1440, and left, as was
natural, Middleham, Sherif Hoton, and all the other lands of her
jointure to her eldest son. Richard of Salisbury thus became a much
greater landholder in the North than he already was in the South. His
Hampshire and Wiltshire fiefs are for the future the less important
centre of his strength. Sherif Hoton becomes his favourite residence,
and it is always as a power in Yorkshire, not in Wessex, that he is
mentioned by the chroniclers of the day.
Neither of the Neville earls took any prominent part in the
never-ending French War. Ralph of Westmoreland seems to have been
wanting both in the appetite for war and the keen eye for the main
chance which had hitherto distinguished the lords of Raby. It was his
younger brother John who was the fighting man of the older branch of
Neville. Earl Richard, on the other hand, was energetic enough, but
seems to have preferred to push his fortunes at home, rather than to
risk his reputation in the unlucky wars where Somerset and Suffolk
and so many more earned ill-fame and unpopularity. We hear of him
most often on the Scottish Border, where he seems to have succeeded
to the commanding position that had once been held by his father. He
was Captain of Berwick, and served as Warden both of the Eastern and
Western Marches, till at the end of 1435 he was sent as ambassador
extraordinary to Edinburgh. James the First, with whom he had to settle
some matters of Border feud, was his own connection, for Salisbury's
mother was aunt of Joan Beaufort, the young Queen of Scots. After
quitting King James, only a few months before his cruel murder at
Perth, Earl Richard went on an embassy of far greater importance, being
sent to France, along with his young brother-in-law the Duke of York,
to endeavour to patch up some agreement that might end the series of
disasters which had commenced with the death of the Duke of Bedford in
the previous year. His mission failed, as indeed all missions were
bound to do that made after the treaty of Arras the same demands which
the French had refused before it. Nevertheless, on his return, in 1437,
Salisbury was made a member of the Privy Council, and took his seat
in the body which ever since 1422 had been directing the fortunes of
England.
This appointment fixed Salisbury in London for the greater part of the
next ten years. We find from the records of the Privy Council that he
was almost as regular an attendant at its meetings as was Cardinal
Beaufort himself, the practical Prime Minister of the realm. His
signature appears at the foot of countless documents, and his activity
and appetite for business seem to have been most exemplary. So far as
we can judge of his action, he appears to have sided with the great
Cardinal, and not with the Opposition which centred round Humphrey
Duke of Gloucester; but factions had not fully developed themselves as
yet in the Council, and the definite parties which existed a few years
later were only just beginning to sketch themselves out.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: Cecily is called Duchess of York in Earl's Ralph's will,
so the children must therefore have been already married; but the
consummation of the marriage was not till about 1438, when he was
twenty-six and she twenty-three years of age.]
[Footnote 2: The grandson was Ralph Earl of Westmoreland; the sons,
Richard of Salisbury, William of Fauconbridge, and George of Latimer;
the sons-in-law, the Dukes of York, Norfolk, and Buckingham, the
Earl of Northumberland, and Lord Dacre. Later, Edward Neville Lord
Abergavenny, and Roger Lord Scrope, appear; the first a son, the second
a grandson.]