THE KINGMAKER'S YOUTH
Richard, the second child but eldest son of Richard Neville of
Salisbury and Alice Montacute, was born on November 22nd, 1428, just
nineteen days after his grandfather had fallen at the siege of Orleans.
We know absolutely nothing of his childhood--not even the place of his
birth is recorded. We must suppose, but cannot prove, that his earliest
days were passed on his mother's lands in Wessex, in moving about
between Amesbury, Christchurch, and Ringwood as his parents' household
made its periodical peregrinations from manor to manor according to
the universal practice of the time. As a boy he must have visited his
paternal grandmother, Joan of Beaufort, on her Yorkshire estates, when
his father was fixed in the North as Warden of the Scotch Border. There
probably he may have imbibed some of the old lady's dislike for her
step-sons of the elder branch of the Nevilles, with whom she and his
father were now at open variance. A little later he must have spent
much time in London, when his father became a member of the Council
of Regency, lodged at the "Tenement called the Harbour in the Ward of
Dowgate," which his father and grandmother had received by will from
his grandfather when the larger London house of the family, "Neville's
Inn in Silver Street," passed with the Westmoreland earldom to the
elder branch.
The fortunes of the house of Neville, as we have told them hitherto,
have consisted of one interminable story of fortunate marriages. The
reader must now be asked to concentrate his attention on another group
of these alliances, a group which settled the whole history of the
Kingmaker, and gave him the title of the earldom by which he is always
named.
The Beauchamps of Warwick held one of the oldest English earldoms; they
represented in direct descent the Henry of Newburgh to whom William
Rufus had granted the county in 1190.[3] Richard Beauchamp, the head
of the family at this time, was perhaps the worthiest and the most
esteemed of the English nobles of his day. The "gracious Warwick," the
"father of courtesy" as the Emperor Sigismund called him, had been
through all the wars of Henry the Fifth, and won therein a name only
second to that of the King himself. He had seen many cities and men in
every land that lay between England and Palestine, and left everywhere
behind him a good report. His virtues and accomplishments had caused
him to be singled out as tutor and governor to the young King, Henry
the Sixth; no better model, as all agreed, could be found for the ruler
of England to copy. Nor did Warwick belie his task; he made Henry
upright, learned, painstaking, conscientious to a fault. If he could
but have made him as strong in body and spirit as he was morally, he
would have given England the best king that ever she possessed.
Richard Beauchamp had married Isabel, heiress of Despenser, and widow
of Richard, Lord of Abergavenny. Their family consisted of a son,
Henry, a boy of ten, and a daughter, Anne, three years younger. In
addition, the Countess of Warwick had an only daughter by her first
husband, who was heiress of Abergavenny. Beauchamp and Richard Neville
of Salisbury were the best of friends, and had determined to seal their
friendship by intermarriage between their families. The alliance was
destined to be complicated; each earl married his heir to his friend's
daughter. The boy Henry, heir of Warwick, was affianced to Cecily
Neville, Salisbury's six-year-old daughter; the boy Richard, heir of
Salisbury, to Anne Beauchamp, daughter of Warwick. Nor was this all;
the family relations were complicated by the marriage of Warwick's
step-daughter Elizabeth, the heiress of Abergavenny, to Edward Neville
the younger brother of Salisbury.
The boy Richard Neville received a competent dowry with his wife, but
nothing more was expected to follow from the marriage. Fate, however,
decreed otherwise.
The old Earl of Warwick died in 1439, full of years and honours.
To him succeeded his son Henry, the husband of Cecily Neville, now
sixteen years of age, and "a seemly lord of person." He had been
brought up with the young King, a lad of his own years, and was Henry
of Lancaster's bosom friend. When the King came of age he heaped on
the young Beauchamp every honour that his affection could devise. Not
only was he made Knight of the Garter and a Privy Councillor before
he was nineteen, but he was created Duke of Warwick, and invested
by the King's own hands with the lordship of the Isle of Wight. If
Henry Beauchamp had lived, it would have been he, and not Suffolk
and Somerset, who in a few years would have ruled England. But his
career was broken in its earliest promise. Ere he had finished his
twenty-third year Henry Beauchamp was cut off from the land of the
living, and his lands and duchy devolved on his only child, a little
girl but four years of age. Her wardship fell to William de la Pole
Earl of Suffolk, already the declared adversary of Salisbury and the
Neville family.
By the wholly unexpected death of Henry Beauchamp only this one frail
life lay between the lad Richard Neville--he was sixteen when his
brother-in-law died--and the earldom of Warwick. Nor was that life to
continue long. The child Anne Beauchamp survived for three years more,
and then died, aged seven, on June 23rd, 1449. She was buried by her
grandam Constance, daughter of Edmund Duke of York, before the high
altar of Reading Abbey.
The heiress of Warwick was now the elder Anne, Richard Neville's young
wife,[4] and in her right Richard received the Beauchamp lands from the
unwilling hands of the little countess's guardian, Suffolk. The patent
which created him Earl of Warwick, and joined his wife in the grant,
was dated July 23rd, 1449.
Thus, in the year in which he reached his twenty-first birthday, the
future Kingmaker became "Earl of Warwick, Newburgh, and Aumarle,
Premier Earl of England, Baron of Elmley and Hanslape, and Lord of
Glamorgan and Morgannoc." He was now a much more important personage
than his own father, for the Beauchamp and Despenser manors in the West
Midlands and the Welsh Marches were broader by far than the Montacute
lands in Wessex, or the Neville holding round Middleham.
A short survey of the items of the Beauchamp heritage is necessary
to show how wide-spread was the power which was now placed in the
hands of the young Richard Neville. Perhaps the most compact block
of his new possessions was the old Despenser holding in South Wales
and Herefordshire, which included the castles of Cardiff, Neath,
Caerphilly, Llantrussant, Seyntweonard, Ewyas Lacy, Castle-Dinas,
Snodhill, Whitchurch, and Maud's Castle. Caerphilly alone was a
stronghold fit to resist ten thousand men, with its tremendous rings
of concentric fortification; and the massive Norman masonry of Cardiff
was still ready for good service. Between Neath and Ewyas Lacy lay no
less than fifty manors of the Despenser heritage. In Gloucestershire
was another group of estates which the Beauchamps had got from the
Despensers--of which the chief were the wide and populous manors of
Tewkesbury, Sodbury, Fairford, Whittington, Chedworth, Wickwar, and
Lydney. In Worcestershire there was a compact block of land along the
Severn and on both its banks; the largest manors included in it were
Upton-on-Severn, Hanley Castle, and Bewdley, but there were twenty-four
more estates of less importance, together with the Castle of Elmley,
which had given the Beauchamps a baron's title. In Warwickshire,
beside the fair town and castle which went with the earldom, there were
not any very broad tracts of land--only nine manors in all, but one of
these was the wealthy manor of Tamworth. Going farther south in the
Midlands we find in Oxfordshire five manors and the forest of Wychwood
reckoned to the Beauchamps, and in Buckinghamshire the baronial seat of
Hanslape and seven manors more. Nor was it only in central England that
Richard Neville could count his estates; there were scattered holdings
accruing to him in Kent, Hampshire, Sussex, Essex, Hertfordshire,
Suffolk, Norfolk, Berkshire, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon, Cornwall,
Northampton, Stafford, Cambridge, Rutland, and Nottingham, amounting
in all to forty-eight manors. Even in the distant North one isolated
possession fell to him--the castle of Barnard's-Castle on the Tees. If
in addition to the manors we began to count up the scattered knights'
fees, the advowsons of churches, the chantries, the patronage of
abbeys, and the tenements in towns, which formed part of the Beauchamp
heritage, we should never be done; but these are all written in the
Escheats Roll, whence the antiquary may excavate them at his will.
The year 1449, in which Richard Neville attained his majority and
gathered in his wife's heritage, was the turning-point in the reign of
Henry the Sixth. No more critical time could have been found in the
whole century in which to place power and influence in the hands of a
young, able, and ambitious man. For it was in 1449 that the doom of the
house of Lancaster was settled by the final collapse of the English
domination in France. In March came the fatal attack on Fougères which
reopened the war, an attack of which it is hard to say whether it was
more foolish or wicked. In August, September, and October occurred with
bewildering rapidity the fall of the great towns of eastern and central
Normandy, ending with the capitulation of Rouen after a siege of only
nineteen days.
It was this unparalleled series of disasters which made the existing
Lancastrian rule unbearable to the English nation. Suffolk, the
minister whose policy had led up to the disaster, and Somerset, the
governor whose avarice had depleted the Norman garrisons, and whose
rashness and ill faith had precipitated the outbreak of hostilities,
were henceforth pursued by the bitter hatred of the majority of
Englishmen. When it was found that King Henry identified their cause
with his own, he himself--against whom no one had previously breathed a
word--found for the first time that the current of public opinion was
setting against him.
It was now that the final scission of the two parties that were
afterwards to be known as Yorkist and Lancastrian took place. Every
man of note in England had now to make his choice whether his personal
loyalty to the King should lead him into acquiescing in the continuance
in office of the ministers whom Henry openly favoured, or whether he
would set himself in opposition to the Court faction, even though he
was thereby led into opposition to the King.
From the first moment there was no doubt which of the two courses
would be adopted by the two Neville earls of the younger branch.
Warwick, now as always, acted in strict union with his father, and
Salisbury had never been a friend of Suffolk. Moreover, they were
both concerned in behalf of their relative the Duke of York, who by
Somerset's contrivance had been sent into a kind of honorary exile in
Ireland. When the crisis should come, it was already pretty certain
that Salisbury and Warwick would be found on the side of York, and
not on that of Suffolk and Somerset. But as yet, though men were
growing excited and preparing for evil times, no one foresaw the exact
shape which the troubles were to take. One thing only was certain,
that Suffolk and Somerset were growing so hateful to the nation that
an explosion against them would soon take place, and that when the
explosion came there would be a large party among the leading men of
England who would rejoice in its effects.
The most ominous sign of the times was that the great barons on both
sides were already quietly arming, seeing to the numbers of their
retainers, and concluding agreements to take their neighbours into
their livery if the worst should come to the worst.
Nothing can be a more typical sign of the times than the treaty which
Salisbury entered into with a Westmoreland knight, whose lands lay not
far from his great holding in the North-Riding, as early as September
1449, the very month when Somerset was losing Normandy.
"This indenture made between Richard Earl of Salisbury, on the one
part, and Walter Strykelande knight, on the other, beareth witness
that the said Walter is retained and withholded with the said Earl for
the term of his life, against all folk, saving his allegiance to the
King. And the said Walter shall be well and conveniently horsed, armed,
and arrayed, and always ready to bide come and go with to and for the
said Earl, at all times and places, as well in time of peace as time
of war, at the wages of the same Earl." Walter's following was worth
having, being "servants, tenants, and inhabitants within the county
of Westmoreland; bowmen with horse and harness, sixty-nine; billmen
horsed and harnessed, seventy-four; bowmen without horses, seventy-one;
billmen without horses, seventy-six"--in fact a little army of two
hundred and ninety men. The existence of a few such treaties as this
between Salisbury and his northern neighbours shows clearly enough
how the Neville power was built up, and how formidable to the public
peace it might become. If once such treaties were in existence, how
long would it be before the single clause "saving his allegiance" would
begin to drop into oblivion?
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 3: The Beauchamps came into the title in 1268, William de
Beauchamp having married the grand-daughter of Henry of Newburgh, whose
male issue had died out.]
[Footnote 4: Anne was the only heir of the full blood to Henry Duke of
Warwick, but he had several half-sisters, to whom the reversion of the
title was left by the patent which gave Richard and Anne Neville the
earldom.]