Warwick the Kingmaker (56 page)

resonabyll and profitable for the honoure and profite of oure seid sovereyn Lord and the commun wele of all this his realm, [they were] fully purposed with other lordis to shew the same to his good grace.

Hence they summoned supporters ‘to accompayneye us thedir, with as many persones defensably arrayede as y[e] can make’. This was to be forceful petitioning: Edward was to be induced to concede by a display of force.

The articles and petitions existed and exist independently of the covering letter of the three lords. It is therefore possible, if highly unlikely, that the popular movement originated independently. Whenever the articles first circulated, the covering letter is dated 12 July, three days
after
the king wrote to Warwick, Clarence and Archbishop Neville about their misconduct. Whilst the articles draw on earlier precedents both of rebellions and manifestos, there is no reuse of past words or phrases, and they were not necessarily of Warwick’s devising. He knew, of course, how unfair some charges were, how little choice Edward had, how much the Nevilles themselves had benefited from Edward’s largesse, how inaccurate were some of the details, but it made good propaganda. It focused on popular grievances, ‘wheche caused alle the people of this lond to grugge’, rather than his own: it draws on popular xenophobia rather than arguing foreign policy; and it treats the counsel of great lords of the blood as good government itself rather than means to ends. Probably Warwick fomented popular insurrection; certainly he wished to exploit it, to destroy his own enemies – ‘certeyne seducious persones’, and pursue his own objectives; and a general manifesto served to enlist support everywhere.

As in 1460, the overwhelming numbers of a popular uprising were to be harnessed by a ruthless noble leadership. Rebellions in Yorkshire and the Midlands were to be supplemented by an invasion through Kent and London spearheaded by Calais and swelled by thousands of mariners, Kentishmen and Londoners. The latter are indistinct because it was the northerners who proved decisive. Warwick was however admitted both to Canterbury (18 July) and to London, whose corporation even made further loans to him. Was not popular discontent too good an opportunity for Warwick to miss? Had it not transformed a minority faction into an overwhelming majority in 1460? This time it was to prove disastrous for the earl. Up to this point, Warwick had been a loyal subject. He could accept Edward’s authority, resign himself to an honourable if secondary role, abandon certain cherished lands and perhaps the unchallenged dominance of the North. He would retain, however, the far larger estates that made him the greatest of English magnates, his constellation of offices, an important if subordinate and honourable part in domestic affairs, and the leadership of English embassies abroad. His rebellion was treasonable in itself. It involved the arrest and imprisonment of the king. It may always have entailed and soon required further rebellions, depositions, civil wars, invasions, and usurpations ever more desperate that propelled him on the perilous course that destroyed him and his dynasty. It was his actions now that earned him the sobriquet ‘the Kingmaker’ – a title reluctantly earned; that overturned his renown amongst contemporaries; and that condemned him as a selfish egotist for posterity. He was insatiable.

Such analysis attributes a cynical and self-interested attitude to Warwick that has much to commend it. But as explanation it is not enough. Warwick was convinced that Edward’s foreign policy was wrong. He sincerely believed that his alternative was in the public interest; so was his rule. He genuinely believed in government by those of ancient ancestry, the highest nobility, the king’s natural councillors, not by parvenus, amongst whom in 1460 he had numbered the Wydevilles. We know of his inability to accommodate differences of opinion, his equation of disagreement with opposition and treason. He saw the rebellions of others as treason and those of himself as legitimate. There had been a sequence of minor disappointments that had left him feeling ill-used. He thought the king’s favourites were ganging up on him and were out to destroy him or cut him down to size, as Herbert apparently was. Royal patronage to himself was the just reward for services rendered – admittedly, enormous services – and he nourished other legitimate expectations that were not being satisfied. And the risks that he took in 1469 – the risk of total destruction, which he of all men could calculate – demand faith in his sincerity of purpose.

Remember that many of Warwick’s earlier historians saw him as consistent, not the king, who had not treated the earl with the respect that he deserved. It had been Warwick in 1459–60 who had taken over York’s popular appeal and had harnessed it to decisive effect. Edward had also benefited. Since then Edward had lost that popular support. Warwick, however, had retained it. His very public opposition to the king’s favourites and policies had distanced him from the popular grievances of 1469 and cleared him of complicity. He stood in 1469 for the same as a decade earlier and appeared in popular eyes as the consistent advocate of the common weal. So well had Warwick gauged the popular mood that he can be said to have represented it. That does not determine whether he sincerely stood for their interests, or cunningly manipulated them.

As in 1455, 1459 and 1460, most of the principal rebels concealed their identity: the covering letter was issued only in the names of Warwick, Clarence and Archbishop Neville. Even they, however, revealed their hand only on 12 July, when the rebellion in Kent was already under way and that in Yorkshire was far advanced. The Yorkshire rebellion was led by Warwick’s Richmondshire connection: by his brother-in-law Lord FitzHugh, his cousins Sir Henry Neville of Latimer and Sir John Conyers, steward of Middleham, though the nominal leader was Robin of Redesdale.69 Once again Warwick was to bring the Calais garrison to England and call out his West Midlanders. A multi-pronged campaign required careful planning and secrecy.

It was preceded and concealed by two important ceremonies. Warwick’s presence in the South-East could excite no surprise as he had business there to execute. In February he was commissioned to inquire into land tenure in the Calais Pale. It was he, not Gloucester or Scales, who was fitting out the fleet. He was personally engaged in negotiations with Burgundy at Ardres on 21 April and at St Omer on the 26th. He met and encouraged the chronicler Waurin, but lacked the time to be really helpful.70 The dedication of the
Trinity
on 12 June has already been described. Secondly, Warwick’s daughter Isabel was married to the king’s brother Clarence at Calais on 11 July. A papal dispensation had been secured at last on 14 March and a licence from Cardinal Bourchier for George Neville to marry them at Calais on 30 June: the delay may account for some of the otherwise unexplained toing and froing by earl, duke and archbishop. Edward’s continuing disapproval is implied by his absence, when he had intended to visit Calais; he cannot have been ignorant of what everyone else knew.

The marriage secured for Warwick a duke for his oldest daughter and determined the destination of one share of his inheritance, a small part of which was assigned as jointure. It also committed to him the king’s brother and male heir, an ally who lent respectability to any insurrection or imposed ministry, his own resources, and bound to their cause those who attended the wedding in the teeth of Edward’s hostility. They remained at Calais for five days, Clarence’s honey-moon, after the wedding.71 The northern sector of the rebellion had been unleashed much earlier, by 28 June at least when Warwick wrote to Coventry soliciting a band of soldiers for service with him and the king against the northern insurgents.72

From Edward’s angle, of course, it looked like a marriage alliance
with
him, binding the Nevilles more tightly to him, rather than against him. Evidently he saw no connection with Robin of Redesdale’s rising. Such revolts occurred frequently. The name, which had been used before and been easily crushed, had no Neville connotations; Redesdale was in Northumberland and thus implied Percy and Lancastrian origins that could be left to his northern officers. Warwick, as we have seen, was apparently mobilizing forces of repression from Coventry. Whilst preparing to go north if necessary, Edward went on pilgrimage to Bury St Edmunds, Walsingham and Norwich, before taking alarm and calling out the Welsh and West Country levies of Pembroke and Devon. By 9 July Edward had heard rumours of ‘suech disposition towards us’ of the three lords:73 did he yet appreciate the connection between their actions in Kent and the northerners and the real character of the latter? The northerners took at least a month to travel from Richmondshire to Banbury, longer clearly than the Welsh and West Country levies with which Herbert and Stafford reacted. The underlying strategy is concealed. Were the king’s forces to be lured northwards, leaving the South exposed for Warwick to repeat the triumph of Northampton in 1460? Or were efforts being made to co-ordinate and amalgamate the various rebel forces? We do not know how close Warwick’s own force proceeded from London towards the king.

What happened, however, is clear enough. Finding Edward’s forces divided, the northerners fell on Pembroke’s Welshmen at Edgecote on 24 July and destroyed them. Whether a popular element was involved, it was Warwick’s Middleham connection that bore the brunt and won the victory. It paid a high price. Among the fallen were two of Warwick’s nephews, a son of Lord FitzHugh and Sir Henry Neville of Latimer, the latter’s brother-in-law Oliver Dudley, and John Conyers, son of the steward of Middleham and son-in-law of Fauconberg.74 As on previous occasions, Warwick made sure that his enemies would cause no further trouble: Rivers, Pembroke and Devon, Sir John Wydeville, Sir Richard and Thomas Herbert were executed. The Duchess Jacquetta herself was appealed of sorcery by Warwick’s retainer Thomas Wake. Only Scales, his younger brothers, Audley and Fogge, escaped. The king himself was arrested almost alone at Warwick’s manor of Olney by Archbishop Neville and imprisoned first at Warwick, where he offered at the College, and then at Middleham.

It was ‘the Earl of Warwick, as astute as ever was Ulysses’, who stayed with Edward and directed the government from afar, the archbishop and duke taking the lead at court. Letters of instruction that were acted on survive among the chancery warrants from the earl to the council in London. The spoils of victory were distributed: Sir John Langstrother, preceptor of Balsall and now uncontested prior of St John, became treasurer in Rivers’s place. Apart from another great duchy of Lancaster office, as supervisor and approver, Warwick was appointed on 17 August to be chief justice and chamberlain of South Wales, steward and constable of Cardigan and Carmarthen, late of the Earl of Pembroke. His brother-in-law Hastings was appointed his counterpart in North Wales.75 Evidently Warwick thought Hastings was still his man.

Such were the arrangements in the short term. Warwick, however, was not content with them. Mere restraint was not enough. Like Richard Duke of York a decade earlier, he needed more secure long-term arrangements, the more so because Edward was vigorous and decisive where Henry VI had been merely passive and inept. Hence his decision to summon parliament, taken against advice.76 One would like to know why: whether because a permanent transfer of power was opposed, because his capacity to control parliament was doubted, or because Warwick had deposition in mind? Surely at the very least Warwick intended a protectorate, from which he or Clarence as protectors could be dismissed only by parliament? Just possibly he may have been taking the more drastic course of deposing the king, as the Milanese ambassador supposed on 16 September?77 Such an approach could exploit the rumours current in August 1469 that Edward IV himself was a bastard, the son of the Duchess Cecily and a franc archer called Blancborgne.78 A charge of sorcery against Jacquetta, perhaps to explain Edward’s infatuation with her daughter, could perhaps have been used to discredit Edward’s marriage. Neither can be traced to the rebel lords. The precedents of 1460 are obvious. If so, it was surely Clarence, next brother of the king, who was to be advanced. We do not know. Probably Warwick’s intentions were never revealed. Certainly they cannot have been, if deposition and usurpation was intended, for such plans were never made a charge against him, even by chroniclers. At a more mundane level, parliament could be induced to neutralize the Wydevilles and Herberts by resumption of their grants.

No parliament was held, because writs of supersedeas were issued. The rule of all English governments over the localities depended on consent, not force. Warwick, despite his victory, lacked that consent, the moral force that a legitimate king possessed. Thus John Duke of Norfolk’s siege of Caister (Norf.), far from being halted by the intervention of the archbishop and Clarence, proceeded apace, Norfolk remarking that he would not desist for any duke in England. So, too, in the North, where the irreconcilable and incurably optimistic Humphrey Neville of Brancepeth saw another opening for a Lancastrian revolt. Neville’s previous efforts had been quelled with ease, but not this time. Not apparently because more popular, but because Warwick’s usual manpower would not serve. Edward had first to be exhibited in public and then allowed to release himself before Warwick was able to deal with Neville, definitively. An impressive escort of English nobility accompanied Edward into London about 10 October. Warwick, Clarence and the archbishop were not among them.79

NOTES

1.
Vale’s Bk.
171–2.

2.
Three 15th-Cent. Chrons.
176; Scofield,
Edward IV
, i. 310; Vaesen,
Lettres de Louis XI
, iii. 155; Waurin-Dupont, iii. 184;
CSPM
i. 100.

3. Scofield, ii. 461–2; for what follows see
New Dictionary of National Biography
, sub Elizabeth.

4. As discussed in Lander,
Crown and Nobility
, 161–2.