by Hugh Bicheno
The sea entrance was guarded by a large fort at Rysbank, while the harbour was dominated by powerful Calais Castle. The walled town itself was surrounded on the landward side by a double wet ditch, with outworks between the two channels. The port could not be starved into submission, as distant naval blockade was not possible with the sailing ships of the era, and shifting sandbanks made a close blockade too perilous to contemplate.
Rowing galleys and other shallow draft vessels that could have operated close to shore required a nearby base of operations, but Gravelines and Dunkirk were not available for as long as the prosperity of neighbouring Flanders depended on the English wool trade. This was Calais’ strategic defence in depth, as seen after the failed siege of 1436, when a revolt of his Flemish cities forced Duke Philippe to abandon his military alliance with France.
The siege of 1436 had illustrated a further aspect of Calais’ military/diplomatic significance, as a potential base for offensive operations. The reason the garrison was so expensive was that it contained a high proportion of men-at-arms and mounted archers, who could launch raids against Burgundian or even French territory at short notice. If reinforced from England they could spearhead devastating chevauchées, something Duke Philippe and King Charles VII were not likely to forget.
This aspect of Calais’ strategic importance only came to the fore after Duke Philippe ended the Anglo-Burgundian alliance in 1435. Somerset seems to have been the first to realize the outpost could become an independent power base, perhaps when he sailed there after surrendering Caen in 1450. When he returned to England he left behind his bodyguard, later joined by others of his Norman affinity including Andrew Trollope, the Captain of Falaise who had made the release of John Talbot a condition of surrendering the town.
In September 1451, when Somerset became constable at the end of Buckingham’s ten-year tenure, he replaced the entire garrison with his own men. In December, he sent Richard Woodville, Lord Rivers, with sixty men-at-arms, to act as his deputy. Subordinate captains at Guînes (Thomas Findern), Calais Castle (Lord Welles), Hammes (John Marney) and Rysbank (Osbert Mountfort) indented for themselves and for, respectively, 100, 50, 41 and 18 men. Trollope commanded the barbican at the sole gate into the town.
By the end of 1452 Somerset had increased the numbers he could indent for by 160 men-at-arms and 511 mounted archers. This alone was an additional daily cost of £25 per day, £9,125 [£5.8 million] per annum, an increase of about 75 per cent above the peacetime establishment. In addition, the crown already owed Buckingham £20,000 [£12.72 million] for the last years of his captaincy, making Calais much the largest single charge to the exchequer at a time of desperately straightened royal finances.
Somerset almost certainly chose Rivers as his deputy because his wife Jacquetta was the sister of Louis of Luxembourg, Count of Saint-Pol 25 miles south of Calais. Louis inherited Saint-Pol and Brienne in 1433, and continued his family’s policy of supporting the English after Duke Philippe renounced his alliance with England in 1435 in return for Picardy, which left Saint-Pol buried deep within Burgundian territory. Louis was also the heir to his uncle, Count of Ligny and Guise, but when he died in 1441 Charles VII seized the counties and only let Louis have Ligny after he swore fealty and ceased helping the English. He was also required to join in the reconquest of Normandy.
Rivers’ dealings with Saint-Pol were probably the reason Richard of York believed Somerset intended treason with regard to Calais. Marguerite, also, may have had doubts about his motives. Her father owed fealty to the rulers of France, Burgundy and the Empire for his scattered domains, and she would have had a greater understanding of how the game was played at the borders of rival kingdoms than any other member of the English court.
So, what was Somerset’s game? First, Calais was a cash cow, although getting the milk was problematic. In 1457, two years after Somerset’s death at St Albans, the crown recognized a debt to his estate of £23,000 [£14.6 million], separate from the arrears separately paid to the garrison. This was a staggering amount for a mere four years’ service, and vastly greater than his landed income. The king’s aim had been to put him on a financial par with the great magnates, but Somerset exploited his benevolence further by indenting for more soldiers than were actually serving in Calais.
Somerset must have known the cost to the crown was unsustainable, and it is hard to dismiss the suspicion that he had a fall-back position in case he lost the king’s favour and was obliged to flee England. It could well have been to enrich himself and those who chose to remain with him by handing over the enclave to the highest bidder, perhaps with Louis of Luxembourg acting as broker, and to remain as Count of Calais.
Whatever plans he had were aborted by his imprisonment during York’s first protectorate. Denied emergency taxation by the Commons, the exchequer could no longer pay Somerset’s men in Calais. This provoked a mutiny, which, had he been free to attend to it in person, might have served as a step towards whatever outcome he had in mind. Instead, it became a means of undermining his rival’s authority, a tricky hand for Somerset’s deputies to play when York was the legally appointed authority for the defence of the realm.
The key to resolving the impasse was the Company of the Staple, set up in Calais in 1399 to handle the export of all English wool to northern Europe. Like any monopoly, it depressed producer income and inflated the price paid by consumers, in this case the great textile manufacturing towns of the Low Countries, which paid in gold and silver. After several other expedients had failed, the Staple was set up to provide the crown with a single point of tax revenue from the wool trade, and practically its only source of bullion, without which the English could not have waged the last half of the Hundred Years War.
So great was the difference between the purchase and sale prices that Cardinal Beaufort’s great wealth had come largely from the sale of wool to southern Europe, less than a fifth of all wool exports, through his port of Southampton. The Calais Staple could do nothing about that; what infuriated the Staplers were the exemptions from their northern European monopoly, granted by the crown to pay debts to favoured individuals. York, for example, was granted one such exemption to recover some of what he was owed for his Normandy lieutenancy.
Consequently, when in May 1454 the garrison seized the entire stock of wool warehoused in Calais as a guarantee of its unpaid wages, the Staplers were not in a mood to compromise. As we have seen, York had pressing calls on his time in England, and he delegated negotiations to Viscount Bourchier. Bourchier set about driving a wedge between the troops, whose grievances were financial, and their politically motivated commanders. This tactic appears to have been on the brink of success when the king recovered from his catatonia and restored Somerset to all his offices.
One of the reasons Somerset did not pay enough attention to the gathering Yorkist storm may have been because his eyes were fixed on affirming his hold on Calais as a bolt-hole should Henry relapse. Not long after the king dismissed the charges against him, he sent Lord Roos and his two most trusted household officers to arrange for his return. The arrears continued to mount and the Staple was no more interested in backing him than it had been to commit to York. For this reason, on 14 May 1455 Somerset appointed shire commissioners throughout the land to raise a loan to pay the garrison.
This would have encountered considerable resistance, but the issue became moot after Somerset was killed at St Albans eight days later. Anxious not to repeat his previous error of trying to do too much himself, one of York’s first acts was to get the king to appoint Warwick as Captain of Calais. With Somerset gone, political resistance from the Calais commanders was limited to a non-negotiable demand for immunity for previous actions, including the theft of the wool. York no longer had cause to find evidence of Somerset’s frauds, beside which any his subordinates might have committed were minor. So it came down to money.
With all claims to be honoured at face value, the amount in question was enormous. The arrears due to the cap
tains and soldiers, net of £17,366 deducted for the stolen wool, were calculated on 20 April 1456 to be £48,080 [£30.6 million]. A cash settlement was provided by the Staple, which accepted £23,000 in crown IOUs (‘tallies’) held by the treasurer of Calais in part payment. Exemptions from the Staple’s monopoly were to cease and, once Buckingham’s debt was cleared, the Staple’s advance was to be paid down by the customs receipts of Sandwich, Calais’ main corresponding port in England. The Staple was also promised the customs receipts from Southampton, although it never collected a penny.
A pardon was issued by the Council on 1 May, and shortly afterwards Warwick entered Calais with his own retinue of 300 men, paid for by a further crown-guaranteed loan from the Staple. He adopted a light-handed approach, and apart from terminating the employment of Rivers, Welles and Mountfort, there was no purge of the remaining Somerset loyalists. Warwick was confident he could win them over – and they were content for him to believe he had. He was to find his confidence misplaced in 1459−60, when Trollope and his men deserted him at a crucial moment, and Findern and Marney handed over Guînes and Hammes to Somerset’s heir, Henry Beaufort.
Previous Captains of Calais had been absentees, governing through deputies, and at first it seemed Warwick might follow the same path. After his ceremonial taking of possession he returned to England to consolidate his gains in Wales and to attend Council meetings. As control slipped progressively from York’s hands, however, Warwick saw Calais was a good place to sit things out. It would take him away from the danger of assassination by the heirs of the men killed at St Albans, and permit him to continue his pose as the king’s loyal servant by distancing himself from active factionalism.
Warwick was a supremely lucky man in an age that believed Lady Luck (the pagan Fortuna) ruled over all. How much of his luck was the product of careful planning is hard to say, but in the peculiar circumstances prevailing after Marguerite’s counter-coup he strengthened his hand by creating tension with Burgundy. The mechanism was raids from Calais across the border into Artois, falsely reported as a response to Burgundian aggression. After a preliminary meeting between representatives of the two sides at Ardres in late 1456 and early 1457, in April the king commissioned Warwick to negotiate in his name with Duke Philippe.
By this time Warwick had made the momentous decision to move his household to Calais, which made him the idol of the townspeople. He was a big spender, which of course pleased the local merchants, but by establishing a glittering court in what had always been a rather drab garrison town, he and Countess Anne also greatly enhanced the social life of the local aristocracy, the very wealthy members of the Company of the Staple and their wives. This marked him as among the first English nobles to appreciate the political advantages of princely magnificence, a feature of the contemporary Italian Renaissance but late in coming to northern Europe.
In July 1457 Duke Philippe’s personal envoy came to meet Warwick between Oye and Marck, inside the pale of Calais. This was Philippe’s eldest illegitimate son Anthony, known as ‘the Grand Bastard of Burgundy’ to differentiate him from his younger brother Corneille, who was merely ‘the Bastard of Burgundy’. Anthony was brought up with Philippe’s legitimate heir Charles, Count of Charolais, and the two were close. More remarkably they were both loyal sons, a rare occurrence among the Valois. Warwick hosted a splendid banquet, and obtained compensation for the border incidents he had provoked.
In August Lady Luck dealt him the ace of trumps in the shape of a large-scale amphibious raid on Calais’ supply port Sandwich led by Pierre de Brézé, Grand Seneschal of Normandy since the reconquest. Although Brézé had lost influence at court since the death of Agnès Sorel, the king’s mistress and his patron, he was still the Charles VII’s go-to man in military matters. The raid underlined Exeter’s complete failure to maintain a fleet to justify his title of Lord Admiral, and Warwick successfully argued for the extension of his power to include Calais’ maritime communications.
He was strongly supported by the inhabitants of Sandwich and many other ports, whose trade was suffering from a great increase in French piracy since the fall of Normandy. Although Brézé claimed his raid was retaliation for English piracy, to Henry VI it confirmed he had a naval war on his hands. Exeter kept his title, but in early October 1457 the king and Council made Warwick Keeper of the Seas, de facto Lord Admiral, ‘for the resistance of [the king’s] enemies and repressing their malice’ and ‘the comfort and relief of his subjects, friends and allies’, with an initial advance of £3,000 [£1.9 million].
Subsequent patents richly gilded the lily. He was authorized to do the king’s enemies ‘all hurt and annoyance’ by sea and, remarkably, by land as well, to issue (for which read sell) safe conducts on his own authority, and to keep a third of any spoils for himself, with another third for his crews, and a wishful thinking third for the crown. He was required to recruit 3,000−5,000 men and to lease or build ships at will, for which he was not only assigned the customs receipts of every port except Sandwich and Southampton (already committed to the Staple), but also to appoint his own customs agents to collect them.
There were an almost infinite number of ways to make money from this astonishingly broad remit. For example, Warwick was already a ship-owner as a result of his lordship (through his wife) of the Channel Islands, and we may be certain the first ships he leased for the crown, no doubt on extremely generous terms, would have been his own. He was not required to render accounts, and we can be sure he would also have received kick-backs from every individual involved in the building, equipping and maintenance of the ships. Not least, the right to issue safe conducts and to collect customs – or not – gave him the option to develop a nationwide coastal and naval affinity.
The powers vested in Warwick, at a time when Marguerite’s star was in the ascendant, were enormous. He was made virtually sovereign of Calais, where he controlled the principal source of bullion for England and even had his own mint. He was empowered to negotiate with other sovereigns in the name of the king, with only remote oversight. He had the only standing army in English territory, as well as a navy he could use to make war, commit piracy, or to trade on his own account. All of this in principle paid for by the crown.
Why, after her assumption of leadership of the Lancastrian faction, did Marguerite not seek to clip the wings of the man responsible for the lethal attack on the king’s retinue at St Albans and the butchery of Somerset, Northumberland and Clifford? I believe the answer is that he was really the only candidate for a ‘Hand of the King’, with no claim by blood to the throne, who was capable of facing down York on behalf of the Lancastrian dynasty. Warwick had been a most assiduous courtier before the king’s illness – why not try to win him back?
Unlike Suffolk and Somerset, Warwick was not a man who could be won by an accumulation of offices, wardships and other small privileges. He had shown no desire for a role in the administration or the other mundane occupations of indirect power. He fancied himself as a prince, so why not encourage him to seek glory, riches and renown – outside England? Just because we know it backfired does not mean Marguerite was wrong to gamble on building Warwick up in the hope of splitting the Nevilles from York. She was looking for a way to win without incurring the risks of a war in which her gender would preclude her from playing a leading role, and really had no other option.
Her hopes were in vain, as Warwick remained in close communication not only with his father, but also with York. Edmund Mulso, previously York’s Midlands steward, came to Calais with Warwick in 1456 and was his marshal until he died in 1458. He was replaced by Walter Blount, another Yorkist councillor whose family home was sacked in 1454 by anti-Yorkists, and who went on to become the treasurer of Calais in 1460.
Even if there had been exploitable differences among Warwick, his father and York, the crown’s finances were in such a parlous state that payments for Calais could not be sustained, and soon ceased. The king’s government also broke its agreement with t
he Staple and continued to issue exemptions, persuading the Staplers their future lay with the Yorkists. Warwick was to use his fleet not only to generate income for the garrison by piracy, but also to seize ships carrying non-Staple wool, and to fence the stolen property through Calais.
Warwick won an even wider following by acting as the champion of English merchants against foreign competition. A particularly shrewd blow was the seizure of three exempt Genoese ships with cargoes worth £4,000 [£2.5 million] at Tilbury, down-river from London, cheered by local merchants deeply resentful that their own government was favouring foreign inroads into their trade. At another level he appealed to bruised patriotism by demanding foreign ships should dip their flags to England’s, and attacking them if they did not.
Warwick was a phenomenon quite outside the normal run of English history. He was indeed a prince, and a quick-witted warlord who would have been quite at home in Renaissance Italy. Most of the English sources for his life are hagiographic, but reports by Burgundian, French and Milanese agents to their masters support the view that he was not only popular, but also a man of exceptional intelligence, personal charm and steely determination. That he was also a serial killer was, if anything, considered a mark in his favour.
He remained devoted to his wife even though they never had the son for whom he yearned, and she is one of the unexplored aspects of his story. She was, after all, the source of his wealth and a considerable peeress in her own right. He did not appoint a formal deputy to govern Calais during his absences in the crucial early years of his captaincy, which strongly suggests Countess Anne must have played an active political role, as well as being the hub around which his court revolved. They were a formidable partnership.
Warwick’s withdrawal to Calais left Wales, the source of his original contention with what was now the Lancastrian party, very much up in the air. It was to play a crucial role, but it is a mistake to see it as simply one more stage on which the evolving rivalry between the English magnates was played out. There was more to it than that.
