by Hugh Bicheno
The handpicked Parliament that met in Coventry in November 1459 was primed to attaint the Yorkists and their supporters root and branch – but the king was not. Acts of Attainder were passed against ten peers present at Ludlow plus Salisbury’s countess, but Grey of Ruthyn had got his submission in early, swore he had been deceived and dodged the bullet. The king reserved to himself the application of the judgements against Grey of Powys and Ferrers of Chartley (Walter Devereux, whose much-persecuted namesake father had died in April), who had also submitted. Both were pardoned, but while Powys was promptly restored to his lands, Ferrers had to pay a fine and was not pardoned until March 1460.
Also attainted were twelve knights who fought for Salisbury at Blore Heath including William Stanley, although the king rejected the attainder of Lord Stanley. There was, however, an order under Privy Seal releasing the knights captured after Blore Heath to Stanley’s care – which was pointedly ironic as they were long gone, and the court knew it. The administrators of the dukedom and the two earldoms were largely spared, with the exception of those who were at Blore Heath, plus York’s treasurer John Clay and Warwick’s chamberlain Thomas Colt. Rounding off the list were Wenlock, Oldhall and others who had accompanied York and the Nevilles into exile, a total of thirty individuals.
Thanks to the prior accusation against Countess Alice, and because the only blood had been shed at Blore Heath, the attainders hit the earldom of Salisbury particularly hard, to the benefit of their local rivals. Northumberland was owed £17,000 [£10.8 million] in back pay as Warden of the East March and Constable of Berwick Castle, and the revenues from many of Salisbury’s northern manors were assigned to him – but not the titles. Clifford was made Warden of the West March, Beaumont was made steward of Knaresborough Castle and the duchy of Lancaster lands in the West Riding, and Shrewsbury of the castles at Pontefract and Pickering (see Map 8).
Another beneficiary of the crown’s recovery of lands previously entrusted to Salisbury was his son-in-law Henry, Lord FitzHugh, who was made steward of Middleham and Richmond. He was among the most lukewarm of the king’s supporters, and the appointments only make sense if the aim was to win over others of Salisbury’s affinity. To complete the picture, John, made Baron Neville in July 1460 and acting head of the Nevilles of Raby and Brancepeth by the incapacity of his brother, the Earl of Westmorland, was made steward of Sheriff Hutton. Most of the offices vacated by Salisbury’s attainder, however, went to royal officials.
Bishop Booth moved to take possession of Warwick’s Durham manors, long claimed by his diocese, even before Warwick was attainted, but otherwise the distribution of spoils went ahead at a glacial pace. In Wales, Warwick’s retainers refused to give up his castles in Glamorgan and Abergavenny. Elsewhere due legal process was generally respected, which prevented any rapid transfer of property. Even Somerset’s and Shrewsbury’s mothers were permitted only to reopen their suits with regard to the Beauchamp inheritance, an admission that previous judgements had been flawed but not a reversal in their favour. A number of those attainted had taken the precaution of settling their lands on Lancastrian trustees, and those properties were specifically excluded in the Acts of Attainder.
Practically all of York’s manors were heavily mortgaged and the titles would have brought no immediate benefit, so there was little point in redistributing them. Wiltshire was awarded some unencumbered lands in the South West and drew revenues from them, but Beaumont and Exeter, made stewards of Stamford and Fotheringhay respectively, encountered stubborn popular resistance. York’s officials found ways to frustrate the new owners, even when it was the king himself. For example, Henry appointed Egremont constable of forfeited Conisbrough Castle, but a year later it was still held against him by York’s lifelong retainer Edmund FitzWilliam. In Wales, Denbigh Castle held out against Jasper Tudor until mid-1460.
From the Yorkist point of view the ‘Parliament of Devils’, responding to the will of the spiteful queen, committed a monstrous injustice against the king’s loyal subjects. Marguerite’s view would have been that the attainders were a good start to the restoration of order to the kingdom, but the process failed because the policy advocated by ‘the arbitrator’ in Somnium Vigilantis was not fully implemented. To do so, however, would have sparked countless local rebellions, and Henry knew he lacked the military means and the leadership qualities required to impose it.
The same consideration explains why Stanley got a pass for his treachery during the Blore Heath campaign. He was so greatly the dominant lord in southern Lancashire that only military force could evict him. He was also lord of the Isle of Man, and with York himself now in Ireland the prospect of the island becoming a Yorkist base was unthinkable. All Henry could do was to prevent Parliament from including Stanley in the Acts of Attainder, and (vainly) hope he would be grateful.
The favour shown to the two Lords Grey fits the pattern of Marguerite’s strategy of trying to weaken York’s hold on central and north Wales. It worked with Powys, who was made steward of Montgomery, later raised troops for the crown in Shropshire, and remained loyal for as long as it was practicable. Ruthyn was a much higher risk gamble. It was worth trying to detach him from his alliance with York in Denbigh, but it was deeply unwise to trust him. He was at daggers drawn with the Duke of Exeter over Ampthill, and he was also responsible for the murder of Speaker Tresham in 1450. Possibly the court’s judgement was influenced by his Lancastrian ancestry: he was a great-grandson of John of Gaunt.
A third view of the aftermath of Ludford Bridge is that the settlement, as pursued, was the only viable option. The attainted estates were kept intact as an incentive for the exiled lords to submit, and resume their titles and their essential local functions without presuming to dictate to the king how he should govern. There was little chance they would, but in the meantime, the revenues from the forfeited lands could begin to pay off the crown’s debts. The alternative would have been to award the estates to today’s loyal lords, who would in all probability prove to be tomorrow’s over-mighty subjects.
Although almost every lord spiritual and temporal apart from those in exile swore an oath of loyalty to Henry and his son during the Coventry Parliament, Marguerite’s triumph was more apparent than real. Every legal right was on her side, but in the end the case for the defence, rejected in Somnium Vigilantis, proved prophetic. The rebel lords were not received into mercy, and subsequently did not seek it. The author of the document should have remembered the Latin aphorism inter arma enim silent leges: laws are silent in matters of arms.
*1 De jure means that they had not yet been summoned to Parliament by the titles they had inherited, in Devereux’s case by marriage. Tiptoft had received the summons that might otherwise have gone to Grey.
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Warwick’s Apotheosis
The Yorkists split up when they fled Ludlow. Warwick, his father, York’s eldest son Edward, Wenlock, Colt and Pickering made their way to south Wales, sailed across the Bristol Channel to Devon, and travelled overland to the Channel coast. They were assisted by John Dynham of Nutwell, a manor on the bank of the River Exe, for which he later joined them in attainder. He provided them with a balinger, a single-masted vessel similar to a Viking longship, and sailed them to Jersey in the Channel Islands, where they were warmly received by Warwick’s governor, John Nanfan. Presumably they then boarded one of Warwick’s own, more substantial ships.
They sailed into Calais harbour on 2 November, only days before the arrival of about 1,000 men including Anthony Trollope and others who deserted at Ludlow. This expedition was led by 23-year-old Henry Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, appointed governor of Calais by the Coventry Parliament, with Lords Roos and Audley and Humphrey Stafford of Hooke. While he was away in England Warwick had left his uncle, Lord Fauconberg, and Countess Anne in charge, but with no news of him in the twenty days since the Ludford debacle, they would have had difficulty persuading the garrison to hold out if he had not arrived opportunely.
Bearing in mind that by this time customs officers in every port except Southampton were Warwick’s nominees, the embargo may have been the most counter-productive of all the exercises of the royal prerogative during Henry’s reign. Trade with Calais was not affected and, far from cowing the Staplers, it resolved any remaining doubts they may have entertained. Somerset arrived with a war chest of 200 marks [£85,000], all Wiltshire had been able to scrape together in addition to the first payment of Somerset’s indentures for troops. In contrast the Staplers made Warwick a personal loan of £3,850 [£2.45 million] and became his financial partners in the military exploits that followed.
Almost as tellingly, the Duke of Burgundy also backed Warwick. He renewed the truce negotiated at Marck in 1457, and ignored a delegation sent by King Henry. At the same time his heir Charles, Count of Charolais, became fascinated by Somerset’s bold playing of a very weak hand. One gets the impression that, for the Burgundian court, reports from their agents about the doings of the English at Calais became something like a soap opera, or at least a large-scale chivalric tournament with wonderfully entertaining characters.
Warwick’s quid pro quo for the truce had been to desist from attacking Burgundian shipping, while continuing his naval war against France, and the English court could offer nothing of comparable value. In addition he now provided political cover for Burgundian raids into north-eastern France by claiming them as his own, burnishing his credentials as the champion of England against the hated French, at no expense to himself.
The asking price of a warlord in contemporary Italy reflected his cunning (furbizia) more than his military prowess. Thus also Warwick. The key to understanding his international stature is that he embodied the paradigm shift which took place during the Renaissance, from lip service to Christian values to the unashamed exaltation of Classical manliness – bravery, strength, pride and ruthlessness (Niccolò Machiavelli’s amoral virtù). Pope Pius II lamented the change in his autobiographical Commentaries (my italics): ‘While men live they take pleasure in the glory of the present, which they hope will continue after death. It is this which sustains the most brilliant intellects, and even more than the hope of a celestial life, which once begun shall never end, cheers and refreshes the heart of man.’
Adding to Warwick’s already extravagant fortuna, Charles VII of France was by now very ill with what sounds like diabetes, and beset by other problems. Chief among them was that the Dauphin Louis had sought asylum with the Duke of Burgundy in 1456, and furiously rejected all his father’s attempts at reconciliation. Louis of Luxembourg, Count of Saint-Pol, Jacquetta’s brother and Marguerite’s brother-in-law, was also involved in a military-diplomatic rats’ nest too off-topic to unravel here. Suffice it to say that the chronic problems England had with Scotland were fully replicated in France’s north-eastern March.
Charles also had to deal with Jean V, Count of Armagnac, one of the more outrageous French nobles. Jean embarked on a relationship with his sister Isabelle, who bore him three children, and they were excommunicated after Jean forged a Papal Bull to permit them to marry. When he also rejected the candidate for Bishop of Auch agreed between the king and the pope, and installed his own bastard half-brother, Charles VII had no option but to invade Armagnac once more.
Somerset’s campaign must have been covertly subsidized by Charles VII because Warwick, decisively assisted by his Kentish supporters, prevented any significant support reaching him from England. Some of Warwick’s most important warships had been impounded at Sandwich, where a second expedition of 1,000 men was being assembled by Richard Woodville, Baron Rivers, and Gervase Clifton, the previous Calais treasurer and another Ludford defector to the royalists. Rivers had replaced Buckingham as Warden of the Cinque Ports, and was accompanied by Jacquetta and 19-year-old Anthony, their eldest son.
Warwick gambled by sending his remaining ships and his most trustworthy troops under Dynham and Wenlock to make a combined assault on Sandwich. Wenlock landed nearby during the night of 14/15 January and in the morning, when Dynham sailed into harbour firing his guns, achieved tactical surprise by attacking from the landward side. Clifton got away, but Rivers, Jacquetta and Anthony were captured. Warwick’s men sailed back to Calais with them, and with the ships, money, equipment and no few of the troops so painfully assembled. The exploit marked the apotheosis of Warwick among the Kentish men, and they were to remain his most devoted followers in the years to come.
Among the men captured at Sandwich were men who had deserted Warwick at Ludford, and they were brought to Calais for execution in a barbaric night-time ritual that included parading Rivers and his son through the streets by torchlight. They were spared, but brought before Warwick, Salisbury and March, sitting on a dais in the central square, who berated and humiliated them as parvenus while boasting of their own royal blood and ancient lineages.
Warwick now had his fleet back and put it to good use. Piracy resumed, the good times rolled once more in Calais, and defections to Somerset ceased. The traffic in fact reversed. In one of Somerset’s frequent attacks on the Calais perimeter, Lord Audley and Humphrey Stafford of Hooke were captured. Honourably treated by Edward, they became two of his most devoted followers. Warwick felt so secure that in late February he set out to meet York in Ireland, leaving his father and March behind and seizing prizes indiscriminately as he went, to arrive magnificently on 16 March. As York’s biographer acutely comments:
It must have been evident, as Warwick’s twenty-six ships sailed into Waterford harbour, that the earl was not only a very able commander, but that whole companies of men and ships were defecting from the Lancastrian regime to serve him. Such defections had been singularly absent from York’s career hitherto. The duke may have had the blood of kings in his veins, but it was Warwick who knew his way to his potential subjects’ hearts.
Warwick’s mother, Countess Alice, was among those who welcomed him. It is not recorded how she made her way from Middleham to Ireland, but reasonable to assume, since she had to pass through Lancashire, that Lord Stanley had much to do with it. Unlike ‘proud Cis’ in the less than tender care of her sister, Alice bore her husband no ill will, so it is also reasonable to assume she and Salisbury had prepared an escape plan before he set out for the ill-fated rendezvous at Ludlow. Of course it helped that Alice had no minor children, although 17-year-old Margaret, her unmarried youngest, probably accompanied her.
York, Warwick and the fleet soon transferred to Dublin, where the Irish Parliament was in session from 7 March to 5 May. The concrete evidence in the harbour of the strength of the Yorkist cause must have influenced the proceedings, which were entirely favourable to York’s cause. As Earl of Ulster he was already strong, and even before Warwick’s arrival the Parliament had ratified his appointment as lieutenant, and declared that in the absence of the king himself, York was due all the rights and privileges of royalty.
This was heady stuff both for York and the Anglo-Irish under the leadership of York’s deputy, Thomas Fitzgerald, Earl of Kildare, who emerged with a far greater degree of self-government than they had previously enjoyed. It may have been at the suggestion of Warwick, applying the lessons learned from his control of the money supply in Calais, that York also created an autonomous Irish currency to halt the outflow of silver to England. The effect of this and other measures designed to boost Irish trade, however, did little to address York’s immediate need of money and men with which to return to Eng
land.
The Irish economy was mainly subsistence-agrarian, and Parliament struggled even to collect the annual subsidy of £360 [£230,000] voted in 1458. Given that Ireland was in a perpetual state of war, and the local lords needed their armed retinues to defend their own lands, the best they could do was grant York a mounted archer for every twenty freeholders – while he was in Ireland. York raised some money from the English merchants of Dublin by the sale of a royal charter to form a guild, and some Anglo-Irish families did contribute men-at-arms to his eventual return to England – but the initiative plainly lay with Warwick.
Before Warwick departed in early May the two men agreed a manifesto listing twelve grievances. The first concerned the abuse of the church, the significance of which is explained below. The second and fourth concerned the crown’s abuse of purveyance, the right of the sovereign to fix the price of provisions and transport below market price in time of war. Indeed, much of the manifesto dwelt on the increasingly arbitrary expedients to which the court had been driven by its rejection of resumption, including repeated accusations that the dreaded French taille (land tax) was being introduced by the back door.
Taken together the charges had the propaganda virtues of being reasonably close to the truth, and also harking back to the arguments used by Henry IV to justify overthrowing Richard II. They also fastened culpability around the neck of Marguerite, doubly guilty of being both French and a ‘designing woman’. She and Beaumont, Shrewsbury and Wiltshire were alleged to have enriched themselves at public expense, and to be seeking to abolish ancient English liberties.*1
