Those who pored over prophetic literature for an insight into the future accepted that history was preordained, although its precise direction was not easy to trace, given that many ancient prophecies were couched in obscure language. Those attributed to Merlin were lucid enough when they predicted the distant triumph of an unknown Welsh prince. This was perfect propaganda for Henry, Earl of Richmond, the grandson of a squire, Owain Tudor, who was imagined to be descended from the legendary Welsh prince Cadwalader. Before and after the decisive Lancastrian victory at Bosworth in 1485, Henry VII’s apotheosis was depicted as the fulfilment of a predestined history whose culmination would be the onset of a golden age. Its arrival was confirmed in 1486 when he named his first son Arthur.
All who probed the after times were ultimately concerned with self-preservation and material advantage. These decided whether men fought and which side they joined. Sir Paston’s faith in a benevolent Providence may have reassured him when he threw in his lot with the Lancastrians, but what pushed him into the war was the fact that his family’s enemies were Edward IV’s friends. In 1470 a prominent Yorkist, John Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, sent his retainers, equipped with artillery, to besiege Caister Castle in Norfolk. Its bombardment and capture was the climax of an extended legal dispute between the Pastons and Norfolk. Justice was beyond the Pastons’ reach: Edward IV’s throne was still insecure and he needed Norfolk’s goodwill. The Pastons had therefore to choose between enduring their losses stoically, or hitching their fortunes to those of another local lord, John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, a diehard Lancastrian.
The Pastons’ dilemma was repeated many times. Since 1440 the legal system had been paralysed by Henry VI’s lassitude and lack of judgement. The nobility lost faith in the Crown’s impartiality. They ignored traditional legal arbitration and litigants increasingly resorted to force to get satisfaction. This resulted in sporadic outbreaks of anarchy in the provinces which increased in number and scale during the 1450s. Small private wars between landowners eventually merged with the wider national conflict. A new moral climate was being created: lords who routinely used violence to settle their personal differences had no inhibitions about applying it in public affairs.
Many were genuinely appalled by encroaching anarchy, but detachment was impossible. Consider Ralph, Lord Cromwell, the rebuilder of Tattershall Castle, an Agincourt veteran, sometime Treasurer and long-serving royal councillor who was proud of his own and his ancestors’ honourable service to the Crown. A grateful Henry VI publicly acknowledged his integrity in 1453, but the King could no longer protect Cromwell from his local enemy, Sir William Tailboys.5 He was Cromwell’s neighbour and could gaze from the parapet of his tower house at South Kyme and see Cromwell’s recently completed castle. It overlooked the surrounding fenland and was a solid reminder that Cromwell was the dominant figure in Lincolnshire. It was a sight which aroused Tailboys’s envy and rage.
He was a devious psychopath determined to topple Cromwell and make himself supreme in a county where his ancestors had lived for centuries. Tailboys had prepared the ground by gaining the favour of Viscount Beaumont and, through him, the Duke of Suffolk and Queen Margaret. Their friendship was tantamount to immunity from prosecution. By 1449 he was confident enough for a trial of strength. It was provoked when one of his servants was arrested, imprisoned in Tattershall and threatened with hanging by Cromwell. Tailboys appealed to Beaumont for help. If the man was executed it would be the ‘greatest shame that might befall’ since his own and the Viscount’s standing would be diminished. If Tailboys had permission to mobilise Beaumont’s followers and rescue the prisoner, their honour would be upheld and everyone in Lincolnshire would see where power lay in the county.6
The operation to save the captive probably miscarried, which may explain why Tailboys attempted to murder Cromwell while he was attending the House of Lords at the end of 1449. He failed, but escaped arrest after Suffolk’s intervention. A brief spell in gaol followed after Suffolk’s downfall, but Tailboys was soon free and determined to pursue his feud with fresh vigour and ingenuity. He conspired to blow up Cromwell’s London lodgings with gunpowder (a novel form of murder) and circulated rumours that his enemy was a covert traitor, in the knowledge that similar libels had helped destroy Tailboys’s former patron Suffolk the year before.
Cromwell was terrified. Even at Tattershall he dared not walk or ride abroad without an escort of at least thirty armed servants.7 He could expect no help from the law, for Tailboys had secured two formidable new patrons: Queen Margaret and Henry Holland, Duke of Exeter. He was an unstable, hot-blooded young man, short of money and bent on securing Cromwell’s castle and a manor at Ampthill in Bedfordshire. Exeter’s servants beat, bribed and bullied local juries to procure verdicts favourable for their master and his allies. As Cromwell lamented, Exeter was a ‘prepotent’ lord in the county who could do what he liked. 8
Beset by powerful and vicious enemies, Cromwell desperately needed security. He was in his fifties, had an annual income of over two thousand pounds and was childless. Apparent deliverance came through an alliance with York and the Nevilles, sealed by marriages between his two nieces and co-heiresses and a younger brother of Warwick and the son of a Yorkist peer, Lord Bourchier, though both bridegrooms were later killed in battle. Cromwell also loaned money to his new friends.
More was demanded of him in 1455 when York and the Nevilles confronted the King at St Albans. Cromwell hesitated; rebellion was a step too far for a lord who had devoted his life to the service of Henry V and his son. Cromwell’s misgivings may have been the reason why his contingent arrived too late for the battle. Afterwards, a furious Warwick accused him of backsliding. Early in 1456, Cromwell died from a stroke in his newly fortified mansion at South Wingfield in Derbyshire. Those present at his deathbed said mass and then made a frantic search for the key to the strongbox where his will was kept. Among those expecting a bequest was his new friend John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, a prominent courtier, and he was well satisfied.9 Cromwell’s adversary Tailboys remained a tenacious partisan of the House of Lancaster and was executed and attainted in 1464. Within ten years his family reclaimed his estate.
Cromwell’s misfortunes coincided with a period when violent aristocratic feuds were increasing. Most were rooted in disputes over land ownership and impatience with the serpentine, expensive and lengthy processes of litigation. Why wait years for judgement when it was possible to seize a disputed property and collect its rents? This was what the Duke of Norfolk did when he besieged Caister in 1470.
Norfolk’s honour was also at stake. No one could defy the Duke with impunity, certainly not arriviste gentry like the Pastons. Honour required a lord to protect his dependents. The news of Suffolk’s arrest in 1450 had been a signal for a gang of Norfolk’s followers to break into his deer park at Eye and kill a dozen bucks and three does.10 This was more symbolic poaching, for it proclaimed the end of the de la Pole ascendancy in East Anglia. The once feared Duke could no longer even protect the beasts he had preserved for his pleasure, let alone his allies and servants.
Honour was precious and to preserve it a noble was always willing to risk his life. In 1455, exasperated by years of rancorous and sometimes bloody bickering between them, Lord Bonville challenged the Earl of Devon to a duel. ‘I shall in myself in proper person upon my body in that quarrel fight and make it good,’ he told the Earl, adding that the latter did not merit this trial of honour, for he was a coward and traitor. Devon replied ‘as true knight’ and accepted the challenge of his ‘false and untrue’ enemy.11 The language of violated honour was always hectoring and overblown. At the head of their retinues, the two peers fought as arranged at Clyst St Mary, a few miles south-east of Exeter, and Bonville was routed. Eight men died and afterwards the victors entered the city and looted the cathedral.
Honour was at the heart of the Berkeley–Talbot dispute over the ownership of several manors in Gloucestershire. It had spluttered on since the early 1450s and, at
various stages, involved kidnapping, intimidation and forcible entry. In March 1470, with Edward IV fighting to regain his crown and effective royal authority suspended, William, Lord Berkeley, challenged Thomas Talbot, Lord Lisle, to settle their differences once and for all in a battle. ‘I will appoint a short day to ease thy malicious heart and thy false counsel: fail not to be at Nibley Green at eight or nine of the clock.’ Lisle agreed in a letter scornfully addressed to ‘William called Lord Berkeley’.
Watched by a crowd of rustics, including children who had climbed trees to get a good view, Berkeley appeared with about a thousand men, some hurriedly recruited in Bristol and the Forest of Dean. The two sides exchanged volleys of arrows and one fired by ‘Long Will’ struck Lisle in the cheek, for his visor was raised. Berkeley and his men then dirked the wounded Lord between the ribs. His men scattered and Berkeley’s forces sacked his house at Wotton-under-Edge and stole vital legal documents.12
‘Lamenting like a virgin and girded in sackcloth,’ Lisle’s widow protested to Edward IV. But what could the King legitimately do? Berkeley and Lisle were peers of ancient blood and Lisle had agreed as a man of honour to put his claims to the assay of arms and, implicit in this, the judgement of God. The King had recently submitted to the same jurisdiction at Barnet and Tewkesbury. Convention demanded that Lisle accept the challenge; to have done otherwise was an admission that he was a poltroon and his cause mendacious.
The skirmishes at Clyst St Mary and Nibley Green were about honour as expressed through aristocratic spheres of influence; today we might call them incidents in the ‘turf wars’ between criminal monopolies. So too were the other minor engagements between aristocratic retinues in East Anglia and Northern England during the 1450s and between 1469 and 1470. They dramatically illustrated the political fact that when royal authority was in eclipse, that of the nobility was omnipotent. Under-mighty kings had over-mighty subjects.
There was something distinctly theatrical about the events at Clyst St Mary and Nibley Green. The appeals to honour, the challenges, the mustering of retainers and their convergence at the pre-arranged battlefield resembled the stage-managed, ritualistic tournaments held to celebrate coronations and royal weddings. These were part of that theatre of power in which the nobility played the lead parts, performing before an audience both dazzled and overawed by the trappings of wealth and authority.
Manpower and political power were synonymous. This was exemplified when the Yorkist lords staged a minatory demonstration of their military muscle early in 1454. They converged on London at the head of impressive cavalcades preceded by carts crammed with armour as an earnest of their readiness to fight if they were checked. York was accompanied by his household, who were reported to be handsome and ‘likely’ men, and his son Edward, Earl of March, rode at the head of ‘a fellowship of good men’. One hundred and forty knights and squires attended the Earl of Salisbury and it was rumoured that his son Warwick was bringing at least a thousand men. The Duke of Norfolk assembled a retinue ‘according to his estate’.13
Where did these men come from and what did they hope to gain from what for many was a long, uncomfortable winter journey? An informed spectator would have identified two species of retainer from their appearance and bearing. There were knights and squires, either attached to a lord’s household or bound to him by contract. If fighting had broken out, they would have worn armour, either suits of full plate or, for comfort, velvet-faced brigandines, which were flexible coats of steel plates, and carried swords and poleaxes. Padded jackets (jacks), sallets (helmets), bows, bills and lead-tipped clubs (mauls) were the equipment of the second type of retainer. They were tenants and domestic servants and, like their betters, were distinguished by their master’s colours or badge.
While the Yorkists were on the march, the Lancastrians James Butler, Earl of Wiltshire, and Lord Bonville were inviting the men of Taunton ‘to go with them and serve them’ for sixpence a day, over twice a labourer’s wage. Aristocrats were never fastidious when it came to raising armies and were happy to trawl the margins of society to fill out their forces with jobless labourers and artisans, petty criminals and ruffians, who, in the vivid phrase of one contemporary indictment, had ‘no other occupation but riots’.
Like everyone else involved, the criminal underclass offset the fear of battle with hopes of profit. After the second Battle of St Albans in February 1461, three soldiers from the Duke of Exeter’s contingent carried their spoils (including a horse and armour taken from Warwick’s men) to a house in Totteridge and left it there. This trio survived the Lancastrian defeat at Towton a month later and had the chutzpah to return south and reclaim their loot. Lancastrian troops plundered civilians in Hackney and in Bedfordshire and Lord Roos’s servants robbed a York parson, alleging he was a traitor. These bandits took their cue from their betters. Sir Robert Clifford and Sir William Lancaster stole goods worth three hundred pounds from the house of Lord Vescy at Wymington near Bedford and deposited their pillage ‘trussed in a fardel’ with the Abbot of St Mary’s, York.14 In these cases, the victims took the trouble to seek legal restitution, but there must have been others for whom it was not worth the expense and bother.
Common bonds of obligation and expectation linked everyone who fought in the Wars of the Roses. The Taunton weaver lured by Wiltshire and Bonville looked for pay, food and drink and hoped his commanders would turn a blind eye to larceny. Knights, squires, gentlemen, yeoman farmers and household servants were likewise paid and victualled. If their lord was fighting for the Crown, it would pay the reckoning for his retainers’ wages and rations. The exchequer might also clothe and arm them: during the 1470 campaign Edward IV provided a thousand jackets of blue and murray embroidered with his badge of the white rose, as well as armour and weaponry.15
Knights and squires expected specific favours, either from the Crown, or the lord to whose service they had pledged themselves by written contracts or verbal promises. In 1478 Gervase Clifton agreed to be ‘faithful and true’ to William, Lord Hastings, and render him ‘true and faithful service’ in peace. In war Clifton was to provide him with as many men as he could raise, all ‘defensively arrayed’ and prepared to fight any man save the King. Hastings would pay their expenses and promised to be ‘a good lord’ to Clifton and show him ‘special favour’.16 Two peers and sixty knights and esquires made similar agreements with Hastings between 1461 and 1483; some appeared in arms when he joined Edward IV at Barnet and Tewkesbury.
Good lordship was all that Hastings promised Gervase Clifton, but it was a valuable commodity since Hastings was the coming man, cherished by Edward IV as a friend and, so gossip ran, fellow philanderer. Hastings was one of a new Yorkist aristocracy created by the King to both buttress and cement support for the dynasty in areas formerly under the sway of Lancastrian lords. His power base was in the East Midlands. Edward IV showered his favourite with grants of local estates and offices (many once held by attainted Lancastrians) and Hastings asserted his new eminence by starting to build an imposing castle at Kirby Muxloe in Leicestershire. Its scale, ornament and gunports proclaimed his pretensions. His political influence was gauged by the numbers of his retainers who were returned to Parliament, served as sheriffs and sat on the bench as justices. Hastings could direct royal patronage towards men like Clifton. As Justice Shallow observed in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part II, ‘a friend at court’ was an asset for a provincial squire.
There were limits to aristocrats’ string-pulling. In 1481 Clifton was considering litigation to recover a manor recently seized by servants of Francis, Lord Lovell, a courtier. He soon dropped his plan, informing the property’s owner, the Bishop of Winchester, that he dared not meddle with Lovell, ‘considering he is a lord, I may not so deal’.17 Shifting balances of power at court had a direct influence on what a lord’s retainers might expect in the way of favour, or how far he might go to assist them. This was why so many of the Pastons’ London correspondents sent reports home of the latest political
alignments at court. Such knowledge was crucial for the ambitious: a servant of John de la Pole, second Duke of Suffolk, once told John Paston that he ‘would forsake his master and get him a new, if he thought he should rule’.
‘Beware of lord’s promises,’ cautioned another Paston correspondent. Lords too had to be watchful and circumspect. Hastings’s political antennae failed him in June 1483 when he was betrayed by his steward William Catesby, who had secretly switched his allegiance to the Dukes of Gloucester and Buckingham. Hastings was executed, the first victim of Gloucester’s coup. His retinue dissolved instantly; as one eyewitness drily noted: ‘all my lord chamberlain’s [i.e. Hastings’s] men became my lord Buckingham’s’. No one worships the setting sun nor expects warmth from it.
By making a compact with a lord a retainer did not sign away his independence of mind or freedom of action. In 1455 Sir William Skipwith, a retainer of York, ‘refused to assist the Duke’s rebellion in that journey to St Albans’, for which he forfeited his twenty-pound annuity and stewardship of York’s estates at Conisburgh and Hatfield.18 In what was a final appeal of despair, Warwick pleaded with his retainer Henry Vernon in 1471: ‘Henry, I pray you fail not now as ever I may do for you.’19 Vernon knew political folly when he saw it and stayed put in Haddon Hall. Both he and Skipwith died in their beds.
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