History of the English People, Volume III / The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540

by John Richard Green

The Nevilles

Thus we find that in the years which followed the Wars of the Roses a change passed over the spirit of English government which was little short of a revolution. As the country tasted the sweets of rest and firm government that reaction of feeling, that horror of fresh civil wars, that content with its own internal growth and indifference to foreign aggrandizement, which distinguished the epoch of the Tudors, began to assert its power. The Crown became identified with the thought of national prosperity, almost with the thought of national existence. Loyalty drew to itself the force of patriotism. Devotion to the crown became one in men's minds with devotion to their country. For almost a hundred years England lost all sense of a national individuality; it saw itself only in the Crown. The tendency became irresistible as the nation owned in the power of its kings its one security for social order, its one bulwark against feudal outrage and popular anarchy. The change however was a slow and gradual one. It is with the victory of Towton that the new power of the Monarchy begins, but in the years that immediately followed this victory there was little to promise the triumph of the Crown. The king, Edward the Fourth, was but a boy of nineteen; and decisive as his march upon London proved, he had as yet given few signs of political ability. His luxurious temper showed itself in the pomp and gaiety of his court, in feast and tourney, or in love-passages with city wives and noble ladies. The work of government, the defence of the new throne against its restless foes, he left as yet to sterner hands. Among the few great houses who recalled the might of the older baronage two families of the northern border stood first in power and repute. The Percies had played the chief part in the revolution which gave the crown to the House of Lancaster. Their rivals, the Nevilles, had set the line of York on the throne. Fortune seemed to delight in adding lands and wealth to the last powerful family. The heiress of the Montacutes brought the Earldom of Salisbury and the barony of Monthermer to a second son of their chief, the Earl of Westmoreland; and Salisbury's son, Richard Neville, won the Earldom of Warwick with the hand of the heiress of the Beauchamps. The ruin of the Percies, whose lands and Earldom of Northumberland were granted to Warwick's brother, Lord Montagu, raised the Nevilles to unrivalled greatness in the land. Warwick, who on his father's death added the Earldom of Salisbury to his earlier titles, had like his father warmly espoused the cause of Richard of York, and it was to his counsels that men ascribed the decisive step by which his cousin Edward of March assumed the crown. From St. Albans to Towton he had been the foremost among the assailants of the Lancastrian line; and the death of his uncle and father, the youth of the king, and the glory of the great victory which confirmed his throne, placed the Earl at the head of the Yorkist party.

Warwick

Warwick's services were munificently rewarded by a grant of vast estates from the confiscated lands of the Lancastrian baronage, and by his elevation to the highest posts in the service of the State. He was Captain of Calais, Admiral of the fleet in the Channel, and Warden of the Western Marches. The command of the northern border lay in the hands of his brother, Lord Montagu. A younger brother, George Neville, already raised to the post of Lord Chancellor, was soon to receive the See of York. Lesser rewards fell to Warwick's uncles, the minor chiefs of the House of Neville, Lords Falconberg, Abergavenny, and Latimer. The vast power which such an accumulation of wealth and honours placed at the Earl's disposal was wielded with consummate ability. In outer seeming Warwick was the very type of the feudal baron. He could raise armies at his call from his own earldoms. Six hundred liveried retainers followed him to Parliament. Thousands of dependants feasted in his courtyard. But few men were really further from the feudal ideal. Active and ruthless warrior as he was, his enemies denied to the Earl the gift of personal daring. In war he showed himself more general than soldier, and in spite of a series of victories his genius was not so much military as diplomatic. A Burgundian chronicler who knew him well describes him as the craftiest man of his day, "le plus soubtil homme de son vivant." Secret, patient, without faith or loyalty, ruthless, unscrupulous, what Warwick excelled in was intrigue, treachery, the contrivance of plots, and sudden desertions.

His temper brought out in terrible relief the moral disorganization of the time. The old order of the world was passing away. Since the fall of the Roman Empire civil society had been held together by the power of the given word, by the "fealty" and "loyalty" that bound vassal to lord and lord to king. A common faith in its possession of supernatural truths and supernatural powers had bound men together in the religious society which knew itself as the Church. But the spell of religious belief was now broken and the feudal conception of society was passing away. On the other hand the individual sense of personal duty, the political consciousness of each citizen that national order and national welfare are essential to his own well-being, had not yet come. The bonds which had held the world together through so many ages loosened and broke only to leave man face to face with his own selfishness. The motives that sway and ennoble the common conduct of men were powerless over the ruling classes. Pope and king, bishop and noble, vied with each other in greed, in self-seeking, in lust, in faithlessness, in a pitiless cruelty. It is this moral degradation that flings so dark a shade over the Wars of the Roses. From no period in our annals do we turn with such weariness and disgust. Their savage battles, their ruthless executions, their shameless treasons, seem all the more terrible from the pure selfishness of the ends for which men fought, for the utter want of all nobleness and chivalry in the contest itself, of all great result in its close. And it is this moral disorganization that expresses itself in the men whom the civil war left behind it. Of honour, of loyalty, of good faith, Warwick knew nothing. He had fought for the House of Neville rather than for the House of York, had set Edward on the throne as a puppet whom he could rule at his will, and his policy seemed to have gained its end in leaving the Earl master of the realm.

Edward the Fourth

In the three years which followed Towton the power of the Nevilles overshadowed that of the king. Warwick was now all-powerful in the state, but the cessation of the war was the signal for a silent strife between the Earl and his young sovereign. In Edward indeed Warwick was to meet not only a consummate general but a politician whose subtlety and rapidity of conception were far above his own. As a mere boy Edward had shown himself among the ablest and the most pitiless of the warriors of the civil war. He had looked on with cool ruthlessness while grey-haired nobles were hurried to the block. The terrible bloodshed of Towton woke no pity in his heart; he turned from it only to frame a vast bill of attainder which drove twelve great nobles and a hundred knights to beggary and exile. When treachery placed his harmless rival in his power he visited him with cruel insult. His military ability had been displayed in his rapid march upon London, the fierce blow which freed him from his enemy in the rear, the decisive victory at Towton. But his political ability was slower in developing itself. In his earliest years he showed little taste for the work of rule. While Warwick was winning triumphs on battle-field after battle-field, the young king seemed to abandon himself to a voluptuous indolence, to revels with the city wives of London, and to the caresses of mistresses like Jane Shore. Tall in stature and of singular beauty, his winning manners and gay carelessness of bearing secured Edward a popularity which had been denied to nobler kings. When he asked a rich old lady for ten pounds towards a war with France, she answered, "For thy comely face thou shalt have twenty." The king thanked and kissed her, and the old woman made her twenty forty. In outer appearance indeed no one could contrast more utterly with the subtle sovereigns of his time, with the mean-visaged Lewis of France or the meanly-clad Ferdinand of Aragon. But Edward's work was the same as theirs and it was done as completely. While jesting with aldermen, or dallying with mistresses, or idling over new pages from the printing press at Westminster, Edward was silently laying the foundations of an absolute rule.

The very faults of his nature helped him to success. His pleasure-loving and self-indulgent temper needed the pressure of emergency, of actual danger, to flash out into action. Men like Commines who saw him only in moments of security and indolence scorned Edward as dull, sensual, easy to be led and gulled by keener wits. It was in the hour of need and despair that his genius showed itself, cool, rapid, subtle, utterly fearless, moving straight to its aim through clouds of treachery and intrigue, and striking hard when its aim was reached. But even in his idler hours his purpose never wavered. His indolence and gaiety were in fact mere veils thrown over a will of steel. From the first his aim was to free the Crown from the control of the baronage. He made no secret of his hostility to the nobles. At Towton as in all his after battles he bade his followers slay knight and baron, but spare the commons. In his earliest Parliament, that of 1461, he renewed the statutes against giving of liveries, and though this enactment proved as fruitless as its predecessors to reduce the households of the baronage it marked Edward's resolve to adhere to the invariable policy of the Crown in striving for their reduction. But efforts like these, though they indicated the young king's policy, could produce little effect so long as the mightiest of the barons overawed the throne. Yet even a king as bold as Edward might well have shrunk from a struggle with Warwick. The Earl was all-powerful in the state; the military resources of the realm were in his hands. As Captain of Calais he was master of the one disciplined force at the disposal of the Crown, and as admiral he controlled the royal fleet. The strength he drew from his wide possessions, from his vast wealth (for his official revenues alone were estimated at eighty thousand crowns a year), from his warlike renown and his wide kinship, was backed by his personal popularity. Above all the Yorkist party, bound to Warwick by a long series of victories, looked on him rather than on the young and untried king as its head.

Lewis the Eleventh

The policy of Warwick pointed to a close alliance with France. The Hundred Years War, though it had driven the English from Guienne and the south, had left the French Monarchy hemmed in by great feudatories on every other border. Britanny was almost independent in the west. On the east the house of Anjou lay, restless and ambitious, in Lorraine and Provence, while the house of Burgundy occupied its hereditary duchy and Franche Comté. On the northern frontier the same Burgundian house was massing together into a single state nearly all the crowd of counties, marquisates, and dukedoms which now make up Holland and Belgium. Nobles hardly less powerful or more dependent on the Crown held the central provinces of the kingdom when Lewis the Eleventh mounted its throne but a few months after Edward's accession. The temper of the new king drove him to a strife for the mastery of his realm, and his efforts after centralization and a more effective rule soon goaded the baronage into a mood of revolt. But Lewis saw well that a struggle with it was only possible if England stood aloof. His father's cool sagacity had planned the securing of his conquests by the marriage of Lewis himself to an English wife, and though this project had fallen through, and the civil wars had given safety to France to the end of Charles's reign, the ruin of the Lancastrian cause at Towton again roused the danger of attack from England at the moment when Lewis mounted the throne. Its young and warlike king, the great baron who was still fresh from the glory of Towton, might well resolve to win back the heritage of Eleanor, that Duchy of Guienne which had been lost but some ten years before. Even if such an effort proved fruitless, Lewis saw that an English war would not only ruin his plans for the overthrow of the nobles, but would leave him more than ever at their mercy. Above all it would throw him helplessly into the hands of the Burgundian Duke. In the new struggle as in the old the friendship of Burgundy could alone bring a favourable issue, and such a friendship would have to be paid for by sacrifices even more terrible than those which had been wrenched from the need of Charles the Seventh. The passing of Burgundy from the side of England to the side of France after the Treaty of Arras had been bought by the cession to its Duke of the towns along the Somme, of that Picardy which brought the Burgundian frontier to some fifty miles from Paris. Sacrifices even more costly would have to buy the aid of Burgundy in a struggle with Edward the Fourth.