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Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick, known as ‘the Kingmaker’, was one of the most significant figures in medieval English political and military history. The last of the great barons whose wealth and influence outdid even the sovereigns they were supposed to serve, Warwick was born (in 1428) to wield power, and increased his birthright by judicious marital alliances and his own gift for intrigue.
A member of the ancient Neville family – who divided overlordship of the far north with their dynastic rivals, the Percies – Warwick, along with his ally the Duke of York, was one of the kingdom’s richest magnates during the early reign of Henry VI. Henry’s fragile mental health periodically tipped into actual catatonic insanity, at which times the kingdom descended into near-anarchy. During these troubled periods, York struggled to restore good government as Protector, and fought for power against a Lancastrian court party led by Henry’s forceful French queen, Margaret of Anjou, and her favourite, the Duke of Somerset.
Having quarrelled with Somerset over an inheritance issue, Warwick joined forces with York, who appointed him Captain of Calais – England’s last possession in France, which became the Earl’s refuge and power base.
The Yorkists and Lancastrians had their first armed clash in 1455 at St Albans. Warwick’s men played a prominent part in the battle, bursting through the Lancastrian lines with their war cry ‘A Warwick!’, and waving banners with his emblem of the bear and ragged staff, before slaying the hated Duke of Somerset outside the Castle Inn.
In the civil strife we know as the Wars of the Roses (1455-1487), Warwick became one of the leading Yorkist lords, after his father, the Earl of Salisbury, and his brother Thomas were slain by the Lancastrians on 30 December 1460 at the Battle of Wakefield, along with the Duke of York himself and York’s second son Edmund.
After York’s death, Warwick hitched his wagon to the fortunes of York’s eldest son Edward, a giant of a young man who proved a formidable military commander. Warwick himself was less fortunate in the field. Despite having earlier captured the hapless King Henry at the Battle of Northampton, he was routed by Queen Margaret’s Lancastrians on 17 February 1461 at the Second Battle of St Albans, and lost custody of the mad monarch.
But he linked up with Edward, and the two men kept Margaret’s northern Lancastrian hordes out of London, where the young new Duke of York was formally crowned as Edward IV in June 1461. The Yorkist triumph had been sealed three months earlier by the bloody Battle of Towton, at which the Lancastrians were slaughtered; Henry and Margaret fled, and Warwick became the power behind the new throne, opening diplomatic negotiations to marry Edward to a French princess.
Warwick’s pride and prestige were hard hit when the king was forced to disclose that he was already a married man – having recently wooed and won Elizabeth Woodville, the beautiful widow of a Lancastrian knight killed at the Second Battle of St Albans. The Earl felt snubbed by Edward’s secret marriage: he had been made to look a fool in front of the French, and his slow divorce from his Yorkist loyalty began with this humiliation.
For the moment, Warwick kept his discontent quiet. But more humiliation was heaped on him when the king granted favours, riches, and titles to the numerous grasping members of the queen’s Woodville family. Finally, Warwick’s patience snapped. His agents in the north fomented Lancastrian rebellions against the king, he lashed out at the Woodvilles, executing their leading members, and he promoted Edward’s unstable younger brother George, Duke of Clarence, as a rival claimant to the throne, marrying him to his daughter Isabel without Edward’s permission.
In the complex Game of Thrones that followed, Warwick at one stage held two kings, the deposed Henry VI and Edward, as prisoners in the Tower of London and his castles of Warwick and Middleham in Yorkshire, earning his ‘Kingmaker’ nickname. But so long as these legitimate monarchs lived, he was unable to claim the throne for himself, and he was forced to set Edward free. The final move in Warwick’s journey from disaffection to openly siding with the Lancastrians came in April 1470, when he and Clarence were exiled to France, where King Louis, eager to keep England weak and war-torn, pressured him to ally with Queen Margaret against Edward.
The vengeful Queen kept the Earl on his knees for a painfully long period in Angers Cathedral, in her native Anjou, before finally agreeing to forgive her old enemy and sink their differences in an unnatural alliance, sealed when Warwick’s second daughter Anne was married to Margaret’s son Prince Edward.
In September 1470, Warwick and Clarence invaded England, and it became Edward’s turn to flee – this time to Burgundy – while poor King Henry, whose mind had given way again, was dragged out of the Tower of London and reluctantly restored to his shaky throne. Afterwards, Warwick ruled behind the scenes as a virtual dictator for a year – until Edward returned, and the final round of their bitter feud began.
Clarence saw that he had no future with Warwick so deeply enmeshed with the Lancastrians, and so he defected from the Earl’s side and rejoined his brother. Warwick’s army met Edward’s at Barnet, north of London, in April 1471. Thick fog masked the battlefield, and in the confusion the Lancastrians found themselves fighting each other. Their army collapsed amid cries of treason, and Warwick and his brother Lord Montague were cut down as they fled the field. Edward displayed their battered bodies outside St Paul’s Cathedral to scotch rumours that they had survived.
Within weeks, Margaret and her son, arriving belatedly from France, were defeated at Tewkesbury, where Prince Edward was killed, and Margaret was brought to London in a cart. The same night that she arrived in the Tower as a prisoner, her husband Henry was murdered as he knelt at prayer in the fortress on Edward’s orders, probably by the king’s youngest brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester – the future Richard III. It would not be the last crime that Richard committed in the Tower.
Warwick’s change of heart and loyalty was prompted by wounded pride and ambition. He felt that he had helped bring Edward to the throne, and deserved to be rewarded for his efforts, but instead was insulted and replaced in the king’s favour by the upstart Woodville brood. In addition, playing both sides off against each other, he had hoped to found a royal line himself if his daughters’ marriages to either Clarence and/or the Lancastrian Prince Edward had proved fruitful. But his dream was destroyed in the fog of war at Barnet.
The English Civil War
Almost two centuries went by before England was once again engulfed in Civil War in 1642, when an increasingly powerful Parliament challenged the tyrannical rule of King Charles I.
Hostilities began when Sir John Hotham, the governor of the important Yorkshire port of Hull, refused to open the town’s gates to Charles when the king arrived to demand admittance. Hotham and his son, also called John, were influential local magnates, who ruled East Yorkshire as their personal fiefdom, and resented taking orders from Parliament or any of its generals – including their rival Yorkshire nobles Lord Ferdinando Fairfax and his son Sir Thomas. They also clashed with the rising Roundhead cavalry commander, one Oliver Cromwell.
Hotham senior apparently promised a Royalist courtier, Sir George Digby, that he would after all open the gates if Charles tried again to enter the town to seize its enormous armoury and gunpowder store, with enough weapons to equip an army of 20,000 men. However, when the king tried his luck a second time, Sir John once again refused him entry, even though he had earlier allowed Charles’ second son James to seek shelter in the port.
Both the Hothams were playing a dangerous double game. In Captain Hotham junior’s case, this went as far as a correspondence with the Duke of Newcastle, the senior Royalist commander in the north, in which he made no secret of his quarrels with his Parliamentary rivals.
When these letters were found after Newcastle’s devastating defeat at the Battle of Marston Moor, in July 1644, both the Hothams were arrested for treason and held in the Tower of London. Here they remained in limbo for months as Parliament debated their fate. Father and son had their Parliamentary sympathisers, who wanted to spare their lives, but they also had an implacable and influential enemy – Cromwell – who was determined to send them both to the block.
During the Civil War, Sir John Hotham and his son played a dangerous double game.
On New Year’s Day 1645, after Parliament voted to execute the Hothams, Cromwell got his way when Captain Hotham, supported by his two brothers, was beheaded on Tower Hill. The following day, old Sir John followed his son to the scaffold. Father and son went to their deaths for being insufficiently vigorous in backing the Roundhead cause at a time when hardline warriors like Cromwell were becoming the dominant Parliamentary faction.
Another father and son who wavered in their loyalties during the Civil War were the West Country men Sir George Chudleigh and his son James. The Chudleighs were members of a tightly knit Puritan family nexus of Devon and Cornish gentry who were proud of their sturdy independence, and who opposed the increasing demands of the king for obedience and the taxes that went with it.
As such, the Chudleighs supported Parliament when war broke out – though Sir George spoke out in favour of a negotiated peace rather than a settling of differences by force of arms. James Chudleigh was far more active on Parliament’s side, and was appointed a Major General and deputy to Henry Grey, 1st Earl of Stamford, commander of the Roundheads’ western army.
Stamford stripped Parliamentary garrisons across the West to form a substantial force of more than 5,000 men with which he invaded Royalist Cornwall. James Chudleigh had captured letters from the Royalist commander Sir Ralph Hopton revealing his intention to unite his scattered troops into a single army, and the Roundheads hoped to catch Hopton on the hop and defeat him before he had a chance to do so.
They caught up with Hopton with his small force of 2,000 men near Stratton in north-east Cornwall on 16 May 1643, and occupied a hillside above the town. Despite being so heavily outnumbered, against all the laws of war, Hopton divided his force into four columns – and, as dawn broke, he boldly attacked uphill from different directions.
Fighting went on throughout the day, but by 4pm the persistent Royalist assaults finally gained the summit of the hill, the Roundhead resistance broke, and James Chudleigh was captured. Taken as a prisoner to the Royalist capital Oxford, young Chudleigh was persuaded to change sides, and ironically joined the Royalist siege of Exeter, which his father was holding for Parliament as governor. James was wounded there in October, and died of his injuries.
His son’s death was the last straw for Sir George, whose half-hearted defence of the city had collapsed in September. He had already published a pamphlet explaining his reluctance to ‘save the kingdom by destroying it’. Though proclaiming his change of adherence to the King’s Cause, Sir George took no further part in military operations, and died after the Restoration in 1673.
Though firm Protestants like most West Country gentry, the Chudleighs were moderate men unwilling to push their opposition to the king to extremes – unlike their cousin William Strode (one of the five rebel members of Parliament whom Charles had famously tried and failed to arrest on the eve of war) or Sir George’s nephew John Carew (who was hanged, drawn, and quartered as a regicide after the Restoration for signing Charles’ death warrant). The divided loyalties of the family were tragically shown when John’s brother Sir Alexander Carew, Parliament’s governor of Plymouth, was, like the Hothams, executed on Tower Hill in 1644 for plotting to betray the port to the Royalists.
One of the few Parliamentary heroes of the Civil War’s early days was Edward Massey, the governor of Gloucester, who held the city for more than a month in the summer of 1643 against a Royalist siege conducted by King Charles in person.
Massey inspired the defence of Gloucester with skill and determination, personally leading sorties into the Royalist siege lines to disrupt their attacks, until the siege was lifted and the town relieved. He continued to fight for Parliament for the rest of the Civil War, crossing swords with Prince Rupert himself, and taking part in Sir Thomas Fairfax’s final victorious Parliamentary campaign in the West Country, as well as Cromwell’s against the Scots.
But Massey was a stern, unbending Presbyterian, and deeply disapproved of the army’s post-war domination of politics, its religious anarchy, and its disdain for the Parliament to which he had been elected after the war.
He was one of the MPs ‘purged’ from Parliament by Cromwell, and went into exile, openly joining Charles II’s court in the Netherlands after the execution of Charles I in 1649. The new king recognised Massey’s military abilities and took him along to Scotland, from where he launched his invasion of England in 1651.
Hoping that Massey’s influence in his old stamping ground of Gloucester in the Severn Valley would win recruits to the Royal Cause, Charles’ Anglo-Scots army had reached Worcester, where he was trapped and thoroughly beaten by Cromwell in September 1651. Massey was severely wounded in the battle and begged Charles to leave him and save himself, fearing his wounds would impede the king’s escape.
Arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London, Massey’s luck held and he managed to escape from the fortress, rejoining Charles in Holland. After the Restoration he was again elected as an MP – for Gloucester, the city where he had sealed his chief claim to fame.
Nigel Jones is a historian, journalist, and broadcaster, who has published widely on topics ranging from the Tower of London to the Valkyrie Plot to assassinate Hitler.
In the next issue of MHM, Turncoats, Part II: Nigel Jones examines the careers of more celebrated military renegades, from Benedict Arnold, the American hero who became a notorious traitor, to Field Marshal Paulus, the German defender of Stalingrad who became a propagandist for the Soviet Union.
All images: Wikimedia Commons, unless otherwise stated
