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February 2006
Parish History Episode 58 Children of Neville
The Wars of the Roses did not end with the Fall of Bamburgh Castle. For some years thereafter, there was relative peace in England, but, just as disaffected barons had, at the start of the century, conspired against their new usurping king, Henry IV, first king of the Lancastrian Dynasty, so now, at mid century, other barons conspired against the new Yorkist king, Edward IV, and there were to be rebellions and further fighting.
The impression might also have been given, in last month’s article, that the North of England had been loyal to the House of Lancaster throughout the first cycle of wars. The House of Percy had certainly been loyal. Henry Percy, the Third Earl, had been slain at the Battle of Towton in 1461, and his brother, Sir Ralph - who had given refuge, and Bamburgh Castle, to the defeated King Henry - was himself killed by the Yorkists in a skirmish on Hedgley Moor in 1464. The new king, Edward IV, by now monarch of (nearly) All England, decreed that the House of Percy was to exist no longer, and that the title of Earl of Northumberland was henceforth to be borne by Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick.
The two greatest families in the North had been, for a century or more: the House of Percy, based at Alnwick Castle, and known as “the Lions of the North”; and the House of Neville, based at Raby Castle, and known as “the Wild Bulls of the North”. If the Percies had been more prominent in Border warfare, it was the Nevilles who had defeated a Scottish king, David II, outside Durham, at the Battle of Nevilles Cross in 1346, and had won the gratitude of the Prince-Bishops. But the Percies were honoured by the Kings of England as Earls of Northumberland, while the Nevilles had only been Barons, until the Sixth Baron had been raised to the peerage by Richard II, as Earl of Westmoreland (the more obvious title of Earl of Durham could not be used, as the prince-bishops, not the kings, were sovereign lords of Durham).
When Ralph, First Earl of Westmoreland, a fecund man, died, in 1425, he left seven children by his first wife, and nine by his second wife, thus ensuring the survival of the dynasty. These children were to bring the House of Neville into many adventures and alliances.
His title was, naturally enough, inherited by his eldest son by his first marriage. His more distinguished sons, however, were those born of Joan Beaufort, his second wife. Joan’s eldest son, Richard, was to bear several titles, including that of Earl of Warwick, but in the Wars of the Roses came to be known as “the Kingmaker”. After slaying Sir Ralph Percy at Hedgley Moor, Richard Neville, the Kingmaker, Earl of Warwick, Salisbury, etc., etc., was rewarded with the additional title of Earl of Northumberland. The power of the Nevilles was now dominant throughout the North.
It was not only on the battlefield that the Nevilles won renown. Robert, the fourth son of Ralph Neville and Joan Beaufort, entered the priest·hood, and in 1438 he succeeded Cardinal Langley as Bishop of Durham. The Neville family now ruled the Prince-Bishopric both from Raby Castle and from Durham Castle. Just as the younger sons of ordinary barons might be ordained and inducted into parishes on their family estates, so the son of the Earl of Westmoreland became Bishop of Durham: such was the relative power of Earl and Bishop at this period.
Another Neville who sought ordination would rise even higher than Robert. That was George Neville, a son of the Kingmaker, who became Archbishop of York in 1464.
Members of the aristocracy needed to breed profusely during the Fifteenth Century, and to find honours for their sons and husbands for their daughters, as the Wars of the Roses led to appalling rates of mortality among their participants. After an unsuccessful battle, the leading men on the losing side, if not killed in action, were usually beheaded by the victors. Very few of the male children of Neville, other than those who entered the priest·hood, died in their beds, Similarly, the nine daughters of Ralph Neville between them had sixteen husbands: most of them were widowed at least once, their husbands dying either on the battlefield or on the headsman’s block. Some were widowed twice.
If it is felt that they were wasting their time, marrying men who would soon be shot to pieces by cannon balls, they were probably aware that widow·hood was also becoming, at this period, a dangerous estate. Persecution of witches was becoming increasingly prevalent.
For the first thousand years of Christianity in Europe, that religion appears to have been a liberating force, as it still is in Africa, freeing men and women from fear of witchcraft and from other forms of superstition. But, for about two centuries, from the middle of the Fifteenth to the middle of the Seventeenth Century, there appears to have been a terrible relapse, when the minds of many Christians, both learnèd and illiterate, seem to have become afflicted by a terrible delusion, that witches and other agents of the Devil were all around them, and that such creatures must be destroyed utterly. Hundreds of thousands of people were to be accused of witchcraft, and very many of them would be executed. The majority were women, few of them were young women, and while some were elderly spinsters, most of them were probably widows.
Even women of the highest rank were sometimes indicted as witches. For instance, Jacquetta Woodville, the widowed mother-in-law of King Edward IV, was to be accused of witchcraft in 1471, and she, with her daughter, Queen Elizabeth, sought Sanctuary from her persecutors in Westminster Abbey. To be sure, this trial was obviously, at least in part, a political show-trial, as it took place while the King was in exile abroad.
This exile had come about, as a result of the King becoming aware that the House of Neville seemed to be running everything, both in Church and state, in the North, now that their rivals, the Percies, had been eliminated. King Edward’s solution to the problem of that imbalance of power was simple. Having earlier destroyed the Percy power, he decided to recreate it. The Third Earl of Northumberland’s son, Henry Percy, had been imprisoned in the Tower of London for some time. King Edward simply revoked his earlier grants of Percy lands to the Nevilles, freed young Henry, installed him as Fourth Earl of Northumberland, and gave him Alnwick Castle as a base for his future power.
That, naturally enough, angered Richard Neville, the Kingmaker, who had once been given all the Percy lands and titles as a reward for his support for the House of York, so he rebelled, freed the former king, Henry VI, and Henry’s son, Prince Edward, from a castle in which Edward IV had been holding them, and proclaimed the Lancastrians to be the royal house of England. King Edward naturally objected, and raised an army, but the Kingmaker’s men defeated him at Edgecote in 1469, and the King had to flee abroad.
In 1471, he returned from exile, rescued his wife and mother-in-law from their Sanctuary in Westminster Abbey, raised another army, and brought his enemies to battle at Barnet, where he triumphed, and that over-mighty subject, Richard Neville, the so-called Kingmaker, was slain.
Unfortunately, on the very same day that the Battle of Barnet was fought, Queen Marguerite, the wife of the former king, landed at Weymouth, and marched inland, to support her husband and son. They hurried to join her, and King Henry, with his son, and Queen Marguerite, with a large army, composed mostly of French knights, were re·united at Tewkesbury.
But King Edward, fresh from his triumph at Barnet, caught up with them the following day, and forced a battle, in which the French were decisively defeated. King Henry and Prince Edward were captured by the Yorkists, but neither survived for much more than a day or two. Queen Marguerite escaped for a while, but was captured, and imprisoned in a castle dungeon. There she managed to seduce a gaoler, and escaped once more to France, where she tried to raise another army, but her purse was empty, and she found that she could not afford another invasion. She ended her days on her father’s estates in Anjou, abandoning all claims to England.
If this seems to be a confusing chronicle of old battles, that is because it was a messy and confusing period. But it did mark, for the Far North of England, a change in power. The Percies did, in the end, survive, but their power was now overshadowed by that of the Nevilles, who were to remain for a century, the greatest Lords of the North.
The military power of the Prince- Bishops was now negligible, and anyway, the Nevilles, through sending their younger sons into the Church, seemed to control both military and ecclesiastical power in this region.
Their power was, however, to last little more than a century. When Tudor kings and queens gave their support to the Reformation, the Nevilles would stand aside, and remain loyal to the old Religion. In 1569, a hundred years after Richard Neville’s victory at Edgecote, which resulted in King Edward IV having to flee abroad, and in King Henry VI being briefly restored, the Nevilles joined the rising of the Northern Earls against Queen Elizabeth I, with the twin aims of replacing her on the Throne of England with Mary Stewart (the exiled Queen of Scotland) and of restoring the Catholic Faith. The decisive defeat of that ill-planned enterprise was to lead to the final downfall of the House of Neville.
Dick Toy
