Warwick The Kingmaker

THE KINGMAKER'S YOUTH

CHAPTER FOUR

Richard Neville of Salisbury and Alice Montacute welcomed their second child, and eldest son, Richard, on November 22nd, 1428, barely 19 days after his grandfather was killed at the siege of Orleans. His upbringing is entirely unknown to us; not even the location of his birth is known. We must assume, but we cannot verify, that he spent his formative years in Wessex on his mother's estates, travelling among Amesbury, Christchurch, and Ringwood as his parents' household made its regular pilgrimages from manor to manor following the custom of the day. When his father was stationed in the North as Warden of the Scotch Border, the kid must have travelled to his paternal grandmother Joan of Beaufort's Yorkshire holdings. There, since she and his father were now in open conflict, it's possible that he picked up some of the old lady's distaste for her step-sons from the older branch of the Nevilles. Later, when his father was elected to the Council of Regency and lived in the "Tenement summoned the Harbour in the Ward of Dowgate," his father and grandmother had got by will from his grandfather when the larger family home in London, "Neville's Inn in Silver Street," passed to the elder branch along with the Westmoreland earldom, he must have spent a considerable sum of time in London. The fortunes of the Neville family, as we have previously described them, have consisted of one endless tale of happy weddings. The reader will now be urged to focus on a different set of these relationships, a group that ended the Kingmaker's whole history and granted him the earldom he is always referred to as.

One of the first English earldoms was held by the Beauchamps of Warwick, who were direct descendants of Henry of Newburgh, to whom William Rufus had handed the county in 1190. The head of the relatives at the time, Richard Beauchamp, was regarded as one of the most deserving and respected English nobility of his day. The "gracious Warwick," or "father of civility," as Emperor Sigismund referred, had participated in all of Henry the Fifth's campaigns and gained a reputation second only to the King's. Between England and Palestine, he had visited many cities and people and made a favourable impression everywhere he went. He was chosen as the young King Henry the Sixth's teacher and governor because of his qualities and talents; everyone believed there was no finer role model for the King of England to follow. Warwick did not deviate from his goal; instead, he made Henry upright, knowledgeable, meticulous, and too diligent. He would have given England the finest monarch she had ever had if he could only have made him as solid in body and soul as he was moral.

Richard Beauchamp had been married to Isabel, the Despenser heiress and widow of Richard, Lord of Abergavenny. Their family consisted of Anne, a girl three years younger than Henry, a lad of 10. The Countess of Warwick's previous marriage produced just one child, an Abergavenny heiress. Beauchamp and Richard Neville of Salisbury, their closest friends, decided to cement their relationship through intertribal marriage. Because each Earl married his heir to a friend's daughter, the union was guaranteed to be complicated. Warwick's son Henry was engaged to Cecily Neville, Salisbury's six-year-old daughter, while Salisbury's son Richard was engaged to Warwick's daughter Anne Beauchamp. Not only that, but Warwick's stepdaughter Elizabeth, the heir to the Abergavenny estate, wed Edward Neville, Salisbury's younger brother, complicating the familial dynamics. The young man Richard Neville was given a respectable dowry with his wife, but nothing more was anticipated from the union. But fate decided otherwise.

The seasoned Earl of Warwick died in 1439 after a life filled with achievements. He was replaced by Henry, Cecily Neville's husband, who is now sixteen years old and "a seemly lord of person." He was a young man who grew up with the young King and was comparable in age to Henry of Lancaster. As soon as the King was old enough, he lavished young Beauchamp with every accolade he could muster. As a result, he rose to Privy Councillor, Knight of the Garter, and Duke of Warwick before turning nineteen. If Henry Beauchamp had survived, he would have been in power in a few years instead of Somerset and Suffolk. However, his career was derailed at the very beginning. Before he had completed his twenty-third year, Henry Beauchamp was exiled from the living, and his sole child, a little girl of just four years old, inherited his estates and duchy. Earl of Suffolk, William de la Pole, already Salisbury and the Neville family's sworn enemy, was responsible for becoming her ward.