English military leader in the Hundred Years' War and the Wars of the Roses, 1402–1460
Humphrey Stafford, 1st Duke of Buckingham, 6th Earl of Stafford, 7th Baron Stafford, (15 August 1402 – 10 July 1460) of Stafford Castle in Staffordshire, was an English nobleman and a military commander in the Hundred Years' War and the Wars of the Roses. Through his mother he had royal descent from King Edward III, his great-grandfather, and from his father, he inherited, at an early age, the earldom of Stafford. By his marriage to a daughter of Ralph, Earl of Westmorland, Humphrey was related to the powerful Neville family and to many of the leading aristocratic houses of the time. He joined the English campaign in France with King Henry V in 1420 and following Henry V's death two years later he became a councillor for the new king, the nine-month-old Henry VI. Stafford acted as a peacemaker during the partisan, factional politics of the 1430s, when Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, vied with Cardinal Beaufort for political supremacy. Stafford also took part in the eventual arrest of Gloucester in 1447.
Stafford returned to the French campaign during the 1430s and for his loyalty and years of service, he was elevated from Earl of Stafford to Duke of Buckingham. Around the same time, his mother died. As much of his estate—as her dower—had previously been in her hands, Humphrey went from having a reduced income in his early years to being one of the wealthiest and most powerful landowners in England. His lands stretched across much of the country, ranging from East Anglia to the Welsh border. Being such an important figure in the localities was not without its dangers and for some time he feuded violently with Sir Thomas Malory in the Midlands.
After returning from France, Stafford remained in England for the rest of his life, serving King Henry. He acted as the King's bodyguard and chief negotiator during Jack Cade's Rebellion of 1450, helping to suppress it. When the King's cousin, Richard, Duke of York, rebelled two years later, Stafford investigated York's followers. In 1453, the King became ill and sank into a catatonic state; law and order broke down further and when civil war began in 1455, Stafford fought for the King in the First Battle of St Albans which began the Wars of the Roses. Both were captured by the Yorkists and Stafford spent most of his final years attempting to mediate between the Yorkist and Lancastrian factions, the latter by now headed by Henry's wife, Margaret of Anjou. Partly due to a feud with a leading Yorkist—Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick—Stafford eventually declared for King Henry and the Duke of York was defeated in 1459, driving York into exile. When the rebels returned the following year they attacked the royal army at Northampton. Acting as the King's personal guard in the ensuing struggle, Stafford was killed and the King was again taken prisoner. Stafford's eldest son had died of plague two years earlier and the Buckingham dukedom descended to Stafford's five-year-old grandson, Henry, a ward of the King until he came of age in 1473.
Background and youth.
Humphrey Stafford was born in Stafford sometime on August 15, 1402. He was the only son of Edmund Stafford, 5th Earl of Stafford, and Anne of Gloucester, who was the daughter of Edward III's youngest son Thomas of Woodstock. This gave Humphrey royal descent, and made him a second cousin to the then king, Henry IV.
On 21 July 1403, when Humphrey was less than a year old, his father was killed fighting for Henry IV against the rebel Henry Hotspur at the Battle of Shrewsbury. Humphrey became 6th Earl of Stafford. With the earldom came a large estate with land in more than a dozen counties. Through her previous marriage to Edmund's older brother, Thomas, his mother accumulated two dowries, each comprising a third of the Stafford estates. She occupied these lands for the next twenty years, and Humphrey received a reduced income of less than £1,260 a year until he came of age. As his mother could not, by law, be his guardian, Humphrey became a royal ward and was put under the guardianship of Henry IV's queen, Joan of Navarre. His minority lasted for the next twenty years.
Early career.
Although Stafford received a reduced inheritance, as the historian Carol Rawcliffe has put it, "fortunes were still to be made in the French wars". Stafford assumed the profession of arms. He fought with Henry V during the 1420 campaign in France and was knighted on 22 April the following year. On 31 August 1422, while campaigning, Henry V contracted dysentery and died. Stafford was present at his death and joined the entourage that returned to England with the royal corpse. When Stafford was later asked by the royal council if the King had left any final instructions regarding the governance of Normandy, he claimed that he had been too upset at the time to be able to remember. Stafford was still a minor, but parliament soon granted him livery of his father's estate, allowing him full possession. The grant was based on Stafford's claim that the King had orally promised him this before dying. The grant did not require him to pay a fee into the Exchequer, as was normal.
The new king, Henry VI, was still only a baby, so the lords decided that the dead King's brothers—John, Duke of Bedford and Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester—would have to be prominent in this minority government. Bedford, it was decided, would rule as regent in France, while Gloucester would be chief councillor (although not protector) in England. Stafford became a member of the new royal council on its formation. It first met in November 1422 and Stafford was to be an assiduous attender for the next three years. Gloucester repeatedly claimed the title of Protector based on his relationship to the dead King. By 1424, the rivalry between him and his uncle Henry Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester—as "de facto" head of council—had become an outright conflict. Although Stafford seems to have personally favoured the interests of Gloucester in the latter's struggle for supremacy over Beaufort, Stafford attempted to be a moderating influence. For example, in October 1425, Archbishop of Canterbury Henry Chichele, Peter, Duke of Coimbra and Stafford helped to negotiate an end to a burst of violence that had erupted in London between followers of the two rivals. In 1428, when Gloucester again demanded an increase in his power, Stafford was one of the councillors who personally signed a strong statement to the effect that Gloucester's position had been formulated six years earlier, would not change now, and that in any case, the King would attain his majority within a few years. Stafford was also chosen by the council to inform Beaufort—now a Cardinal—that he was to absent himself from Windsor until it was decided if he could carry out his traditional duty of Prelate to the Order of the Garter now that Pope Martin V had promoted him.
Stafford was made a Knight of the Order of the Garter in April 1429. The following year, he travelled to France with the King for Henry's French coronation, escorting him through the war-torn countryside. The Earl was appointed Lieutenant-General of Normandy, Governor of Paris, and Constable of France over the course of his next two years of service there. Apart from one occasion in November 1430 when he and Thomas Beaufort, Duke of Exeter took the English army to support Philip, Duke of Burgundy, Stafford's primary military role at this time was defending Paris and its environs. He also attended the interrogation of Joan of Arc in Rouen in 1431; at some point during these proceedings, a contemporary alleged, Stafford attempted to stab her and had to be physically restrained.
On 11 October 1431 the King created Stafford Count of Perche, which was a province in English-occupied Normandy; he was to hold the title until the English finally withdrew from Normandy in 1450. The county was valued at 800 marks per annum, although the historian Michael Jones has suggested that due to the war, in real terms "the amount of revenue that could be extracted ... must have been considerably lower". Since Perche was a frontier region, in a state of almost constant conflict, whatever income the estate generated was immediately re-invested in its defence.
In England, the King's minority ended in 1436. In preparation for his personal rule, the council reorganised Henry's Lancastrian estates to be under the control of local magnates. This gave Stafford responsibility for much of the north Midlands, which was the largest single area of the duchy to be delegated among the nobility. This put the royal affinity—those men retained directly by the Crown to provide a direct link between the King and the localities—at his command.
Estates.
The centrepiece of Stafford's estates, and his own caput, was Stafford Castle. Here he maintained a permanent staff of at least forty people, as well as a large stable, and it was especially well-placed for recruiting retainers in the Welsh Marches, Staffordshire, and Cheshire. He also had manor houses at Writtle and Maxstoke, which he had purchased as part of most of the estates of John, Lord Clinton. Writtle was particularly favoured by the Earl, and they were both useful when the royal court was in Coventry. Likewise, he made his base at Tonbridge Castle when he was acting as Warden of the Cinque Ports or on commission in Kent. His Marcher castles—Caus, Hay, Huntingdon, and Bronllys—had, by the 1450s, generally fallen into disrepair, and his other border castles, such as Brecon and Newport, he rarely used. Stafford's Thornbury manor was convenient for Bristol and was a stopping point to and from London.
Stafford's mother's death in 1438 transformed his fiscal position. He now received the remainder of his father's estates—worth about £1,500—and his mother's half of the de Bohun inheritance, which was worth another £1,200. The latter also included the earldom of Buckingham, worth £1,000 on its own; Stafford had become one of the greatest landowners in England overnight. "His landed resources matched his titles", explained Albert Compton-Reves, scattered as they were throughout England, Wales and Ireland, with only the King and Richard, Duke of York wealthier. One assessment of his estates suggests that, by the late 1440s, his income was over £5,000 per annum, and K. B. McFarlane estimated Stafford's total potential income from land to have been £6,300 gross annually, at its peak between 1447 and 1448. On the other hand, the actual yield may have been lower; around £3,700: rents, for example, were often difficult to collect. Even a lord of the status of Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, owed Stafford over £100 in unpaid rent for the manor of Drayton Bassett in 1458. In the 1440s and 1450s, Stafford's Welsh estates were particularly notable for both their rent arrears and public disorder. Further—and like most nobles of the period—he substantially overspent, possibly, says Harriss, by as much as £300 a year. His treasurer, William Wistowe, when rendering his accounts for the years 1452–1453, noted that Stafford was owed £730 by his reckoning, some debts being 20 years old. Despite this, says Woolgar, "there [is] no suggestion that [Stafford] found it difficult to obtain cash or goods".
Affinity and problems in the localities.
In the late medieval period, all great lords created an affinity between themselves and groups of supporters, who often lived and travelled with them for purposes of mutual benefit and defence, and Humphrey Stafford was no exception. These men were generally his estate tenants, who could be called upon when necessary for soldiering, as well as other duties, and were often retained by indenture. In the late 1440s his immediate affinity was at least ten knights and twenty-seven esquires, mainly drawn from Cheshire. By the 1450s—a period beginning with political tension and ending with civil war—Stafford retained men specifically "to sojourn and ride" with him. His affinity was probably composed along the lines laid out by royal ordinance at the time which dictated the nobility should be accompanied by no more than 240 men, including "forty gentlemen, eighty yeomen and a variety of lesser individuals", suggested T. B. Pugh, although in peacetime Stafford would have required far fewer. It was directly due to the political climate