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English Men of Action

WARWICK THE KINGMAKER


[Illustration: Publisher's logo]


Copyright

First Edition 1891. Reprinted 1893, 1899, 1905
(Prize Library Edition) 1903, 1909, 1916


[Illustration: WARWICK

From the Rous Roll]


WARWICK THE KINGMAKER

by

CHARLES W. OMAN






Macmillan and Co., Limited
St. Martin's Street, London
1916




CONTENTS


   CHAPTER I
                                                               PAGE

   The Days of the Kingmaker                                     1


   CHAPTER II

   The House of Neville                                         12


   CHAPTER III

   Richard of Salisbury                                         19


   CHAPTER IV

   The Kingmaker's Youth                                        29


   CHAPTER V

   The Cause of York                                            38


   CHAPTER VI

   The Beginning of the Civil War: St. Albans                   47


   CHAPTER VII

   Warwick Captain of Calais and Admiral                        60


   CHAPTER VIII

   Warwick in Exile                                             79


   CHAPTER IX

   Victory and Disaster--Northampton and St.
   Albans                                                       93


   CHAPTER X

   Towton Field                                                107


   CHAPTER XI

   The Triumph of King Edward                                  128


   CHAPTER XII

   The Pacification of the North                               137


   CHAPTER XIII

   The Quarrel of Warwick and King Edward                      159


   CHAPTER XIV

   Playing with Treason                                        175


   CHAPTER XV

   Warwick for King Henry                                      193


   CHAPTER XVI

   The Return of King Edward                                   208


   CHAPTER XVII

   Barnet                                                      228




CHAPTER I

THE DAYS OF THE KINGMAKER


Of all the great men of action who since the Conquest have guided the
course of English policy, it is probable that none is less known to the
reader of history than Richard Neville Earl of Warwick and Salisbury.
The only man of anything approaching his eminence who has been treated
with an equal neglect is Thomas Cromwell, and of late years the great
minister of Henry the Eighth is beginning to receive some of the
attention that is his due. But for the Kingmaker, the man who for ten
years was the first subject of the English Crown, and whose figure
looms out with a vague grandeur even through the misty annals of the
Wars of the Roses, no writer has spared a monograph. Every one, it is
true, knows his name, but his personal identity is quite ungrasped.
Nine persons out of ten if asked to sketch his character would find, to
their own surprise, that they were falling back for their information
to Lord Lytton's _Last of the Barons_ or Shakespeare's _Henry the
Sixth_.

An attempt, therefore, even an inadequate attempt, to trace out
with accuracy his career and his habits of mind from the original
authorities cannot fail to be of some use to the general reader as well
as to the student of history. The result will perhaps appear meagre
to those who are accustomed to the biographies of the men of later
centuries. We are curiously ignorant of many of the facts that should
aid us to build up a picture of the man. No trustworthy representation
of his bodily form exists. The day of portraits was not yet come; his
monument in Bisham Abbey has long been swept away; no writer has even
deigned to describe his personal appearance--we know not if he was dark
or fair, stout or slim. At most we may gather from the vague phrases
of the chroniclers, and from his quaint armed figure in the Rous Roll,
that he was of great stature and breadth of limb. But perhaps the good
Rous was thinking of his fame rather than his body, when he sketched
the Earl in that quaint pictorial pedigree over-topping all his race
save his cousin and king and enemy, Edward the Fourth.

But Warwick has only shared the fate of all his contemporaries. The
men of the fifteenth century are far less well known to us than are
their grandfathers or their grandsons. In the