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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 fourteenth century the
chroniclers were still working on their old scale; in the sixteenth
the literary spirit had descended on the whole nation, and great men
and small were writing hard at history as at every other branch of
knowledge. But in the days of Lancaster and York the old fountains
had run dry, and the new flood of the Renaissance had not risen. The
materials for reconstructing history are both scanty and hard to
handle. We dare not swallow Hall and Hollingshead whole, as was the
custom for two hundred years, or take their annals,  from
end to end with Tudor sympathies, as good authority for the doings of
the previous century. Yet when we have put aside their fascinating,
if somewhat untrustworthy, volumes, we find ourselves wandering in a
very dreary waste of fragments and scraps of history, strung together
on the meagre thread of two or three dry and jejune compilations of
annals. To have to take William of Worcester or good Abbot Whethamsted
as the groundwork of a continuous account of the times is absolutely
maddening. Hence it comes to pass that Warwick has failed to receive
his dues.

Of all the men of Warwick's century there are only two whose characters
we seem thoroughly to grasp--the best and the worst products of the
age--Henry the Fifth and Richard the Third. The achievements of the one
stirred even the feeble writers of that day into a fulness of detail in
which they indulge for no other hero; the other served as the text for
so many invectives under the Tudors that we imagine that we see a real
man in the gloomy portrait that is set up before us. Yet we may fairly
ask whether our impression is not drawn, either at first or at second
hand, almost entirely from Sir Thomas More's famous biography of the
usurper, a work whose literary merits have caused it to be received as
the only serious source for Richard's history. If we had not that work,
Richard of Gloucester would seem a vaguely-defined monster of iniquity,
as great a puzzle to the student of history as are the other shadowy
forms which move on through those evil times to fall, one after the
other, into the bloody grave which was the common lot of all