Richard Beauchamp E-Book

David Brindley

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 236

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

'An avaricious knight errant with a taste for the spectacular' or 'one of the few upright and honest figures in these difficult years'? Contemporary views of the most colourful, wealthy and powerful knight of medieval England varied wildly, and they continue to do so today. Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, was at the centre of power in the first half of the fifteenth century and, as Henry V's closest friend, accompanied the English warrior king to France to pursue the English claim to the French Crown in the Hundred Years War. Richard Beauchamp had an unrivalled reputation for his skills in the strategy of war and diplomacy, and secured Normandy in 1420. He arranged Henry V's marriage and, following the king's death, was appointed as Henry VI's tutor and guardian. In 1431 he encouraged the ecclesiastical court of the Inquisition to try to burn Joan of Arc at the stake for heresy. In Richard Beauchamp, David Brindley pens a fascinating biography of this medieval chivalric hero.

Leseprobe

Front cover illustration: Drawing of Richard Beauchamp holding Henry VI in the Rous Roll, c. 1483.

First published 2001

This paperback edition first published 2024

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© David Brindley, 2001, 2024

The right of David Brindley to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781803997216

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

Contents

Preface

Introduction

1 The Beauchamps of Warwick

2 Richard’s Early Years

3 Jerusalem, Calais and Agincourt

4 Commander, Diplomat and Marriage Broker

5 Securing the Dual Monarchy

6 The Infant King

7 A Coronation and a Burning

8 Losing France – Richard’s Old Age

9 The End of the Beauchamps

Notes

Bibliography

PREFACE

My fascination with Richard Beauchamp grew because almost every day for the last six years I have looked at his effigy in the beautiful chapel which was built by his executors in fulfilment of his will. A three-month sabbatical in 2000 gave me the opportunity of researching his life, and this book is the result of that time.

Many people have helped me in the preparation of this book. I am grateful to the staff at Warwick Records Office and in the British Library Manuscripts Room for their help and guidance. Thanks to Doreen Mills who took some of the photographs of the Beauchamp Chapel and Thomas Beauchamp. Noel Reeve generously allowed me to use her cottage in Devon which gave me the space and peace to write. Trevor Barr accompanied me on a research trip to Normandy, following in Richard’s footsteps.

My daughter Catherine helped with some translations from Latin, and my son Matthew made many stylistic suggestions. My daughter Rachel helped with researching Shakespeare’s portrayal of Beauchamp.

This book is dedicated with love to Gill, my wife, in the year of our Silver Wedding Anniversary.

INTRODUCTION

The closing centuries of medieval England were a time of great contrasts, and Richard Beauchamp was a child of his age. He has been described as ‘an avaricious knight errant with a taste for the spectacular,’1 and as ‘one of the few honest and upright figures in these difficult years’.2 The contrasts exhibited by the closing years of the middle ages begin to look like complex contradictions when they are seen through the life of an individual.

It was an age when the arts and crafts of architecture, painted glass and illuminated manuscript reached their highest achievements; it was also an age when the plague brought obsession with death and piles of bodies were seen in the cities. There was a deep-seated fear of hell and there was naïve joy in simple pleasures. There were elaborate pageants and magnificent feasts; yet chronic debt and economic depression meant that villages were left depopulated and overgrown. Methods of torture were devised to prolong the agony of a prisoner while keeping him just alive; Christian piety was at its height, with Mary and the Saints being elaborately venerated. Ladies were cosseted and treated with dignified respect; witches were hunted down and burned at the stake. The great castles and Churches were a riot of colour and pattern; most people lived in drab single-room hovels.

The fifteenth century was not only a time of startling contrasts; it was also a century which saw an acceleration of great change sweeping across Europe and leading to a new era. Chivalry had been a common way of life binding the aristocracy and knights in a single code of purpose, behaviour and honour; but the rise in national identity and new methods of warfare such as the development of the cannon meant that this code was drawing its last breath. Handwritten books, richly illustrated and illuminated, were among the greatest treasures produced by European culture, but printing was about to be invented. Schools of copiers would no longer be needed and books, once an expensive luxury owned by few outside the monasteries, would be widely available. Feudalism had provided an economic and social system in which the strata of society all had a clear position and knew their duties; but the authority of lord, state and Church was becoming open to question and challenge. All of them were to change radically within the span of a few decades.

Richard Beauchamp was one of the richest of medieval figures (a recent article in The Sunday Times placed him eighth in a list of the two hundred richest people in history). Within a generation, however, his great fortune was to be split and then to disappear, for he was the last male of his line to reach adulthood. He was fêted as one of the greatest medieval knights, developing an international reputation for his ability in jousting and as a military commander. He was, perhaps, the last great medieval knight, for the age which he represented was rapidly passing. The values that dominated Richard’s life were on the way out. The united crown of England and France which he fought all his life to establish was a lost cause by the time of his death; fighting with lances and bows and arrows was fast being superseded by modern technology.

Those who have seen George Bernard Shaw’s St Joan or Shakespeare’s history plays of the first half of the fifteenth century, Henry IV, V and VI, will already have a view of the sort of person Richard Beauchamp was. Shaw portrays the earl of Warwick as ruthless and single-minded in his determination to have Joan executed. For Shakespeare he appears little more than a cipher – a loyal, perhaps plodding, courtier on the fringes of power. Neither playwright approaches the reality of Richard Beauchamp, and Shakespeare continually confuses him with his son-in-law Richard Neville, ‘the Kingmaker’. To be fair to the dramatists, however, it is notoriously difficult to write the biography of a medieval figure.

We are fortunate that there is a large amount of contemporary documentary evidence about Richard Beauchamp. There are household records from Warwick, Rouen and Berkeley castles from periods when he was living in them; there are Privy Council minutes of meetings at which he was present; there are eye-witness accounts of sieges and battles in which he took part; there is a unique pictorial biography following his career from birth to death. All these add up to give a detailed picture of his campaigns, estates and travels. It is often possible to pinpoint exactly where Richard was, what he was doing, and even what he had to eat on particular days for months at a time. It is surprising, then, that there is no adequate biography of him.

For the modern reader, however, the most interesting parts of a human life are not so easily discovered about a person who lived six centuries ago. Motivation – the underlying psychological force of a personality – was not an issue raised by the medieval mind. Richard was conventionally portrayed as loyal, courageous, honourable and religious. How he was affected by his father’s imprisonment; whether he felt conflict between his Christian devotion and his brutality in war; his interaction with his family and close associates – all these can only be guessed at, although at times there are certainly strong hints and indications in the material. What we can be certain of is that conflict was a determining factor in his development as an adolescent and young adult. He and his family were at the centre of the intrigue which brought the Lancastrian dynasty to the English throne and kept it there for sixty years. Richard was also part of the very small group of people who, with Henry V, defeated France between 1415 and 1420, and then lost it again under Henry VI.

Richard was, then, a great soldier and diplomat. He was also an extraordinarily able businessman, heading an empire with a private civil service that would make modern international companies look insignificant. Moreover, he was a patron of the arts and illuminated manuscripts, history books, and music commissioned by him still survive. We even have a poem written by Beauchamp to his second wife, one of the richest medieval heiresses and a member of the Spencer family that produced Diana, Princess of Wales. His main artistic legacy is the chapel specified in his will and built on to St Mary’s Warwick after his death. It is ‘one of the few buildings in England that can still give us an impression of medieval religious feeling, and show the importance of all the arts in giving it expression.’3

Medieval art, military strategy, politics, religious faith, business management and social structure were all interdependent, despite the great contrasts and contradictions found in the age. Unlike the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, life was seen as all of a piece. Coming to understand Richard Beauchamp, then, will give us an insight into his times.

1

THE BEAUCHAMPS OF WARWICK

The Beauchamps were perhaps the most consistently successful family among the English nobility for a period approaching two centuries. They acquired the title of earl of Warwick by good fortune rather than by judgement, and managed to hang on to it by producing a male heir who grew to adulthood in each generation – an achievement equalled by very few other aristocratic families in an age when infant mortality was high. Between the years 1268 and 1445 there were six Beauchamp earls of Warwick, and in each generation, with only two relatively minor setbacks, the family increased its wealth and influence by involvement in war, good marriages, and consistent royal and political service. During these closing centuries of the middle ages, there was almost no major military expedition in which an earl of Warwick was not present and playing a significant part. From the border struggles with Scotland and Wales to the battlefields of France at least four of the six highly distinguished themselves, and two of them – the first Earl Thomas and Richard himself – were among the greatest military commanders of late medieval times.

The century from about 1340 to 1440 was dominated by three themes. The Black Death, which swept across Europe to kill about one third of the population of England around 1350, brought devastation which was to blight the economy for several generations. Fresh outbreaks of the plague were liable to occur at any time, although none of them approached that of the mid-fourteenth century in severity. With the population decimated, labour was scarce; land owned by the Beauchamps produced decreasing income as the fourteenth century entered its second half, although they countered this by adding to their holdings.

The second major development was the longbow, and its contribution to the ‘Hundred Years War’. At Crécy and Agincourt, and at other set-piece battles, its skilled use gave the English a clear advantage over the French who were using the much slower crossbow and were encumbered by excessive body-armour. The Hundred Years War also brought economic problems for England – the monarchy was rarely out of debt for the duration of the hostilities. For individual commanders such as a Beauchamp, however, great riches were to be reaped, and the family profited greatly from their campaigns in France.

The third dominant theme was the rise of religious and political dissent, the first stirrings of the storm which at the beginning of the sixteenth century was to become the Reformation. The heresy trial of Wycliffe in 1384, the Lollard rebellions which gathered pace across Europe in the early fifteenth century, and the ‘Peasants’ Revolt’ of 1381 were all indications that the Church and the aristocracy no longer had an unbreakable grip on the minds and actions of the king’s subjects. Individual conscience was beginning to assert its strength; tradition and authority began to look as thought they might be open to question.

The Beauchamps had been hereditary sheriffs of Worcestershire since Norman times, when a Walter Beauchamp married the daughter of Urse d’Abitot, William the Conqueror’s notorious and brutal sheriff of Worcestershire, around 1110. Where the name originated is unknown, but the small village of Beauchamps a few miles south of the River Somme is the strongest candidate. For more than a century, the family gathered a useful, but by no means outstanding, range of estates in Worcestershire, the centre of their operations being Elmley Castle near Evesham. Their first major piece of good fortune happened in 1268 when William Beauchamp inherited the title of earl of Warwick through a convoluted series of marriages, deaths and failures of the male line. The focus of the Beauchamps’ interest began to shift from Worcestershire to Warwick, although the family were to retain a close attachment to the Worcestershire manors, with Elmley and Hanley Castles and Salwarpe, near Droitwich, all featuring significantly in the subsequent family history.

Little information survives about William, who remained as earl of Warwick until his death in 1298. He fought a number of times against the Welsh between 1277 and 1294, and was involved in a campaign on the Scottish borders in 1294. It is likely that at some stage he went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land as the three crosslets which he added to the family coat of arms were generally an indication of this act of piety. Of his character all that we know is that he had a reputation for hot-headed behaviour. On hearing a rumour that someone else had been buried in place of his father, he dug up the grave in the Church of Friars Minor in Worcestershire and exhumed the corpse. He was excommunicated for sacrilege.4

William’s most important contribution to the Beauchamp family, besides his father’s marriage to a distant relative of the earl of Warwick, was to appropriate the legend of Guy of Warwick. Guy was the subject of an Anglo-Norman romance written in the first half of the thirteenth century, telling the story of a great champion who fought against the Viking invasion. The stories are set in the early tenth century, and feature a hero who after pilgrimage to Jerusalem returns incognito and in single combat defeats a Danish giant. He then lives as a hermit in a cave at Guy’s Cliffe, north of Warwick, and unrecognized by his wife or neighbours performs acts of charity and piety. There is no good evidence that this Guy ever existed, but William Beauchamp gave the name to his eldest son and ensured that the legend became part of the psychology of the Beauchamps, who handed on down the generations not only the alleged armour of Guy but also the tradition of loyalty and honour.

The only Beauchamp earl to bear the name of their mythical ancestor was born about 1271, and inherited the title on the death of William in 1298. Guy was much more prominent in national affairs than his father had been, and was one of the principal players in the Piers Gaveston affair. Gaveston was the ‘favourite’, and allegedly the homosexual lover, of Edward II, and had been banished by Edward I who believed that the knight was a bad influence on his son. On his deathbed, Edward I made Guy promise that he would do all he could to prevent Gaveston’s return to England, and to keep him away from his son. This was to no avail, for Edward II recalled Gaveston, and gave him the title of earl of Cornwall, along with lands to provide him with a substantial income. Edward, who became king in 1307, gained a reputation for being idle, frivolous and incompetent, and when in 1308 he appointed Gaveston as regent while he went abroad, the nobles were incensed. Gaveston, who called Guy Beauchamp the ‘black dog of Arden’ was kidnapped by Beauchamp and a group of nobles in June 1312 and taken to Warwick Castle. A few days later he was taken to Blacklow Hill, two miles north of Warwick, and beheaded. It is significant that Blacklow was on the duke of Lancaster’s land, belonging to Kenilworth Castle. Lancaster’s wealth and independence made him virtually untouchable by the king. Edward continued his capricious reign until Parliament forced his abdication in January 1327, and he was murdered at Berkeley Castle, a place which was to have strong Beauchamp connections, later the same year.

Of Guy’s personal life, little is known. He married Alice, his second wife, in 1402, and she bore him six children in their first five years of marriage. Other children were born later, and they may have produced as many as nine in total. He was clearly well educated, being described a ‘bene literatus’, which probably meant at least that he was competent at Latin, and perhaps that he had spent some time at University. Unusually for nobles at the time, he possessed an excellent library, which has been described as ‘one of the most interesting book collections of the fourteenth century’.5 A selection of forty-two books, which represented only part of his library was given in 1306 to Bordesley Abbey where he was to be buried. Works on surgery, philology, lives of the saints, historical stories and ‘romances’ were included. A chronicler of Edward II wrote that ‘in wisdom and council Guy held no peer’.6 When Guy died in 1315 there were rumours that he had been poisoned on the orders of Edward II in revenge for his part in the death of Piers Gaveston. The Beauchamp dynasty now suffered a potential hiccough, for Guy’s eldest surviving son, Thomas, was not yet two years old.

The danger which lay in an earl dying before his son had reached the age of majority was that his estates were liable to be held by the Crown, and administered by appointed agents. With no adult male to oversee the family affairs, exploitation and neglect were common. Despite a promise to Guy that his executors could administer the estates, within two years Edward II had appropriated the Beauchamp estates and handed them over to agents; no doubt considerable losses were suffered during the early 1320s. Around 1330, the union having been contracted at a very young age, Thomas married Katherine, the daughter of Roger Mortimer who, although she brought no great fortune to the marriage, did bring a good name and influence. They were to produce nine daughters and five sons.

Thomas was a lifelong friend and confidante of the new monarch Edward III, who was to make a huge impact not only on the fourteenth, but also on the following century. There is some evidence which suggests that Thomas may have spent much of his early years growing up in the royal household where he would have formed a close relationship with Edward, who was two years his senior. By 1332 Thomas was governor of the Channel Isles, and his subsequent rise through the military hierarchy was meteoric. He was captain of the army in Edward’s campaign against Scotland in 1337, and from 1339 until his death in 1369 he was involved in all the initial engagements of the Hundred Years War. He commanded the fleet transporting the army to Flanders in 1345, and in the following year was, together with the Black Prince, one of the two commanders at the battle of Crécy, where the longbow made its first real impact on warfare. In 1350 he was made one of the inaugural Knights of the Garter, the new order of chivalry devised by Edward III for his closest and most trusted associates, and was created Marshal of England in 1353. At the battle of Poitiers in 1356 he captured the Archbishop of Sens, for whom he gained the enormous ransom of £8,000. A chronicler reported that Thomas ‘fought so long and so stoutly, as that his hand was galled with the exercise of his Sword and Pole Axe’. His reputation as a soldier was unparalleled, except by the Black Prince himself. Walsingham the English historian wrote about one incident when the French were so terrified by reports of the arrival of the earl of Warwick that they fled even before he had time to disembark from his ship. In 1365 he joined the Crusades alongside Teutonic knights, and returned with the infant son of a Saracen prince of Lithuania whom he had baptized in London, naming him Thomas and himself standing as Godfather. As a diplomat Thomas took part in two significant missions, being a negotiator at the treaty of Arras, and also being sent to the Pope to argue the justice of England’s claim to the French crown. His grandson Richard was to become the most significant diplomat of the early fifteenth century.

Thomas did not neglect his business and family affairs during his long and distinguished military career. In 1354 he acquired the Lordship of Gower after a long legal dispute with the Mowbray family which had started in his grandfather’s time. Gower was to move in and out of Beauchamp possession a number of times, and it was never entirely secure for them. It was a particularly profitable dominion because not only did it produce excellent revenue from wool and trading through the ports, but the coal mining industry was beginning to develop. Thomas added many smaller parcels of land and a range of manors to the Beauchamp portfolio, probably investing most of his profits from the war in this way. There were three principal ways of gaining financially from the war. The simplest, but least lucrative, was pay. Thomas was retained by the king and would have been paid a daily wage while at war, as well as the expenses of his retinue and followers. More money could be made from spoils. The conquering army saw itself as free to take anything from the beaten soldiers or towns. Armour, clothing, stores, and especially jewels and plate were taken, as was anything else of value. However, the most important source of income for a senior commander such as Warwick was ransom. The capture of important prisoners could bring massive reward – Thomas’ £8,000 for the Archbishop of Sens was the largest ransom paid in the fourteenth century. By the time of his death Thomas owned land from Castle Barnard in County Durham to manors in Cornwall.

Of Thomas’s five sons, only two survived into adulthood. William, the fourth son to be born, was sent to Oxford in 1358 to train for the Church, and is the first English peer definitely known to have received a University education. When two of William’s older brothers died, the margin for error in the succession was too fine, and so his father extricated him from his clerical career and he became a soldier. His marriage brought the Lordship of Abergavenny to the Beauchamps, and on the death of William’s daughter-in-law in 1435, this estate reverted to the main male line and became Richard’s. The Beauchamps were fortunate in that additions to the family pool of land gained by younger sons in time generally added to the wealth of the head of the house.

Thomas died in Calais in 1369 of the plague. He willed to be buried in Warwick, the first of the Beauchamp earls not to go back to Worcestershire for interment, and ‘that his executors should new build the choir of the Collegiate Church in Warwick where he purposed to be buried.’ His fine tomb with its effigy of alabaster and his wife Katherine alongside still survives in excellent condition in the centre of the chancel at St Mary’s. Of particular interest are the miniature alabaster figures of mourners or ‘weepers’ around the sides of the tomb for they give a clear indication of contemporary dress in the late fourteenth century. Thomas’ wealth at his death can be seen in his will. He left many gifts of jewellery, silver, gold, rings, crosses and relics. Most significantly, he left to his eldest surviving son, also called Thomas, the sword and coat of mail which had belonged to the legendary Guy. The provenance of this important relic is unknown.

Earl Guy had been outspoken and involved in major political intrigues. Thomas, by contrast, had been totally loyal to the king, had served faithfully and well, and had greatly extended the family wealth and influence. His son, also called Thomas, was to be even more at the centre of disagreement with the crown than had been his grandfather. It is not coincidental that the two setbacks to the Beauchamps’ rise in influence and wealth were both in the reigns of monarchs whom historians have generally judged to be either incompetent or deliberately wayward – Edward II and Richard II.

The second Thomas Beauchamp was probably born in early 1339. He does not seem to have had the flair and energy of his father, but the National Dictionary of Biography’s description of a person ‘retiring and somewhat indolent in disposition’ is an unfair exaggeration, for at times he showed flashes both of good sense and of courage. Thomas became earl at the age of thirty, and was certainly in his father’s shadow. The English victories in the opening phase of the Hundred Years War had reached a temporary pause with the treaty of 1360 and the French successes in the early 1370s. Thomas did take part in some incidents in France, accompanying John of Gaunt in the expedition of 1373, but Edward III’s encroaching senility and Richard II’s lack of interest in the campaign meant that opportunities for distinguished service, and therefore for rewards and spoils, were fewer. Thomas’s main impact was on domestic politics in the 1380s and 1390s. Richard II had become king in 1377 at the age of ten, and found himself monarch of a country ravaged by plague and oppressed by taxes to pay for the war across the Channel. That Richard was developing a reputation for an extravagant lifestyle, lavishly rewarding his favourites, and for an ungovernable temper, only added to the increasing tension in government. In 1379 parliament insisted that the king should have a ‘governor’ to curb his tendencies to excess, and Thomas Beauchamp was appointed.

Dissent was developing on two seemingly unconnected fronts. John Wycliffe and his followers were questioning Papal authority and the philosophy which underlay the doctrine of transubstantiation in the eucharist, and were arguing for the Bible to be available in English. Tradesmen, merchants and land-workers were complaining about the level of taxation, and were struggling under labour shortages and the economic collapse following the plague. The link between the two movements was the questioning of traditional authority, a questioning which was to gather pace for the next century and to bring the medieval order of society to its end. The imposition of the Poll Tax in 1380 ignited the smouldering discontent. Parliament demanded a payment of three groats per annum from everyone over the age of fifteen. Duke and labourer were to pay the same amount, but for a duke a shilling was negligible, while for a peasant it was a month’s wages. A movement which seemed to be spontaneous began in the South-east, centred on Kent and Essex, and crowds marched to London in June 1381, with Wat Tyler of Kent, a veteran of the French expeditions, acting as spokesman. The term ‘Peasants Revolt’ is a misnomer – artisans and tradesmen were as much involved as peasants, suggesting that the issues were wider than the payment of a shilling. This is confirmed by the presence of large numbers of returned soldiers who were complaining that the promises to them of good pay on their return to England had not been met. Having taken