Warwick The Kingmaker

THE KINGMAKER'S DAYS

CHAPTER ONE

Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick and Salisbury, is the most minor well-known historical figure among all the prominent figures of action who have shaped English politics since the Conquest. Thomas Cromwell is the only person of comparable stature treated with a similar lack of respect. In recent years, the great Henry the Eighth minister has started to get some of the respect he deserves. But for the Kingmaker, a man whose figure stands out in the murky annals of the Wars of the Roses with a nebulous grandeur despite having served as the English Crown's first subject for 10 years, A monograph has not escaped any author. Although everyone knows his name, nobody really understands who he is as a person. When asked to describe his persona, nine out of 10 people would discover—to their own surprise—that they were relying on Shakespeare's Henry the Sixth or Lord Lytton's Last of the Barons are good starting points.

Therefore, even a feeble attempt to accurately reconstruct his career and thought patterns from the original sources cannot help but be of some use to both the general reader and the student of history. Those accustomed to reading the biographies of persons from subsequent periods may find the outcome meagre. Many details that help us form a picture of the individual need to be discovered. His physical shape has no reliable portrayal. We don't know if he was dark or fair, thick or skinny since the day of portraiture was yet to arrive here; his memorial in Bisham Abbey has long since been removed, and no writer has even bothered to mention it. From the cryptic descriptions of the chroniclers and his charming armed image in the Rous Roll, we can only infer that he was pretty tall and had broad shoulders and limbs. When sketching the Earl in that charming graphic pedigree that surpassed all members of his race save for his cousin, the King and opponent Edward the Fourth, it's possible that the excellent Rous was more concerned with his renown than his physical appearance.

But Warwick has only experienced what his contemporaries did. Compared to their grandfathers or grandchildren, the males know far less about the men who lived in the fifteenth century. Moreover, the chroniclers still used their traditional methods in the fourteenth century. Still, by the sixteenth century, the whole country had been swept up in the literary spirit, and both famous and obscure authors worked as diligently on history as they did on other fields of study. But the original fountains had dried up during the Lancaster and York eras.

Additionally, the Renaissance's fresh flood still needed to rise. The historical evidence is scarce and difficult to work with. We dare not accept Hall and Hollingshead's whole works, as had been the practice for two hundred years, or their annals, which were permeated with Tudor sympathies from beginning to finish, as reliable sources for the events of the preceding century. However, after putting aside their intriguing, though somewhat unreliable, volumes, we find ourselves lost in a gloomy wasteland of historical tatters connected by a meagre thread of two or three drab and juvenile annals collections.

The foundation of a consistent history would have to be William of Worcester or excellent Abbot Whethamsted; absolutely maddening. So, it happens that Warwick still needs to be paid his dues.

The finest and worst products of the era, Henry the Fifth and Richard the Third, are the only two persons of Warwick's century whose characteristics we fully understand. Even the inferior authors of the day were moved by one person's achievements to a level of detail they participated in for no other hero. In contrast, the other served as the text for so many insults under the Tudors that we believe we are looking at a real man in the gloomy portrait placed before us. However, we may question if our initial or secondhand view is not painted nearly entirely from Sir Thomas More's well-known biography of the usurper, which is regarded as the only reliable source for Richard's history because of its literary virtues. If we hadn't done that work, Richard of Gloucester would have appeared to be an ill-defined monster of iniquity, making him just as perplexing to the historian as the other spectral figures who moved through those dark times before falling into the crimson grave that was everyone's end, one by one.