Warwick the Kingmaker Read Free

his quarel (iust I thinke) was slayne.

    ‘Sure’, observed the Mirror, ‘I thinke the Erle of Warwike although he wer a glorious man, hath sayd no more of him selfe than what is true.’8 When Warwick turned against Edward IV, the latter commissioned new histories hostile to the earl, but these reposed in manuscript until Victoria’s reign9 and thus missed the publicity given to Warwick’s own manifestos that were printed in the Annales of England of the Elizabethan John Stow. For four centuries of historians it was the earlier, Yorkist, Warwick that was praised.
    ‘Of him, it was said that he made kings and at his pleasure cast them down’, wrote the Scot John Major (1521), when first dubbing him the kingmaker in Latin ( regum creator ).10 The English translation was first deployed by the Elizabethan Samuel Daniel and achieved currency only in the eighteenth century with David Hume;11 during the interim ‘the great’, ‘the stout earl of Warwick’ and ‘Warwick make-king’ were preferred.12 It was Warwick’s glory to have made and unmade kings. To his first biographer, he deserved the surname
    Great, by reason of his hospitality, riches, possessions, popular love, comelynes of gesture, gracefulnes of person, industrious valour, indefati-gable paynstaking and all the signatures of a royal mynde and generous spirite.13
    For Thomas Carte (1750) Warwick was ‘the most popular man of the age, universally beloved and esteemed. He was undoubtedly the greatest subject in England for power and estate and deserved all the popularity he enjoyed’.14 For Warwick’s fellow northerner James Raine the Elder (1834), the earl was:
    ‘the greatest subject that ever lived...His marriage with the heiress of the Beauchamps added to the splendour of his inheritance and his valour and extraordinary energy, combined with his profuse liberality and fascinating manners, rendered him the idol of the multitude. He was, in good truth, the setter up and putter down of kings.
    He was ‘King Edward’s father’ who ‘trained him up’, ‘the Soul of Edward’s Army’, even worthy of the crown itself. He stood for the public good.15 He was a romantic or heroic subject to nineteenth century-painters. Those cited above are merely the most extravagant of many tributes.
    Such hero-worshipping historians were themselves the products of an age of aristocracy. They still understood and respected the lineage, magnificence, largesse, hospitality, committed retainers, ruthless justice, courage, boldness and frankness that they perceived in Warwick. They praised him for his virtues and for his popularity with the people, which they attributed to his eloquence, to his generosity and hospitality, and to his good lordship, and illustrated always with the same examples from Fabyan’s Chronicle and Commines’s Mémoires . ‘Warwicke had their hartes’, said Daniel.16 ‘The common people,’ wrote Edward Hall, ‘iudged hym able to do all thynges, and that without hym, nothyng to be well done’.17 ‘Send his soul rest’, asked the Mirror , ‘for sure his bodye never had any.’18
    An absence of rest can be translated into unruliness and disorder. So thought Thomas Habington, who saw Warwick’s ‘mighty spirite...consumed in his own fire’.19 ‘Nothing more glorious could be said of a private man’, observed Rapin de Thoyras in 1732, ‘if true glory consists in excess of power’.20 The values that Warwick stood for became antique and out of date: pride of lineage was trans-muted into haughty arrogance, liberality into extravagance, and his exceptional ruthlessness was ruthlessly exposed. His generalship, his abilities and his character were considered more critically. Historians more overtly biased towards kings and towards progress took no pride in those who opposed such desirable ends. The Scot David Hume categorized Warwick into ‘the greatest, as well as the last, of those mighty barons who formerly overawed the crown, and rendered