Aristocrats: Power, Grace, and Decadence: Britain's Great Ruling Classes from 1066 to the Present Read online

  De Meulan was a distinctive kind of knight, he had the title ‘Earl’. It was a gift of the Crown, and at that time was not necessarily hereditary, but it marked him out as an owner of larger than average estates. He was, therefore, richer than a knight and could devote some of his wealth to the creation of a following of knights. They were given land and, in return, pledged loyalty to their overlord and promised to serve him in war or in his household for the customary forty days. An earl’s retinue of knights was vital if he were to perform his function as a servant of the Crown. He was a local strongman whose military resources enforced the king’s authority, particularly in lawless or frontier areas. Earls and their castles guarded the southern coastline of England and its borders with Scotland and Wales until the fourteenth century.

  However powerful they were in their locations, earls were subjects of the King. Allegiance to the Crown overrode all private obligations. In 1124 Henry I ordered the blinding and castration of two knights who had joined their immediate overlord in a rebellion. The king was both the ruler of his kingdom and its landlord. His legal powers were extensive: an earl or a knight needed royal permission to inherit their lands and the king charged a fee for granting it. On taking possession of his estate, the heir paid public homage to the king. If a knight died leaving an underage heir, the boy was made a royal ward. Orphaned heiresses likewise were placed under royal protection and the king had the right to select their husbands. The power of the king as a landlord and a ruler often overlapped; if an earl or a knight wished to build a castle, he needed a royal licence.

  Tension was inevitable whenever kings strapped for cash pressed their legal rights to the limit, and, if they were desperate, beyond. Early-medieval domestic politics revolved around the creation of a balance between the legal prerogative of the Crown and the rights of all landowners. This was vital since the Crown needed their cooperation in government: they enforced his laws and collected his taxes. Those whom the Crown had honoured as ‘earls’ or ‘barons’ were royal advisers. It was axiomatic that good government was the result of reasoned debate among wise men. They included bishops, who were often civil servants, and the greater landowners, who were experienced in war and, in many cases, administration.

  Kings chose their councillors, but custom and common sense dictated the selection of men whose goodwill was vital for government. Many were called ‘Earl’ or ‘Baron’ in the writs which commanded them to attend the royal council, but these titles were not yet all automatically hereditary. In 1295 Edward I (1272–1307) ordered eleven earls and fifty-three barons to attend his Parliament, and in 1307 writs were delivered to seven earls and seventy-one barons.

  These magnates were a fledgling aristocracy. All had substantial estates, many held offices under the Crown and some were the king’s councillors, intimate companions who ate, diced, jousted and hunted with him. They were also gradually coming to think of themselves as representatives of all the landowners within the kingdom with a responsibility not just to counsel the king, but to remind him of where his duty lay and, if necessary, compel him to undertake it properly.

  Hereditary monarchy has always been hostage to genetic accidents which produced kings who were temperamentally unfit or intellectually deficient and, therefore, a danger to their high office and welfare of their subjects. The character of a king mattered, for the warrior class admired kings who were made in their image and showed leadership, courage and open-handedness. Richard I (1189–99) had all these qualities, which excused but did not alter the fact of his neglect of his domestic duties. The Lionheart spent a greater part of his reign as a Crusader fighting to recapture Jerusalem, which immeasurably enhanced his reputation as a knight.

  Richard’s younger brother John (1199–1216) had no martial charisma and was a spasmodically idle and supremely unlucky monarch. His endeavours to stay solvent and twist feudal law to fill his coffers, and the favours he showered on mercenaries and adventurers of low birth, alienated his barons. A substantial number of them formed a coalition (backed at various times by the papacy and Philip II of France) to save John from himself. In 1215 they forced him to concede Magna Carta, a lengthy document contrived to rectify the pent-up grievances of the preceding fifty years. The charter drew the boundaries between royal power and established the inalienable legal rights of all freemen – everyone, that is, who was not a serf. Excessive feudal fines, burdensome tax demands and unlawful imprisonment were outlawed. Magna Carta was a landmark: it clarified relations between Crown and subjects and gave an additional legal weight to the concept that kings ruled by consent and were bound to pursue what was to the common good of their subjects.

  Another principle was implicit in Magna Carta. The great men of the realm had a duty to represent the nation as a whole and call fickle or overbearing kings to account. There was a contract between the Crown and the kingdom, and the magnates had the power and the men to enforce it. They did so again in 1264 after Henry III (1216–72) extended lavish favours to imported French favourites, cold-shouldered English barons and misspent his revenues. Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, led an armed protest and looked beyond the usual allies of the magnates to enlist support from the commercial community of London.

  After defeating a royal army at Lewes, de Montfort summoned a parliament in which the barons and earls were joined by representatives of the counties, cities and boroughs. The voice of the kingdom thus extended beyond the barons to knights and merchants. This experiment provided the model for all future bicameral Parliaments in which earls, barons, bishops and the richer abbots sat in what became the House of Lords and elected Members of Parliament sat in the Commons. The theoretic consent by which kings ruled now became actual; although elected by men of property (a tiny proportion of the population), parliament could claim to be the authentic voice of the kingdom. Its powers soon ceased to be advisory and by 1340 it had secured control over direct taxation.

  The House of Lords was now a permanent feature of the legislature. Past custom was regularised so that territorial magnates who had hitherto been summoned as ‘barons’ and ‘earls’ were now, if the king wished, allowed to pass on their titles to their eldest sons, who were henceforward guaranteed seats in the House of Lords. Land was the principal qualification for this honour, coupled with proven loyalty to the Crown. This could be expected from members of the royal family: King John’s younger son Richard became Earl of Cornwall and was succeeded by his son, Edmund Crouchback. Yet the policy did not always work as intended, for kinship was never a guarantee of allegiance. Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, a grandson of Henry III, was the mainstay of baronial opposition to his cousin Edward II (1307–27). Undeterred by this example, Edward III (1327–77) substantially reinforced the royal power base in the Lords by giving dukedoms to four of his sons and arranging their marriages to the richest heiresses on the market. Edward’s fourth son, Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, was Richard II’s (1377–99) most intransigent and vindictive adversary. Kinship was never a guarantee of loyalty.

  The fourteenth century saw the emergence of an aristocracy in an Aristotelian sense. The House of Lords contained bishops, respected for their learning, and noblemen whose virtue lay in their distinguished ancestry, courage and wisdom. ‘The more we bestow honours on wise and honourable men, the more our crown is advanced with gems and precious stones,’ declared Richard II in 1397 after he had ennobled his Beaufort cousins. This fitted the ideal of rule by the best, although cynics wondered whether handing out titles to the King’s more distant and, in some cases, poorer kinsfolk was a device to create a more tractable House of Lords. Well-established peers felt that their status had been devalued and dismissed the new creations as ‘duketti’, petty and inferior dukes.

  By the close of the fourteenth century a hierarchy had emerged within the peerage. At the top were dukes, then followed marquesses, earls, viscounts and barons. It became common for the eldest sons of peers to have ‘courtesy’ titles, a notch or two lower in the scale tha
n their fathers. Status was indicated by the fur trimmings of a peer’s robes and the design of coronets. There was a correlation between rank and wealth. A rough guide compiled early in the next century indicated that a duke should have annual revenues of at least £5000, an earl £2000, a viscount £1000 and a lord £500. There were exceptions: Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, had an income of over £10,000 a year, as did Edward III’s fourth son, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster.

  At the bottom of the scale, Lord Ogle got by on £200 a year and often less, for his estates lay in the war zone between England and Scotland. If a nobleman’s revenues were insufficient to maintain his status, his title could be forfeit. In 1484 Parliament stripped the impoverished George Neville of the dukedom of Bedford on the intriguing assumption that ‘a lord of high estate’ without the wherewithal to maintain his dignity would resort to crime to raise money. Maybe this judgement said something about Neville’s character.

  The aristocracy of the fourteenth century upheld the political traditions of their predecessors. They were vigilant and obstreperous whenever the Crown attempted to impinge on the legal rights of property. Whenever a king showed undue partiality towards one or more individuals, aristocratic hackles were raised. Favourites were an anathema simply because they soaked up the royal patronage which kings were expected to spread evenly. Edward II and Richard II did not and each faced coalitions of disgruntled peers.

  Edward II’s infatuation with his favourites Piers Gaveston (his homosexual lover) and the rapacious Hugh, Lord Despenser provoked three baronial rebellions, all designed to bring the King to heel and restore good and disinterested government. The lords complained that Gaveston’s promotion to the earldom of Cornwall was inappropriate for so ‘slight’ a man. This insult was compounded by Gaveston’s rudeness: he called Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, ‘an old Jew’ and Guy de Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, ‘the black dog of Arden’. Worse still for peers proud of their blood, Gaveston was a good jouster. They and their allies were revenged in 1312 when Gaveston was kidnapped and murdered. Edward II found other favourites, the Despensers, and in 1327 he was deposed by a cabal of lords led by his wife Isabella of France and her lover, Roger Mortimer, Earl of March. Both houses of Parliament endorsed the coup and the succession of Edward’s son, Edward III. His father was imprisoned in Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire, where he was murdered. Living kings, even if under lock and key, were always a focus for a counter coup.

  Resisting royal tyranny was an aristocratic duty and, some believed, a hallowed one. This made Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, the implacable leader of opposition to Edward II into a martyr in the eyes of his adherents. He had been beheaded in 1322 and five years later they had begun a campaign for his canonisation on the grounds that he served God by resisting tyranny. Miracles were claimed at his tomb in Pontefract and Lancaster’s ‘martyrdom’ was painted on the south wall of South Stoke church in Oxfordshire.1 Rome, however, withheld the Earl’s sainthood.

  Ultra-royalists, including Richard II, responded many years later by seeking the canonisation of Edward II as a martyr slain for his defence of the God-given authority of kings. It was a cause close to Richard’s heart and his interpretation of his divine powers provoked a series of clashes with the nobility which ended in 1399 when he was deposed. Charges against Richard included deviation from the laws and customs of the kingdom, intimidating those councillors who ‘dared to speak the truth’, and announcing that the laws ‘were in his mouth’. In short, Richard wanted his own way, just as John and Edward II had done.

  Richard’s abdication was confirmed by Parliament, which then approved the claim to the throne of his cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Lancaster, the leader of the coalition which had unseated Richard. Propaganda issued by the new king, Henry IV (1399–1413), represented himself and his allies as the genuine voice of a country exasperated by Richard’s caprice and misrule. This was partially true. Bolingbroke had been guided more by ambition and opportunism than patriotism. The wealthiest landowner in England, Bolingbroke’s first intention had been to recover his property, which had been illegally confiscated by Richard, an act that had frightened the nobility. The King’s temporary absence in Ireland, the disintegration of an army raised from the royal estates in Cheshire and Richard’s surrender convinced Bolingbroke that a coup was both possible and likely to succeed. He had the King imprisoned and his and his allies’ retainers were sufficient to scare off any resistance by Richard’s former followers.

  Twice within a century a coalition of noblemen had assumed the collective right to correct and then dethrone a king whom its members considered headstrong and incorrigible. It was a power which proved mischievous, intoxicating and addictive. Between 1400 and 1408 there was a sequence of aristocratic rebellions against Henry IV. In 1415 a handful of peers plotted to assassinate Henry V (1413–22) on the eve of his departure for France and replace him with his cousin, Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March.

  The deposing of Edward II and Richard II had been blows to the power of the Crown and an advancement of that of the aristocracy. Both kings were largely responsible for their misfortunes, not least in their inability to reach any understanding with their nobles and their extreme sensitivity to any form of criticism. For their part, the aristocrats had radically departed from their role as a force for stability within the kingdom and become instead a disruptive element. Yet it was only the peerage who possessed the capability to restore just government and equilibrium to England. This was the chief thrust of their propaganda, which, in the crucial years 1327 and 1399, had presented them as selfless figures reluctantly driven to arms to save the country from the consequences of wayward and inadequate monarchs.

  There was some truth in this, but the lords who posed as tribunes for a misgoverned nation were also driven by private jealousies and dreams of future advancement. The most trenchant and persistent critics of Edward II, Richard II and Henry IV were peers who considered themselves undervalued or displaced in the pecking order of royal patronage by upstarts like Gaveston. Their private grievances mutated into public causes, but coalitions of the envious and discontented were always fragile. ‘The love of magnates is as a game of dice, and the desires of the rich like a feather blown upon the wind,’ observed the unknown author of the Vita Edwardi Secundi.

  Whether exercised for the public benefit or private gain, the power of the aristocracy was in the ascendant at the beginning of the fifteenth century. Two factors determined its nature and application. There was individual temperament, which made some peers prone to resort to violence or the threat of it whenever a political crisis seemed imminent. This, in turn, was influenced by the assurance of military support in the form of readily available soldiers, arms and armour. Both were in evidence in January 1400 when Richard II’s half-brother John Holland, Earl of Huntingdon (a former ‘duketti’ with the title Duke of Exeter), joined a conspiracy to overthrow and murder Henry IV. A rash and impetuous nobleman, Huntingdon had little to lose, for he was tainted by his former attachment to Richard II and could expect no favours from the new regime.

  Huntingdon had extensive lands in the South-West and he instructed his estate officials and servants to mobilise his tenants. Affection and fear were appealed to in equal parts. One volunteer declared that he would stand by his landlord with ‘all my body’ and in Saltash the Earl’s bailiff threatened the hesitant with immediate beheading. In Exeter a canon of the cathedral who was one of Huntingdon’s close advisers raised forty archers.2 Armour and weapons were freely available from the Earl’s arsenal. They were never used, for he and several other plotters were seized and lynched by the townsfolk of Cirencester before the uprising had gathered any momentum.

  Territorial, political and military power were inextricably linked. A lord’s network of estate officials could be transformed into recruiting sergeants who could bully tenants with threats of future victimisation or cajole them with promises of future favour. These methods yielded the largely untrained and illequipped rank and f
iles of the baronial retinues, but what counted in terms of political leverage was the number of knights a lord could rely on in a crisis. Their numbers and their loyalty depended on the depth of the lord’s purse, for they were either his salaried household servants, or men under contract to him and paid annual fees.

  From the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries the feudal overlords of the aristocracy had used legal power to summon their knights, but the compulsion of custom proved a less efficient way of raising men than signed and sealed indentures. By 1300, these documents had spelt out the reciprocal duties of the lord and his retainer. The gist was always the same: the lord promised an annuity and, in return, the retainer pledged his service and that of his servants in war and peace. A caveat was always added which excused the knight from taking up arms against the Crown.

  Indentured retainers were the sinews of aristocratic power. In 1312 the outstandingly rich Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, had ridden to Parliament at the head of two-and-a-half thousand men, including fifty knights. He was a maestro of political stagecraft who used the spectacle of an armoured cavalcade to impress the world at large, hearten his allies and browbeat Edward II. Thomas’s private army was an expensive luxury which cost him between £1500 and £2000 a year, just under a fifth of his yearly revenues. His bluff was finally called in 1322, when thanks to slipshod generalship he was defeated at Boroughbridge by a royal army. Only two of his knights had refused to serve against the King.3

  Paradoxically, the system of retaining gave aristocrats the means both to overawe the Crown and uphold royal authority in the countryside. Retainers were part of a nationwide latticework of personal alliances whose struts were compacts between the nobility and lesser landowners. It also offered the Crown a means to raise armies for foreign wars: when Edward III invaded France in the 1340s, he invited his nobles to mobilise their retainers into contingents whose wages and transport costs were paid by the royal exchequer.