"Familiar in our mouths as household words,"
that sound with a trumpet-note through the pages of English history. Few—probably none—of our great historic houses can rank with the Nevills in their pride of place. They represent, in direct male descent, the sovereign Earls that ruled the North in early Saxon times; "were barons from the time for which records first exist"[1] under the Norman kings; and swayed the destinies of the country at their will in the wars of York and Lancaster. In the fullest and truest sense of the word, they were "princes in the land;" foremost in the council and the field, unsurpassed in arms, splendid in hospitality, and ruling in feudal power and supremacy a territory more important than some of the kingdoms of the Heptarchy. Their domain, in the county of Durham alone, extended for forty miles along the valley of the Tees, and seven hundred knights held their fees of the great Honour of Raby. "This Saxon line," says their historian, Henry Drummond, "surpasses all others in England by the greatness of its alliances, honours, and possessions. It has furnished a Duke of Bedford, Marquess of Montacute, Earls of Northumberland, Westmorland, Salisbury, Kent, Warwick, and Montacute; Barons Nevill, Furnivall, Latimer, Fauconberg, Montacute, and Abergavenny; two Queens; a Princess of Wales; a mother of two Kings; Duchesses of Exeter, Buckingham, Norfolk, Warwick, York, Clarence, and Bedford; Marchioness of Dorset; Countesses of Northumberland, three Westmorland, Arundel, Worcester, Derby, Oxford, two Suffolk, Rutland, Exeter, Bridgewater, and Norwich; Baronesses Ros, three Dacre, three Scrope, Daincourt, Mountjoy, Spencer, Fitzhugh, Harrington, Hastings, Conyers, Willoughby de Broke, Hunsdon, Cobham, Strange, Montacute, and Lucas; nine Knights of the Garter, two Lord High Chancellors, two Archbishops of York, Bishops of Durham, Salisbury, and Exeter, Ambassadors, Speaker of the House of Commons, &c." The list reads like a peerage-roll.
The Nevills derived their name from the Norman fief of Neuville-sur-Touque, and "descended from Baldric Teutonicus, who with his brother Wiger came to Normandy c. 990 to offer his services to the Duke (Ord. Vitalis, 479)."—The Norman People. It is said that the first who came to England, Gilbert de Nevill, commanded the Conqueror's fleet; and they bore on a canton of their arms a galley, or ancient ship, in memory of this ancestor. Strangely enough, his name is not written in Domesday. The family became widely spread, and was numerous in Lincoln (where they held baronial rank) and elsewhere; but its greatness emphatically belongs to the North. The admiral's grandson, Geoffrey, married Emme, the heiress of a great Northern baron, Bertram de Bulmer, who brought him the splendid dowry of Brancepeth Castle in the county of Durham, and Sheriff Hutton in Yorkshire, with a whole train of estates and manors, dependent on these two great fees. Their son Henry died s. p., and his sister Isabel, reversing the custom that gave rich Saxon wives to the Norman conquerors, transferred all these possessions to her Saxon husband, the Lord of Raby.
Robert Fitz Maldred, Lord of Raby, was the heir male of the ancient sovereigns of Northumberland, whose authority extended from the Humber to the Tweed. He descended from Earl Uchtred, the son-in-law of Ethelred II., by his earlier marriage with Sigen, daughter of Styr, the great Danish chief who "gave to St. Cuthbert Darlington and its appendages." She brought him two sons, Eadulf (Adolf) and Gospatric. Eadulf eventually succeeded to his father, but was slain by Siward the Dane, who had married his niece, and usurped the sovereignty on his death. Thus Gospatric, the younger son, was never Earl of Northumberland, as by right of blood he should have been. He was the father of Uchtred, Lord of Raby in the reigns of the Confessor and Conqueror, who (probably because, like the other Northern nobles, he had refused to join Harold's standard at Hastings) was apparently left undisturbed in the new Norman settlement.
Raby, the head of the Honour of Staindropshire, was held of the Church of Durham. As its name implies, it was a Danish settlement, and had been the residence of Canute the Great,[2] who, in his penitential old age, undertook a barefoot pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Cuthbert, and offered on the altar Staindrop and Staindropshire, comprising Raby and eleven other manors. Under William Rufus, it was forcibly appropriated by Ralph Flambard, the "Firebrand Bishop" of Durham, but Dolfin, the son of Uchtred, being the husband of the Bishop's niece Adelicia, peaceably succeeded his father at Raby; and Flambard repented and made restitution before his death, restoring Canute's gift by charter to the convent. Three years afterwards, in 1131, Algar, then Prior of Durham, by another charter confirmed Dolfin in the possession of Staindropshire; and the Honour of Raby was held by sixteen generations of his descendants for the space of something over five hundred years, till it finally passed out of the family in 1569. Since that time, the castle has been owned and inhabited by the Vanes, and thus, throughout the long lapse of ages reaching down from the days of the Confessor to our own, there has always been a hearth-fire alight within its venerable walls. This Dolfin was the father of Maldred, and the grandfather of Robert, who married the Norman heiress.
Geoffrey, the son of Robert and Isabel, in accordance with the Normanizing fashion of the time, took his mother's name of Nevill, but retained his own coat of arms, the famous silver saltire that was to bear the proudest quarterings in England. His great-grandson Robert acquired a great territory in Yorkshire through the "fair and gentle" Mary of Middleham, who was the heiress of Robert Fitz Ranulph (see Richmond), and lived a widow for forty-nine years after his death. Ralph, the next in descent, is chiefly known for his quarrel with Bishop Beke, who twice summoned him to go with horse and arms to Scotland, while he alleged that his tenure was only to defend the patrimony of St. Cuthbert, and that he had no right, for King or Bishop, to go beyond Tyne or Tees. He was the father of two sons; Robert, "the Peacock of the North," slain early in life in a Border fray; and Ralph, the hero of Nevill's Cross, and the first layman ever buried in Durham Cathedral. He was one of the two chief commanders in the great victory that turned back the threatening tide of Scottish invasion; and carried his young son John (then barely five years old) with him to see the battle. John Lord Nevill lived to do honour to this early training, and to eclipse his father's renown; for he is computed to have won, in the course of his soldier-life, eighty-three walled towns, castles and forts; and far from restricting his services to the Palatinate, as his ancestor had done, carried arms even against the Turks. He was retained by the Duke of Lancaster to serve him in peace and war; attended Richard II. to Scotland with a train of three hundred archers and two hundred men at arms; was at different periods Warden of the East Marches, Governor of Bamborough, High Admiral of England. Lieutenant of Aquitaine and Seneschal of Bordeaux, and one of the Founder Knights of the Garter. In 1378, having obtained from Bishop Hatfield license to castellate "touz les tours, mesons, et mures de son manoir de Raby," he encircled the old irregular pile with the greater part of its stately coronal of towers, and made it what Leland found it nearly two centuries afterwards, "the largest Castel of Logginges in al the North Cuntery." As it had been the cradle of the race, so it continued to give his designation to the head of the family, who, though at the same time Lord of the castles of Middleham, Brancepeth, Snape and Sheriff Hutton, was invariably styled Dominus de Raby,—in common parlance, Dan Raby, or Daraby, as Leland gives it.
This Lord Nevill was twice married. His first wife, Maud de Percy, brought him (besides three daughters) two sons; Ralph, the first Earl of Westmorland; and Thomas, who married the heiress of the last Lord Furnival, and in her right was summoned to Parliament in 1383 as Lord Furnival, but left no male issue. By his second wife Elizabeth, daughter and heir of Lord Latimer (whose arms appear on one of the stone shields of the inner gate-house at Raby) he had another son named John, who bore his mother's title of Latimer and died s. p. in 1430; and two daughters, on whom the barony did not devolve. (See Latimer?)
Ralph, the son and heir, was a man of unusual talent and ambition, who played his part ably and skilfully through life, and built up the fortunes of his house to the highest point of prosperity. "The strong light in which Shakespeare brings out Westmorland in his Henry IV. and Henry V. is a proof that he was even then remembered as a subtile and powerful agent in the intrigues of his age."—Surtees. He was appointed Constable of the Tower and created Earl of Westmorland in 1397, but soon deserted the failing fortunes of Richard II., and, turning towards the kindling star of Lancaster, became one of the principal instruments in placing Henry IV. on the throne. The new King showered dignities upon him. He was made a Knight of the Garter, invested for life with the Honour and county of Richmond, and created Earl Marshal of England, with a provision in the patent that "whereas in times past all other Marshals had borne a staff of wood, he should bear a staff of gold." By his second marriage he became the brother-in-law of the King, and never wavered in his allegiance to the Red Rose. He defeated the Percies at the battle of Shrewsbury, where Hotspur's headlong career was brought to a close; and put down a second Northern insurrection at Shipton Moor without striking a blow. In the next reign, he went as Earl Marshal with Henry V. to Agincourt, followed by five knights, thirty lances, and eighty archers. Surtees remarks that "Shakespeare preserves the consistency of his character by making him wish, as any reasonable man would do before the commencement of so doubtful a battle:—
"'Oh that we now had here
But one ten thousand of those men in England
That do no work to-day.'"
This elicits one of the finest passages in the play, Henry's rejoinder, commencing—
"Who's this that wishes for more men from England?
My cousin Westmorland? No, my fair cousin;
If we are mark'd to die, we are enow
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of honour!"
The Earl died in 1426, full of years and honours; and lies buried under "a right statelie Tumbe of alabaster" in the choir of his own collegiate church of Stain-drop. His effigy rests between those of his two wives. He is in full armour; a strikingly handsome man, such as we might conceive the father of the Rose of Raby to have been; and wears round his neck the collar of SS as the badge of Lancaster. He had no less than twenty-one children; nine by his first Countess, Lady Margaret Stafford, and twelve by the second, Joan de Beaufort, the daughter of John of Gaunt, and the widow of Lord Ferrers. To this latter family the Earl showed a decided preference, for he first dismembered the splendid heritage of the Nevills by settling upon them his great Yorkshire estates. The royal Joan had brought him eight sons. Of these, the three youngest died s. p., and Robert, the fifth, was Bishop of Durham; but the four elder brothers, Richard, Earl of Salisbury, William, Earl of Kent, George, Lord Latimer, and Edward, Lord Bergavenny, each became the founder of an illustrious house. They soared to the highest offices of the state; and "were, perhaps, at that time, both from their opulent possessions, and their individual characters, the most potent family that has ever appeared in England."—Hume. As they were allied to the House of Lancaster through their mother, so were they allied to the House of York through the youngest and fairest of their sisters. Cecily Nevill, the last born of these twenty-one children, was remarkably beautiful, and called in the neighbourhood the Rose of Raby. She married in her early youth Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, and was the mother of Edward IV. and Richard III.[3] This marriage shaped the politics of the Nevills, for thenceforward they espoused the cause of their brother-in-law, who placed his reliance on their power to set him on the throne of England; "and became," says Surtees, "the chief agents in the destruction of their kindred blood of Lancaster." To write their history would be simply to recapitulate the chequered and bloody story of the Waife of the Roses; and I can here afford but a scanty account of their fortunes and career.
1. Richard, the eldest son of the Earl's second marriage, was the husband of the heiress of the Montacutes, Alice, only child of Thomas Earl on Salisbury, who brought him the baronies of Montacute and Monthermer, and the Earldom was revived in his favour in 1442. This was but one of several grants and distinctions conferred upon him by Henry VI.; yet he was among the foremost to desert his cause. He fought and won with his brother-in law the first pitched battle between the contending Roses at St. Albans; and was constituted Lord Great Chamberlain after the victory of Northampton in 1460; but his campaigns ended with the disaster of Wakefield. Here—again with the Duke of York—he was taken prisoner, beheaded, and his head set up by the side of the Duke's over the gates of York. He left many children. One of his sons was slain at Wakefield; another was Archbishop of York and Chancellor of England; John, the third, was Marquess of Montacute; and Richard, the eldest, was the
"Proud setter up and puller down of Kings,"
who married the heiress of the Beauchamps, and is renowned in history as the "stout Earl of Warwick." The portrait of Richard Nevill the King Maker, "the greatest and last of the old Norman chivalry—kinglier in pride, in state, in possessions, than the King himself," has been so often and so eloquently drawn, that his splendid presence has grown to be familiar to us. We see him with his body guard of six hundred retainers in russet coats, embroidered with the Ragged Staff of Beauchamp before and behind; with his "exceeding great household," daily feeding thirty thousand mouths at his various castles and manors; [4] and his special pursuivant, called the Warwick Herald, assigned to him for his service in his martial exploits. We see him "ever in favour" with the commons, and so popular that every one was proud to wear his badge: "no man," reports Sir Philip de Comines (who visited him when he was Captain of Calais) "esteeming himself gallant, whose head was not adorn'd with his Ragged Staff, nor no door frequented, that had not his white Crosse painted thereon." We see him the great commander of his age, leading the van at Northampton, and seizing the King himself at the first battle of St. Albans. We see him turning the tide of victory at Ferrybridge, where, "receiving some loss, whereat divers were staggered," he stabbed his horse before the King's eyes, in token that where he fought there could be no retreat, and crying, "Let him flee that flee will, I will tarry with him that will tarry with me," kissed the cross of his sword to confirm the vow. We see him crowning and discrowning King after King at his will and pleasure; raising and dispersing armies by the sole magic of his name; and last of all, we see him in the closing scene, on that fatal Easter Sunday in 1471, when he fell by the hand of Sir Roger Kynaston at the battle of Barnet. "Though fought between blood-relations," says Mr. Drummond, "no combat was ever more sanguinary or cruel." He was attainted after his death, and both his Earldoms forfeited. He had received from Henry VI. a grant of pre-eminence above all the Earls of England, and held Crown lands of the annual value of fourscore thousand crowns, in addition to his own inheritance of Middleham, and the great Beauchamp estates.
Two daughters only had been born of his marriage: Isabel, Duchess of Clarence; and Anne, married first to the Lancastrian Prince of Wales, Edward, the son of Henry VI., and then to the Yorkist King, Richard III. Isabel was the mother of the last male Plantagenet, Edward, Earl of Warwick and Salisbury, who suffered on the block in 1499, "a victim to the jealousy of the House of Tudor," and two daughters, Margaret, restored as Countess of Salisbury by Henry VIII, but also beheaded, who was the wife of Sir Richard Pole, and is now represented by the house of Hastings; and Winifred, who left children only by her second husband, Sir Thomas Barrington. Of her, too, descendants remain. Anne Nevill, the younger sister, whose life, bound up with each of the conflicting dynasties, was "full of state and woe," left none. She pined away and died within a year of the death of her only child, Edward, Prince of Wales, King Richard's son.
John, Marquess of Montacute, the brother of the King-Maker, had inherited their mother's great estates, and was summoned to parliament by Henry VI. in 1460, and again on his accession by Edward IV., as Lord Montacute. He had rendered good service to the House of York, and when Henry Percy, third Earl, fled into Scotland with the Lancastrian king in 1467, he was himself created Earl of Northumberland. Two years later, however, he had to relinquish the title in favour of the dispossessed heir, Henry Percy's son, who, then a prisoner in the Tower, tendered his allegiance to Edward, and was re-instated in his Earldom. John Nevill received in compensation the Marquessate of Montacute. He changed sides with his brother, fell with him at the battle of Barnet, and, like him, was sentenced to attainder and confiscation after death. His eldest son George had been created Duke of Bedford two years before, as the intended husband of the King's daughter, Lady Elizabeth Plantagenet; but this sudden collapse of his fortunes reduced him to beggary, and for this reason, having no means to maintain the ducal dignity, he was degraded from all his honours by Act of Parliament in 1477. Neither he nor his brother John were ever married; and five sisters alone remained, to whom Henry VIII. restored the inheritance. They were: 1. Anne, married to Sir William Stonor; 2. Elizabeth, married first to Lord Scrope, and then to Sir Henry Wentworth; 3. Margaret, married first to Sir John Mortimer, and secondly to Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk; 4. Lucy, married first to Sir Thomas Fitz William, and secondly to Sir Anthony Browne; and 5. Isabel, married to Sir William Hudlestone.
2. William, the second son of the Earl of Westmorland by Joan de Beaufort, married the heiress of Thomas, sixth Baron Fauconberg, and was summoned to parliament in her right in 1429. Like all the rest of the Nevills, he was an excellent soldier, and was rewarded for his valour at Towton by being named High Admiral of England, and created Earl of Kent in 1463. He died the same year, leaving three co-heiresses, among whose descendants the Barony of Fauconberg remains in abeyance; Joan, married to Sir John Bethune; Elizabeth, married to Sir John Strangeways; and Alice, the wife of Sir John Conyers.
3. George, the third son of the same marriage, inherited several of the Latimer estates from his father, and had summons to parliament in 1469 as Baron Latimer, but in the latter years of his life became an idiot. The title was borne by his son, grandson, and great-grandson, with whom the line closed in 1577. This last Lord Latimer left four daughters: 1. Katherine, Countess of Northumberland; 2. Dorothy, Countess of Exeter; 3. Lucy, married to Sir William Cornwallis; and 4. Elizabeth, married to Sir John Danvers, who became his co-heirs. Nevertheless, there remained a male heir, Edward Nevill, descended from the second Lord, who should have been Lord Latimer, and sought to recover the Earldom of Westmorland from James I., but was obliged to content himself with having both titles inscribed on his tombstone in Eastham church. It is believed that his two sons had died before him.
4. Edward, the fourth son of the same marriage; Lord Bergavenny by right of his wife, Lady Elizabeth Beauchamp, sole heiress of Richard, Earl of Worcester and Baron Bergavenny: of whom presently.
I now return to the children of the Earl of Westmorland's first marriage with Lady Margaret Stafford, the elder line that remained seated at Raby, and continued there for six generations more. By the division of the estates (see p. 346) they had lost a great part of their patrimony, and with it much of their ancient power and importance, but still ranked foremost among the potentates of the North. When the great Catholic rising was being concerted in 1569, it was at their castle of Raby, in the same hall where the seven hundred knights that held of the Nevills had been wont to assemble, that the gentlemen of the North met in council. Besides the Earl of Northumberland, there were present old Norton and his sons, Markinfield, Swinburne, and about one hundred more. "They were," says Froude, "all uncertain, * * * there was no resolution any where. They had all but broken up, and 'departed every man to provide for himself,' when Lady Westmorland, Lord Surrey's daughter, threw herself among them, weeping bitterly, and crying 'that they and their country were shamed for ever, and that they would seek holes to creep to.' The lady's courage «put spirit into the men." The die was cast; "and at four o'clock the following afternoon, Sunday, November 14th, as the twilight was darkening, Northumberland, Westmorland, Sir Christofer and Sir Cuthbert Nevill, and old Richard Norton, entered the city of Durham. With sixty followers armed to the teeth behind them, they strode into the cathedral; Norton with a massive gold crucifix hanging from his neck, and carrying the old banner of the Pilgrimage, the Cross and streamers and the Five Wounds. They overthrew the communion board; they tore the English bible and prayer-book to pieces; the ancient altar was taken from a rubbish heap where it had been thrown and solemnly replaced, and the holy water vessel was restored to the west door; and then, amidst tears, embraces, prayers, and thanksgivings, the organ pealed out, the candles and torches were lighted, and mass was said once more in the long desecrated aisles." But the rebellion, begun with such enthusiasm, was short-lived and unsuccessful. Though the insurgent leaders gathered together a force variously estimated at from eight thousand to fifteen thousand men, and marched as far south as Tadcaster, they met with no support, and their solitary feat of arms was the capture of Barnard Castle. By the middle of December the discouraged army was broken up, and the two Earls were riding for their lives "in a blasting North wind that swept across the moors, with snow and sleet lashing in their faces," to seek refuge in Scotland. Here Lord Westmorland, "to be the more unknown, changed his cote of plate and sword with Jock o' the Syde," than whom, says
Maitland,
"A greater thiefe did never ryde;"
and was harboured by the Kerrs at Ferniherst till he could make his escape to Flanders. He never returned home, but lingered on for thirty years in exile and dire poverty; sharing a slender Spanish pension with forty or fifty of his banished followers that "daily came to meat with him;" most anxious to obtain his pardon, and pining for his native land. But Elizabeth, who had taken possession of his estates, proved inexorable from first to last; and he died, neglected and forgotten, a very old man, in 1601. His wife, who had remained in England, subsisted on a grudging pittance doled out to her by the Queen; but at her death in 1593, his four daughters—the daughters of so princely a house—were literally left in want of bread. There had been no son; and, on the accession of James I., Edward Nevill (as we have seen) put in his claim as heir male, pleading that the last Earl's fall was caused "by his service and affection for the King's mother." This was undeniable, and in Queen Elizabeth's lifetime James had not only been profuse of promises, but had even written a letter to Nevill, styling him Earl of Westmorland. But now promises and precedent alike went for nothing; his petition was handed over to the Judges, who declared the Earldom forfeited by attainders and in 1624 it was conferred on Francis Fane, the eldest son of Sir Thomas Fane and Mary, Baroness Le Despencer, the then heir general of the house of Abergavenny.
This was an act of injustice. Edward Lord Bergavenny (see p. 349) had transmitted his title to his son, grandson, and great-grandson, and the latter was the father of Mary Fane. He had no other child; and, on his death in 1586, she claimed the barony, as having been held by tenure of the Castle of Bergavenny from the time of Henry III. But she had a cousin, another Edward Nevill, to whom, as the unquestioned male heir, it was adjudged by the House of Lords; and the King, as "some satisfaction" to the disappointed heiress, granted her the Barony of Le Despencer, that had been held by one of her ancestors.
To this Edward, fourteenth Baron of Bergavenny by tenure, and to his posterity, it is evident that, on the failure of the elder branch of Latimer, the Earldom of Westmorland should have belonged. Had the attainder been reversed, it must have been his by birthright. From him the present head of the family is directly derived; and thus descends, in an unbroken male line extending over nearly thirty generations—a lineage such as scarcely any other house in England can boast of—from Uchtred, Earl of Northumberland in the reign of Ethelred II. George, the twenty-fourth baron, was created Earl of Abergavenny in 1784, and the present and fifth Earl received a Marquessate in 1876.
-- Cleveland
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