Dr Simon Payling, of our Commons 1461-1504 section, explores the fortunes of one particularly loyal Yorkist family during the Wars of the Roses.
For leading landowning families ready to commit themselves to one side or the other, the Wars of the Roses offered both hazard and opportunity. In terms of the latter, that commitment needed to be whole-hearted, but not necessarily consistent. So frequent were the turns of the political tide, consistency was hard to reconcile with self-interest. Family connexions across the divides of national political division facilitated changes of allegiance, as did the readiness of the ascendant party to reconcile with all but the intractable. At certain moments there were significant shifts, notably in the wake of the attainder of the Yorkist lords in 1459 and the usurpation of Richard III in 1483. Some families, however, were consistent in their loyalty. One such was the Devereuxs of Weobley, who energetically supported the house of York from the 1430s until the death of Richard III at Bosworth.
Their service to York began well before the outbreak of civil war when one young man entered the service of another. In 1435 Richard, duke of York, recently come of age, appointed Walter Devereux as steward of his Welsh estates, perhaps on the recommendation of Walter’s father-in-law, the influential John Merbury, formerly justiciar of South Wales. Walter quickly became one of the duke’s most trusted servants, serving under him in France in the early 1440s, and he took plentiful advantage of the enhanced status that came with so close a connexion to so great man. He contracted two important marriages for his young children. Materially, the most important of these was that of his son and heir, another Walter, to Anne, the young daughter of Sir William Ferrers of Chartley in Staffordshire, in 1446. When Ferrers died in 1450, Anne was left sole heiress to an estate worth some £500 p.a., enough (at least when it fell into their hands in its entirety on the death of her mother in 1471) to raise the family to the ranks of the greatest gentry. Politically more important, however, was the marriage, in 1449, of his own daughter within the ducal network, to a Welsh esquire, William Herbert of Raglan, then at the beginning of a career that culminated in his elevation to the earldom of Pembroke.
In the 1450s Devereux and Herbert were the duke’s principal lieutenants in the marches as he moved into active opposition to the Crown. Devereux led the Herefordshire part of York’s failed rising in 1452 and was accordingly indicted for treason. He was pardoned on personal supplication to the King, but four years later his Yorkist allegiance led him into greater difficulties. After a resurgent court party had once more driven York into the political wilderness, Devereux joined Herbert in an orgy of violence in the marches. Most seriously, on 10 August 1456, some 2,000 men, with Devereux and Herbert at their head, took Carmarthen castle, imprisoning its keeper, the King’s half-brother, Edmund Tudor, earl of Richmond. Devereux was imprisoned for seven months but eventually, in February 1458, he was acquitted of treason.
Sir Walter’s death in the spring of 1459, when in his early fifties, spared him further trouble. That lot fell to his son. He was in the duke’s ranks at the rout at Ludford Bridge in the following October, and, although he escaped attainder, he was fined 500 marks and was among those Yorkist partisans forced to abase themselves, in ‘schyrtys and halters’, before the King. Not surprisingly, he rallied to York when the duke returned from exile early in September 1460. On 4 October he and Herbert were elected to Parliament in which the duke dramatically claimed the throne, and he went on to fight at the battles of Mortimer’s Cross and Towton, where he was knighted. With York’s son, Edward IV, now King, this loyalty brought him substantial rewards. On 26 July 1461 he and Herbert were among the five new peers created in the interests of the new regime, and, to support his new rank, Devereux was granted forfeited Lancastrian estates worth over £250 p.a.
In the great crisis of the reign, although he appears not to have gone into exile with Edward IV, Devereux fought for him at the battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury in the spring of 1471. His military value was recognised a year later when he was accorded the singular honour of admission to the Order of the Garter. Fittingly, he fought on the French campaign of 1475 and then played a prominent role in the elaborate chivalric ritual that attended the reburial of the duke of York in the collegiate church at Fotheringhay in July 1476.
This simple pattern of loyal service to the ruling house was to be complicated by events following Edward IV’s death in April 1483. However much Devereux may have disapproved of the deposition of the prince of Wales, upon whose council of the marches he had served, his gains from royal patronage depended on the continuation of Yorkist rule. Yet, on the other hand, he had, by a fortuitous route, personal connexions with Richard’s would-be supplanter, Henry Tudor. In the wake of the battle of Edgecote in July 1469, the young Tudor, who had come to the field in the company of his guardian, the Herbert earl of Pembroke, was brought safely away by Devereux’s own former ward, Richard Corbet, who took the boy to Weobley and the custody of Devereux’s sister, the newly-widowed countess of Pembroke. Henry remained there until the Readeption. Perhaps it was knowledge of this personal connexion that led Henry Stafford, duke of Buckingham, ready to rebel in Tudor’s favour in October 1483, to come to Devereux’s house at Weobley to rally aid.
If, however, Devereux was wavering in his support for Richard III, the duke’s endeavour was too desperate to attract his support, and soon afterwards he was given a new reason to support Richard. Early in 1484 his nephew, the Herbert earl of Huntingdon, married the King’s bastard daughter, Katherine. This family connexion, combined with his family’s long-standing loyalty to the house of York, led him to fight for it one last time. While Corbet, now his son-in-law, was one of the first to join Tudor on his landing in early August 1485, Sir Walter was among those killed on the Ricardian side at Bosworth. Instructively, however, although he was duly attainted in the first Parliament of the new reign, the new King, perhaps because of his youthful experience at Weobley, allowed the family speedy rehabilitation. After Devereux’s son and heir, John, had proved his loyalty by fighting for him at the battle of Stoke in June 1487, the attainder was reversed. The family won further promotion in Tudor England. John’s great-grandson, another Walter, was made earl of Essex in 1572 and was the father of Elizabeth I’s ill-fated favourite, Robert.
SJP
Further reading
For detailed discussions of the careers of the two Sir Walters, see: The Commons, 1422-61, iv. 121-39. For those of Sir Walter (d.1402) and John Merbury (d.1438), see: The Commons, 1386-1421, ii. 783-4; iii. 716-20; 1422-61, v. 448-50.
