This piece is in memory of Professor Peter W. Fleming, who died in April 2025. His publishing career spanned 40 years, from an article on the religious faith of the gentry of Kent in 1984 to a defining monograph on the history of late-medieval Bristol in 2024. His career would have been yet more notable but for the ill-health that blighted his last years. A significant proportion of his work relates to Bristol, where he taught for many years at the University of the West of England. The subject of this blog is, however, his revisionist foray, published in 2011, into the history of another of England’s great cities, Coventry.
Peter starts with the received wisdom that, in the late 1450s, Coventry was militantly Lancastrian. Such a view had the endorsement of the greatest authority on the reign of Henry VI, Ralph Griffiths (who, incidentally, supervised Peter’s thesis on the Kentish gentry), who described its citizens as ‘fiercely loyal to the Lancastrians’ (R.A. Griffiths, The Reign of Henry VI, pp. 777-8). This conclusion has a persuasive context, which Peter sets out. The city had close and historic ties with the Crown. The royal earldom of Chester, part of the endowment of the heir to the throne, was overlord of its southern half; and, when Crown and duchy of Lancaster were united on Henry IV’s accession in 1399, its proximity to the great duchy castle of Kenilworth brought it closer to the centre of the political nation. In the late 1450s the increasing power of Queen Margaret, who held Kenilworth as part of her dower, brought these connexions into the most intense political focus. The court spent extended periods there, and the notorious Parliament of November 1459, which confiscated the lands of the Yorkist lords, was convened in the city’s Benedictine priory.
This was the well-established picture Peter set out to re-examine. A small doubt had already been raised by Michael Hicks, who, in 2010, pointed out that the court’s residence in the city in the late 1450s was more intermittent than is generally supposed (M. Hicks, The Wars of the Roses, 126). Peter took this doubt very much further. Indeed, he entirely subverted the argument. In his formulation the court’s periodic sojourns there, even if less prolonged than was once thought, eroded rather than strengthened the city’s ties with the house of Lancaster. He describes the tensions evident from the outset. On 11 October 1456, during a great council in the city, there was ‘a gret affray’ between the followers of Henry Beaufort, duke of Somerset, and the city’s watchmen in which two or three of the citizens were killed. By 1460 there are clear signs that the court had become an unwelcome visitor. Royal signet letters to the city authorities on 8 February of that year, cited reports that ‘diuers of thinhabitantes of oure Cite of Couentre haue …. vsed and had right vnfittyng langage ayenst oure estate and personne’ and in favour of the recently-attainted Yorkist lords, a curious circumstance in a city of unquestioned loyalty.
The next evidence Peter cites is yet starker. On 17 February 1461, in signet letters in the name of the young prince of Wales and dated at St. Albans, where the Lancastrians had just defeated the leading Yorkist lord, Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, the mayor and aldermen were peremptorily ordered to be ‘assystent, helping and faverable’ to three local Lancastrian loyalists, the King’s carver, Sir Edmund Mountfort, Sir Henry Everingham of Withybrook, only a few miles from the city, and William Elton, MP for the city in 1453. This reads, Peter suggests, as a desperate attempt to recall the city to its earlier Lancastrian allegiance. If so, it failed. When it was read before the ‘Comyns’ in St. Mary’s Hall, they were so ‘meved’ against its bearer, a priest in Everingham’s service, that they would, but for the mayor’s intervention, ‘A smytt of the prestes hed’. Soon after, according to one chronicle, its erstwhile resident, Queen Margaret, singled out the city for punishment. In this context, it is not surprising that the city authorities soon came to share the Yorkist sympathies of the ‘Comyns’. They provided £100 for soldiers to accompany Edward, earl of March, to London in the wake of Neville’s defeat at St. Albans, and a further £80 for 100 men to go with him to what proved to be the decisive battle of Towton.
To explain this support for the Yorkist cause in a city with long-standing Lancastrian connexions, Peter pointed not only to the tensions inherent in the court’s presence but also to influence of the earl of Warwick, whose castle of Warwick lay only ten miles away. It is instructive here that, in the crisis of 1469-71, the city appears to have sided, albeit rather equivocally, with the earl when he rose against Edward IV. Peter shows that, in the campaign of the spring of 1471 during which the earl met his death at the battle of Barnet, Coventry provided him with at least 40 soldiers and was fined by the restored Edward IV for its temerity in doing so. He might also have cited other evidence for the city’s support for the earl. Two of its leading citizens, Richard Braytoft, a former MP, and Robert Onley, were accused of complicity in the execution at Gosford Green, just outside the city, of the King’s father-in-law Earl Rivers, one of the principal victims of Warwick’s rising against Edward IV (TNA, KB27/836, rot. 61d). The reception accorded to Everingham’s priest may, therefore, have been an expression of the city’s support not for the Yorkist cause in general but for the earl of Warwick in particular. Even so, one thing is clear: Peter has shown that Coventry was not a Lancastrian stronghold, even in the late 1450s when its ties with the Lancastrian ruling house were, at least to outward appearances, at their closest.
S.J.P.
Further reading
P. Fleming, Coventry and the Wars of the Roses (Dugdale Society Occasional Papers, 2011)
and Late-Medieval Bristol: Time, Space and Power (2024).
The Commons,1422-61, ed. L. Clark, iii. 497-9 (for Braytoft), iv. 235-8 (for Elton), 281-3 (for Everingham), v. 547-56 (for Mountfort).
