Ladybird books – Warwick the Kingmaker.
It’s got to be the definitive biography.
The lord only knows how long it’ll take to get here, but I’m salivating already.
I’m going to put it on my shelf, right next to Hicks.
Ladybird books – Warwick the Kingmaker.
It’s got to be the definitive biography.
The lord only knows how long it’ll take to get here, but I’m salivating already.
I’m going to put it on my shelf, right next to Hicks.
Kingmaker – it’s such a cool title, just the kind of thing you might have on your business card, especially if you’re the original and the best.
And for a man who collected titles – after his father’s death, he styled himself Earl of Warwick and Salisbury – it might have been irresistible.
Except the word doesn’t enter the language until 1599 (see OED). There’s an earlier recorded use (1520) of something similar and, of course, Shakespeare’s “setter up and plucker down of kings”, but even these are hardly contemporary.
There’s a list of literary shortcuts that readers of WOR fiction regularly come across: Elizabeth Wydeville’s greed and hauteur; Clarence’s reckless drunkenness; Margaret of Anjou’s (alleged) adultery, spite and vindictiveness; Edward IV’s womanising; Cecily Nevill’s pride and piety; Richard III’s (v1) hunchbacked evil and (v2) steadfast love and loyalty; the torn loyalties of John Nevill; the saintly incompetence of Henry VI; the earl of Rutland’s murdered innocence; Anne and Isobel Nevill, the political pawns; Thomas Stanley’s double dealing and opportunism…
Each of them is someone’s pet peeve – the straw that breaks the camel’s back and makes the reader hurl the book at a wall. For others, they’re not even noticed and for yet others, they’re exactly what they expected to find. And it’s true what they say: you can’t please everyone.
In the end, every writer has decisions to make. If Nevill ever gets finished, let alone published, it’ll no doubt be hurled at several walls by people who feel that I’ve violated one of their most deeply held beliefs. But you won’t find kingmaker in the text.
(I recently read one novel in which Warwick bellows: “I am the Kingmaker!” This was the catalyst for Nevill. Even in the darkest depths of pet-peevery a light can still shine.)
Welcome to my very first Nevill blog. I’m currently working on a novel (a Nevill novel) called Nevill (which makes me a Nevillist novellist, hopefuly), and as and when things come up in my research that I find interesting, I’ll share them.
The Great Nevill Feast was held at Cawood Castle near York to celebrate the enthronement of George Nevill as Archbishop of York in September 1465.
It lasted for days and they ate a whole lot of food – I won’t reproduce the list here, but someone took the time and trouble many years ago to jot down a comprehensive inventory of walking, flying, swimming and scuttling creatures all sacrificed to the glory of God (or Nevill, which I’m pretty sure came to the same thing at the time).
And that is more or less all that anyone out there in the interscape knows or cares about. It is my mission to set this straight.
A couple of vegetarian websites* even use it to suggest that mediaeval households were bereft of vegetables. This isn’t true. Even if there were no veggies or fruit on the list, doesn’t mean there were none on the tables. Most would have come from Nevill farms – and there were plenty of them. Rather than writing out a shopping list, the chefs and stewards would simply have ordered up everything that was available at the time of year and used whatever arrived in the kitchens.
(*quick disclaimer – I have no beef with vegetarians, we are each entitled to eat what we will (only no-one’s allowed to eat swans anymore except the queen (even sick swans in the Orkneys.)))
A Boke of Gode Cookery certainly contains plenty of fruit and vegetable recipes.
The feast is used again and again in historical fiction to illustrate the excesses of the Nevills. Ok, so there was some oneupmanship going on here – a point seems to have been made to hold a feast bigger and grander than Edward IV’s coronation feast. George’s brother, Richard earl of Warwick, was definitely trying to make a point – he had more money than the king. Actually, he had more money than God, but I’ve found nothing in my research to suggest there was any kind of tension between Warwick and the Almighty.
But it was also very much a family thing. There were more than two thousand people in attendance and not all of them were related, but a significant number were. All the important roles were played by either Nevills or their close adherents.
It wasn’t so much of a slap in the face for Edward IV that he prevented his brothers, sisters, brother in law and closest friend from attending. The king and his siblings were Nevills through their mother, after all, so a family event of this nature and magnitude was always going to include them. All of Warwick’s surviving sisters were there with their husbands as was their mother’s erstwhile stepmother, the dowager duchess of Suffolk.
Getting back to the list of proteins… (an out of context list can be found here.)
Divide all that by 2000 people, then divide by a further 6 days – possibly 7 (some days there would have been 2 meals, others probably only one) and you get a far more manageable amount of food. Ok, so everyone got 2 rabbits, half a sheep and a goose, but only one third of a fish, a quarter of a partridge and 1 hot custard. Begins to sound a little less excessive and a bit more like generous hospitality.
All leftovers would have been put into alms vessels and distributed.
And, as I said, the man had more money than anyone in the known universe – all he was doing was funneling it back into the economy…
What would you do if your brother was enthroned as Archbishop of York? A congratulatory twitter would probably be a bit mean spirited – the least you could do is shout him dinner at the local Chinese.