The Kingmaker's Sisters: Six Powerful Women in the Wars of the Roses Book

David Baldwin, a biographer of Elizabeth Woodville, queen of Edward IV, here produces a group portrait of the six daughters of Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury and his wife Alice Montacute, sisters of Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, the Kingmaker. The sisters all made politically motivated marriages, which were intended to bring advantage to the Nevilles (as their father had through his marriage to the heiress of the Montacute earls of Salisbury), and all experienced in various ways the tribulations of the mid- to late fifteenth century, some prospering at times more than others, the three who lived longest and into the reign of Henry VII proving themselves survivors of the turmoil regardless of the differing fortunes of their husbands.
The material that is directly related to the Neville sisters with which Baldwin works is quite thin, so much of the book is fleshed out with narratives relating to the lives of their father, brother, husbands, and the events of the Wars of the Roses, while the characters of the women themselves remain mostly hidden. With such limited evidence available, the author often tends to hypothesis, but this is a necessity if he is to draw some personal sense out of the lives of women whose fortunes were dependent upon the power of their spouse, and whose influence as noblewoman and as estate managers, which would have been considerable, particularly when their menfolk were away on national political business or war or in exile, is made more or less invisible by the lack of surviving documentation and the conventional assumptions of the age.
What a collective approach does reveal is both how interconnected the nobility of the age was by marriage, and how within the same kinship groups there was much division during the Wars due to local and familial conflicts that predominantly determined which specific side a nobleman and close family would take in conflicts at national level.
It is both over simplistic and erroneous to describe the Nevilles as a Yorkist family, not only because Salisbury and Warwick only threw in their lot with Richard, duke of York, when attainder and exile made it necessary after 1458 (although, even then, they did not back Richard's attempt to claim the throne in 1460 when they had seemingly triumphed politically), and because Warwick later rebelled against Edward IV and died at Barnet fighting for Henry VI, but also because the sisters' husbands - with the exception of William, Lord Hastings, second husband of Katherine, who was Edward IV's chamberlain (and, Yorkist though he had been, was executed by Richard III on his way to the throne in 1483) - would be particularly hard to identify as adherents of the House of York, especially in the case of John, earl of Oxford, whose wife was Margaret Neville, and who fought for Henry VI and Henry Tudor (at Bosworth), rebelled and was exiled under Edward IV and Richard III, and prospered under Henry VII. It was Eleanor Neville's husband, Thomas, Lord Stanley, who later married Henry Tudor's mother, Margaret Beaufort, who typified a fifteenth century nobleman, being a partisan of neither Lancaster nor York, but a powerful landowner with large estates and a regional powerbase (in his case Lancashire and the north-west), adapting to political realities, making accommodations with those who had national power, and avoiding political and military commitment to one side or another where possible. His main concerns, like those of his noble peers, were the consolidation and expansion of his wealth and estates, the securing of his family's local and regional power, and the descent of his lands intact to his heirs. Family always came before loyalty or political principle.
The Wars of the Roses were not just about kingship and who should rule England. They were also about regional and local politics and local rivalries - the Nevilles overriding concern remained their regional power rivalry with the Percies in Yorkshire and the North, and it was this which predominantly determined the alliances and marriages into which they entered. The Wars, as this book helps to show, should not be seen as a binary conflict between two opposing sides, but rather as an intra-elite conflict between rival families primarily concerned with land and localised power, and a result of political weakness at the national centre, originally the result of the weak kingship of Henry VI, and then the product of the shifting noble alliances formed to try to seize control of the national government, so as best to secure and pursue the interests of noble families in their own areas. Fifteenth century politics is at heart about regional and local politics and disputes.
This then is not a new analysis of the Wars of the Roses, and as a collective biography it is limited by the scarcity of direct evidence relating to the six sisters, but it is an interesting approach to a time of vicious political dispute and localised civil war during a prolonged period of uncertainty and contested kingship. However, it is not really for the fifteenth century novice. As a slim volume, it swiftly skirts over much of the political and constitutional disputes, concentrating on those which have direct relevance to the lives of the Neville women and, more importantly, those which immediately affect the fortunes of their husbands, so a reader new to the period would be better equipped to find value in this volume if they already have some understanding of the chronology and events of the Wars of the Roses from a narrative history. It is, though, a diverting read and shines light on six influential women placed at the heart of great events by virtue of their birth and the contingencies of their noble marriages..