The Nevilles: The Family That Made (and Lost) Kings
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If you had to pick one noble family that defined the chaos of 15th century England, it might just be the Neville's. For a while, they were practically a royal family in their own right, marrying into the crown, bankrolling rebellion, and deciding which king got to wear the crown that week. Richard Neville, the so-called kingmaker, had so much power, he made Edward IV. And he then tried to unmake him again. His daughters married royal princes.

his cousin's descendants would launch one of the deadliest uprisings Elizabeth I ever faced. And yet a hundred years after the Wars of the Roses, the mighty Neville name was basically extinct in English politics. Land gone, titles forfeit, the last scions scattered in exile. So what happened? Well, welcome back, my friend, to the Renaissance English History Podcast, a part of the Agora Podcast Network. I am

I am your host, Heather, and as always, I am delighted that you are here with me today. In this episode, we are going to dive into the dramatic rise and collapse of the Neville family, from their origins as Northern Lords to the powerful women who married into the royal bloodline, and the final desperate gamble of a doomed rebellion. This is the story of how a single family helped to shape, influence,

England's dynastic wars and how the Tudors made very sure that they would never do it again. Let's get started. But before we do, I have a couple of patron thank yous I want to give. It's been a little bit since I've done a patron shout out. So just really quick thank you and hello to Elena, to Paul, to Mimi, Emily, Kathy, Lisa, Lori, Michael, Lynn, and Robert.

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So the Neville's didn't start out as kingmakers. They were northern gentry, respectable, wealthy, but not royal adjacent. That all changed in the late 14th century when Rafe Neville, the first Earl of Westmoreland, made a marriage that would rewrite the family's future.

He married Joan Beaufort, daughter of John of Gaunt, who was the third surviving son of Edward III. So that made Joan a royal cousin, and their children suddenly had Plantagenet blood. Joan was Rafe's second wife, and her children, known as the Beaufort Nevels, got most of the good stuff—titles, land, and royal connections. And that is where things start to get complicated.

Rafe had kids from his first marriage, too, and when he passed over those older sons in favor of his Beaufort children, it kicked off a long-running rivalry between the two Neville branches. That division between the senior Westmoreland line and the junior Warwick line would haunt the family for the next hundred years. While the Westmorelands stayed up north, the Warwick line moved in fast on national politics.

The crown needed strong men to keep order in the wilds of northern England, and the Neville's fit the bill. They became sheriffs, wardens of the marches, justiciars, anything that gave them power over land, people, and local justice. The more the Lancastrian monarchy struggled, the more powerful these noble families became, filling in the power vacuum.

By the time Richard Neville, the future kingmaker, inherited the Earl of Warwick through his wife, the Neville's were one of the richest and most dangerous families in England. They weren't just nobles anymore. They were a political force that kings had to take seriously at their peril.

Richard Neville wasn't born an earl, he married one. In 1449, he wed Anne Beauchamp, the only surviving child of the Earl of Work. When her father died, the title passed to her, and by extension, to Richard. With the Beauchamp inheritance came not just a title, but vast lands, castles, and influence.

It's time for the random Monty Python reference of the day. With Anne Beauchamp came huge tracks of land.

Anyway, if you know, you know. It turned Richard Neville into one of the most powerful nobles in England, and he didn't plan to waste it. Warwick made his name during the early years of the Wars of the Roses, backing the Yorkist cause and helping to bring Edward IV to the throne. He bankrolled armies, negotiated alliances, and led military campaigns, and for a while, he actually ran the country. He was effectively the power behind the young king.

Foreign ambassadors reported that no one dared act without Warwick's permission. But Edward had ideas of his own, and when he secretly married Elizabeth Woodville, a Lancastrian widow from a large but relatively low-ranking family, Warwick felt humiliated. He'd been in the middle of arranging a royal marriage to a French princess, and now he looked like a fool. It all went downhill from there. The Woodville family was elevated at court, crowding out Warwick's allies.

Edward increasingly resisted Warwick's control, so Warwick did what he always did when things didn't go his way. He changed sides. In a move that still shocks even jaded students of this period, Warwick turned against Edward, reconciled with his former enemy Margaret of Anjou, and married his daughter Anne Neville to Margaret's son, Prince Edward. Yes, that Prince Edward, the heir to the Lancastrian throne.

The whole plan came crashing down for Warwick at the Battle of Barnet in 1471. Warwick was killed in the fighting, his body stripped and displayed in London to prove that he was truly dead. His estates were divided and his power base was shattered. The man who once made kings was now just another corpse on the battlefield. But his legacy wasn't finished because both his daughters had married into the royal family and the chaos that they inherited was just beginning.

Richard Neville didn't have sons, but he had two daughters, and in the brutal marriage market politics of 15th century England, that was still enough to make plenty of trouble. Isabel and Anne Neville weren't just heiresses, they were strategic weapons, and as it turned out, both ended up married to royal brothers in the House of York.

Isabel, the elder, married George, Duke of Clarence, brother of Edward IV. This was a love match and a power grab. George was ambitious, and Warwick needed someone to help him undermine Edward. The two men cooked up a plan to make George king in Edward's place. It didn't work, but Isabel stayed married to Clarence as Warwick tried his next plan, using his younger daughter Anne to forge a new alliance.

Anne was married to Prince Edward of Lancaster, like we said, the only son of Henry VI and Margaret of Anjou. It was a deeply uncomfortable arrangement. Anne was a Yorkist by birth, and Margaret had spent years fighting her family. Fun, fun Thanksgiving dinners! The wedding was meant to seal the deal between Warwick and the Lancastrians, but the alliance was a hot mess from the start.

Anne was probably around 14. Her new husband was said to be sickly, possibly unstable, definitely not long for this world. Within months, Prince Edward was dead, killed after the Battle of Tewksbury in 1471.

Now, Anne was taken prisoner by Edward IV's forces and eventually ended up in the custody of her sister and brother-in-law, that is, Isabel and George. It was not a happy household. George didn't want Anne to remarry. Why? Because if she married again and produced children, it would complicate the inheritance of the Warwick lands, which he wanted all to himself.

Then came Richard, Duke of Gloucester, the future Richard III. He wanted Anne for his wife. He was also George's younger brother. So George quite literally tried to hide Anne, allegedly disguising her as a servant in a London cook shop to keep Richard from finding her. It didn't work. Richard tracked her down and they were married sometime in 1472.

By then, Isabel and George's marriage was fracturing. Isabel had suffered several pregnancies, and in December 1476, she died shortly after giving birth to a stillborn child. The official cause was consumption or childbed fever.

George, however, accused one of her ladies-in-waiting, Anker at Twinhoo, of poisoning her and had the poor woman dragged out of her home and hanged without trial. Later accounts suggest that George may have poisoned Isabel himself.

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Legend, of course, says that he was drowned in a butt of malmsy wine, which may or may not be true, but it's the version that everyone remembers. Meanwhile, Anne Neville was becoming Queen of England, crowned alongside her husband, Richard III, in 1483. But she also would not live very long. Their only child, Edward of Middleham, died young, and Anne followed in 1485, just months before Richard lost the Battle of Bosworth. She was likely no more than 28.

The kingmaker's grand dynastic plans ended with two dead daughters, no surviving grandchild, and a family fortune torn apart by royal politics and infighting. But we're not done with the Neville women just yet, because before Isabel and Anne, there was Cecily.

So before Anne and Isabel married into royalty, there was one Neville woman who made royalty, and that was Cecily Neville, the Duchess of York. Known later as the Rose of Raby after her birthplace in County Durham, Cecily was the youngest of Rafe Neville and Joan Beaufort's 22 children. God bless her, 22 children. And unlike her more tragic descendants, Cecily lived a long, dramatic life and died peacefully in her bed.

So she married Richard, Duke of York, in 1429, and together they had a whopping 12 children, though only a handful survived childhood. Among them, Edward IV, George Duke Clarence, and Richard III, which means that she wasn't just mother to kings. She was also mother to traitors, exiles, and one man who may or may not have murdered his nephews in the tower. He probably did. Family dinners must have been awkward.

Cecily played her role as duchess with absolute seriousness. She was pious, intelligent, fiercely proud of her family's royal bloodline. When her husband began pressing his claim to the throne in the 1450s, she supported him. When he was killed at Wakefield in 1460, she didn't retreat. Instead, she remained a force at court, shepherding her sons through the chaos of the Civil War and into power.

She was famously dismissive of Edward IV's marriage to Elizabeth Woodville, sniffing that he had dishonored himself by marrying a widow. She may have even spread the rumor that Edward was illegitimate in order to boost Richard III's claim, though we will never know that for sure.

By the time Henry VII took the throne in 1485, Cecily was still very much alive and watching closely. She lived until 1495, dying at the very respectable age of 80, having seen not only her sons crowned and killed, but also her granddaughter, Elizabeth of York, marry the new Tudor king. In that way, Cecily became the unlikely matriarch of a newly united dynasty, though whether she approved of the match is anyone's guess.

Now, what happened to the Neville legacy under the Tudors? Well, by the time Henry claimed the crown at Bosworth, the main Neville power base had already been blown apart. Warwick, the kingmaker, was dead. His daughters had either died young or been absorbed into rival houses, and Cecily's line, through her sons Edward and Richard, had been nearly wiped out in the final stages of the Wars of the Roses.

But there was one Neville branch still standing, the Westmerlins. This was the senior line descended from the sons of Rafe Neville's first marriage, the ones who got cut out of the really juicy inheritance in favor of the Beaufort kids. They had kept their heads down during the Yorkist era, and as a result, they made it to the Tudor period with their lands intact and their titles still functional. Well, for a while anyway.

The head of the family during Elizabeth I's reign was Charles Neville, the sixth Earl of Westmoreland. And he did not appreciate the direction that the kingdom was heading. He was a Catholic, and he had strong ties to the old noble families in the north. And like many of his generation, he quietly believed that Mary, Queen of Scots, had a stronger claim to the throne than Elizabeth did. Now in 1569, Charles joined forces with Thomas Percy, the seventh Earl of Northumberland.

to launch what became known as the Rising of the North. It was a dramatic, half-baked rebellion aimed at deposing Elizabeth and restoring Catholic rule. Banners were raised with the five wounds of Christ. Priests were freed. Masses were held in cathedral towns. But they had no real backing, and once Elizabeth's army started marching north, support melted away. The whole thing collapsed within weeks.

Percy was captured and eventually executed. Charles Neville fled across the Channel and ended up living a miserable exiled life in the Spanish Netherlands. He lost everything, his title, his estates, his income. He died in poverty in 1601, still technically the Earl of Westmoreland, but without a shred of land to his name.

The Tudors were nothing if not efficient. After the rising of the North, they made sure that no Neville would ever again control that kind of power. Castles were garrisoned or dismantled, family connections were picked apart, and the last fragments of the old Neville dynasty were quietly absorbed or erased.

But despite the Tudor effort to bury them, the Neville's had left fingerprints all over the 15th century. Their rise had shaped the Wars of the Roses. Their fall had helped to define the Tudors. When your workforce, tech stack, and business needs are evolving all at once, you need HCM software that moves just as fast.

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Let's talk very briefly. I said that Cecily gave birth to 12 children, but history usually just focuses on the three, Edward, George, Duke of Clarence, Richard III. And that's fair. They became kings, traitors or both. But several of Cecily's other children did survive and married and left descendants who would tangle with the Tudors, which honestly, tangling with the Tudors should be a band name or a podcast name or something.

If you want to start something and call it Tangling with the Tudors, please feel free to use that. You're welcome.

Anyway, let's take a quick look at what happened to the rest of her line and why Henry VIII had every reason to be paranoid. So there were some forgotten sons. There was Edmund Earl of Rutland, who was killed at age 17 alongside his father. His death was later dramatized in Shakespeare, but he, of course, left no heirs. Then there was also Thomas, William, and John. All of them died young, either in infancy or childhood.

Now, there were some daughters who lived, including Anne of York. She married Thomas Howard, who later became the second Duke of Norfolk. This marriage connected the Neville-York line to the powerful Howard family. Their grandson was Thomas Howard, the third Duke of Norfolk, who played a major role under Henry VIII and survived by sheer political slipperiness. And, of course, he had a niece called Anne Boleyn.

Also, there was Elizabeth of York, not to be confused with her niece, Henry VII's queen. Elizabeth of York, this older one, married John de la Pole, the second Duke of Suffolk. Their son, John de la Pole, was named heir by Richard III and then rebelled against Henry VII, and he died at the Battle of Stoke in 1487.

There was another son, Edmund de la Pole, who spent years in European exile claiming the throne. We've done episodes on the de la Pole family, which you can go back and listen to as well. Henry VII had him extradited and imprisoned. It was actually one of the very first foreign diplomatic victories of Cardinal Wolsey to bring him back so that Henry VIII could execute him in 1513.

There was also then Margaret of York. She married Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy. She became a critic of the Tudors, a bankroller of Tudor pretender, and spent decades sheltering Yorkist exiles. And Henry VII never forgave her. There were also Ursula, Cecily, and Agnes all died young or entered a religious life. Little trace remains of them.

So, Cecily's children and their descendants were everywhere, tied into the great families of England and continental Europe. And while the Tudors had tried to build a new dynasty, they were constantly looking over their shoulders at the lingering shadows of the Neville York bloodline that Cecily had unleashed. So, the Nevilles started out as northern landowners. They ended up making kings, marrying queens, and setting off rebellions that still gave the Tudors nightmares decades later.

They were everywhere in the late 15th century, at court, on the battlefield, and behind the scenes, twisting family loyalty and ambition into something close to national catastrophe. But for all their power, they couldn't hold on to it. The kingmaker's gamble backfired, his daughters were pulled into the violent collapse of the Yorkist dynasty, and the senior line, the Westmoreland Nevilles, finally threw their lot in with Mary Queen of Scots and lost everything.

The Tudors didn't just beat the Neville's, they dismantled them. Titles were revoked, estates seized, survivors fled or went quiet, and what remained of the Neville bloodline flowed into other families. Some of them Tudor themselves, but the name was no longer dangerous, it was just history. But if you peel back enough layers in 16th century politics, you keep just finding those Neville's in castles, in court intrigue, in rebellious sermons and whispered plots.

They were kingmakers and kingbreakers, and even when they were gone, the threat of them lingered enough to make Henry VIII reach for his axe, which, of course, he wasn't particularly reluctant to do, but there you have it. All right, my friend, we will leave it there, talking about the Neville's today. I hope you enjoyed this look at this family who were all over 15th and 16th century England.

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And I should say we still have about 10 tickets available for TudorCon in person as well. If you would like to come to that, englandcast.com slash TudorCon to come in person, englandcast.com slash TudorCon from home to join us online. All right, my friend, thank you so much for listening. Thank you for spending this time with me. I hope you enjoyed it. I will be back again very soon and have an amazing week. All right. Bye-bye.

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