Humphrey Stafford, 1st Duke Of Buckingham

Humphrey Stafford, 1st Duke of Buckingham, 6th Earl of Stafford, 7th Baron Stafford, (December 1402 – 10 July 1460) of Stafford Castle in Staffordshire, was an English nobleman and a military commander in the Hundred Years' War and the Wars of the Roses. Through his mother he had royal descent from King Edward III, his great-grandfather, and from his father, he inherited, at an early age, the earldom of Stafford. By his marriage to a daughter of Ralph, Earl of Westmorland, Humphrey was related to the powerful Neville family and to many of the leading aristocratic houses of the time. He joined the English campaign in France with King Henry V in 1420 and following Henry V's death two years later he became a councillor for the new king, the nine-month-old Henry VI. Stafford acted as a peacemaker during the partisan, factional politics of the 1430s, when Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, vied with Cardinal Beaufort for political supremacy. Stafford also took part in the eventual arrest of Gloucester in 1447.

Stafford returned to the French campaign during the 1430s and for his loyalty and years of service, he was elevated from Earl of Stafford to Duke of Buckingham. Around the same time, his mother died. As much of his estate—as her dower—had previously been in her hands, Humphrey went from having a reduced income in his early years to being one of the wealthiest and most powerful landowners in England. His lands stretched across much of the country, ranging from East Anglia to the Welsh border. Being such an important figure in the localities was not without its dangers and for some time he feuded violently with Sir Thomas Malory in the Midlands.

After returning from France, Stafford remained in England for the rest of his life, serving King Henry. He acted as the King's bodyguard and chief negotiator during Jack Cade's Rebellion of 1450, helping to suppress it. When the King's cousin, Richard, Duke of York, rebelled two years later, Stafford investigated York's followers. In 1453, the King became ill and sank into a catatonic state; law and order broke down further and when civil war began in 1455, Stafford fought for the King in the First Battle of St Albans which began the Wars of the Roses. Both were captured by the Yorkists and Stafford spent most of his final years attempting to mediate between the Yorkist and Lancastrian factions, the latter by now headed by Henry's wife, Margaret of Anjou. Partly due to a feud with a leading Yorkist—Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick—Stafford eventually declared for King Henry and the Duke of York was defeated in 1459, driving York into exile. When the rebels returned the following year they attacked the royal army at Northampton. Acting as the King's personal guard in the ensuing struggle, Stafford was killed and the King was again taken prisoner. Stafford's eldest son had died of plague two years earlier and the Buckingham dukedom descended to Stafford's five-year-old grandson, Henry, a ward of the King until he came of age in 1473.

Background and youth

Humphrey Stafford was born in Stafford sometime in December 1402. He was the only son of Edmund Stafford, 5th Earl of Stafford, and Anne of Gloucester, who was the daughter of Edward III's youngest son Thomas of Woodstock. This gave Humphrey royal descent, and made him a second cousin to the then king, Henry IV.

On 21 July 1403, when Humphrey was less than a year old, his father was killed fighting for Henry IV against the rebel Henry Hotspur at the Battle of Shrewsbury. Humphrey became 6th Earl of Stafford. With the earldom came a large estate with land in more than a dozen counties. Through her previous marriage to Edmund's older brother, Thomas, his mother accumulated two dowries, each comprising a third of the Stafford estates. She occupied these lands for the next twenty years, and Humphrey received a reduced income of less than £1,260 a year until he came of age. As his mother could not, by law, be his guardian, Humphrey became a royal ward and was put under the guardianship of Henry IV's queen, Joan of Navarre. His minority lasted for the next twenty years.

Early career

Although Stafford received a reduced inheritance, as the historian Carol Rawcliffe has put it, "fortunes were still to be made in the French wars". Stafford assumed the profession of arms. He fought with Henry V during the 1420 campaign in France and was knighted on 22 April the following year. On 31 August 1422, while campaigning, Henry V contracted dysentery and died. Stafford was present at his death and joined the entourage that returned to England with the royal corpse. When Stafford was later asked by the royal council if the King had left any final instructions regarding the governance of Normandy, he claimed that he had been too upset at the time to be able to remember. Stafford was still a minor, but parliament soon granted him livery of his father's estate, allowing him full possession. The grant was based on Stafford's claim that the King had orally promised him this before dying. The grant did not require him to pay a fee into the Exchequer, as was normal.

The new king, Henry VI, was still only a baby, so the lords decided that the dead King's brothers—John, Duke of Bedford and Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester—would have to be prominent in this minority government. Bedford, it was decided, would rule as regent in France, while Gloucester would be chief councillor (although not protector) in England. Stafford became a member of the new royal council on its formation. It first met in November 1422 and Stafford was to be an assiduous attender for the next three years. Gloucester repeatedly claimed the title of Protector based on his relationship to the dead King. By 1424, the rivalry between him and his uncle Henry Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester—as ''de facto'' head of council—had become an outright conflict. Although Stafford seems to have personally favoured the interests of Gloucester in the latter's struggle for supremacy over Beaufort, Stafford attempted to be a moderating influence. For example, in October 1425, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Portuguese Duke of Coimbra and Stafford helped to negotiate an end to a burst of violence that had erupted in London between followers of the two rivals. In 1428, when Gloucester again demanded an increase in his power, Stafford was one of the councillors who personally signed a strong statement to the effect that Gloucester's position had been formulated six years earlier, would not change now, and that in any case, the King would attain his majority within a few years. Stafford was also chosen by the council to inform Beaufort—now a Cardinal—that he was to absent himself from Windsor until it was decided if he could carry out his traditional duty of Prelate to the Order of the Garter now that the Pope had promoted him.

Stafford was made a Knight of the Order of the Garter in April 1429. The following year, he travelled to France with the King for Henry's French coronation, escorting him through the war-torn countryside. The Earl was appointed Lieutenant-General of Normandy, Governor of Paris, and Constable of France over the course of his next two years of service there. Apart from one occasion in November 1430 when he and Thomas Beaufort, Duke of Exeter took the English army to support Philip, Duke of Burgundy, Stafford's primary military role at this time was defending Paris and its environs. He also attended the interrogation of Joan of Arc in Rouen in 1431; at some point during these proceedings, a contemporary alleged, Stafford attempted to stab her and had to be physically restrained.

On 11 October 1431 the King created Stafford Count of Perche, which was a province in English-occupied Normandy; he was to hold the title until the English finally withdrew from Normandy in 1450. The county was valued at 800 marks per annum, although the historian Michael Jones has suggested that due to the war, in real terms "the amount of revenue that could be extracted ... must have been considerably lower". Since Perche was a frontier region, in a state of almost constant conflict, whatever income the estate generated was immediately re-invested in its defence.

In England, the King's minority ended in 1436. In preparation for his personal rule, the council reorganised Henry's Lancastrian estates to be under the control of local magnates. This gave Stafford responsibility for much of the north Midlands, which was the largest single area of the duchy to be delegated among the nobility. This put the royal affinity—those men retained directly by the Crown to provide a direct link between the King and the localities—at his command.

Estates

The centrepiece of Stafford's estates, and his own caput