| Nationality | Beauchamp, Henry, duke of Warwick (1425–1446), magnate, was the only son, and heir, of Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick (d. 1439), with his second wife, Isabella, sister and heir of Richard, Lord Despenser, and widow of Richard Beauchamp, heir of Bergavenny and earl of Worcester. Henry, who had three older sisters from his father's first marriage, to the Berkeley heiress, was born at the Despenser property of Hanley Castle in Worcestershire on 22 March 1425. His godparents were Cardinal Beaufort, the earl of Stafford, Joan Beauchamp, Lady Bergavenny, and Philip Morgan, bishop of Worcester. As a child he accompanied his father overseas at least once. In 1434 he married Cecily Neville (d. 1450), the second daughter of Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury. At the same time Henry's only full sister, Anne, was married to Salisbury's eldest son and heir, also called Richard.
Both of Beauchamp's parents died while he was still a minor, his father in France in April 1439 and his mother the following December. He thus became heir to a large estate, most of it in the west midlands and south Wales, centred on the Beauchamp political capitals of Warwick and Elmley (Worcestershire) and the Despenser one of Tewkesbury (Gloucestershire), although there were outliers in, for example, Cornwall, Staffordshire, the east midlands, Durham, and East Anglia. With the lands went the hereditary offices of chamberlain of the exchequer and sheriff of Worcestershire. He also inherited the Hastings lands, including the lordship of Bergavenny, together with the Warwick estates which had been granted to William Beauchamp, Lord Bergavenny, both of which had come to his father under entail in 1435, although most of the Warwick estates in the entail had been placed in the Beauchamp trust. During his minority, custody of much of his land was held by a group comprising mainly close servants of his father, including William Mountford of Warwickshire, John Throgmorton of Warwickshire and Worcestershire, and John Vampage of Worcestershire, but led by two rising figures at court, Lord Sudeley and Lord Beauchamp of Powick, the latter of whom had a long-standing connection with the boy, as he had presented him at his confirmation.
As early as 1442 Henry Beauchamp was already benefiting from the generosity with grants characteristic of Henry VI's majority. While it is now clear that it would be unwise to divide the nobles in the 1440s into a small number of privileged courtier nobility and a larger body of disgruntled outsiders, Beauchamp seems to have been regarded as a promising recruit by the group around the duke of Suffolk who were managing the kingdom. Indeed part of his father's following, notably Mountford, was moving in the same direction. It may well be that Henry was seen by Sudeley and Beauchamp of Powick as the focus for a possible alternative power base within the household. He continued to be the recipient of grants to the end of his life, including, in 1444, the reversion of the manor and forest of Feckenham, Worcestershire, held by Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, and the marriage of the heir of the earl of Arundel in 1445. He was a royal counsellor as early as 1441. In 1444 he was given the reversion of a number of offices in the duchy of Lancaster honours of Tutbury and of the High Peak in Staffordshire and Derbyshire, most notably the stewardship of Tutbury, with inheritance in tail male. The Tutbury offices had been granted, eventually for life, to Humphrey, earl of Stafford, in 1435 and 1437, and the prospect of their eventual alienation to someone who was then so young, whose interests in the north midlands were nothing like as strong as his own, and the eventual exclusion of any other grantees, including the Staffords, must have seemed profoundly insulting to Humphrey. That this was much more a matter of indiscriminate gift-giving, and possibly of internal division within the royal household, than a sign that Stafford was no longer persona grata at court can be seen from the leap-frogging in titles of the two men in 1444–5: Warwick was made premier earl in April 1444, Stafford created duke of Buckingham in September, Warwick made a duke in April 1445 and given precedence over all other dukes except for Norfolk but, rather farcically, was later made to alternate precedence with Buckingham. Although there is no formal record of grant of livery of Henry Beauchamp's lands (many were in any case in the hands of feoffees), a royal signet letter of July 1445 instructed that he be placed on appropriate commissions of the peace, and in February 1446, just before he was officially of age, he was appointed to the Warwickshire commission.
In Warwickshire Henry Beauchamp inherited a situation in which the power of his father's affinity, which had once embraced the whole county and much of its periphery, had been seriously diluted during his minority. However, no one else had been able to replace Richard Beauchamp's hegemony. The problem was that this was a county whose geography and tenurial structures deprived it of any natural unity, and strong noble leadership, preferably backed by authoritative kingship, would always be essential if it was to function cohesively as a political and administrative entity. Consequently, the coincidence of a minority in the obvious ruling family and failure of kingship had led to a period of incoherence in local governance. Buckingham himself had made an unsuccessful attempt to master the county from his power base in the north midlands and north Warwickshire, and the west Warwickshire/east Worcestershire heartland of Warwick power was being taken over by Beauchamp of Powick and Sudeley. Henry Beauchamp needed to reconstitute his father's affinity and rebuild the family authority in Warwickshire and the west midlands. From 1444 the appointments to Warwickshire offices and other evidence suggest that Beauchamp was succeeding in re-establishing the family position. The fact that he could look forward to possession of the duchy authority in the counties to the north, which his father had never had, should have made his task relatively easier.
However, Henry Beauchamp's efforts foundered on three interlinked difficulties. First there were the divisions within the Warwick affinity which he was never able to heal properly; most damagingly, he was particularly unsuccessful in reabsorbing those at the geographical core who had drifted towards Sudeley and Beauchamp of Powick. Then he came up against Buckingham in local as well as national politics and, here again, he found himself at odds with some of his father's former supporters among the local gentry. Finally, and most seriously, deep rifts began to appear within his own immediate following, notably with the Verneys, a rising family from Compton Murdack (Compton Verney) in south Warwickshire. They had done well out of service to Beauchamp's father and now seem to have been trying to exploit the youth and inexperience of Henry Beauchamp himself and his bad relationship with Buckingham. In 1445–6 there was a period of considerable confusion in Warwickshire politics, caused principally by the personal failure of Duke Henry, the man with much the greatest power within the county, in which none of the local magnates appear to have been able to manage either local governance or their own affinities. It was only the sudden death of Beauchamp at Hanley on 11 June 1446 that made it possible for a measure of local equilibrium to be restored. His commendation in the Rous roll for piety and justice seems somewhat out of keeping with what is known of his career (Rous, ed. Ross, no. 54). He was buried, with the rest of the Despenser line, in Tewkesbury Abbey.
Henry Beauchamp was succeeded by his daughter Anne, then two years old, who was placed in the custody of Suffolk, but who died in 1449 at Suffolk's residence of Ewelme, Oxfordshire. The title and much of the estate descended to Richard Neville, the Kingmaker, as husband of Beauchamp's only full sister. In 1449 Henry Beauchamp's widow married John Tiptoft, later earl of Worcester. |