Warwick the Kingmaker: The Man Who Put Two Kings on the English Throne — and Died for the Third
He had six hundred personal guards, thirty thousand people fed daily at his table, and more political influence than the kings he served. Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, spent twenty years making and unmaking English monarchs during the Wars of the Roses — until the last king he tried to control came back from exile, met him on the field at Barnet, and killed him.
By BookOfWorldHistory·June 2, 2026·History·7 min read · 1,271 words
Originally published at: https://www.bookofworldhistory.com/blog/warwick-kingmaker-wars-of-roses-medieval-england-history
He had six hundred personal guards, thirty thousand people fed daily at his table, and more political influence than the kings he served. Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, spent twenty years making and unmaking English monarchs during the Wars of the Roses — until the last king he tried to control came back from exile, met him on the field at Barnet, and killed him.
Six hundred armed men in his personal retinue. Thirty thousand people fed at his table every day — not a typo, thirty thousand, according to contemporaries who recorded it. One hundred and ten estates across England. The whole city of Worcester. The Channel Islands. A castle at Warwick with towers taller than most church spires that still stands today and draws tourists by the thousand.
Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, was the wealthiest and most powerful English subject of the fifteenth century, and he used that power to do something that should have been impossible: he installed two different men on the English throne, overthrew each of them when they stopped following his advice, and spent the last years of his life ricocheting between the Lancastrian and Yorkist factions in a way that would have seemed like impossible cynicism if it hadn't been driven by perfectly coherent political logic.
He was called the Kingmaker, though not in his own lifetime. The name came later, from historians trying to describe what he had actually done. It fits.
Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, commanded six hundred personal guards, owned more than a hundred estates across England, and exercised political power that made the kings he nominally served dependent on his support — until the last king he tried to control came back from exile and killed him at Barnet in 1471.
The Wars That Needed a Kingmaker
The Wars of the Roses grew out of a dynastic problem that had been festering since 1399. Henry Bolingbroke had deposed and effectively murdered Richard II in that year, taking the throne as Henry IV. His claim was good enough to hold, but it was not beyond challenge — there were other descendants of Edward III with claims that were, by some readings of inheritance law, more direct.
For a generation, the Lancastrian kings — Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI — held on. Henry V's Agincourt glory papered over the cracks. But Henry VI was not his father. He was pious, passive, repeatedly incapacitated by mental illness, and incapable of the decisive rule that medieval kingship required. His queen, the formidable Margaret of Anjou, was the real political force on the Lancastrian side, but her foreign birth and forceful personality made enemies faster than Henry's weakness made them.
The Yorkist claim came through Richard, Duke of York — a great-great-grandson of Edward III through a line that some argued was senior to the Lancastrian line. Richard was competent, popular with the nobles, and understandably frustrated by the spectacle of Henry VI's misrule. He was also Warwick's cousin, and Warwick's loyalty to the Yorkist cause would do more for it than Richard's own sword.
Making the First King
Richard, Duke of York, was killed at the Battle of Wakefield in December 1460 — his head was mounted above one of the gates of York, wearing a paper crown in mockery of his royal pretensions. It was a brutal humiliation, and Queen Margaret's forces were responsible for it.
This left the Yorkist cause to Richard's son Edward, who was eighteen years old, tall, handsome, and physically imposing in a way that his father apparently hadn't been. He also had Warwick behind him, which in 1461 was arguably more important than personal charisma.
Warwick marched to London with his army. The city opened its gates. Edward was proclaimed king. He met the Lancastrian army at the Battle of Towton in March 1461 — the bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil, in a snowstorm, with Warwick fighting on foot beside his men after reportedly killing his own horse to demonstrate he would not run — and won decisively. Henry VI and Margaret fled to Scotland.
Edward IV was on the throne. Warwick had put him there and expected to be the power behind it.
The Break With Edward
Edward IV did not behave like a king who thought he owed his throne to Warwick's support. He was shrewd, politically capable, and fundamentally unwilling to let anyone else run his kingdom for him — least of all a cousin who had gotten used to giving orders to monarchs.
The breaking point came over a marriage. Warwick had been negotiating on Edward's behalf for a French princess, a diplomatic arrangement that would have cemented an alliance with France. While Warwick was abroad conducting those negotiations, Edward secretly married Elizabeth Woodville — a widow with two sons from her previous marriage, no royal blood, and a large family of brothers and sisters who immediately began filling positions at court.
Warwick found out when he returned to England. The humiliation was compounded by the Woodvilles' rise — they were now his rivals for royal favor, and Edward had demonstrated that he was entirely capable of making major decisions without consulting the man who had made him king.
Relations deteriorated through the mid-1460s. Warwick started putting his own candidates forward against Edward's in various disputes. He stirred up northern rebellions. He even had Edward briefly imprisoned in 1469. Eventually, in 1470, he was driven out of England entirely — forced to flee to France with his family.
The Strangest Alliance in English History
In France, Warwick ran into Queen Margaret of Anjou — his old Lancastrian enemy, the woman whose forces had killed his cousin Richard and put a paper crown on the severed head.
And they made a deal.
Margaret needed military force to reclaim England for her imprisoned husband Henry VI. Warwick needed a king to support who was not Edward IV. The French king Louis XI, who had reason to want trouble in England, provided men and money. Warwick's daughter was betrothed to Margaret's son as a seal on the arrangement.
In September 1470, Warwick landed in England with an army. Edward IV, caught between Warwick's forces from the south and a Lancastrian rising in the north, had no choice — he fled to the Netherlands in a fishing boat without waiting for a battle. Warwick marched to the Tower of London and led out Henry VI, half-mad and barely functional, and placed him back on the throne for the second time.
He had now installed two kings. Edward IV's five-year reign was apparently over.
Barnet and the Death of the Kingmaker
Edward was not finished. The Duke of Burgundy provided ships and soldiers, and in March 1471 he landed back in England. The same English pragmatism that had welcomed Warwick six months earlier now welcomed Edward back — people had gotten a good look at the restored Lancastrian government and found it not significantly better than what they'd had.
Edward marched toward London. Warwick moved to intercept him. They met at the Battle of Barnet on April 14, 1471, in heavy fog so thick that one of Warwick's own units attacked another Lancastrian force by mistake, thinking they were Yorkists. The confusion broke the Lancastrian line.
Warwick was killed in the fighting — cut down trying to reach his horse, some accounts say, as his army collapsed around him. He was forty-three years old.
Edward IV went on to rule for another twelve years, dying in his bed in 1483. Henry VI died in the Tower a few weeks after Barnet — almost certainly murdered on Edward's orders. Margaret of Anjou was captured, ransomed back to France, and spent her last years in poverty.
The Kingmaker's influence outlasted him in unexpected ways. The instability his maneuvers had created, and the precedent he had set for making kingship conditional on noble support, fed directly into the dynastic struggles that continued for another generation. Richard III's seizure of the throne in 1483 and his defeat at Bosworth in 1485 — which ended the Plantagenet dynasty and brought the Tudors to power — grew directly from the soil that Warwick had spent twenty years turning over.
Warwick Castle is still standing. The towers are still taller than most church spires. The family that built it has been gone for five hundred and fifty years, but the building remains, which is more than can be said for most of the kings Warwick made.
Warwick Castle — described by contemporaries as having towers taller than most church spires — was the seat of Richard Neville's power during the Wars of the Roses. It remains one of the best-preserved medieval castles in England, now a popular heritage attraction visited by thousands each year.