Personalities and Politics

Abstract

Medieval politics were built on personal relationships. At the king’s coronation the great men of the realm did homage to him one by one, and it was as individuals that the king would have to deal with them for the rest of his reign, alert (if he was doing his job properly) to their influence, their interests, and their abilities — as they, of course, would be aware of his. But the relationships acknowledged in the coronation ritual were only the central strands of a far wider network of connections, once stigmatised as ‘bastard feudalism’, in which men rendered service to a social or political superior in return for support and favour. Those connections might not necessarily be close, but they were never impersonal, and they meant that for contemporaries political action was almost always an expression of personal service, in which the performance of that service consolidated the underlying relationship by creating a degree of obligation. In the crisis of 1471 Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, ended a letter to Henry Vernon of Haddon: ‘Henry, I pray you fail not now as ever I may do for you.’¹ Even kings, who could call upon the loyalty and support of their subjects without invoking a personal relationship, utilised a similar nexus of personal service in matters which touched them particularly closely.