Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 40.djvu/282

Neville spondent wish the night before Agincourt that they had there

But neither episode has any good historical warrant. They are first met with in Hall (d. 1547), from whom Shakespeare got them through Holinshed (, Chronicle, p. 50). Chichele was not yet archbishop at the time of the Leicester parliament; the question of war was certainly not discussed there, and the speeches ascribed to Chichele and Westmorland are obviously of later composition. Westmorland, in urging the superior advantages of war upon Scotland, if war there must be, is made to quote from the Scottish historian [q. v.], who was not born until 1469. The famous ejaculation before Agincourt was not made by Westmorland, for he did not go to France with the king. He was left behind to guard the Scottish marches and assist the regent Bedford as a member of his council (Ord. Privy Council, ii. 157). Henry had also appointed him one of the executors of the will which he made (24 July) before leaving England (Fœdera, ix. 289). The author of the ‘Gesta Henrici’ (p. 47), who was with the army in France, tells us that it was [q. v.] who was moved by the smallness of their numbers to long openly for ten thousand English archers. The attitude imputed to Westmorland in these anecdotes is, however, sufficiently in keeping with his advancing age and absorption in the relations of England to Scotland, and may just possibly preserve a genuine tradition of opposition on his part to the French war. In any case, he never went to France, devoting himself to his duties on the borders, and leaving the hardships and the glory of foreign service to his sons. He was one of the executors of Henry's last will, and a member of the council of regency appointed to rule in the name of his infant son (Rot. Parl. iv. 175, 399). As late as February 1424 he was engaged in his unending task of negotiating with Scotland (Ord. Privy Council, iii. 139). On 21 Oct. in the following year he died, at what, in those days, was the advanced age of sixty-two, and was buried in the choir of the Church of Staindrop, at the gates of Raby, in which he had founded three chantries in 1343 (, p. 314). His stately and finely sculptured tomb of alabaster, in spite of the injuries it has received since its removal to the west end to make way for the tombs of the Vanes, remains the finest sepulchral monument in the north of England. It has been figured by Gough in his ‘Sepulchral Monuments’ (1786), by Stothard in his ‘Monumental Effigies’ (1817), and by Surtees in his ‘History of Durham.’ It bears recumbent effigies of Westmorland and his two wives. His features, so far as they are revealed by the full armour in which he is represented, are too youthful and too regular to allow us to regard it as a portrait (, De Nova Villa, p. 311;, Warwick the Kingmaker, p. 17). The skeleton of the earl, which was discovered during some excavations in the chancel, is said to have been that of a very tall man with a diseased leg (, p. 315).

In his will, made at Raby, 18 Oct. 1424, besides bequests to his children and the friars, nuns, and anchorites of the dioceses of York and Durham, he left three hundred marks to complete the college of Staindrop, and a smaller sum towards the erection of bridges over the Ure, near Middleham, and the Tees at Winston, near Raby (Wills and Inventories, Surtees Soc., i. 68–74). Westmorland was, in fact, no inconsiderable builder. He rebuilt the castle of Sheriff-Hutton, twelve miles north-east of York, on the ridge between Ouse and Derwent, on a scale so magnificent that Leland saw ‘no house in the north so like a princely lodging,’ and the Neville saltire impaling the arms of England and France for his second wife may still be seen on its crumbling and neglected ruins. The church of Sheriff-Hutton has had inserted some of those curious flat-headed windows which are peculiar to the churches on the Neville manors, and they may very well be Westmorland's additions (, Yorkshire, under Staindrop, Well, and Sheriff-Hutton). At Staindrop he added the chamber for the members of his new college on the north side of the choir, and the last bay of the nave in which his tomb now lies. The license to establish a college for a master or warden, six clerks, six decayed gentlemen, six poor officers, and other poor men, for whose support the advowson of the church was set aside with two messuages and twelve acres of land for their residence, was granted on 1 Nov. 1410 (Monasticon Anglicanum, vi. 1401; cf., p. 314). Westmorland doubled the entrance gateway of Raby Castle, and threw forward the south-western tower, now called Joan's tower, to correspond (see Pritchett in the Reports and Journal of the British Archæological Association, 1886, 1887, 1889). He is also said to have been the builder of the tall and striking tower of Richmond parish church.

Westmorland was twice married: first (before 1370) to Margaret, daughter of Hugh,