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Updated: June 7, 2025
We must also remember the enormous power of the Scottish Crown through its right of granting wardships, especially in the case of a female heir. Under such grants the grantee, usually some very powerful noble, took over during minority the title of his ward and all his revenues absolutely, in return for a payment, correspondingly large, to the Crown.
Hubert's offices and lands were divided among his supplanters. Peter of Rivaux became keeper of wards and escheats, castellan of many castles on the Welsh march, and the recipient of even more offices and wardships in Ireland than in England. The custody of the Gloucester earldom went to the Bishop of Winchester.
To this were added Oswestry and Clun, the Fitzalan march in western Shropshire, forfeited to the crown by the faithfulness with which Edmund Fitzalan, the late Earl of Arundel, had laid down his life for Edward II. Minor grants of lands, offices, wardships, and pensions were constantly lavished upon him by the complacency of his mistress.
Nor did Hubert, with all his rugged honesty, neglect his own interests. He secured for himself lucrative wardships, such as the custody for the second time of the great Gloucester earldom, and of several castles, including the not very profitable charge of Montgomery, and the important governorship of Dover. On the very eve of his downfall he was made justice of Ireland.
On the 1st of April, 1644, the king gave to him, by the name of Edward Somerset, alias Plantagenet, Lord Herbert, Baron Beaufort, &c., a commission under the great seal, appointing him commander-in-chief of three armies of Englishmen, Irishmen, and foreigners; authorizing him to raise moneys on the securities of the royal wardships, customs, woods, &c.; furnishing him with patents of nobility from the title of marquis to that of baronet, to be filled up with names at his discretion; promising to give the Princess Elizabeth to his son Plantagenet in marriage with a dower of three hundred thousand pounds, a sum which did not much exceed what Herbert and his father had already spent in the king's service, and in addition to confer on Herbert himself the title of duke of Somerset, with the George and blue ribbon.
They were content, even in this plenitude of power, to depart from some articles of Henry I's charter, which they made the foundation of their demands, particularly from the abolition of wardships, a matter of the greatest importance; and they seem to have been sufficiently careful not to diminish too far the power and revenue of the crown.
It could have been no light thing to be a great man in such times, and small wonder was it that those who lived in and about the Court, whose duty it was to make a brave show in the eyes of royalty, were so often rewarded for trifling services by the gifts of Manors, benefices, or wardships; for the cost of keeping up such state as was required was great indeed, and could not have been done without some adequate compensation.
King Richard came not of a squeamish race, and would have sold anything to any buyer, pawned his crown or taken another man's to get the worth of a company's pay out of it. Fines, escheats, reliefs, forfeitures, wardships, marriages he heaped exaction on exaction, with mighty little result. When his mind was set he was inexorable, insatiable, without scruple.
For their tenure was liable to homage and fealty, as understood in the feudal sense, to wardships and impediments to marriage, to fines for alienations, to what English legists call primer seizins, rents, reliefs, escheats, and, finally, forfeitures; this last was at all times more strictly observed in England than in any other feudal country, and by its enactments so many noble families have, in the course of ages, been reduced to beggary, and their chiefs often brought to the block.
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