The English nobleman Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick and of Salisbury (1428-1471), known as the Kingmaker, was the most powerful noble of his time in England and the principal baronial figure in the Wars of the Roses.

The eldest son of the Earl of Salisbury and nephew to Richard, Duke of York, Richard Neville was born on Nov. 22, 1428. He married Anne Beauchamp, through whom he inherited in 1449 the Warwick estate of a hundred manors. This wealth supplied troops for the 1455 street fight at St. Albans in which York, Salisbury, and Warwick captured the pliable Henry VI.

Warwick's reward was the captaincy of Calais, a position he filled with vigor and independence. Surviving a premature Yorkist demonstration in 1459 but forced to flee the country, in June 1460 Warwick and York's son Edward invaded England with 2,000 troops from the Calais garrison and captured Henry VI at Northampton on July 10. Parliament resisted...