In 1461 Warwick found himself without rival in and around Warwickshire. Buckingham had died at Northampton in 1460 and his son of plague in 1458; the heir was an infant grandson, who was not to come into his lands until 1473. The family estates in England were in the hands of the duke's widow, who in 1467 was to marry Walter Blount, a Derbyshire landowner who had eventually gone over to the Yorkists in the late 1450s. The dowager duchess seems to have spent a good deal of her time at Maxstoke, which meant that this particular north Warwickshire citadel was no longer the threat it had been in the past. Warwick's northern flank was further secured by his appointment to the stewardship of Tutbury for life and to other Duchy offices in Staffordshire and Derbyshire, while Tutbury itself was granted in 1464 to the king's younger brother, the duke of Clarence, whose political interests were to move steadily closer to the earl's over the decade. Warwick also had a grant of the crown manor of Atherstone in north Warwickshire which had formerly helped reinforce Buckingham's power there. The senior branch of the Mountfords had won an outright victory with the defeat of the Lancastrians and Edmund's exile with Henry VI and the queen. Although Baldwin promptly retired into the priesthood, his son and heir Simon had been formally retained by Warwick since at least 1456 and had been very much under his protection before then. The confiscation of the lands of the earl of Wiltshire had left the disputed Botetourt estate in the hands of the crown, apart from Weoley and Northfield which remained with the Berkeleys.