Chapter 8: Two Favourites, Two Weddings - Edward II’s Nieces, The Clare Sisters: Powerful Pawns of the Crown

The king gave Roger Damory custody of the castle of Alton in Staffordshire, formerly Theobald Verdon’s main seat, on 24 January 1317, and later also granted Damory the marriage rights of the younger two of Elizabeth Burgh’s three stepdaughters, Elizabeth and Margery Verdon.^[1] Edward gave his friend Sir William Montacute the rights to her eldest stepdaughter’s marriage, and 14-year-old Joan Verdon married Montacute’s eldest son and heir John at Windsor on 28 April 1317, in the king’s presence.^[2] The teenaged John Montacute died a few months later, to the king’s evident sorrow: he paid forty clerks to pray for his soul and thirteen widows to watch over John’s body. John was buried in the cathedral church at Lincoln on 14 August 1317, and a few days later the king gave generous alms at the Masses celebrated in the cathedral for the repose of John’s soul.^[3] After John Montacute’s death, his younger brother William, probably born in 1301, became their father’s heir, and was later a close friend of Edward II’s son Edward III and was made Earl of Salisbury in 1337.

The year 1317 saw a further deterioration in the already dreadful relations between Edward II and the Earl of Lancaster, and the king foolishly allowed Roger Damory, Hugh Audley and William Montacute to encourage him in his hatred and distrust of his cousin. At a meeting of the royal council at Clarendon in early 1317, the three men openly attacked the earl, calling him a traitor.^[4] Lancaster sent messengers to the king, claiming that ‘he fears the deadly stratagems of certain persons who thrive under the protection of the royal court’.^[5] He asked Edward to expel the men from court, but the king refused. Lancaster continued to demand their removal from court, and the lands Edward had granted them taken away. The men had no intention of allowing Lancaster to diminish their vast influence over Edward, and selfishly counselled the king to remain hostile to his cousin and ‘intrigued against the earl as best they could’.^[6] The king was blind to Damory and Audley’s faults and foolish, dangerous behaviour, and wished as much as ever to marry the men to his two younger Clare nieces.

Elizabeth Burgh gave birth to her second child Isabella Verdon at Amesbury Priory, Wiltshire on Monday, 21 March 1317, eight months after Theobald Verdon’s death. Edward II sent a silver cup as a christening gift for his great-niece, and Queen Isabella was escorted the few miles from the royal palace of Clarendon near Salisbury by the under-sheriff of Wiltshire, John Harnham, to attend the infant’s christening at Amesbury on the day of her birth. Isabella Verdon was named after the queen, who was her chief sponsor or godmother, and one of her other godparents was Elizabeth’s aunt Mary. The christening was conducted by the Bishop of Salisbury, Roger Martival.^[7] If Elizabeth had borne a boy, he would have become Theobald Verdon’s sole heir from the moment of his birth and disinherited Elizabeth’s three stepdaughters Joan, Elizabeth and Margery, but Isabella Verdon became her father’s joint and equal heir with her older half-sisters. A few years later, the division of the Verdon inheritance into four parts was to cause much ill-tempered legal squabbling among the sisters and their husbands.^[8]

Edward II allowed his niece to recover for three weeks after giving birth then visited Elizabeth at Amesbury on 10 April 1317, taking Roger Damory with him. The date of the visit is not recorded, but the king granted a favour to a Robert Scales at Elizabeth’s request on 10 April, so she was in his presence on that date. This is the only known instance of Elizabeth successfully interceding with her uncle, which tends also to give the lie to Edward’s claim in September 1316 that he felt more affection for her than his other nieces. If he had, she would have been in his presence far more often and would have been able to ask him for favours on behalf of others, as her aunt-in-law the queen often did and her husband-to-be Roger Damory very frequently did.^[9] Edward left the royal palace of Clarendon near Salisbury on 10 April and was in Andover on the 11th, and Amesbury was just a short ride off the road between the two places.^[10] Presumably the visit was intended to arrange a date for Elizabeth and Roger’s wedding.

Elizabeth must have gone through the ceremony of purification (also sometimes called ‘churching’) on about 30 April 1317 approximately forty days after giving birth, though as she gave birth to a daughter she may have been churched only thirty days afterwards. As soon as this was over, she could be married to Roger Damory. The date of their wedding is, rather oddly, not recorded anywhere, but had already taken place by 3 May 1317 when an entry on the Patent Roll talks of ‘Roger Damory and Elizabeth his wife’.^[11] A month later, Damory was granted the castle of Knaresborough in Yorkshire (formerly Piers Gaveston’s) for life, and on 25 September 1317 Edward gave Damory and Elizabeth the castle of Salmon Leap in Ireland. It was to pass to their future ‘first-born son’— though as it turned out, they would not have any sons together—and after the son’s death, back to Edward and his heirs.^[12] Elizabeth gave birth to Damory’s daughter a little under eight months after the date of this grant, so it is not impossible that she, her husband and the king already knew she was pregnant.

It is sometimes assumed that Elizabeth’s attitude towards her new husband is revealed by her travelling on pilgrimage to various sites around the country before and after their wedding with her aunt Mary (the nun) and their kinswoman Isabella of Lancaster, second daughter of the Earl of Lancaster’s younger brother Henry (and a future nun and prioress of Amesbury).^[13] The idea goes that Elizabeth tried to delay married life with Damory, though this is only speculation, and it seems unlikely. Edward II paid all the ladies’ expenses, and is hardly likely to have been willing to pay his niece’s costs if he thought she was deliberately disrespecting Roger Damory. For all we know, Elizabeth asked Damory’s permission to travel and he gave it his full blessing, and she intended her travels to sanctify their marriage, not run away from it. For many years after Damory’s death, Elizabeth showed a great interest in pilgrimages and frequently went to Canterbury, Walsingham and Bromholm, and she must have been aware that her mother Joan of Acre had been born in the Holy Land while her grandparents Edward I and Leonor of Castile were on crusade there. In 1343, Elizabeth was absolved by Pope Clement VI from a vow she made ‘in her husband’s lifetime’ (perhaps Damory’s) to go on pilgrimage to the Holy Land and Santiago de Compostela, and in her will of 1355 left 100 marks for five men-at-arms to go to the Holy Land in ‘the service of God and the destruction of His enemies’.^[14] She might also have intended her 1317 journey to give thanks for her safe delivery of her daughter eight months after she lost her second husband.

There seems little reason to assume that her pilgrimage speaks to her distaste for Damory and her marriage to him. Then again, on 1 November 1317, six months after their wedding, Roger Damory founded a chantry at Bindon Abbey in Dorset and requested daily prayers for the ‘good estate’ of himself and Edward II but, perhaps rather pointedly, not for Elizabeth nor for any children they might have together, though he surely knew by then that she was pregnant with their child.^[15] The early months of their marriage may not have been particularly harmonious. Damory is mentioned in the Chancery rolls interceding with Edward II on 18 May 1317, still at Windsor, and it is likely that he remained at the king’s side for the weeks and months after his wedding while Elizabeth resumed her pilgrimage with her aunt.^[16] Elizabeth gave birth on or a little before 23 May 1318, so Damory had claimed his marital rights by late August 1317. Presumably Elizabeth’s pilgrimage had ended by then, and the couple had taken up residence together.

Elizabeth’s biographer has called the circumstances of her wedding to Damory ‘brutal and unfeeling’, though the marriage does not necessarily seem more brutal and unfeeling than most other fourteenth-century noble marriages, which were rarely founded in romance and true love. Her third marriage was surely less brutal and unfeeling than her second husband Theobald Verdon abducting her within hours of her return to England, and at least Damory sought Elizabeth’s consent, as Verdon may not have done.^[17] Elizabeth, already getting married for the third time and a mother of two, was still only 21 years old in April/May 1317, and Damory (like Theobald Verdon) was much older than she. Roger’s date of birth is not known, but his father Sir Robert Damory died in about July 1285, so he must have been at least in his early 30s in 1317 and was possibly a few years older than that. His elder brother Richard was old enough to be summoned for military service in 1297 and acted as keeper of the peace in Oxfordshire in 1300, so cannot have been born later than the mid-1270s or thereabouts.^[18] Whether Roger Damory had been married before is unknown, though as he was already in his 30s it is certainly possible. If so, he had no surviving legitimate children, though seems to have had illegitimate ones.

On 28 April 1317, the wedding of Elizabeth’s sister Margaret Gaveston and Sir Hugh Audley took place at the chapel in the park of Windsor Castle, in the king’s presence. Edward gave £3 in coins to be thrown over the heads of the bride and groom and another mark (two-thirds of a pound) for oblations.^[19] It is virtually certain that Elizabeth and Damory’s wedding took place within days of Margaret’s nuptials, also at Windsor, where the king stayed for much of May. Elizabeth Burgh spent five days at Windsor, so almost certainly attended her sister’s wedding as well as her own.^[20] Four days after the Audley wedding, Edward II wrote to his chancellor and treasurer to inform them that all the lands which Margaret held of him, providing her with an income of 2,000 marks a year, should be now held by herself and Hugh Audley jointly.^[21] Margaret was now 23 or almost, and Audley not much older. His parents married in 1288 or soon afterwards—his mother Isolde was widowed from her first husband in 1287—and he was the second of their three children. He was probably born around 1291 or 1293.^[22] Hugh was a nobleman, and his father Hugh Audley Senior of Stratton Audley in Oxfordshire was a former justice of North Wales and acted as steward of Edward II’s household for a while in 1312.^[23] Like Roger Damory, Hugh Audley was a second son: his elder brother James was their father’s heir, and they had a younger sister, Alice, ancestor of the Neville earls of Westmorland. Their father, the elder Hugh, was also a second son. Hugh Audley the younger may have known Roger Damory before they became royal favourites, as his family’s seat of Stratton Audley lies just ten miles from the Damorys’ seat of Bletchingdon, though Damory was a few years Audley’s senior. Whether the two men got along is uncertain, though as they rarely appear on record together while they were prominent at court between 1315 and 1318 (such as witnessing the same royal charters, for instance), perhaps they considered themselves rivals for the king’s affections.

Margaret Gaveston, whose name became Margaret Audley, had now married two of her uncle’s male favourites, though what kind of relationship Edward II had with Audley is impossible to say for sure: perhaps it was sexual, perhaps not. In the absence of any evidence on the matter, we cannot know how Margaret felt about marrying another man who may have been Edward’s lover. She was certainly more compliant than her mother Joan of Acre, who married a second husband of her own choice in 1297 while her father Edward I was pressing ahead with a marriage for her with the Count of Savoy. From other evidence we have, Margaret was arguably a biddable and acquiescent person in general. She could perhaps also have clandestinely married another man in the five years of her widowhood, and braved her uncle’s wrath, but she did not. This was probably a result of the king’s generous grants of land to her in the aftermath of Gaveston’s death, which she held ‘provided that she does not marry without the king’s licence’ (a common and entirely usual condition, not Edward imposing a harsh or unfair restriction on his niece).^[24] Hugh Audley seems to have been a rather decent and capable man, so Margaret might not have been at all unwilling to marry him. Their marriage would last for a quarter of a century, and in 1320, when their accounts happen to survive for a few months, they spent most of their time together. After the failed baronial rebellion of 1321/22, Margaret successfully begged the king to spare Audley’s life which she would hardly have done if she hated him, and they would be buried together at Tonbridge Priory, which also implies that they had built a happy and successful marriage. Eleanor Despenser buried both her husbands at Tewkesbury Abbey on her own lands and herself chose to be interred there with them, and it is probably also revealing that Elizabeth Burgh, by contrast, chose not to be buried next to any of her three husbands (admittedly, requesting burial next to John Burgh in Ireland would have caused some perhaps insurmountable logistical issues).

Eleanor Despenser and her husband Hugh the Younger probably attended her sisters’ weddings, and after the farce of Maud Clare’s pretended years-long pregnancy and Despenser’s long efforts to claim their lands, they must have been delighted that the inheritance could now be partitioned, though a lot of work remained to do before they were ready. The king finally gave the order for the partition on 12 May 1317, almost three years after the Earl of Gloucester’s death, now that his two younger nieces were married to men he trusted. Almost certainly he did not trust Hugh Despenser, but there was nothing he could do about it. On or just before 22 May, the king took the homage of Hugh Despenser, Hugh Audley and Roger Damory for the lands they would now control in right of their wives, though it would take another six months before the lands were ready to be partitioned.^[25] Edward II had every right to feel pleased with himself in 1317. One third of the Clare inheritance would fall to his beloved Piers Gaveston’s daughter Joan—assuming Margaret and Hugh Audley did not have a son, which would disinherit her—and another would pass to William Burgh, grandson and heir of the king’s ally the Earl of Ulster (in 1317, Edward arranged Joan Gaveston’s future marriage to John Multon, born 1308, another grandson of the Earl of Ulster). One third of the inheritance falling to Hugh Despenser the Younger, a man he had never liked or trusted, was the one thing Edward was probably not pleased about, though one consolation was that it would ultimately descend to Despenser’s son Huchon, Edward’s eldest great-nephew.

It may have been Hugh Audley and Roger Damory’s marriages to the most eligible women in England which prompted some of Edward’s household knights to stage a theatrical protest against the king’s promotion of new favourites in May 1317. As Edward dined at Westminster Hall at Pentecost, a woman entered dressed as a stage-player and riding a magnificently caparisoned horse. She rode around the hall, then turned to Edward on the dais, placed a letter in front of him, and rode out. Edward, amused, began to read the letter, but soon stopped, horrified; it was an indictment of the favouritism he showed his friends. Although the woman, when later questioned, denied knowledge of the contents of the letter, the St Albans’ chronicler says it was written by established men of Edward’s household angry with him for not treating them properly and for promoting worthless men in their place.^[26] The letter exhorted him to remember his duty to his nobles. Although Edward released the woman and, impressed with the integrity of the knights who had written the letter, gave them gifts, he failed to take their sage advice. In 1317 and 1318, the pernicious influence of Edward’s favourites, now his nephews-in-law, grew ever stronger.