Chapter 16: Intruder and Pharisee - Edward II’s Nieces, The Clare Sisters: Powerful Pawns of the Crown

In France, meanwhile, Queen Isabella was involved in long and intense negotiations with her brother Charles IV. She wrote to Edward II on 31 March, addressing him five times as ‘my very sweet heart’ and telling him how difficult her brother was being.^[1] The queen finally managed to arrange a peace settlement between England and France in June 1325. Although its terms were catastrophic for Edward II (through no fault of Isabella), he had no other choice but to ratify it. There remained, however, the awkward situation of the homage owed to Charles IV for Edward’s lands in Gascony and Ponthieu which he absolutely had to travel to France to perform. For various reasons, Edward did not wish to leave England. After prevaricating for many weeks and changing his mind regarding the correct course of action almost daily, Edward sent his son Edward of Windsor, not yet 13 years old, to France in September 1325 in his place. Hugh Despenser the Younger had pleaded with the king not to leave him behind in England, as his life would be in severe danger in Edward’s absence. His life was also in danger in France: the Vita Edwardi Secundi says that if Despenser and his father ‘are found within the kingdom of France [they] will assuredly not lack bad quarters’, a reference to a punishment (mala mansio) where the victim was stretched out and tied to a board. It adds that Despenser and his father ‘realised that in the absence of the king they would not know where to live safely’ in England and Wales. Adam Murimuth, royal clerk and chronicler, agrees that the whole country hated the two Hugh Despensers and that therefore they did not wish Edward to go abroad and leave them behind.^[2] The king, therefore, could neither leave his beloved behind or take him with him.

That Hugh Despenser the Younger genuinely did feel in physical danger because of the loathing he had brought upon himself by his extortions and general despotism is demonstrated by his being guarded by eight hobelars, armed men on horseback, all the time: the eight were paid by the king for ‘following Sir Hugh at all times wherever he went’.^[3] There is no doubt whatsoever that Eleanor Despenser’s husband and father-in-law were widely hated in England and Wales, and the younger Despenser was surely correct that someone, or indeed many people, would wish to assassinate him if they got the chance. He had spent the previous few years as cosseted royal favourite taking lands and manors from others, forcing them to acknowledge huge debts to him, and even imprisoning people until they agreed to do what he wished. His sister-in-law Elizabeth Burgh was only one of his many victims. Another, whom he imprisoned for eighteen months in 1324/25 until she signed over three manors to him, his father and the king, was the Scottish noblewoman Elizabeth Comyn. Others included the barons John Botetourt and his wife Maud, John Sutton and his wife Margaret, Despenser’s own sheriff of Glamorgan Sir John Inge, and his wife’s second cousin Alice Lacy, Countess of Lincoln. Other victims were considerably lower down the social scale, and Despenser was an equal opportunities extortionist who preyed on both women and men.

Eleanor Despenser stayed at Tonbridge Castle in Kent, which by right belonged to her sister Margaret Audley, from mid-September 1325 or earlier until about 9 October. Her husband joined her there on or just after 23 September, eleven days after he and the king watched Edward of Windsor sail to France from Dover; Hugh would next see his wife’s first cousin fourteen months later when the boy attended his execution. Eleanor sent her page John Dalby with letters to Edward II from Tonbridge shortly before 16 September, and the king sent letters to Hugh and perhaps Eleanor on or before the 28th.^[4] She joined her uncle at Banstead in Surrey on or just after 9 October; he had bought her a present of forty-seven goldfinches (an oddly random number, so perhaps three had died) which waited there for her arrival. Hugh Despenser, meanwhile, may have made a flying visit to their castle of Caerphilly, Eleanor’s birthplace, 150 miles away, and might also have been present at Westminster on 12 October when Sir John Sutton handed over eight of his and his wife Margaret’s manors to him and Eleanor after being imprisoned for three weeks and coerced.^[5] Over the next few days, Eleanor and her household moved into her uncle’s manor-house of Sheen west of London, where she would stay for the next few months; she was now about seven months pregnant, and would give birth at Sheen. Edward II visited her there from 12 to 17 October, paid her expenses, bought extra firewood for her chamber, and a month later purchased two lanterns for her. Hugh Despenser was also at Sheen with Eleanor and the king on 16 October, and withdrew £60 from his Italian bankers for his wife’s further expenses in November 1325.^[6] Given that Hugh and Eleanor owned extensive lands across southern England and South Wales and she could have lived at and given birth at any of them, it is perhaps rather odd, and revealing, that Edward II accommodated her at one of his own manors in the last two months of her pregnancy.

While she was living at Sheen in early November 1325, Eleanor lent £40 to a London merchant called Hugh Madefrey. Her uncle, who doted on her but who never forgave people he thought had betrayed him, ordered her sister Margaret’s husband Hugh Audley to be moved from prison at Berkhamsted Castle to Nottingham at this time.^[7] Audley had now been in prison for more than three-and-a-half years, and had Edward II and Hugh Despenser not fallen from power a year later, the king’s former companion and perhaps lover might have stayed in prison for the rest of his life (and Audley was still only in his early 30s in 1325). The same applies to Margaret Audley at Sempringham Priory. Whether her conscience troubled her over her sister and brother-in-law’s fate or not, Eleanor Despenser was surely very comfortable and living very well at the royal manor-house, but things were about to go terribly wrong for her husband, her uncle and herself. Around late October or early November 1325, her aunt-in-law Queen Isabella made a speech to the French court:

I feel that marriage is a joining together of man and woman, maintaining the undivided habit of life, and that someone has come between my husband and myself trying to break this bond; I protest that I will not return until this intruder is removed, but, discarding my marriage garment, shall assume the robes of widowhood and mourning until I am avenged of this Pharisee.^[8]

This has always been assumed to be a reference to Hugh Despenser the Younger. The queen also threatened to destroy Hugh with the help of her brother Charles IV and other Frenchmen; her letter or speech to this effect does not survive, but is known about from a letter which King Edward ordered all the English bishops to write to her during a parliament held in London in November/December 1325: ‘But as for what you [Isabella] have written, that what your brother the king of France and your other friends of France intend to do on your behalf, will turn out not to the prejudice of the lord king [Edward] or anyone else, but to the destruction of Hugh [Despenser] alone’.^[9]

Rumours reached Edward II near London in about the middle of November 1325 that Hugh Despenser, then in Wales while his wife remained at Sheen, had been killed. The king hastily sent three men to Wales to see what was going on and to return to him as quickly as possible with news of Despenser’s welfare (he was in fact perfectly well).^[10] It is not impossible that the king—and others, including Eleanor—believed that the queen had had Despenser assassinated. She had not, and Despenser had not been harmed in any way, though the rumour that he had been killed gives an impression of the fevered atmosphere and accusations and counter-accusations at the English and French courts which began in late 1325. Pope John XXII (r. 1316–34) assured Edward II a few months later that the messengers of the king’s half-brother the Earl of Kent had not spoken ill of Hugh Despenser to the pope, and assured Isabella herself that no messengers from England had spoken against her honour to him either. Emotions ran high. Isabella claimed on other occasions, though not in this speech to the French court, to be so frightened of Hugh Despenser that she feared for her life from him, and refused to return to Edward or allow her son to do so until the king removed Despenser from his side. The queen stated that she wanted above all else to be in her husband’s company, but dared not while Despenser was there, and seems genuinely to have been terrified of him. Whether she had cause to be, whether Despenser had hurt her or threatened to do so, is not clear. In a letter of February 1326, Isabella referred to Despenser as nostre mauvoillant, literally ‘our evil-wisher’, though the word can also mean ‘devil’.^[11]

Although Queen Isabella threatened on other occasions to destroy Hugh Despenser and he may well have been the person she meant when she spoke of the ‘Pharisee’ and ‘intruder’ who had come between her husband and herself and tried to break their marriage, she did not name the person involved, and it is not impossible that she did not mean Hugh but Eleanor Despenser. The word ‘Pharisee’ is usually used to mean a hypocritical, self-righteous and insincere person or someone who claims to be religious but behaves in an immoral way, and whatever Hugh Despenser’s faults, he was not a hypocrite. He certainly did immoral things, but by the standards of the day was not particularly pious and did not claim to be, and openly admitted his ambitions to be rich and powerful. The queen’s description might fit Eleanor Despenser better; someone who for years had acted as Isabella’s companion and even her friend and confidante, but who, Isabella may have come to believe, betrayed her by usurping her position with Edward II.

Isabella did not name the ‘Pharisee’ and ‘intruder’, either because she loathed Hugh Despenser so much she could not bring herself to utter his name, or perhaps because she meant Eleanor Despenser and did not wish, despite her rage and grief at the breakdown of her marriage, to cause too much embarrassment to a noble and partly royal woman in public. Perhaps the rather cryptic comment of the later chronicler Henry Knighton that Eleanor Despenser behaved as though she were Edward’s queen during Isabella’s absence in France is an oblique reference to Isabella’s belief that her husband’s niece was the third person in her marriage. It may also be significant that Isabella made her speech just weeks after her husband accommodated the pregnant Eleanor at his manor-house of Sheen and treated her with the utmost solicitousness there. There was a rumour in 1326/27 reported by a Flemish chronicler that Eleanor might be pregnant by the king, and the Westminster chronicler declared in its account of events in England in 1324 that Edward II enjoyed forbidden and sinful sex (and incest was certainly deemed forbidden and sinful). If the lover with whom Edward had a secret and intimate meeting opposite the Tower of London in October 1324 was indeed Eleanor, this was months before Isabella left England, and she and Eleanor spent much time in each other’s company at Christmas and New Year 1324/25 two months after that meeting. If Isabella subsequently learned that Eleanor had had sex with her own uncle, Isabella’s husband, before the two women were together in Nottingham and Kenilworth, it can only have disgusted and angered her, and made her feel intensely betrayed by them both. Whether the queen meant Hugh or Eleanor Despenser in her speech, it seems beyond doubt that she knew the person was having a sexual and romantic relationship with her husband, and took to wearing widow’s clothes to symbolise the destruction of her marriage by a third party.

Edward II wrote a letter to his wife on 1 December 1325, ordering her to come home from France.^[12] He told Isabella that he was suffering greatly from her absence, but devoted much of the letter to defending Hugh Despenser from Isabella’s complaint that she was frightened of him to the point of fearing for her life. The king made no reference to Isabella’s complaint about a third person destroying her marriage, either in his letter to the queen or in another letter he sent to her brother Charles IV. Edward also wrote to his son Edward of Windsor on 2 December to tell him to come home, and later that day went to visit the heavily pregnant Eleanor Despenser at his manor-house of Sheen. The king rowed himself along the River Thames from Westminster with eight of his chamber valets as attendants, who all received ‘boots for the water’. He gave his niece yet another generous gift of 100 marks ‘with his own hands’, dined on fresh roach, dace and loach (kinds of fish) with her, and returned to Westminster that night. The king had bought Eleanor larks and forty-seven goldfinches a few weeks previously and now had thirty of the goldfinches taken to her at Sheen, with three swans for good measure. Her chambers must have rung pleasantly with the sound of birdsong, and presumably she kept the swans on the River Thames outside—unless they were intended for her to eat. And the gift-giving was not one-sided: Eleanor sent a valet of her chamber called Thomas to the king with ‘a robe of four garments’ (i.e. a set of clothes) for him the day after his visit, as she had also done thirteen months previously, days after Edward’s clandestine meeting with a lover at La Rosere opposite the Tower of London.^[13] Hugh Despenser may have been with his wife at Sheen; he had returned from Wales and was at Westminster on 28 and 30 November and 3 December, and at the Tower of London on 5 and 9 December.^[14] Hugh and Eleanor’s eldest son Huchon, now probably 17, was at court with his father and his great-uncle the king in December 1325.^[15]

Eleanor Despenser gave birth to another child at the royal residence of Sheen shortly before 14 December 1325, when an offering by the king of 30 shillings to the Virgin Mary in gratitude for her prompt delivery was recorded in his accounts.^[16] She may, in fact, have given birth on or just before 2 December, and perhaps this was the reason for her uncle’s visit that day and for the large gift of cash. He had also given her 100 marks in April 1325 perhaps on hearing the news of her pregnancy. Little is known about noblewomen’s experience of childbirth in the early fourteenth century, but in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries they went into seclusion with female attendants a month or so before their due date. From this perspective, it seems strange for a man who was not even the child’s father to visit the expectant mother only days before she gave birth, or perhaps just afterwards. Eleanor would have been purified after childbirth in late December 1325 at the earliest, and the third week of January 1326 at the latest.

The child, at least Eleanor’s tenth, was not named or given a sex in the king’s accounts, but was most probably the Despensers’ fifth daughter Elizabeth, future Lady Berkeley. Perhaps Eleanor—who was now 33 years old—somewhat defiantly named her daughter after the sister her husband had persecuted, or perhaps Hugh himself chose the name and intended it to honour his own youngest sister Elizabeth Camoys née Despenser. It is also not impossible that Despenser, who was prone to malicious sarcasm, chose his daughter’s name as a mocking tribute to his victim of earlier in the year, Elizabeth Comyn. The infant would be the Despensers’ youngest child, unless the Flemish chronicler who speculated that Eleanor was pregnant when she was imprisoned at the Tower of London in and after late 1326 was correct.