Chapter 18: The End of Hugh Despenser - Edward II’s Nieces, The Clare Sisters: Powerful Pawns of the Crown

Eleanor Despenser was staying at Leeds Castle in Kent on 4 June 1326 while Hugh and Edward II were at Saltwood Castle thirty miles away. Here they met the archbishop of Vienne and the bishop of Orange, envoys sent to England by Pope John XXII as part of his attempts to reconcile Edward and Queen Isabella. The envoys’ journey proved fruitless as the king refused to send Hugh Despenser away from him, as Isabella had demanded as the condition for her return to her husband. At some point in the summer of 1326, the queen moved to the county of Hainault on France’s northern border, which was ruled by Willem, husband of her first cousin Jeanne de Valois. Isabella betrothed her son Edward of Windsor to Philippa of Hainault (c. 1314–69), one of Willem and Jeanne’s daughters, at the end of August 1326 in return for their aid in raising an army and providing ships so that she could invade Edward II’s kingdom and bring down the loathed Hugh Despenser. Edward, so dependent on Hugh in some way that he would not remove him from his side even in the face of his wife’s impending invasion, also continued to show great affection for his niece Eleanor Despenser. He sent her a gift of 20 marks via his sergeant John Mildenhale while she was at Leeds Castle. Eleanor was taken to Edward at the Tower of London by twenty-five sailors of the ship La Despenser on 17 June, and was at the Tower with him and her husband on the 20th and still at court on the 25th, when her uncle gave her ‘one piece of white worsted’ cloth. Her eldest son Huchon was also with his parents and the king in late June and early July 1326.^[1] Edward II continued to make unsuccessful attempts to persuade his wife and son to return from France. Although he wrote to Edward of Windsor on 19 June 1326 (as he was surely aware, it was the fourteenth anniversary of the death of his beloved Piers Gaveston, Margaret Audley’s first husband), the boy was not acting under his own agency but his mother’s, and Isabella was set on Hugh Despenser the Younger’s destruction. She was not willing to return to her husband’s side or permit her son to do so until she had achieved it.

Edward II and Eleanor Despenser ‘ate privately’ together in the park of Windsor Castle on 11 July 1326. Their cook, Will Balsham, was given 40 shillings to buy himself a hackney horse on which to follow them there, the money given to him by the king in person ‘between two silver dishes’. A hackney was a riding horse, so the animal was not intended for Balsham to carry whatever food he had prepared for the two or for his equipment, implying that Edward and his niece went to a remote corner of the park, too far for Balsham to follow them on foot. The king had a personal bodyguard of eight archers who presumably stayed somewhere near him on this occasion, though there is no specific record of anyone other than Will Balsham attending the pair during their alfresco meal. Whether this says anything about the nature of Edward and Eleanor’s relationship is unclear, though the word in the king’s account which describes their dining can be translated as ‘secretly’, ‘discreetly’, or ‘covertly’, as well as ‘privately’. Will Balsham had been in France with the queen and was one of her many servants who returned to England after Isabella refused to come back, and after Edward II’s downfall, he went to work for her again. Balsham might, therefore, have been able to inform the queen if he had seen anything untoward in her husband’s behaviour towards his niece.^[2] The summer of 1326 was terribly hot: two chroniclers comment that there was a drought in England, rivers dried up and ‘conflagrations’ burst out spontaneously, so perhaps Edward and Eleanor sat in the shade. In June, Edward gave linen cloth to his eight archers for hose which, he said, was a gift in return for their hard work in running fast and well with him in the hot weather (the archers were on foot and ran alongside and in front of the king when he rode from place to place).^[3]

Two weeks after their Windsor picnic, on 25 and 26 July 1326, Edward and Eleanor sailed along the Thames together in Surrey in a flat-bottomed boat or barge called a shoute, and Edward spent 18 pence on roach and dace for Eleanor from a fisherman in Byfleet. The king paid a man in Walton-on-Thames 6 pence to bring them fresh water from a well, perhaps another indication of the heat, and ordered a servant to give 3 shillings in alms to seven women fishing in the Thames. This entry in Edward’s account states that the alms were given to the women ‘in the presence of the king and my lady’. This means Eleanor, who was not named, and otherwise in documents of Edward II’s reign the words ‘my lady’ (ma dame) without a name referred to Queen Isabella. The same applies in Edward III’s reign: his queen, Philippa of Hainault, was often simply called ma dame in his accounts without her name.^[4] It is most unusual for the king to be linked in such a way with a woman who was not Isabella, and this entry gives the curious impression that Eleanor was Edward II’s wife and queen. They could not, of course, truly have married, given the close family relationship between them and given that they had both been married to other people for many years, but perhaps the descriptions of Eleanor in the king’s accounts reveal that he thought of her as his real queen, at least in some ways. Eleanor was still with her uncle at Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire on 28 July when he granted a favour to the priory of Wix in Essex at her request. Her husband Hugh made a quick visit to Wales—where exactly in Wales was not specified—in late July and early August 1326, though soon returned to the south-east of England, and just before his departure had received a rather poignant gift from the king: a large and expensive manuscript of the doomed love story of Tristan and Isolde. The king sent his ‘runner’ John Stretton with letters to Despenser in Wales on 25 July while he and Eleanor were in his boat near the bridge at Kingston-on-Thames, and sent him more letters on the 30th.^[5] Various extant petitions of c. 1322 to 1326 complain about Hugh Despenser taking people’s manors from them with the aid of a man called William Horwode, said to be a member of ‘the household of the king and Sir Hugh Despenser the son’.^[6] This description of their joint household also tends to give the impression that Edward and Hugh were a married couple and reveals the two men’s extraordinary closeness. It is easy to understand why a chronicler thought that Eleanor Despenser was treated as though she were Edward II’s queen during Isabella’s absence abroad, and also why an abbey annalist referred to Edward and Hugh Despenser as ‘the king and his husband’.

On 29 July 1326, while Eleanor was with the king in Oxfordshire, Elizabeth Burgh’s former father-in-law Richard Burgh, Earl of Ulster, died in Ireland at the age of about 67. His heir to the earldom was Elizabeth’s son William ‘Donn’ Burgh, born in September 1312 and not yet 14, who was also heir to her third of the Clare inheritance. As heir to Ulster, William lived some of the time in Ireland as he grew up. He was in his grandfather the earl’s company in July 1322 and April 1323, when he and Richard were given safe-conducts for ‘coming to the king [Edward II] on the king’s affairs’. William was also in Ireland in August 1323 shortly before his eleventh birthday, when he and Richard Burgh were two of the people ordered to search for the recently-escaped Roger Mortimer in Ireland.^[7] He must have spent at least some of his time with his mother, however, as in 1324/25 there is a reference to his chamber at Clare Castle.^[8] William was in England with his mother in the summer and autumn of 1326, and one of Elizabeth’s servants purchased black cloth for him in Ipswich after his grandfather’s death. Elizabeth spent 15 shillings on a saddle for William’s courser on 30 September, and gave him 4 pence on 13 October for mending a sheepskin for his basinet (a kind of helmet) and 2 shillings for leather to line the basinet. He had joined his mother in June 1326 or earlier, as that month Elizabeth spent £1, 4 shillings on a ‘German saddle’ for him.^[9] Elizabeth’s daughters Isabella Verdon and Margaret and Elizabeth Damory appear to have lived with her for most of the 1320s. She had to travel to Wales in 1327/28 and left her daughters behind at Clare in Suffolk on that occasion, and left them in the care of Isabella, Lady Hastings while she travelled to Gloucester in December 1327.^[10] Elizabeth’s statement in her protest document of May 1326 that she feared to lose her children also strongly implies that her daughters lived with her, whereas her sister Eleanor Despenser appears to have sent her own daughters, or at least some of them, to foster families. In 1326, Isabella Verdon turned 9 and Margaret Damory was probably 8, Elizabeth Damory perhaps only 4 or 5.

Unfortunately for Elizabeth Burgh, her father-in-law Richard had been too far away to help her or to offer much support against Edward II and Hugh Despenser, and her son was too young. Elizabeth’s sister Margaret Audley was still incarcerated at Sempringham Priory in 1326 by their vindictive uncle, but sometime that year or at the end of 1325, Margaret’s husband Hugh Audley escaped from captivity in Nottingham Castle. After Edward II’s downfall, the castle’s constable Richard, Lord Grey of Codnor was pardoned for having allowed him to do so.^[11] Grey was appointed constable of Nottingham Castle on 14 December 1325, so Hugh must have escaped after that date.^[12] Where he subsequently went is not known, though he may well have joined the Contrariant exiles on the continent (Roger Mortimer of Wigmore, John Maltravers and other men who had fled abroad after the Battle of Boroughbridge in March 1322), and perhaps travelled to Sempringham Priory in Lincolnshire in a bid to see his wife and child. As Audley had had no income at all since April 1321 and was a penniless fugitive, someone must have aided him financially and given him shelter, and perhaps his mother Isolde was one of those who did. In October 1337, Hugh was finally pardoned by Edward III ‘for all homicides, robberies, larcenies and trespasses against the peace of Edward II’.^[13] Many or most of these felonies probably relate to the Despenser War and the Contrariant rebellion in 1321/22, though the pardon might also suggest that Audley went on a one-man crime rampage after his escape. His father Hugh Audley senior died still in prison on or before 9 March 1326, leaving his widow Isolde and his elder son James as his heir.^[14] James Audley is rather obscure, and did not play any part in the rebellion of his father and brother in 1321/22; he seems to have been in the king’s favour after the Contrariants’ defeat and was with Edward in Yorkshire in early 1323.

Elizabeth Burgh carefully and diplomatically kept in regular contact with her uncle the king, despite her understandable anger with him. She sent him letters in late August, mid-September and late September 1326, and almost certainly earlier that year as well, though her accounts do not survive. There is no direct evidence that he reciprocated, though the messengers Elizabeth sent to him carrying her letters might have returned with Edward’s messages to her. Although Elizabeth was surely aware that her sister Eleanor was almost always in Edward’s company, there is no record of her sending any letters to her, or indeed vice versa. Elizabeth did, however, keep in touch with their aunt Mary at Amesbury Priory: Mary is almost certainly the ‘Lady Maria’ of Elizabeth’s accounts.^[15]

Neither Elizabeth Burgh nor Margaret Audley are mentioned at all in Edward II’s two chamber accounts of 1324/26. He did send letters to their cousin Jeanne de Bar, Countess of Surrey (the only daughter of Edward’s eldest sister Eleanor, d. 1298) in France where she was attending Queen Isabella, and Jeanne visited him in 1324. Their aunt Mary had been close to her brother for much of his reign, and often visited him and went away with presents, but she also does not appear in Edward II’s last two chamber accounts, nor in the Chancery rolls of those years. Edward spent part of May 1326 in Wiltshire and was therefore near his sister at Amesbury, but does not seem to have visited her there or to have invited her to court, or even sent letters. This all perhaps reveals something of Mary’s attitude towards her younger brother in the last years of his reign and her displeasure at his shabby treatment of their two younger Clare nieces, and may indicate that the royal siblings had fallen out.^[16] Edward’s relationship with Hugh Despenser the Younger had alienated him from his wife Isabella, his son Edward of Windsor, his half-brothers Thomas and Edmund, his cousins Henry of Lancaster and John of Brittany (Earl of Richmond) and his Clare nieces Margaret and Elizabeth, and perhaps the king had now also become estranged from the sister he had formerly been very close to. This surely reveals something sinister about Hugh Despenser’s dominance over Edward and about Eleanor Despenser’s own relationship with the king. Edward II, so close to Eleanor and Hugh that one can easily gain the impression they were involved in a ménage à trois, had become isolated from almost all his family and everyone else.

Queen Isabella’s invasion force, consisting of around 1,500 mercenaries and the Contrariants who had fled abroad years before, landed at the River Orwell in Suffolk on 24 September 1326. She and her allies, including the Clare sisters’ half-uncle Edmund of Woodstock, Earl of Kent, were determined to rid the country of the hated Hugh Despenser and his father. Elizabeth Burgh cautiously sent letters to both Edward II and Isabella, doing her best to remain studiedly neutral for now though she must have been delighted that at last someone was taking forceful action against her brother-in-law Despenser with the aim of destroying him and his hold over the king. Her manor of Clare lay under forty miles from where the force landed, and she heard the news of the queen’s arrival on the same day: on 24 September, she sent a messenger called Thomas Ryot to her manor of Cranborne in Dorset ‘in haste’ to inform her retinue there. She carefully also sent a messenger to the king on 26 September.^[17] Her kinsman Henry of Lancaster, Earl of Leicester (b. c. 1280/81), nephew of her grandfather Edward I, who had been deprived by his cousin the king of much of his rightful inheritance from his executed brother Thomas, joined his niece, the queen, by early October though like Elizabeth took the precaution of sending letters to Edward II as well.^[18] The Clare sisters’ other half-uncle Thomas of Brotherton, Earl of Norfolk, who owned the lands where the queen and her allies arrived, immediately went to join them. The king had tried to conciliate Thomas in 1325 and 1326, but his efforts failed; Thomas had been forced to give up his lands between the rivers Severn and Wye in Wales to Hugh Despenser the Younger for far less than their true value, and both he and his brother Edmund had been edged out of their rightful position by Despenser.

The king was at the Tower of London with his second son John of Eltham, Eleanor Despenser, her husband Hugh, her father-in-law Hugh the Elder and probably her son Huchon, when he received the news of his wife’s arrival. At the beginning of October 1326, the king and the two Hugh Despensers realised that they could not hold London—the city tended to be anti-royalist and was hostile to them—and decided to head for South Wales which was controlled by Hugh and where the king was more popular than in England. They left the Tower under Eleanor’s command. She would never see her husband or her uncle again. The queen sent a letter to London on 6 October, urging the mayor and citizens to help her ‘destroy Sir Hugh Despenser [the Younger], our enemy and the enemy of the whole realm, as you well know’, for the common good of the whole country, and told them to capture Hugh and keep him under strict guard ‘on the faith which you owe to our lord the king and to us’.^[19] At this point, the queen seems not to have known that Hugh and Edward had departed from London three days earlier, and had left the city under the nominal control of her 10-year-old son John of Eltham and the Tower under Eleanor Despenser’s. Isabella and her allies followed the king and the two Hugh Despensers west, towards Wales. The Anonimalle chronicle says ‘the king would not leave the company of his enemies’, and that Isabella pursued him to make him leave the Despensers and because she wanted ‘to rejoin her lord [husband] if she could’.^[20] Thousands of people flocked to the banner of the queen and her son, their future king, and few were willing to defend their present king, at least when he had the hated Hugh Despenser and his father in his company. Even at this desperate stage, Edward II still would not abandon Despenser.

Hugh Audley was said in 1331 to have joined Queen Isabella and her son in pursuing the Despensers, so after his escape from prison in late 1325 or 1326 he must have made his way to Isabella and Edward of Windsor, either on the continent or after their return to England.^[21] His wife Margaret remained in captivity at Sempringham Priory for a few more weeks. Audley would be the only one of Edward II’s male favourites to survive the reign, and outlived his brother-in-law and great enemy Hugh Despenser the Younger by more than twenty years. Later in life he was to become something of a respected elder statesman, and his career in the 1330s and 1340s was so entirely different from the 1310s as to give the impression that he had become almost another person entirely, no longer the frivolous knight who may have been Edward II’s lover and who was called ‘worse than [Piers] Gaveston’ by one chronicler. Audley was not, however, one of the chief barons and bishops named as the queen’s most important allies on 26 October 1326, when Isabella’s son Edward of Windsor was appointed custos regni or ‘keeper of the realm’ on the pretext that his father had left his kingdom.^[22] Edward II and Hugh Despenser sailed from Chepstow on 20 October probably in a desperate, and futile, attempt to reach Ireland and launch a counter-invasion.

Eleanor Despenser’s father-in-law Hugh Despenser the Elder, Earl of Winchester, was hanged in Bristol on 27 October, the day the city fell to the queen and her allies. He was 65. Winchester’s body was fed to dogs, and his head was sent to the town of Winchester for public display. Some days before, his son and the king had been forced to put in at Cardiff after contrary winds prevented them leaving the south coast of Wales. They moved on to Eleanor Despenser’s birthplace, the great stronghold of Caerphilly, accompanied by Eleanor’s eldest son Huchon. Everything was going the queen’s way; Edward II’s disastrous rule of the previous few years and his encouragement of Hugh Despenser’s despotism and extortion ensured that the king found little support, and soon became little more than a fugitive in his own kingdom. Edward and Despenser left Caerphilly on or about 2 November for reasons that remain mysterious, leaving Huchon Despenser and most of their remaining households inside, and a large amount of cash and treasure. They headed for Neath Abbey with a handful of attendants, and were captured on 16 November on their way back to Caerphilly Castle, by a group of men who included Queen Isabella’s uncle Henry of Lancaster and a baron named William Zouche.

Elizabeth Burgh, who cannot have been anything but delighted at the turn of events—any affection she might once have felt for her uncle had surely evaporated after he shouted threats at her and allowed Despenser to persecute her—returned to her Welsh lordship of Usk by mid-November 1326, possibly even before the king and Despenser were captured, and spent Christmas there. Her officials had arrived there as early as mid-October.^[23] Usk had been taken from her by her brother-in-law and sister in 1322, and she returned there as soon as she could, though officially Usk was not regranted to her until late February 1327. Elizabeth seems to have made some financial arrangement with her sister Eleanor regarding the lordship, and in the year 1329/30 paid her 500 marks for ‘the fine of Usk’. It is even possible that Despenser had given Usk back to her in 1325 or earlier in 1326, as in 1329/30 Elizabeth paid the money to her sister ‘for the preceding four years’.^[24] Keen to know what was going on, in mid-October 1326 Elizabeth sent a man to ‘report rumours from the king’s court’ to her, and on the same day sent another man to Queen Isabella, perhaps to assure her of her support.^[25]

The Clare sisters’ wheel of fortune turned; now it was Eleanor Despenser’s turn to be imprisoned, while her sisters Margaret and Elizabeth were freed. Eleanor was incarcerated in the Tower of London with some of her children and a few servants on 17 November 1326.^[26] She would remain there for more than fifteen months. Her husband and uncle had been captured in South Wales the day before her arrest, though of course this news had not yet reached her in London. Her cousin John of Eltham, who had been left in nominal command of the city of London although he was only a child, was removed from her custody and taken to his mother Isabella at Wallingford just before Christmas. Also on 17 November, the king and the Despensers’ ally Edmund Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel, was beheaded in Hereford without a trial on the orders of his cousin Roger Mortimer. Arundel was the father-in-law of Eleanor’s eldest daughter Isabella and they had a mutual grandson in the infant Edmund Fitzalan, and his son Richard was disinherited by his execution and would not regain his entitlement to his patrimony for years to come.

Hugh Despenser the Younger was led slowly to Hereford and treated with every possible disrespect, and was pelted with filth by the populace, who hurled abuse at him. In front of the queen, her uncle Henry of Lancaster and her brothers-in-law the earls of Norfolk and Kent, and Roger Mortimer and other barons, Hugh was hanged on a fifty-foot gallows, cut down before he was dead, disembowelled and castrated, and finally beheaded. His long-term rival Hugh Audley probably also witnessed his execution. 27 The four quarters of Despenser’s body were sent to be publicly displayed in York, Carlisle, Bristol and Dover, and on 4 December 1326 his head was carried down Cheapside in London to the sound of trumpets and set on a spike on London Bridge. This was barely half a mile from where his widow Eleanor and some of his children were incarcerated in the Tower. Hugh and Eleanor’s eldest child Huchon was besieged at Caerphilly Castle from November 1326 until March 1327, and Queen Isabella was determined to execute him, even though he was only 17 or 18 years old and had committed no crime except to be his father’s heir. The siege was led by William Zouche, lord of Ashby in Leicestershire, one of the men who had captured the king and Hugh Despenser the Younger on 16 November. Fortunately for the teenaged Despenser, the garrison inside Caerphilly refused to give him up for execution and bravely held out against the besieging force, even though there were only two knights within the castle and most of the garrison were not military men but carpenters, blacksmiths and a few of Edward II’s chamber valets and ushers.

And thus so easily did the king and his powerful chamberlain fall. Yet although Edward II’s reign was now over in all but name, its aftermath was to prove every bit as turbulent for the three Clare sisters as the previous two decades had been.