Chapter 22: A Belated Funeral - Edward II’s Nieces, The Clare Sisters: Powerful Pawns of the Crown

Edward III gave permission on 15 December 1330 for the ‘friends of Hugh’ to collect Hugh Despenser the Younger’s remains from London Bridge, Bristol, Dover, York and Carlisle and to bury them honourably.^[1] Even though she was married to her second husband and bore a child this year, Eleanor Despenser must have taken charge of her late husband’s burial. Hugh was interred at Tewkesbury Abbey which stood on her own lands and where her brother, father, grandfather and other Clare ancestors were buried. In 2004, several bones of a medieval man who appeared to have suffered the traitor’s death, excavated on land where Hulton Abbey in Staffordshire had once stood, were examined. The Audley family had been patrons of Hulton, and it was speculated that Hugh and Margaret Audley buried their brother-in-law Hugh Despenser the Younger there.^[2] This is basically impossible; Despenser was the last person in the country to whom Hugh Audley would have given Christian burial on his own land, and he is far more likely to have had Despenser’s bones flung into the nearest river. It also seems to have been Hugh Audley’s brother James and nephew the younger James who were patrons of Hulton, not Hugh himself.^[3] There is no reason to doubt that Eleanor Despenser buried her husband at Tewkesbury Abbey, and his tomb in the ambulatory behind the high altar, much vandalised centuries later at the Dissolution, can still be seen there. In 1349, his and Eleanor’s eldest son Huchon was buried in the same position on the other side of the altar.

In January 1331, Edward III restored Glamorgan, Tewkesbury and Hanley to Eleanor Despenser and William Zouche on condition that they pay him £10,000, of which he almost immediately respited half.^[4] By 5 April 1332 they had paid £1,333 of it, and were meant to pay instalments of 250 marks twice yearly, though in January 1333 this was reduced to 100 marks twice yearly.^[5] The king stated that he was making this grant of her lands to his cousin to ‘ease his conscience’ which suggests he realised how badly his mother and Roger Mortimer had treated Eleanor.^[6] (Eleanor’s first husband and uncle had of course treated plenty of people equally badly, including her two sisters, but the revolution of 1326/27 was meant to have ushered in a more just era.) Much of the money was still unpaid when Eleanor and Zouche died.^[7]

Also in January 1331, William Zouche was appointed as one of the mainpernors of Roger Mortimer’s son Geoffrey, arrested with Roger at Nottingham in October 1330 but soon released, and the mainpernors promised to ensure that he ‘shall behave himself well in the king’s realm’.^[8] Despite his and Eleanor’s wealth, William Zouche frequently borrowed large sums of money in the early 1330s, which indicates that he lived well beyond his means. John Hotham, bishop of Ely, lent him £2,000 in May 1333, and another debt of £1,000 acknowledged by Zouche in 1333 was to Benedict Fulsham, a rich and important merchant of London who had been involved in Eleanor Despenser’s supposed theft of jewels from the Tower of London. In January 1331 Fulsham was alleged to have received the jewels from Eleanor, and was ordered not to leave London.^[9] Zouche and six other men acknowledged a joint debt of £2,900 to John Pulteney, merchant and mayor of London, in February 1331. One of the six men was Elizabeth Burgh’s close adherent Sir Robert Chedworth, who, with his brother Thomas, still served Elizabeth into the late 1330s.^[10] As well as the joint debt acknowledged with Robert Chedworth, Zouche appointed Robert as one of his attorneys in April 1332 when he went overseas on the king’s service.^[11] This connection suggests that there may have been rather more contact between Eleanor Despenser and her sister Elizabeth Burgh than is visible in extant records. Elizabeth sent Eleanor cloth in 1330/31, though apart from this, the payments Elizabeth made to her eldest sister for the lordship of Usk and the association of Zouche and Chedworth, there is little or no evidence of any real closeness.^[12] Given the way Eleanor had encouraged and supported her husband Hugh’s schemes in the 1320s, including against Elizabeth, this is hardly surprising.

Hugh Audley, high in the young king’s favour and pardoned for his role in the Earl of Lancaster’s 1328/29 rebellion, was named as a knight banneret of Edward’s household in 1330, and appointed as one of the men sent to treat with Philip VI, king of France (r. 1328–50), in January 1331. The envoys were to ‘treat of the mutual debts of the two kings’ and to ‘treat of all matters in dispute’.^[13] The Earl of Lancaster, the king’s great-uncle and also forgiven for his rebellion, was another of the envoys who travelled with Audley, and Margaret may have travelled with her husband.^[14] A treaty with Philip VI’s envoys was signed on 9 March 1331, and the following month the two kings met in person at Pont-Sainte-Maxence after Edward III left England secretly and disguised as a merchant. Shortly before Hugh Audley’s departure, he and Margaret asked for Edward II’s grants of various manors to them in July 1319 to be exemplified and confirmed, as their original documents ‘had been stolen from them with other muniments in the quarrel of Thomas, Earl of Lancaster’ (i.e. during and after the Contrariant rebellion of 1321/22).^[15]

Elizabeth Burgh was at her manor of Clare in Suffolk in January 1331 when her brother-in-law Audley travelled overseas, and received a visit from her kinswoman and friend of many years, Marie de St Pol, Dowager Countess of Pembroke (c. 1303–77). Marie, like the Clare sisters, was a great-granddaughter of Henry III and hence their second cousin, and was the widow of Aymer Valence, Earl of Pembroke, himself a nephew of Henry III and decades Marie’s senior. Marie had also been a victim of Hugh Despenser the Younger after her husband’s death in June 1324, when Despenser tried to keep some of her dower lands for himself.^[16] Elizabeth became a grandmother for the first time in February 1331 when her daughter Isabella Ferrers née Verdon, not yet 14, bore a child who did not survive. Elizabeth herself was 35.

Eleanor Despenser’s eldest son and heir Hugh ‘Huchon’ Despenser was finally released from prison at Bristol Castle on 5 July 1331 after almost five years of imprisonment since his father left him at Caerphilly at the end of October 1326, when a dozen knights mainperned to produce him before his cousin the king at the parliament to be held at the end of September 1331. One of the knights was Hugh Audley’s brother-in-law Sir Ralph Neville, steward of Edward III’s household, which perhaps indicates that there was some measure of sympathy in the Audley family for their Despenser nephew, however much they had loathed his father. Two others were Sir Eble Lestrange (d. 1335) and Sir Richard Talbot, both married to women—Alice Lacy and Elizabeth Comyn respectively— who had been victims of Hugh Despenser the Younger’s extortion in 1322 and 1324/25. A fourth was Sir John Ros, perhaps the man of this name who was beaten up by Huchon’s father at the Lincoln parliament of early 1316. This all suggests a pleasing lack of vindictiveness on the men’s part, and a willingness to allow a young nobleman to prove himself and not to visit the sins of his father upon his head.^[17] Huchon petitioned the king pointing out that he had been pardoned of the forfeiture of life and limb for holding Caerphilly Castle against Queen Isabella, and enclosed a copy of the pardon with his petition.^[18] There was perhaps a measure of defiance in Huchon naming himself ‘Hugh son of Hugh Despenser’ in the petition, and the young man must have wondered why he alone had not been released or pardoned when Edward III set matters straight after the downfall of Isabella and Roger Mortimer and did his best to heal the wounds of the previous few years. (His mother Eleanor chose to retain the name of her first husband throughout her second marriage.) Huchon appeared before parliament as requested, and was officially pardoned on 30 September 1331.^[19] He was now 22 or 23 years old, and for all his high birth and close family relationship to the king of England—whom he had known well years before when they were boys—he had an awful lot of work to do to restore his and his family’s reputation. He bore the name Hugh Despenser, the most reviled name in England in the late 1320s and 1330s.

Eleanor Despenser and William Zouche went overseas in May 1332 as part of the retinue of Edward III’s sister Eleanor of Woodstock, elder of the two daughters of Edward II and Isabella of France, and Eleanor Despenser’s first cousin.^[20] Eleanor of Woodstock was not quite 14 years old, and was marrying Count Reynald II of Guelders, in the modern-day Netherlands close to the German border, a man who was decades her senior and had four daughters from his first marriage. The party left London on 1 May, sailed from Dover on 5 May and returned to London on 11 June after attending the wedding in Nijmegen. The twins Edward and William Bohun, nephews of Edward II and thus first cousins of both Eleanors, also went, and so did, interestingly, Hugh Audley and his brother-in-law Ralph Neville, and John Grey, presumably the man of this name who was still claiming Eleanor Despenser as his wife.^[21] Eleanor’s son Huchon also accompanied them. Apparently the young man had not yet been knighted, as his name was not followed by the word ‘knight’ in the list unlike those of several other men accompanying William Zouche.^[22] Earlier that year, however, Edward III had promised to give Huchon 200 marks of lands and rents a year. This was a small income for such a high-ranking nobleman, but it was at least a first step on Despenser’s long journey to prove himself and to restore his reputation, as was Edward’s courteously acknowledging him as ‘the king’s kinsman’. To provide him with the promised income, the king granted Despenser three manors, Freeby in Lincolnshire and Mapledurwell and Ashley in Hampshire, all of which had once belonged to his grandfather Hugh Despenser the Elder.^[23] Despenser was said in late April 1332 to be going on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain, a journey he presumably undertook after the visit to Nijmegen.^[24] He had certainly been knighted when he participated in a jousting tournament in Dunstable sometime in Edward III’s seventh regnal year, probably in January 1334, when he appears as Monsire [Sir] Hugh le Despenser in the list of participants, carrying the Despenser coat of arms. Another knight at Dunstable was Sir John Grey of Rotherfield, who a few months previously had finally given up his claim to be married to Huchon’s mother.^[25]

As Hugh Audley went on the journey to Nijmegen, doubtless his wife Margaret did too. One wonders what Eleanor Despenser found to say to her sister and brother-in-law, and what her husband Zouche and her putative husband Grey found to say to each other. Grey had not yet given up his claim that Eleanor was rightfully his wife (even though she had borne Zouche a child by then), and the journey to Nijmegen took place mere weeks after Grey came close to stabbing Zouche, so the situation must have been very awkward. This journey is one of the very few pieces of evidence we have of contact between Eleanor Despenser and Margaret Audley after Hugh Despenser the Younger forced the Audleys to sign over their lordship of Gwynllŵg to him in 1318. Perhaps the Clare sisters were willing to let bygones be bygones, or perhaps events of the late 1310s and 1320s had left a legacy of bitterness which they could not overcome. Margaret must have been aware that her older sister had stayed at her castle of Tonbridge several times while she herself had been incarcerated in a convent, and that Eleanor had been incredibly close to the man who ordered her incarceration, perhaps even his lover. Relations were somewhat better between the Audleys and Elizabeth Burgh, though not especially friendly: Hugh Audley sent his sister-in-law occasional letters and visited her in June 1339, while she seems to have visited him eight years later. There is little, however, to demonstrate any closeness between Margaret and Elizabeth other than a few letters exchanged between 1338 and 1342.^[26]

Edward II’s sister Mary, the reluctant and rather secular nun of Amesbury Priory and aunt of the three Clare sisters, died at the age of 53 on 29 May 1332, just days after her niece Eleanor of Woodstock married her much older husband hundreds of miles away. Mary may, or may not, have been the last surviving child of Edward I and Leonor of Castile; it is unclear when her older sister Margaret, Duchess of Brabant died, and although her younger brother Edward II had officially been dead since September 1327, there is evidence that he lived for years past that date. The only child of Edward I who certainly outlived Mary was her much younger half-brother Thomas of Brotherton, Earl of Norfolk, elder of the two sons of Edward I and Marguerite of France, who lived until 1338. Mary and Thomas’s nephew King Edward III planned a visit to Ireland in the summer of 1332, though in the end the Battle of Dupplin Moor in Scotland, where an English army won a surprise victory that August, overtook his plans and he did not depart. Among the men the king ordered to accompany him to Ireland were William Zouche and Hugh Audley, Elizabeth Burgh’s son-in-law Henry Ferrers and all three husbands of her Verdon stepdaughters, and Hugh Despenser the Younger’s nephew Amaury St Amand.^[27] The division of the late Theobald Verdon’s inheritance into four parts for his four daughters continued to cause problems which were made worse after Elizabeth Burgh’s daughter Isabella Verdon came of age (14, because she was already married) in March 1331, and perhaps the king thought it wise to have all four Verdon husbands under his eye.^[28]