Chapter 23: Death of an Earl - Edward II’s Nieces, The Clare Sisters: Powerful Pawns of the Crown

Elizabeth Burgh, still only 36 years old, became a grandmother for the second time on 6 July 1332, when William Burgh and Maud of Lancaster’s daughter was born in Ireland and named Elizabeth in her honour. Exactly eleven months later, on 6 June 1333, 20-year-old William was murdered near Belfast. The assassination was carried out by some of his own vassals on the orders of Gylle, widow of William’s cousin Walter Burgh, whom he had starved to death in captivity. William’s widow Maud fled back to England with her baby daughter, and may have given birth to twins later in 1333: there are references on the Patent Roll in 1338 and 1340 to two other daughters of William Burgh. In July 1338, mention is made of ‘Isabella, daughter and heir of William, late Earl of Ulster’, and in June 1340 Edward III gave the marriage of ‘Margaret, daughter and heir of William Burgh, Earl of Ulster’ to his brother-in-law Reynald of Guelders, for the use of Reynald and Eleanor of Woodstock’s second son Eduard (b. 1336).^[1] Assuming the girls existed and are not clerical errors, they cannot have lived long past 1340, as young Elizabeth Burgh was the sole heir of her father and of her grandmother the elder Elizabeth. Elizabeth Burgh the elder became a grandmother again in February 1333 when William Ferrers, eldest surviving child of her daughter Isabella Verdon, was born. Isabella was still not 16 years old, and had already given birth twice. She had a daughter Elizabeth Ferrers born around the mid-1330s, who later became Countess of Atholl, at least nominally; the earldom lay in Scotland, but her husband’s family lived in England and did not hold the lands they claimed to own. Another daughter, Philippa Ferrers, would have become Countess of Warwick, but her husband Guy Beauchamp died in his father’s lifetime.

Hugh Audley, in the 1330s, enjoyed a friendship with Isabella of Lancaster, second of the six daughters of Henry, Earl of Lancaster and sister-in-law of Elizabeth Burgh’s late son William. Isabella—who had gone on pilgrimage with Elizabeth Burgh and her aunt Mary as a child in 1317—became a nun at the ever-popular Amesbury Priory in Wiltshire in 1327, but often left the priory to visit her father and siblings at Earl Henry’s castles of Kenilworth and Tutbury. Isabella of Lancaster’s accounts happen to survive for a few months in the early 1330s, and reveal that she and Audley frequently sent each other letters, and even exchanged greyhounds for hunting. Audley sent Isabella a gift of expensive lampreys on two occasions, while she gave gifts to the marshal of his hall and wrote to his steward of Heytesbury in Wiltshire.^[2] As Isabella of Lancaster was veiled as a nun and later became prioress of Amesbury, this was clearly not a romantic affair, but appears to have been a genuine and perhaps rather unexpected friendship. Isabella of Lancaster also left Amesbury on one occasion to visit her aunt Isabella, Lady Hastings (d. 1334), a woman on good terms with Elizabeth Burgh.

On 29 September 1333, Hugh Audley was said to be going overseas on pilgrimage.^[3] There is no mention of his wife Margaret accompanying him (though as married women rarely appear in records relating to their husbands, she may well have done) or where he went; perhaps to Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain, an enormously popular pilgrim destination. One of the two men Hugh appointed to act as his attorneys in his absence was his elder brother James Audley, and he intended to be overseas until two weeks after Easter 1334. Hugh Audley’s desire to go on pilgrimage and leave the country for a while might have been a result of a feud he was involved in with his brother-in-law William Zouche. Apparently as prone to quarrelling as Eleanor Despenser’s first husband had been, Zouche was ‘making gatherings and meetings of armed men’ in both Wales and England ‘by reason of the dissensions between him and Hugh Daudele [Audley]’. Edward III ordered both men to cease threatening each other on 19 August 1333.^[4] Somewhat ironically, William Zouche had been appointed to ‘keep the king’s peace in the land of Wales’ on 26 June that year.^[5]

On the same day as the record on the Patent Roll relating to his pilgrimage, Audley was pardoned a debt of £12,000 which he had acknowledged to Hugh Despenser father and son fifteen years before and which had fallen to the king by the Despensers’ forfeiture. Elizabeth Burgh must have noted this with some interest, as she also asked shortly afterwards for her late husband Roger Damory’s own debt of £12,000 to the Despensers to be pardoned. In June 1334, it was. Hugh Despenser father and son, Hugh Audley, Roger Damory and William Montacute had all acknowledged debts to each other of £6,000 in 1318, which perhaps represented a mutual alliance against Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, Edward II’s powerful cousin. Audley and Elizabeth were pardoned the £12,000 which Audley and Damory owed to the two Hugh Despensers because, so they claimed, the ‘recognisances were made under compulsion’ and were obtained ‘by force against his [Audley’s] will’.^[6] The two did not explain how their brother-in-law and his father were able to coerce Audley and Damory into making the recognisances to them before Despenser the Younger became a powerful royal favourite; claiming that they had was simply a convenient way to absolve themselves of the enormous debt.

Edward III spent much time on campaign against Scotland in the 1330s; its king, David II (b. 1324, r. 1329–71), was in fact his brother-in-law, but Edward had had no say in the marriage of his youngest sibling Joan of the Tower to the young David in 1328 and strenuously objected to it. One English nobleman who played little part in his cousin the king’s wars in Scotland and France was John Bohun, Earl of Hereford, eldest son of Edward II’s sister Elizabeth. Elizabeth Burgh was named after Hereford’s mother, her aunt, and the earl visited her at Clare for a couple of days in May 1334 and again later in the year. She had a gold ring made for him in 1333.^[7] The third Bohun brother William later became Earl of Northampton, and the second, Humphrey, succeeded the childless John as Earl of Hereford in 1336. Humphrey, like his older brother, seems to have suffered from some long-term illness or disability, and like John played no part in Edward III’s wars. Their brother Northampton was, however, one of the king’s chief commanders and an early member of the king’s chivalric order the Knights of the Garter at the end of the 1340s. He visited his cousin Elizabeth Burgh often, and the two frequently exchanged letters and gifts. In 1339/40, Elizabeth paid over £7 for a palfrey horse for Northampton, called Grisel Pomeld, and was clearly extremely fond of her Bohun cousins including their sister Margaret Courtenay, Countess of Devon.^[8]

The intensely masculine and intensely militaristic nature of Edward III’s regime created numerous exciting opportunities for noblemen to fight, both in wars in Scotland and France and also on the jousting field. Edward II had often banned tournaments and himself never participated in a jousting contest (that we know of), but his son, who both as a man and a king was far more conventional than his father by the standards of the fourteenth century, adored jousting and both held and personally took part in many tournaments. As women, the Clare sisters could not of course participate in such events and their husbands were rather too old to do so, especially William Zouche. Life in Edward III’s reign was vastly easier for the sisters than it had been in his father’s and during the regime of his mother Isabella from 1327 to 1330, but they were also much less caught up in political events and the life of the court.