Chapter 25: The Young Generation - Edward II’s Nieces, The Clare Sisters: Powerful Pawns of the Crown

Eleanor did not live long enough to see the marriage of her fifth and youngest daughter Elizabeth Despenser to Maurice Berkeley, son and heir of Thomas, Lord Berkeley, a great nobleman and landowner in Gloucestershire and Somerset, in August 1338. The marriage was arranged partly to resolve the conflict and hostility between the Despenser and Berkeley families during and after the Contrariant rebellion of 1321/22, and also as a means to ensure that the Despensers would not attempt to claim Berkeley lands in the future, as Hugh Despenser the Younger had held them in the 1320s when they were forfeit to the Crown. For Elizabeth Despenser, it was perhaps quite a surreal experience to go to live at the castle where her great-uncle Edward II had allegedly been murdered, and to have a father-in-law who had attended her father’s execution. Her young husband Maurice Berkeley, born c. 1330 and some years her junior, was a grandson of none other than Roger Mortimer, lord of Wigmore and first Earl of March, via Mortimer’s eldest daughter Margaret; one can imagine Despenser and Mortimer turning in their graves to see their daughter and grandson united in matrimony. Elizabeth and Maurice’s eldest son Thomas, Lord Berkeley the younger was born in January 1353 when Elizabeth was probably 27 and Maurice about 22 or 23, and they had three younger sons and apparently three daughters.^[1]

Despite their father Hugh Despenser the Younger’s actions against her in the 1320s and her understandable hatred of him, after her sister Eleanor’s death Elizabeth Burgh reached out to her Despenser nieces and nephews. Gilbert, the third Despenser son, joined her household for a while in the late 1340s, and went hunting on her estates at Trelleck and Caerleon which had, ironically, been taken from Elizabeth in 1322 by Gilbert’s father. The fifth Despenser daughter Elizabeth also joined her aunt’s household for a while before she went to live with her young husband Maurice Berkeley and his family in Gloucestershire. Elizabeth Burgh sent items for the funeral of her fourth Despenser niece Margaret in 1337, received a gift from her eldest niece Isabella Fitzalan née Despenser, Countess of Arundel, and was visited by her eldest nephew Huchon Despenser and his wife. In November 1339 Elizabeth sent her falconer to Huchon, and in February and August 1340 sent letters to him in London.^[2] Elizabeth Burgh may have been involved in the marriage of Eleanor’s second son Edward Despenser: Edward wed Anne Ferrers, the much younger sister of Elizabeth’s son-in-law Henry, Lord Ferrers, on 20 April 1335 at Ferrers’ chief manor of Groby in Leicestershire.^[3] The eldest of Edward and Anne’s four sons was Edward the younger, born eleven months after his parents’ wedding on 24 March 1336, who joined his great-aunt Elizabeth’s household for a while in 1346 when he was 10 years old. In January 1347, this Edward attended the funeral of Elizabeth’s councillor Sir John Wauton, who fought at the Battle of Crécy in 1346 and died during Edward III’s siege of Calais. The Despenser brothers Huchon and Gilbert and their youngest sister Elizabeth Berkeley all spent time together at their aunt’s homes in Wales in the summer of 1348, as did Eleanor Zouche, widow of their stepbrother Alan Zouche (her second husband was Elizabeth Burgh’s long-term retainer Sir Nichol Damory), and Margaret, Lady Monthermer, widow of their half-uncle Thomas Monthermer.^[4] Elizabeth Burgh also rented out the Oxfordshire manor of Bletchingdon to her nephew William Zouche, Eleanor Despenser’s youngest child who later became a monk of Glastonbury, so must have kept in touch with him as well.^[5] The lady’s kindness and generosity to her Despenser kin speaks well of her. With the exception of Huchon, lord of Glamorgan, who spent most of the 1330s and 1340s doing his utmost to restore his family’s name, there was little if anything the Despenser siblings could do for their aunt in return for her support of them, and Elizabeth did not help them in expectation of receiving anything in exchange for her efforts. She was not a woman to visit the sins of the father onto his children, and her support of Hugh Despenser the Younger’s children speaks volumes about her character.

Another insight into Elizabeth Burgh’s character is revealed by her generous endowment in 1338 of a hall founded at Cambridge University a dozen years before. University Hall was founded in 1326 by the university chancellor, but twelve years later it was struggling financially, so Elizabeth stepped in, saved the hall and renamed it after her birth family and one of her favourite residences, Clare in Suffolk. It was known as ‘Clare Hall,’ and began to be called Clare College 500 years later in the middle of the nineteenth century. Twenty-one years after her endowment, in 1359, Elizabeth issued statutes of the college which stated in part:

We, therefore, desiring to assist true religion and to further the public good by promoting learning so far as God has put it in our power to do so, have turned our attention to the University of Cambridge in the diocese of Ely, where there is a body of students. Our purpose is that through their study and teaching at the university they should discover and acquire the precious pearl of learning, so that it does not stay hidden under a bushel but is displayed abroad to enlighten those who walk in the dark paths of ignorance.^[6]

By July 1353 the hall Elizabeth had founded and endowed was already ‘grievously wasted and dilapidated’, and her cousin Edward III sent five men to investigate how this had happened and to ascertain whether any of the scholars needed to be ‘chastised … and if necessary to be removed from the hall’ for allowing it to fall into such a state.^[7] Elizabeth wrote her will in September 1355, and bequeathed ‘my hall called Clarehall in Cambridge’ numerous items including nine books, all her chapel furnishings, high-quality vestments and ample silverware.^[8] Elizabeth’s kinswoman and good friend Marie de St Pol, Dowager Countess of Pembroke and widow of Aymer Valence, followed her lead, and in 1347 founded a college at Cambridge which she called the Hall of Valence Marie, and which later became known as Pembroke College. Elizabeth’s uncle Edward II had founded Oriel College at Oxford in 1326 and, on the tenth anniversary of his accession to the throne in July 1317, the King’s Hall at Cambridge. King’s Hall was incorporated into the new foundation of Trinity College in 1546, and Clare College, Pembroke College and Oriel College all still exist in the twenty-first century.

Elizabeth Burgh was a lover of books. In 1324, during the period of Despenser tyranny, she paid a scribe 8 shillings to make her a copy of the Vitae Patrum, ‘Lives of the Fathers’. In February 1327, the month of Edward III’s coronation, she borrowed seven books from the royal collection: four romances and, rather oddly, three books about surgery. When Elizabeth visited London in 1350/51, she sent seven horses home with her book purchases, and bought and commissioned other books nearer to home, paying to have them covered with silver or decorative covers.^[9] Her grandmother Queen Leonor had owned a fine book collection which she probably bequeathed to her daughters on her death in 1290, including the Clare sisters’ mother Joan of Acre. The sisters’ great-grandmother Isabella Clare née Marshal, Countess of Gloucester and Cornwall (d. 1240), left a large number of items including books to Tewkesbury Abbey which Eleanor Despenser, as the abbey’s patron, must have known. It is possible that all three Clare sisters owned books which had belonged to their mother, grandmother and great-grandmother.^[10] We have no direct evidence that any of the sisters could write, but their contemporary Margaret Wake, who was born in the mid- or late 1290s and who married their half-uncle the Earl of Kent in late 1325, was certainly able to write.^[11] If a woman from a fairly minor baronial house in the north of England was literate, surely the great Earl of Gloucester’s daughters and Edward I’s granddaughters were as well.

Elizabeth wrote to Margaret Audley, Countess of Gloucester, at Tonbridge on 8 June 1339. This is one of the very few indications that the sisters kept in touch, and is another indication that Tonbridge was the residence which Margaret enjoyed the most. She spent most of her time there, and she and Hugh Audley would both be buried in the priory there. Elizabeth also sent letters at this time to her daughter Elizabeth Bardolf at Wormegay in Norfolk, John Bardolf’s main seat, and to her cousin William Bohun, Earl of Northampton, at Rochford in Essex.^[12] Elizabeth Burgh had strong family feelings: in December 1339 she buried her half-brother Sir Edward Monthermer, Joan of Acre’s eighth and youngest child, at the Augustinian friary in Clare, Suffolk, with their mother. Her sense of duty towards Edward and her burying him with their mother, and her support of her Despenser and Audley kin, reveal a great deal about her affection for and feelings of obligation towards her close family. She sent servants to Bury St Edmunds to purchase meat, fish, poultry and dairy for the attendees of Monthermer’s funeral, and gave 69 shillings-worth of bread and herring to paupers in exchange for their prayers for his soul. Her grandson William Ferrers, son and heir of Isabella Verdon, attended his great-uncle’s funeral; he was 6 years old at the time.^[13] Edward Monthermer, curiously for a medieval nobleman, never married, and died at the age of only 35, a few weeks after taking part in military action in October 1339. His two destriers or war-horses were listed among Elizabeth’s horses in 1339/40, and one was called Bay Monthermer. Of Elizabeth’s other destriers, one was called Bay Bardolf, as it had been a gift from her son-in-law John Bardolf in exchange for one called Grey Hundon.^[14]

Elizabeth’s half-sister Joan Monthermer, probably born in 1299, joined their aunt Mary in becoming a nun at Amesbury Priory in Wiltshire, but nothing is known of Joan’s life, not even the year when she died. Mary MacDuff, Countess of Fife, Elizabeth’s other Monthermer half-sister, went to live in Scotland in 1320 and it is unclear whether the two women had any contact. Mary MacDuff was the only child of Joan of Acre who outlived Elizabeth Burgh: she lived until c. 1371 when she was in her 70s, and her only child Isabella MacDuff, Countess of Fife in her own right, married four times but had no children. The remaining Monthermer sibling was Thomas (b. 1301), who survived his brother Edward by only a few months and died shortly after the naval Battle of Sluys in the summer of 1340, leaving his daughter Margaret as his heir. There was also Elizabeth Burgh’s much older half-sister Isabella Clare, eldest child of Gilbert ‘the Red’, who was thirty-three years Elizabeth’s senior. Isabella was widowed in 1326 when her husband Maurice, Lord Berkeley died imprisoned as a Contrariant. She lived into the 1330s, but was probably already dead when her step-grandson, the younger Maurice Berkeley, married her niece Elizabeth Despenser in 1338. Joan MacDuff, Countess of Fife, Gilbert the Red’s other daughter from his first marriage to Alice Lusignan and Mary MacDuff’s mother-in-law, vanishes from the record after 1322 and presumably died in Scotland.

The Clare sisters’ cousin Edward III had claimed the throne of France in 1337 as the only surviving grandson of King Philip IV of France, Queen Isabella’s father (Edward’s younger brother John of Eltham, Earl of Cornwall—under the care of Eleanor Despenser when he was a child— died at the age of 20 in September 1336). The Clares’ Monthermer half-brothers took part in the king’s French wars, as did their cousin the Earl of Northampton, Margaret Audley’s son-in-law Ralph Stafford (later the first Earl of Stafford), and Eleanor Despenser’s son-in-law Richard Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel. Edward III stayed outside England for much of the period 1338 to 1340, seeking allies against his mother’s cousin PhilipVI, who had taken the French throne in 1328 as the first Valois king. Queen Philippa accompanied him overseas, and gave birth to two of their sons, Lionel of Antwerp and John of Gaunt (i.e. Ghent), in November 1338 and March 1340. The king returned to England for a while, and on 22 June 1340 embarked for the continent again from the River Orwell in Suffolk. He stayed with his cousin Elizabeth Burgh at Clare for three days on his way to the port, from 27 to 29 May 1340. Elizabeth’s servants had to provide hay for 180 horses, and the king’s retinue consumed 170 gallons of ale, 200 eggs, 120 mackerel and 700 herring on the first day of the visit alone.^[15]

At least in public, Edward III and Elizabeth appear to have enjoyed a reasonably cordial relationship, and certainly one much better and easier than Elizabeth’s tense relationship with Edward’s father. Edward III always courteously referred to Elizabeth as ‘the king’s kinswoman’, yet the two do not seem to have been close on a personal level, and Elizabeth’s biographer considers that the lady felt a ‘muted dislike’ for her cousin and deliberately provoked him on several occasions with her demands.^[16] Elizabeth got on much better with Edward III and Queen Philippa’s three eldest sons Edward of Woodstock, Lionel of Antwerp (who became Elizabeth’s grandson-in-law when he was a young child in 1342) and John of Gaunt. Edward of Woodstock, made Prince of Wales in 1343 and heir to the throne since his birth in June 1330, developed a remarkably close friendship with his kinswoman Elizabeth, despite an age difference between them of three-and-a-half decades. He visited her no fewer than twenty-three times in twenty months in the 1350s.^[17]

Elizabeth’s four Despenser nephews Huchon, Edward, Gilbert and John also played enthusiastic roles in their cousin the king’s French wars. Gilbert Despenser became a household knight of the king, and later also served in the retinue of Edward III’s young grandson Richard II. Sometime in early 1338, Huchon sent a letter to Edward III jointly with his uncle Hugh Audley, Earl of Gloucester, and his brother-in-law Richard Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel, who was unhappily married to the eldest Despenser sister Isabella.^[18] Huchon made an excellent marriage sometime before 27 April 1341, to Elizabeth Montacute, daughter of William, Earl of Salisbury. She was the granddaughter of the William Montacute who, alongside Roger Damory and Hugh Audley, had been powerful at Edward II’s court in the 1310s and who died in Gascony in 1319.^[19] Elizabeth Montacute’s sister Sybil married Huchon’s nephew Edmund Fitzalan, his sister Isabella Despenser’s son. Another Montacute sister, Philippa, married Roger Mortimer of Wigmore’s grandson and heir Roger Mortimer the younger (1328–60), who was made second Earl of March in 1354. This must have led to some interesting conversations around the Montacute family dinner table. Elizabeth Montacute was many years Huchon’s junior; her date of birth is not known, but her brother William, their father’s heir, was born in June 1328, and their parents probably married in 1327 or shortly before.^[20] Elizabeth is likely to have been the eldest Montacute daughter as she was named after her paternal grandmother Elizabeth Montfort, and Sybil was probably the second eldest as she was named after their maternal grandmother Sybil Tregoz. William Montacute, Earl of Salisbury, was Edward III’s closest friend, and it is likely that the king had a hand in promoting the marriage of Salisbury’s daughter and his kinsman Huchon. Despite her youth, Elizabeth Despenser née Montacute was already the widow of Bartholomew Badlesmere’s son and heir Giles (1314–38), who was Huchon’s second cousin, and thus the couple had to ask for a dispensation from the pope before they could marry.^[21] Huchon settled eight of his manors on himself and Elizabeth Montacute jointly.^[22] She was old enough to consummate their marriage by the mid-1340s or earlier, but they were to have no children. Elizabeth did have children with her third husband, so probably Huchon was infertile.

Huchon’s aunt Margaret Audley, Countess of Cornwall and Gloucester, died in early April 1342, aged 47 or 48. The date of her death is usually given as 9 or 13 April, though her Inquisition Post Mortem says she died on ‘Tuesday the morrow of the Close of Easter last’, and Easter Sunday fell on 31 March in 1342, which would seem to give a correct date of 2 April for Margaret’s death. The order to take her lands into the king’s hand, as always happened when a tenant in chief died, was issued on 15 April, and the writ to hold her IPM on 24 April.^[23] Margaret’s heir was her only surviving child Margaret Stafford, and had her elder daughter Joan Gaveston still been alive, the two half-sisters would have inherited equally. By the custom called the ‘courtesy of England’ her widower Hugh Audley was entitled to hold all her lands for the rest of his life, and Hugh thus managed to keep his wife’s share of the Clare inheritance out of his son-in-law Ralph Stafford’s grasp for another few years. Margaret and Hugh had been married for almost exactly a quarter of a century, since 28 April 1317; the marriage, arranged by her uncle Edward II for no better reason than he was currently infatuated with Audley, had endured and seemingly thrived. Margaret was buried at Tonbridge Priory, and her husband would be buried there with her a few years later. Margaret was the quietest of the three Clare sisters and her private life is the most difficult of all of them to illuminate in a biography, but her life was as eventful as those of her sisters: she survived years of incarceration in a convent, marriage to two of her uncle’s favourites and perhaps lovers, and the abduction of her pubescent daughter. Although she had only one child who lived into adulthood and had children of her own, the modern-day descendants of Margaret Gaveston Audley née Clare number in the millions.