Chapter 3: Journeys to Ireland - Edward II’s Nieces, The Clare Sisters: Powerful Pawns of the Crown

Eleanor Despenser, though not her younger sisters, frequently attended their aunt by marriage, Queen Isabella, as one of her ladies-in-waiting. The first evidence for this comes on 28 November 1310 when Eleanor set off to meet Isabella at Berwick-on-Tweed in the far north-east of the kingdom, where the young queen spent a year with her husband from October 1310 until September 1311. Eleanor’s expenses of 100 marks (£66) were paid by her uncle, who also gave her a gift of 20 marks.^[1] Most probably, she had begun attending Isabella when the young queen arrived in England in early 1308. Isabella’s household accounts survive for her husband’s fifth regnal year from 8 July 1311 to 7 July 1312, and reveal that Eleanor headed the list of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting that year ahead of Alice, Countess of Buchan, Isabella, Lady Vescy, and Ida, Lady Clinton. Eleanor was called Domina [Lady] Alianore la Despensere, the contemporary spelling of her name, in the accounts. It is unclear how much time Eleanor spent with the queen, though it was probably at most a few weeks a year, as she had her own familial and feudal responsibilities. It was not a paid position, though she was entitled to receive robes twice a year as a member of the queen’s household, and Eleanor continued attending Isabella into the mid-1320s.

There is ample evidence throughout Edward II’s reign of his great affection for his eldest niece Eleanor Despenser, who was only eight years his junior. When Edward was at Windsor Castle on 1 April 1308, fortifying it against his own barons and obstinately refusing to send Eleanor’s brother-in-law Piers Gaveston into exile, he found time to send her 20 marks to cover her expenses for her stay at the royal castle of Rockingham near Corby, Northamptonshire. On 8 May 1308, Edward gave her a further 10 marks to travel from Rockingham to visit him at Westminster.^[2] Eleanor is likely to have been pregnant with her first child, Huchon, at this time. In the year 1313/14 when his accounts happen to survive, Edward gave his niece generous sums of money, between £3 and £10, every few days or weeks, and there is no reason to suppose that this was unique or unusual.^[3] The king had to give the money to Hugh Despenser the Younger as he was Eleanor’s husband, but the money was specifically said to be for Eleanor alone, not the two of them. Although Edward was hugely fond of Eleanor and of her father-in-law Hugh Despenser the Elder, one of his closest and staunchest allies, for many years he seems to have distrusted and even actively disliked Eleanor’s husband. Hugh the Younger followed the political lead of his maternal uncle the Earl of Warwick in the first few years of Edward II’s reign and hence was quite hostile to both the king and Piers Gaveston. Given the way in later years the king came to love Despenser the Younger greatly and to allow him to rule his kingdom, it can be difficult to grasp how powerless and out of favour Hugh was for well over half the reign.

Although Piers Gaveston was still in Ireland in the spring of 1309, baronial dissatisfaction with the king persisted in many quarters, and a jousting tournament was held in Dunstable, Bedfordshire in March or April 1309 as a cover for several noblemen to air their grievances and discuss possible solutions. It was probably at Dunstable that a programme of reforms presented to the king at parliament later in 1309 was first worked out: these included grievances about escheators, purveyances, writs, petitions and the like. Edward II’s nephew Gilbert Clare, Earl of Gloucester, was one of the men present at Dunstable, as was his brother-in-law Hugh Despenser the Younger. Hugh attended with a retinue of ten knights, who were all or almost all his father’s retainers, rather than his own. Hugh the Elder himself, immensely loyal to the king, did not attend the tournament. Another young knight at Dunstable, competing as part of the Earl of Gloucester’s retinue, was the man who one day would marry Gloucester’s widowed sister Elizabeth Burgh: Sir Roger Damory.^[4]

Piers Gaveston and his wife Margaret née Clare returned to England in late June 1309, a year almost to the day after he had been sent into his second exile by his baronial enemies. The besotted king restored Piers to the earldom of Cornwall at the Stamford Parliament of August 1309, and gave him and Margaret all their lands back. Neither man showed much common sense, however, and continued to behave in the same manner as they had before Gaveston’s exile. Piers probably gave some of the English barons insulting nicknames, though the only one recorded in his own lifetime is the one he gave to Eleanor Despenser’s uncle-in-law Guy Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick: the ‘Black Dog (or Hound) of Arden’. The others were not recorded until much later in the fourteenth century and is it not impossible that they were the invention of chroniclers. Supposedly Piers called the portly Earl of Lincoln ‘Mr Burst-Belly’, the Earl of Pembroke ‘Joseph the Jew’, and Edward II’s first cousin the Earl of Lancaster ‘the Fiddler’ or ‘the Churl’. The most derogatory nickname recorded is filz a puteyne, ‘whoreson’, which many historians assume Piers gave to his brother-in-law Gilbert Clare, Earl of Gloucester. However, it seems highly unlikely that Piers would insult Edward II’s beloved sister and his own late mother-in-law Joan of Acre in such a public fashion, and the Earl of Gloucester was his close ally after his return from Ireland, which would argue against the notion that Gaveston called Gloucester’s mother a whore. It seems far more likely, assuming Piers Gaveston ever did call anyone ‘whoreson’, that he was referring to the Clare siblings’ stepfather Ralph Monthermer, who was illegitimate. As well as Gloucester, another earl who grew close to Gaveston in and after 1309 was John Warenne, Earl of Surrey, husband of the Clare siblings’ first cousin Jeanne de Bar. Surrey had previously been hostile to the royal favourite, and was one of the knights defeated at Gaveston’s Wallingford tournament of December 1307. The author of the Vita Edwardi Secundi wrote in exasperation ‘See how often and abruptly great men change their sides … the love of magnates is as a game of dice.’^[5]

Neither the hatred for Gaveston among many of the earls and the general populace, nor the knowledge that his friend’s ‘name was reviled far and wide’ and that he was thought to be ‘wicked, impious and criminal’ bothered Edward II; the more he heard that almost everyone in the country hated Gaveston, the more he loved him.^[6] Margaret Gaveston perhaps cared more about her husband’s appalling reputation than her uncle did. Gaveston was at his own castle of Knaresborough in Yorkshire on 6 November 1309 when he sent a polite letter to John Langton, bishop of Chichester and chancellor of England. He called himself ‘Pieres de Gavastoun, Earl of Cornwall’, and the letter demonstrates that he was perfectly capable of courtesy when he chose: part of it runs ‘Sire, we beseech you urgently that, if it please you, you may please let us have two letters’.^[7] The letter was written in French. This was Gaveston’s native language and the language he would have spoken with the king and with his wife Margaret, though Gaveston’s French would have had a strongly southern flavour. Edward II was just six miles away from Knaresborough at Great Ribston on that date – where Gaveston’s itinerary in England can be established it generally coincides with the king’s, or they were mere miles apart – and probably Margaret was with her husband. Her uncle adored Gaveston; whether she herself loved him or even liked him, and whether she thought that her uncle was the third person in her marriage and resented it, cannot be known.

Elizabeth Burgh née Clare set off for Ireland some months after her sister Margaret’s return from there, on 15 October 1309.^[8] She was now 14 and considered old enough to join her husband John, the Earl of Ulster’s eldest son and heir. Not much is known of Elizabeth’s life in Ireland. John Burgh had many sisters: Maud was Countess of Gloucester and the wife of Elizabeth’s brother Gilbert Clare; Elizabeth Bruce was the wife of Robert, king of Scotland and under house arrest in England; and Eleanor lived in Cumberland in northern England with her husband Thomas, Lord Multon and had a son John Multon in 1308, later the fiancé of Margaret Gaveston’s daughter. John Burgh’s other sisters included the Countesses of Kildare and Desmond and the future Countess of Louth, who all lived in Ireland and whom Elizabeth must have known.

Presumably Elizabeth’s sister, 15-year-old Margaret Gaveston, and their 14-year-old aunt-in-law Queen Isabella, were with Edward II and Piers Gaveston at Edward’s favourite residence of Langley in Hertfordshire at Christmas 1309. The king and the Earl of Cornwall passed the time ‘making up for former absence by their long wished-for sessions of daily and intimate conversation’.^[9] Eleanor Despenser’s father-in-law Hugh Despenser the Elder was also with the king that Christmas, as he usually was; now 48 years old, Despenser had been a loyal royal servant all his life, and was the only English nobleman of high rank to remain loyal to Edward II for his entire reign.^[10]

Eleanor’s husband Hugh Despenser the Younger left England for much of 1310, taking part in jousting tournaments abroad despite an order issued by the king on 31 December 1309 prohibiting English noblemen and knights from doing so. The disgruntled Edward II ordered Hugh’s lands and goods to be seized on 9 January 1310 after he learned that Hugh had disobeyed him, though restored the lands a few weeks later on finding out that they belonged by right to Hugh the Elder, not his son.^[11] Hugh the Younger, now about 21 years old, held no lands of his own, and he and Eleanor only had the income assigned to them from a half-dozen manors belonging to his father. Hugh might have left his wife Eleanor pregnant when he departed from England at the end of 1309 or beginning of 1310, and perhaps returned to England in or after July 1310 – one tournament he certainly took part in, in the town of Mons, was held that July – to find that she had borne him a child or was heavily pregnant. A payment of 20 marks to Eleanor’s messenger John Chaucomb for taking news of her to the king is recorded in the royal accounts on 21 October 1310, just after Eleanor’s eighteenth birthday.^[12] It is likely, though not certain, that this news related to the birth of a child: Edward II often paid messengers for bringing him news of children born to his sisters and nieces. Eleanor may have become pregnant while overseas accompanying Hugh the Younger when he went jousting. If so, she must have returned to her homeland to give birth, as English people born outside the lands ruled by their king ran into legal difficulties when it came to estates and inheritances.^[13] The king’s territories comprised Wales, Ireland, Gascony and Ponthieu, as well as England. As such, Eleanor herself, who was born in Wales, her sister Margaret, who was perhaps born in Ireland, her sister Elizabeth’s son the Earl of Ulster, who was certainly born in Ireland, and Margaret’s Gascon husband Piers Gaveston, encountered no such problems. If Eleanor did give birth in 1310, it is likely to have been to her second son Edward Despenser. Perhaps naming him ‘Edward’ in honour of the king was Eleanor’s way of appeasing her annoyed uncle after her husband, and she herself, defied his command not to leave the kingdom to joust. Then again, Eleanor as a wife was bound to obey her husband and to go where he told her, and Edward II would not have blamed her or held her responsible if she did go abroad with Hugh. His paying her expenses and sending her frequent gifts of money in the following years reveals that the incident had not damaged Eleanor’s close relationship with her uncle at all.

In the autumn of 1310, Edward II made his way north to attempt to deal with Robert Bruce, who had crowned himself king of Scotland in 1306. The kings of England claimed overlordship of the northern kingdom, though Edward had postponed campaigning there since the start of his reign, being infatuated with both Gaveston himself and protecting him (bringing him back from Ireland in 1309). Bruce, well aware that the king of England would always be able to field a larger army than he could, wisely refused to meet the English king in battle, and Edward’s year spent in Berwick-on-Tweed accomplished nothing. Queen Isabella, who turned 15 in or around late 1310, accompanied her husband; she was attended by her niece-in-law Eleanor Despenser in November 1310 and possibly in other months. Eleanor’s brother Gilbert Clare, Earl of Gloucester, also went north with his uncle, as did John Warenne, Earl of Surrey, and Piers Gaveston.

Gaveston was based in and around Perth, and his wife Margaret née Clare was with him. On 19 April 1311, both Margaret and her cousin Jeanne de Bar, Countess of Surrey, are recorded as visiting their uncle at Berwick.^[14] It must have been almost exactly at this time that Piers and Margaret Gaveston conceived a child who was born on or a little after 12 January 1312; a 38-week pregnancy from the date of conception would be about 21 April 1311. This may have been their first child together, or Margaret—who turned 17 sometime in 1311—may have been pregnant before and had miscarriages or stillbirths. Presumably she was aware that her husband had an illegitimate daughter, whom he had named Amie after his only sister. The identity of the girl’s mother is unknown, nor do we know when Amie was born, or anything about her at all until she first appears on record in 1332. Edward II presumably knew about her existence. He himself had an illegitimate son called Adam, born sometime in or before 1310, either before he married Isabella or when she was too young to be his wife in more than name only.

Eleanor Despenser attended Queen Isabella again in the far north of England for part of the period from early July 1311 to early July 1312, according to surviving queen’s accounts. On 31 July 1311, Isabella paid 12 pence for ale for Eleanor’s breakfast, a curiously large sum to spend on ale when a gallon of it could be purchased for a penny, so presumably it was intended for all of Eleanor’s retinue as well. At Christmas 1311, a couple of months after she turned 19, Eleanor headed the list of Isabella’s four ladies-in-waiting and eight damsels entitled to receive robes from the queen.^[15] Eleanor had her own chamberlain called John of Berkhamsted, who appears in an entry on the Close Roll of 30 April 1311 when he was supposedly sent into retirement at Barnwell Priory in Northamptonshire after he had served Eleanor for an unspecified long time. (The manor of Barnwell belonged to Eleanor’s father-in-law Hugh Despenser the Elder.) However, he still attended Eleanor from July 1311 to July 1312 as he is named as her chamberlain in the queen’s accounts.^[16]

Eleanor had two damsels serving her, Emma Prior and Emma’s daughter Joan. Emma was known as Emote or Emmote and Joan as Jonette, affectionate diminutives of their names. Joan first appears on record serving Eleanor as a damsel in 1309, and she and her mother appear several times in Edward II’s chamber account of 1324/25. One of Margaret Gaveston’s damsels was called Maud Woodmancote, and later in life their sister Elizabeth Burgh’s attendants included Suzanne Neketon and Anne Lexden. It seems to have been the norm for noble ladies of the fourteenth century to be attended by two damsels, sometimes more: in the 1340s, Elizabeth Burgh’s daughter-in-law Maud of Lancaster employed Pernel (or Petronilla) Pagham and Agnes Waleys.^[17]

The queen, meanwhile, had nine damsels who are named in 1311/12, and three who are named in Edward II’s accounts in 1324/25 (this was not necessarily all of them), as well as her four ladies-in-waiting.^[18] ‘Damsel’ was a social rank and meant a woman who was either not married or married to a man who was not a knight, and does not imply anything about the women’s ages. One of Queen Isabella’s damsels in 1311/12 was Alice Leygrave, who in 1284/85 had worked as Edward II’s wet-nurse and who was therefore decades older than the young queen (born c. late 1295). Alice’s daughter Cecily was another royal damsel.^[19]

Although she had a chamberlain, two damsels and no doubt other attendants, before they inherited a third of her late brother’s lands, Eleanor and Hugh Despenser the Younger were probably not rich enough to be able to afford a large household of servants. Eleanor was at court sometimes, in attendance to the queen and probably spent time with her uncle, but Hugh was rarely there. The London annalist stated in late 1311 that various courtiers, including Sir Edmund Bacon and Piers Gaveston’s retainer Sir Robert Darcy, left court with the specific intention of assaulting Hugh Despenser the Younger.^[20] Presumably this was done to punish Hugh for not supporting the king. Although his father was one of Edward II’s closest allies, Hugh himself followed the political lead of his maternal uncle Guy Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, Piers Gaveston’s most implacable enemy.

While the king was in the far north of his kingdom, a group of earls, barons and bishops calling themselves the Lords Ordainer had been working on a programme to reform the royal household and government. Edward II reluctantly travelled south to London in September 1311 to hear what they had to say. The Lords Ordainer presented their forty-one reforms or Ordinances to the king, and to his horror, they limited his royal power severely. The twentieth Ordinance banished Piers Gaveston from England for the third time, and this was the one that caused the king the most grief. On this occasion, Piers was specifically exiled from all Edward II’s territories (even Gaveston’s native Gascony) to prevent the king again turning disaster into triumph by appointing him as a high-ranking royal official. Gaveston may have expected his exile to be permanent, or at least drag on for some years, as on 22 October 1311 he was given letters of protection for five years and appointed four attorneys for the same length of time.^[21] His wife Margaret did not accompany him abroad this time, for the simple reason that she was a few months pregnant. Gaveston’s earldom of Cornwall was revoked, but financial arrangements were made for Margaret. As the Earl of Gloucester’s sister and Edward I’s granddaughter, she was not the target of the Ordainers’ bile. Some of the barons affixed their seals to letters testifying to Gaveston’s ‘good character and loyalty’. At Edward II’s request, his nephew and Gaveston’s brother-in-law Gloucester also affixed his seal, but later changed his mind and tore it from the letters, ‘excusing himself on the grounds of his minority’ (the Clare sisters’ older and only brother was now 20 years old).^[22]

Gaveston was meant to leave England by 1 November 1311, though (as in 1308) left some days late, and there were suspicions amongst the Ordainers that he did not leave the country at all but went to the West Country. Men were sent there to search for him.^[23] If this were true, presumably Margaret Gaveston was aware that her husband had not left the country, even if he could not openly join her. In November 1311, the month of Gaveston’s third exile, a young knight of good noble birth joined her uncle’s household and became a retainer of Edward II: Sir Hugh Audley, second son of an Oxfordshire lord.^[24] He was about 18 or 20 years old. Audley would one day become one of the king’s male favourites and among those called ‘worse than Gaveston’ by one chronicler, and would marry the widowed Margaret Gaveston.

The pregnant Margaret retired to Wallingford Castle, and Queen Isabella wrote to her there at New Year 1312, courteously calling her ‘Countess of Cornwall’ although her husband had, once again, been stripped of the title. Edward II resumed Wallingford, and all Gaveston’s other lands, into his own hands on 10 December 1311 and appointed custodians, but as Margaret was at Wallingford weeks later he must have allowed her to maintain residence there. The queen sent Margaret ‘various precious goods’ as her New Year gift, and wrote to her receiver in the county of Ponthieu calling Gaveston ‘the Earl of Cornwall’. She may have been aiding him financially, and Edward II rewarded his wife by giving her his palace of Eltham in Kent. Isabella set off there with Eleanor Despenser.^[25] Sometime in early January 1312, Edward II collected his niece Margaret from Wallingford, and headed to Yorkshire with her. The 200-mile journey must have been dreadfully uncomfortable for Margaret, whose pregnancy was nearing full term. Presumably, Edward’s motive in dragging Margaret on such an awful journey was to protect her. He must have known that Piers Gaveston was returning, probably because he had ordered him back, and wanted to keep Margaret out of the way of the Ordainers, who might use her as a hostage. Yorkshire was a safe distance from them in the south.

Margaret arrived safely in York, where she gave birth to a child on or around 12 January 1312.^[26] This was, presumably, her and Gaveston’s only surviving child Joan Gaveston, named after Margaret’s mother Joan of Acre, and Piers’ heir. Piers’ former nurse Agnes received a payment on 5 February, probably for aiding Margaret during her pregnancy or labour.^[27] The king seems to have met Gaveston at Knaresborough on 13 January, and the two men rushed the seventeen miles to York that same day so that Gaveston could see his wife and newborn infant.^[28] On 18 January 1312, the king revoked Piers Gaveston’s exile, declaring that he ‘has returned to the kingdom by the king’s order and is ready to justify himself before the king, wherefore the king holds him good and loyal’. Edward had his sheriffs proclaim the news, and two days later, ordered them to restore the lands of Gaveston’s earldom to him.^[29] The king, so determined to keep his beloved nephew-in-law with him, was about to bring his kingdom to the brink of civil war.