Chapter 6: The First Abduction - Edward II’s Nieces, The Clare Sisters: Powerful Pawns of the Crown

In May 1315, Eleanor’s husband Hugh Despenser the Younger seized control of Tonbridge Castle in Kent, which had formerly belonged to the Earl of Gloucester. Hugh must have known by this point that Countess Maud could not possibly be pregnant by the earl eleven months after Bannockburn. The jurors who had erred in his late brother-in-law’s Inquisition Post Mortem and wrongly named the earl’s half-sister Isabella as one of his heirs still had not met to clarify Gloucester’s real heirs, and would not do so until August 1315. Despenser, impatient for his and Eleanor’s share of her late brother’s inheritance, took matters into his own hands. On 20 May 1315, Edward II at Hadleigh in Essex ordered Hugh ‘to surrender without delay to the king’s escheator the castle and honour of Tunebrigge [Tonbridge], which he has seized’. Edward told his escheator, John Abel, ‘to go in person and take the said castle and honour into the king’s hand’, and ordered several men who were in Tonbridge Castle with Despenser to surrender possession of it to Abel. Hugh’s wife Eleanor is not mentioned as being present, and her sister-in-law Maud, the dowager countess, was not there either.^[1]

John Abel returned to the king and his council on the 22nd with the news that Hugh Despenser and his men had refused to hand Tonbridge Castle over to him: Abel tried to take possession of it, but Hugh and his associates ‘raised the drawbridge, so that he could not enter the castle’. The incident in fact ended shortly afterwards, when Hugh and his men left the castle on Friday, 23 May, and Hugh rode directly to Edward to explain himself in person.^[2] Despenser was not trying to remain in possession of his late brother-in-law’s castle, but was making some kind of point; presumably an implicit demand to the king to begin the partition of the Clare inheritance. Hugh and Eleanor, although certainly not impoverished by the standards of most of the population, were poor by the standards of their class, and Hugh at least – and surely Eleanor as well – was desperate for their share of Gloucester’s lands and income. Hugh Despenser was never punished for his illegal seizure of Tonbridge Castle, even though in 1315 Edward still distrusted and probably even disliked him.

Eleanor, Margaret and Elizabeth, and Hugh Despenser the Younger, were ordered on 25 June 1315, a year almost to the day after their brother’s death at Bannockburn, to appear before Chancery on 21 July 1315 (though Elizabeth was still residing in Ireland). Eleanor and Margaret appointed lawyers to act on their behalf on 13 July.^[3] In August 1315, the jurors of all the counties who had given Elizabeth Burgh the wrong name finally admitted their error, and declared that ‘there is no Isabella, a sister of the said earl by the same father and mother, who could be co-heir’ to Eleanor, Margaret and Elizabeth.

One of the most peculiar stories of the fourteenth century, however, was about to unfold. The dowager countess Maud continued to pretend to be pregnant by her late husband, even long after the nine months had passed and it was obvious to all that she could not possibly be expecting her late husband’s child. Maud, Edward II and his lawyers pretended until the end of 1316 that Maud might give birth to the Earl of Gloucester’s posthumous child, because the king did not want his late nephew’s lands divided. By contemporary inheritance law, as the Earl of Gloucester had held his lands from the king-in-chief, after his death the lands passed into the king’s own hands until the earl’s heir, his putative child, turned 21 (if male) or 14 or 15 (if female). Edward would enjoy the late earl’s enormous income of around £7,000 annually for many years, so it is easy to understand his reluctance to give it up to Gloucester’s three sisters and his willingness to pretend that Maud was pregnant. Maud’s own motives are unclear. It is not impossible that she was pregnant at some point in 1314 – she and Gloucester apparently did have a son in 1312 who died in infancy, so they were not infertile – but if so, she must have had a miscarriage or stillbirth. Hugh Despenser the Younger again went to see Edward II personally on 16 October 1315 at Impington in the Fens, where the king was taking a month’s holiday, swimming and rowing with a large company of his common subjects. There, Hugh demanded his and Eleanor’s share of the Clare lands and income.^[4] His demand, however, came to nothing: the Dowager Countess of Gloucester’s alleged pregnancy was raised again, as though this was in any way plausible sixteen months after her husband’s death.

In late 1315, Edward II ordered 20-year-old Elizabeth Burgh to return home from Ireland, which indicates that he knew perfectly well she was one of her brother’s three heirs and that he would eventually have to hand over the lands to her and her sisters, regardless of what he was pretending in public. (Elizabeth’s 3-year-old son William may have remained in Ireland with his grandfather the Earl of Ulster, and was to spend much of his short life travelling between there and England.) Whatever the king’s plans for her may have been at this stage, they went badly awry. Elizabeth arrived in Bristol on Wednesday, 4 February 1316, and was staying at the castle there at both the king’s command and at his expense when, almost immediately after her arrival – before she even had a chance to see her uncle and her sisters – she was abducted by the baron Theobald Verdon, Lord of Alton in Staffordshire. The two married.^[5] Verdon was born in September 1278 and was seventeen years Elizabeth’s senior, and had three daughters, Joan, Elizabeth and Margery, from his first marriage to Maud Mortimer (d. 1312), sister of the influential Marcher baron, Roger Mortimer of Wigmore. He was the second son of Theobald Verdon the elder (d. 1309) and became his father’s heir when his elder brother John died. Edward I sent a notably unsympathetic letter to the older Theobald Verdon in July 1297 to say that he was ‘much displeased’ with him for not coming to him as ordered, owing to the ‘feeble’ excuse of his infirmity and the loss of his eldest son John. The king told Verdon to send his second son Theobald to him instead, calling him ‘strong and able’.^[6] Theobald the younger was appointed justiciar of Ireland by Edward II in April 1313, and probably knew Elizabeth Burgh there in some capacity.^[7]

Verdon claimed to the parliament held in Lincoln until 22 February 1316 that he and Elizabeth had been betrothed in Ireland, and that Elizabeth voluntarily came outside the castle to meet and marry him and that he did not abduct her.^[8] This is a classic fourteenth-century example of ‘he would say that, wouldn’t he?’, and should not be taken too seriously. It seems unlikely that Elizabeth would willingly have married Verdon, or indeed anyone else, without obtaining her uncle the king’s permission first. It was forbidden for tenants-in-chief (the men and women who held land directly from the king) to marry without a royal licence, and though they sometimes did, a large fine and seizure of lands and goods was the usual punishment. Although in later years Edward II certainly treated Elizabeth callously, in early 1316 he had done nothing wrong to her which might have made her wish to defy him, and her uncle was both her closest surviving male relative and the king to whom she owed obedience and allegiance. It is not impossible that Elizabeth’s second marriage was not an ‘abduction’ but was arranged and carried out with her consent. That the marriage took place on her first day back in England, however, as soon as she was no longer under the protection of her powerful father-in-law Ulster and before she had a chance to talk to any of her family, might suggest that it happened against her will. She perhaps travelled to Lincoln with her new husband, which would have been the first time she had seen her uncle and sisters since she went to Ireland in the autumn of 1309.

As for Theobald Verdon, any fine he had to pay for marrying Elizabeth without royal permission would be merely a drop in the ocean compared to the riches he would enjoy annually from her lands. In fact, Verdon never did pay a fine, and the only penalty he suffered for abducting and marrying the king’s niece was a removal of some of the liberties he enjoyed in one of his Shropshire manors. Verdon’s second daughter Elizabeth and her husband Bartholomew Burghersh later complained somewhat disingenuously that Edward II had done this ‘on account of his rancour of mind towards the said Theobald’ (they of course knew perfectly well that the king had good reasons for his ‘rancour of mind’).^[9] Verdon was a close ally of Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, whom the king considered his greatest enemy, and Lancaster may well have encouraged him to abduct and marry Elizabeth. One third of the Gloucester estate in the hands of the Lancastrian faction was Edward II’s nightmare, and his niece’s marriage can only have encouraged him not to allow the partition yet.

The constable of Bristol Castle, who allowed the king’s niece and one of the richest and most important women in the country to be snatched from under his nose, was Bartholomew Badlesmere, a baron of Kent married to the Clare sisters’ first cousin, who was confusingly also called Margaret Clare.^[10] Badlesmere had been in the retinue of their brother the Earl of Gloucester, and a contemporary poem written in Latin states that Badlesmere abandoned his lord to die on the battlefield of Bannockburn and therefore was a vile traitor and ‘representative of Judas’ who deserved to be ‘put to the rack’.^[11] Despite allowing the king’s niece to be abducted, and despite provoking a large-scale rebellion against himself in Bristol in the 1310s which the king had to put down, and despite allegedly abandoning his lord to die in battle, Bartholomew Badlesmere was appointed steward of the royal household in 1318 and was an important figure in English politics in the late 1310s. He has a bafflingly excellent reputation among some modern historians.^[12] Sometime in 1319, his wife Margaret and her household were besieged overnight in a house in Cheshunt, Hertfordshire by a large group of armed men and women, who demanded a payment of £100 in return for allowing Margaret to walk free. The following morning, she was rescued by Hugh Despenser the Younger, her cousin Eleanor’s husband.^[13] Fortuitously, Despenser happened to be somewhere in the vicinity when he heard of Margaret’s plight.

Despenser went before the Lincoln parliament of early 1316, demanding his and Eleanor’s third of the Gloucester inheritance again. The royal justices Gilbert Touthby and Geoffrey Scrope told him that he and Eleanor, and her sisters Margaret and Elizabeth, should not yet receive any of their lands, because:

the said countess [of Gloucester], after the death of the aforementioned earl her late husband, at the due time according to the course of nature, felt a living boy, and that this was well-known in the parts where she lived, and that although the time for the birth of that child, which nature allows to be delayed and obstructed for various reasons, is still delayed, this ought not to prejudice the aforesaid pregnancy, at least while nature does not suppress the same pregnancy, but supposes a future birth.

On top of pretending that Countess Maud might still be expecting her husband’s child twenty months after his death, they added:

the said Hugh could, and ought to … have sued out a writ of the lord king’s chancery to have the belly of the aforesaid countess inspected by knights and discreet matrons, that is to see whether the said countess were pregnant or not: and if so, then when she was expected to give birth. And since the aforementioned countess was always prepared to undergo such an examination, and the said Hugh and Eleanor had not observed that due process, their negligence ought not to prejudice the said pregnancy, but rather to redound to the harm and prejudice of the same Hugh and Eleanor.

Faced with such an absurd legal defence of an impossible situation, there was nothing more Despenser could do, and his frustration and rage revealed itself when he assaulted a baron called John Ros in the middle of Lincoln Cathedral, in the king’s presence, by punching him repeatedly in the face until he drew blood. He was arrested and fined £10,000, of which he never paid a penny, and as with his seizure of Tonbridge Castle nine months before, was never punished. Edward II had much else on his mind. His loathed cousin Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, was made his ‘chief counsellor’ at the Lincoln parliament against his wishes; a deadly famine was holding his kingdom in its grip and he was doing his best to ease his subjects’ suffering. In addition, a rebellion broke out in Glamorgan, South Wales against the harsh governance of the royal officials who ruled it after the death of the Earl of Gloucester, formerly lord of Glamorgan. The king sent his three current court favourites, William Montacute, Hugh Audley and Roger Damory, as well as his brother-in-law the Earl of Hereford, cousin Henry of Lancaster, Bartholomew Badlesmere and Roger Mortimer of Wigmore, to quash the uprising.^[14] On a much happier note, Edward learned in February 1316 that Queen Isabella was once again pregnant. They had a healthy 3-year-old son, Edward of Windsor, but it was as well to have more potential heirs to the throne, just in case: all three of Edward II’s older brothers had died in childhood.

The Clare sisters’ aunt Elizabeth, Countess of Hereford and Dowager Countess of Holland, fifth daughter of Edward I and Leonor of Castile, died on 5 May 1316 at the age of 33 after giving birth to her tenth child, who also died. Edward II attended his sister’s funeral at Walden Abbey in Essex, and perhaps Eleanor, Margaret and Elizabeth did too. In 1316, Eleanor and Margaret were among the favoured few who received green cloth lined with miniver (expensive fur) from the king, along with the queen, the Dowager Countess of Warwick, and the sisters’ first cousin Edward of Windsor, heir to the throne.^[15] Margaret Gaveston now lived in her uncle’s household, and in 1315 or 1316, the king began to plan another marriage for his widowed niece.