Introduction - Edward II’s Nieces, The Clare Sisters: Powerful Pawns of the Crown

Edward II’s Nieces: The Clare Sisters
Powerful Pawns of the Crown
By Kathryn Warner
First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Pen and Sword Books Ltd.
Copyright © Kathryn Warner, 2020
ISBN 9781526715579

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Between 1292 and 1295, three women were born who were granddaughters of the reigning king of England, Edward I, and daughters of the greatest English nobleman of the late thirteenth century, Gilbert ‘the Red’ Clare, Earl of Gloucester and Hertford. Eleanor, Margaret and Elizabeth Clare’s lives were full of drama, intrigue, conflict and tragedy. The death of their brother the Earl of Gloucester at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314 made the women hugely rich and therefore highly desirable as marriage partners—two of the three sisters, and the daughter and heir of the third, were abducted and forcibly married for their wealth. All three women spent time in captivity during the turbulent reign of their uncle Edward II and its aftermath: the regime of their aunt-in-law Queen Isabella. The sisters were married to a total of seven men, four of whom were involved in intense and perhaps sexual relationships with Edward II, and Eleanor was even said by one chronicler to have had an incestuous affair with her own uncle, a statement which finds some support in his accounts. Events of the early 1320s destroyed the sisters’ relationship forever when they and their husbands found themselves on opposite sides of a bloody conflict between Edward II and some of his barons.

The youngest Clare sister, Elizabeth, is by far the best known of the three, as she lived much longer than Eleanor and Margaret and founded Clare College at Cambridge, and because many of her household accounts fortuitously survive, revealing much more about her life than is the case for her two older sisters. She has been the subject of an excellent monograph, For Her Good Estate by Frances Underhill, while Jennifer Ward has done much work on Elizabeth’s household accounts and has published a useful translation of some of them under the title Elizabeth de Burgh, Lady of Clare (1295–1360), in addition to her many articles about Elizabeth. It is much harder to delve into the personal lives of Eleanor and especially Margaret as the records simply do not exist, though much of Eleanor’s life in the 1320s, when her husband was the powerful and despotic favourite of her uncle Edward II and she herself was high in the king’s favour and perhaps even his mistress, can be reconstructed. Married women of the fourteenth century do tend to disappear from the written record, sadly, and it can be frustrating for author and reader alike to have to delve frequently into a welter of ‘probablys’ and ‘she might haves’, and to run the risk of writing what amounts to a biography of the women’s husbands rather than the women themselves. With these limitations in mind, this is an account of the lives of three wealthy and fascinating women, and the tumultuous times they lived in.