Chapter 9: A Rich Inheritance - Edward II’s Nieces, The Clare Sisters: Powerful Pawns of the Crown

In April 1317, Elizabeth Burgh’s former father-in-law Richard Burgh, Earl of Ulster, was imprisoned in Dublin Castle, and Edward II ordered Roger Mortimer of Wigmore, ‘keeper of Ireland’, to determine whether it would be more beneficial to the king to have Ulster sent to him in England or to continue to detain him. By early August 1317, Ulster had been released and was ready to set out from Ireland to England, and was still in England in November 1317.^[1] Elizabeth probably had a chance to spend time with her father-in-law, and perhaps he brought her son William, his grandson and heir, with him. Ulster’s daughter Elizabeth Bruce had been freed from house arrest in England and returned to Scotland and to her husband King Robert after the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314, and another of the earl’s many daughters, Maud the Dowager Countess of Gloucester, lived in complete obscurity after the peculiar and unprecedented situation of her pretended three-year pregnancy. Maud was to die in 1320 at the age of only 30 or so. As for Roger Mortimer of Wigmore, the king’s lieutenant of Ireland and a nobleman of Herefordshire and the Welsh Marches, he was a loyal ally of the king until the behaviour of Elizabeth Burgh’s brother-in-law Hugh Despenser the Younger drove him into opposition some years later.

The Clare lands were divided at last in November 1317. The Despensers took the rich lordship of Glamorgan in South Wales; the Audleys, many of the estates in the south-east of England including Tonbridge, and the Welsh lordship of Gwynllŵg; the Damorys, the lands in Essex and Suffolk and some in Dorset, and received the rich Welsh lordship of Usk in 1320. Eleanor and Hugh Despenser received far more lands in England in 1320 after Maud Clare née Burgh died, and almost all their lands lay in Wales from 1317 until 1320.^[2] The three parts of the Clare lands were not equal (it being impossible to divide lands into exactly equal parts), and the Despensers received lands worth £1,415 a year, the Audleys £1,292, and the Damorys £1,287. On the death in the 1320s of their sister-in-law Maud, Dowager Countess of Gloucester, the reversion of her dower lands gave each couple more lands worth around £900 a year. Hugh Despenser the Younger, as husband of the eldest sister, was given first pick of the divisions, and naturally enough took the largest one and the one which included the great lordship of Glamorgan.^[3] Eleanor and her husband now owned Caerphilly Castle, her birthplace, though whether she ever spent time there is unclear. In 1320, the Gloucestershire manor of Tewkesbury, Elizabeth Burgh’s birthplace and the burial place of the sisters’ father Gilbert ‘the Red’ and brother the younger Gilbert, also passed to the Despensers. Elizabeth and Roger Damory now owned Clare in Suffolk where the sisters’ mother Joan of Acre was buried at the Augustinian priory.

A third each of the Clare inheritance made the three sisters probably the richest women in the country after the queen, with the exception of their second cousin Alice Lacy (b. 1281), who inherited the earldoms of Lincoln and Salisbury from her parents (and who walked out of her unhappy marriage to Thomas, Earl of Lancaster in May 1317).^[4] Hugh and Eleanor Despenser also received two manors in Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire which had formerly belonged to Eleanor’s much older half-sister Joan MacDuff, Dowager Countess of Fife.^[5] Joan, younger of the two daughters of Gilbert ‘the Red’ from his first marriage to Alice Lusignan, was now married to her second husband Gervase Avenel, and they returned to Scotland sometime after the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314 and took an oath of loyalty to Robert Bruce. Joan’s son Duncan MacDuff, Earl of Fife, who was the Clare sisters’ half-nephew and married to their younger half-sister Mary née Monthermer, also returned to Scotland and entered Bruce’s allegiance in 1315. Mary MacDuff née Monthermer appears to have stayed in England for a few more years: her uncle Edward II gave her permission to go to Scotland in January 1320, ostensibly to rescue a noblewoman called Elena Neville being held captive there. By May 1321 Mary was living in Scotland, but still sent servants to shop for clothes and jewels for her in London.^[6]

Edward II’s powerful first cousin and enemy, Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, still distrusted the three royal favourites Roger Damory, Hugh Audley and William Montacute immensely, especially Damory. In early October 1317, Lancaster seized Knaresborough Castle in Yorkshire and kept hold of it until January 1318, and by the beginning of November had also forcibly gained possession of Alton Castle in Staffordshire.^[7] Roger Damory was the custodian of both.^[8] Clearly, Lancaster saw Damory as his chief enemy at court, and determined to attack him. Edward’s chief priority was the safety and well-being of his friends, and he took Damory’s lands in Yorkshire, Herefordshire and Lincolnshire into his own hands on 18 October 1317 to protect Damory from his cousin’s aggression, also ordering a clerk to remove Damory’s stud-farm from Knaresborough to Burstwick. He restored Damory’s lands to him on 2 December, assuming the danger from Lancaster was past (Damory had in the meantime taken possession of his and Elizabeth’s many lands as well).^[9] Lancaster did not attack the lands and castles of Hugh Audley or William Montacute, implying that Roger Damory was the foremost man at court, highest in Edward’s affections, and thus Lancaster’s chief enemy.

Numerous grants and favours recorded in the Chancery rolls in 1317 were made ‘on the information of Roger Damory’, and the royal favourite was clearly very often at court and had frequent access to the king’s ear.^[10] The king had a falcon named Damory after his friend or lover which had presumably been a gift from him, and he still owned the bird in 1319.^[11] Damory’s closeness to the king implies that his wife Elizabeth Burgh was also often at court in 1317 and into 1318, though she mostly disappears from the record during their marriage. Elizabeth probably saw much of her sister Eleanor in 1317/18, as the itinerary of Eleanor’s husband Hugh Despenser reveals that he was also far more often at court than previously.^[12] As for Hugh Audley, he witnessed none of Edward II’s charters after August 1317, so apparently was not as close to the king as he once had been; perhaps he spent most of his time away from court with his new wife Margaret and did his best to build a good relationship with her. Two favours granted, which were made at Audley’s request, were recorded on 7 April and 20 May 1318, and on 18 November that year Hugh was commissioned to arrest a group of men who had imprisoned and tortured a woman in Northamptonshire, but otherwise he rarely appears on record (and by 20 May 1319 had still not arrested the torturers).^[13]

Roger Damory’s frequently malignant influence over Edward II caused much concern among many of the English barons and bishops. In early October 1317, it is likely that Damory came close to persuading the king to attack Thomas of Lancaster at Thomas’s stronghold of Pontefract in Yorkshire. Lancaster, astonishingly, jeered at the king and his retinue as they rode past in a display of appalling manners and lèse-majesté, and Edward understandably never forgave him for it, but assaulting the Earl of Lancaster in his own castle would have led to civil war. To restrain Damory, the Earl of Pembroke and Bartholomew Badlesmere signed an indenture with him in London on 24 November 1317, just days after the division of the Clare inheritance had made Damory and his wife Elizabeth Burgh rich. The favourite promised that he would do his best to prevent Edward II from taking action prejudicial to himself or his kingdom—a telling comment which demonstrates what little faith Pembroke and Badlesmere had in Edward—and if he were unable to dissuade him, would inform Pembroke and Badlesmere as soon as possible so that the three of them together could talk Edward out of whatever foolishness he might be planning. Damory swore on the Host to obey the covenant, and pledged the massive sum of £10,000 as a penalty for breaking it. For their part, Pembroke and Badlesmere swore to defend and maintain Damory against all persons except the king, as long as he kept and observed the covenant. This indenture may be unique, or it may be one of a series which Pembroke and Badlesmere signed around this time with Edward’s friends, and the only one which happens to survive.^[14]

As early as November or the beginning of December 1317, Hugh Despenser the Younger took the homage of some of the lords and tenants of the county of Gwynllŵg in South Wales, which had once been part of his lordship of Glamorgan but had been given to Margaret and Hugh Audley. News of this and of the tenants’ refusal to do homage to Audley reached the king’s ears at Windsor on or before 12 December 1317.^[15] This is the first example, but by no means the last, of Despenser trying to gain control of more lands in South Wales than he was rightfully entitled to. Edward II refused to accept his behaviour and told his council to consider the oaths taken to Despenser ‘as of no effect’, but Despenser refused to give up, and in September 1318 Hugh and Margaret Audley gave in and exchanged Gwynllŵg, including the castle and manor of Newport, for some of the Despensers’ manors in England.^[16] These were of much lower value, so Hugh and Eleanor Despenser profited considerably from the deal. There is no evidence of how this affected the relationship between the two sisters, but it must have damaged it, and perhaps the year 1318 saw the beginning of a permanent rift between them.

Hugh Despenser’s enemies were to accuse him in 1321, probably correctly, of trying to encroach on the lands of Roger Damory and Elizabeth Burgh as well.^[17] The version of the Flores Historiarum chronicle written at Tintern Abbey on the border of England and Wales—Damory was the abbey’s patron—states that Damory successfully resisted Despenser’s encroachments.^[18] The Lanercost chronicle says that ‘being a most avaricious man, he [Despenser] had contrived by different means and tricks that he alone should possess the lands and revenues, and for that reason had devised grave charges against those who had married the other two sisters’. The Vita agrees, saying that Despenser ‘set traps for his co-heirs; thus, if he could manage it, each would lose his share through false accusations and he alone would obtain the whole earldom [of Gloucester]. But they, relying on the help of the barons, were a match for his wickedness’.^[19] The three Clare sisters now stood on opposite sides of a divide where the husband of one was trying his hardest to take lands from the other two, and as the years went on, things only became worse.

The king and queen and their court spent Christmas 1317 at Westminster, and Edward gave rings to his nieces Margaret Audley and Elizabeth Burgh and his sons Edward of Windsor and John of Eltham, although the latter was only 16 months old. Eleanor Despenser is not listed as receiving a gift despite the king’s undoubted great affection for her, so perhaps this reveals his annoyance with her husband Hugh, who had only owned Eleanor’s lands for a few weeks and was already causing trouble. Margaret Audley’s 5-year-old daughter Joan Gaveston received a gold ring with two emeralds and three pearls from her great-uncle the king, worth 32 shillings, and another gold ring with six emeralds, worth 20 marks, went to the Clare sisters’ aunt Mary. Queen Isabella’s gift from her husband was an enamelled silver-gilt bowl, with foot and cover, worth £17.^[20] It is rather interesting to note that on 27 December 1317, Edward II took the custody of all the lands and tenements of the late Theobald Verdon away from Roger Damory, and granted them to Queen Isabella instead.^[21] Perhaps this was intended to persuade the turbulent Thomas of Lancaster, Isabella’s uncle as well as the king’s first cousin, to relinquish control of Alton Castle, though in that case granting the queen custody of Alton alone might have served the intended purpose. Isabella was several months pregnant with the royal couple’s third child and first daughter Eleanor of Woodstock, who was born in June 1318. Damory’s wife Elizabeth Burgh was also pregnant, and her child was due a few weeks before the king and queen’s. Edward II and his sister Mary attended the funeral of their stepmother Queen Marguerite, Edward I’s widow, at the Greyfriars church in London in mid-March 1318, a month after her death. Roger Damory also attended, a sign that he was still high in Edward’s favour and spent much or most of his time with him; the king bought Damory two pieces of Lucca cloth to have himself mourning clothes made for the funeral.^[22] Roger Damory was still powerful at court, but his ruthlessly ambitious brother-in-law Hugh Despenser the Younger was waiting in the wings for his opportunity, and in 1318 he took it.