Chapter 11: The Despenser War - Edward II’s Nieces, The Clare Sisters: Powerful Pawns of the Crown

Eleanor Despenser suffered a personal tragedy at the end of 1320 or beginning of 1321 when she lost a child. It was a boy, whose name was never recorded, if he ever even had one; perhaps he was stillborn. Edward II bought a piece of gold and silk tissue to lie over the coffin or tomb of ‘the son of Hugh Despenser the son’ on about 13 January 1321.^[1] By the end of 1320 Eleanor and Hugh Despenser already had many children, though their birthdates and birth order are almost impossible to ascertain. They had three and perhaps four sons already: Hugh or Huchon born sometime before July 1309, Edward born sometime before October 1313, conceivably in 1310, Gilbert born perhaps in the mid- or late 1310s (though not mentioned on record until July 1322), and John, who was already old enough to ride a horse in November 1324 when Edward II bought a saddle for him. John was born in the late 1310s or early 1320s. Their eldest daughter Isabella was probably born in 1312, their second, Joan, in the mid-1310s, and their third, Eleanor, in the late 1310s or early 1320s. Two more daughters, Margaret and Elizabeth, would follow in 1323 and 1325. Nine Despenser children would survive childhood, and possibly there were more miscarriages or stillbirths or early deaths in addition to the one we know about at the beginning of 1321. Like her mother Joan of Acre, Eleanor was very fertile, and given the regular pattern of her pregnancies throughout her twenty-year marriage to Despenser—she gave birth at least every two years—the couple seem to have had significant physical desire for each other and to have spent much time together.

The Despensers attended the wedding of their 8-year-old eldest daughter Isabella Despenser at the royal manor of Havering-atte-Bower in Essex on 9 February 1321. She wed the 7-year-old Richard Fitzalan, son and heir of Edmund, Earl of Arundel, and nephew and heir of John Warenne, Earl of Surrey, the estranged husband of the Clare sisters’ cousin Jeanne de Bar. In theory it was an excellent match for the Despensers’ daughter and was intended to make her a countess twice over, but the marriage proved to be an unhappy disaster and was to end in annulment, and although Richard became one of the richest men in England in the entire fourteenth century neither Isabella nor her son benefited from it. Edward II was also present, and paid for a piece of Lucca cloth to make a veil for spreading over the heads of the child couple during their nuptial Mass and gave £2 in pennies to be thrown over them at the chapel door.^[2] This was a custom of the era, intended to bring the couple luck, and the money was later distributed to the poor; Edward II had provided over £7 for the same purpose at Margaret Clare and Piers Gaveston’s wedding in 1307. Less happily, the king learned shortly after Isabella Despenser’s wedding that his hated cousin the Earl of Lancaster and other magnates, not named but presumably some of the Marchers or their representatives, had met five days earlier and decided to ‘raise disturbances and begin some mischief’ against Hugh Despenser the Younger in Wales. The king was advised to ‘command Despenser, the son, that he be prepared and arrayed in his lands that he may be able to counteract these evils’.^[3] The king and Despenser left London on 1 March 1321, and travelled slowly towards Gloucester, hoping to reconcile the Marcher lords. Eleanor Despenser’s whereabouts are not clear, though perhaps she remained in and around London with the queen, who was pregnant with her fourth and last child.

Sir Henry Spigurnel, a justice of the assize, and Edward II’s much younger half-brother Thomas of Brotherton, Earl of Norfolk and Earl marshal of England, were appointed on 2 April 1321 to put Hugh Audley on trial. Hugh was accused of having sworn an oath in writing to ‘assist the king in all things all his life’ and never to leave Edward’s company come what may, but of doing so. The king fumed that he ‘has frequently ordered the said Hugh to come to him at certain dates and places to obey the king’s orders and pleasure, and Hugh has refused to obey’. (Whether Edward and Audley had had a sexual relationship or not, ‘pleasure’ in this context certainly does not mean sexual pleasure.) Edward told Norfolk and Spigurnel ‘to give judgement and act as the king himself might do, if present’.^[4] Hugh Despenser the Younger already knew on 21 March that Spigurnel and Norfolk would be appointed to try Audley when he wrote a letter to Sir John Inge, sheriff of Glamorgan, and did his best to influence Spigurnel to find Audley guilty by sending him letters stating that he could not believe Spigurnel ‘would like to be against us nor against any of our friends’.^[5] This was a not very subtle threat that if Spigurnel was too lenient with Audley, he would displease the king and his powerful favourite (and Despenser was prone to ordering his followers to harm and generally harass men who displeased him, or threatening them with execution). Edward sent the sheriff of Gloucestershire to Hugh and Margaret Audley’s manor of Thornbury to summon Audley to appear and argue his case as to why his lands and goods should not be confiscated, but Hugh did not do so. On 8 April, therefore, Spigurnel and Norfolk duly pronounced a sentence of forfeiture on him, and on the 9th the king ordered sheriffs all over the country to confiscate all Audley’s lands and goods.^[6]

The garrison of Hugh and Margaret Audley’s castle of Tonbridge refused to surrender it to the sheriff of Kent, so Edward II ordered the sheriff to take all the posse comitatus (the county militia) and besiege it and arrest everyone inside. The garrison duly gave in, and the king pardoned them all. He granted custody of Tonbridge to his steward Bartholomew Badlesmere on 17 May 1321.^[7] Edward was considerably less forgiving towards Audley himself than towards the Tonbridge garrison: he was so furious with him that a few months later he fined a merchant of Hereford 20 marks merely for communicating with him. A clerk called Hugh of Leominster felt the need to beg the king’s pardon because he had borrowed 50 shillings from Audley.^[8] Much had happened in the four years since a besotted king had married Hugh Audley to his niece Margaret, and Audley had now moved into a position of hostility to Edward thanks to the excessive favouritism the king showed to Hugh Despenser. Confiscating Audley’s lands and goods also affected Margaret profoundly, but this did not stop Edward, and where Margaret and Audley lived for the next few months is not clear. They were officially penniless, landless and possession-less, and perhaps had to throw themselves on the mercy of Audley’s parents Hugh senior and Isolde, or Margaret’s sister Elizabeth and Roger Damory. The man given custody of the Audleys’ lands in Devon, however, complained to the king probably in 1322 that ‘some people came on behalf of the said Sir Hugh Daudeleye [Audley] and left with the issues of the lands for the use of the said Sir Hugh’.^[9] Hugh and Margaret Audley still had friends and supporters taking care of their welfare. Suffering from one of his usual bouts of over-confidence, Hugh Despenser the Younger told John Inge, his sheriff of Glamorgan, ‘do not doubt that neither [Hugh Audley] nor any of his allies have the power to hurt any of us’ on 21 March.^[10] A few weeks later, he would be proved badly wrong. Audley and his former rival Roger Damory, now his ally, were not men to sit back and passively accept their fate, and almost certainly with their wives Margaret and Elizabeth egging them on, they decided to take action against their brother-in-law Despenser.

The king, who realised that the disaffected Marcher lords could not be reconciled as long as Hugh Despenser remained at his side but who was determined to keep his beloved with him, removed Roger Damory from his position as keeper of the castle of St Briavels and of the Forest of Dean on 11 April 1321. He replaced him with Hugh Despenser’s cousin Sir William Beauchamp, and Damory was also replaced as the keeper of Corfe Castle in Dorset on 8 May.^[11] At some point in the next few months, Damory seized the castle of St Briavels, formerly in his custody, and kept more than twenty men imprisoned there; they managed to escape after he left the town of Gloucester, a few miles away.^[12]

On 1 May 1321, Edward made one last attempt to prevent the impending violent conflict by ordering his brother-in-law the Earl of Hereford, Roger Mortimer of Wigmore and Hugh Despenser not to attack each other, but his commands fell on deaf ears.^[13] The ‘Despenser War’ began on 4 May, when Hereford, Damory, Audley, Mortimer of Wigmore and his uncle Roger Mortimer of Chirk, John Mowbray, Roger Clifford and their allies including Bartholomew Badlesmere (who had switched sides) attacked Hugh and Eleanor Despenser’s castle at Newport in South Wales. It fell three days later.^[14] Eighty-eight men-at-arms, 500 hobelars and 10,000 footmen were with them.^[15] The Marchers and their men tried to burn down the Despensers’ castles, and although they succeeded only in destroying a few outer buildings, they did steal windows, lead and ironwork. They made a special point of burning the charters and documents granting the lands to Eleanor and her husband.^[16] Hugh Despenser later claimed that the Marchers had stolen from him and Eleanor, among many other things, 40 destriers, 60 mares, 10,000 sheep, 400 pigs, 400 oxen, 500 cows and 160 plough-cattle, armour for 200 men, siege-engines, crossbows and other military equipment, wagons and carts, wine, honey, corn, rye and other victuals, to a total loss of £14,000 on twenty-three manors. The Marchers also attacked Eleanor and Despenser’s lands in England, ‘throwing down houses, robbing and spoiling what they could find’ to a loss of £10,000, or so Despenser claimed, and ‘whatever the barons found of value in the castles, contrary to the laws of war they divided between themselves’, according to the Vita.^[17] They kept for themselves the Despensers’ rents and other income, cut down their woods, burned their barns, robbed all their moveable goods, imprisoned Hugh’s supporters, and killed quite a few men, including the constable of Neath Castle, Sir John Iweyn. Despenser’s father Hugh the Elder and the Despenser retainers Sir Ingelram Berenger and Sir John Haudlo also saw their lands attacked and plundered. Roger Damory’s sister Katherine and her husband Sir Walter Poure robbed six manors in Oxfordshire belonging to Haudlo.^[18]

Edward II was forced to grant a pardon on 20 August 1321 to the main Contrariants—as he soon took to calling his and Despenser’s foes— and their followers for all the crimes they had committed against the Despensers, during a parliament held in London. The Marcher lords sat menacingly with their armies all around the walls of the capital to prevent the king leaving. Over 100 adherents of Roger Damory were pardoned for their actions against the Despensers, including the 50-year-old Maurice, Lord Berkeley, husband of the Clare sisters’ much older half-sister Isabella Clare (b. 1262). Damory’s former position close to the king and his excellent marriage to the king’s rich niece had enabled him to attract a large following, and the fact that such a wealthy and powerful nobleman as Lord Berkeley was classed as his supporter and not vice versa also reveals how influential Damory had become. Around fifty adherents of Hugh Audley were also pardoned, including his sister Alice’s husband Ralph Greystoke.^[19] The Marchers demanded the permanent exile and disinheritance of Hugh Despenser and his father, and the perpetual disinheritance of their descendants. With no other choice, a furious Edward II was forced to consent, but as he had done with Piers Gaveston years before, immediately began plotting to get them back. Hugh Despenser the Elder took himself off abroad; Hugh the Younger became a pirate in the English Channel with the king’s full knowledge and connivance.

Eleanor Despenser was, as her sister Margaret had been a few months previously, deprived of her lands and her income, and had to suffer the knowledge that her children were also permanently disinherited thanks to her husband’s actions. How she felt about her husband’s foray into piracy is not known, though she must have been furious that he had been expelled from his own homeland with no money and possessions at the instigation of her sisters’ husbands and others. Unlike Margaret Audley, however, Edward II was keen to look after Eleanor and protect her interests. Although it is difficult to ascertain her whereabouts while her husband was a ‘sea-monster’ (the word the Vita Edwardi Secundi ascribes to him in 1321), it is highly likely that Edward took Eleanor, her children and her servants into his own household and paid all her expenses. It is also possible, given the regular pattern of Eleanor’s childbearing throughout her Despenser marriage, that she was pregnant when her husband was exiled, as her sister Margaret had been when her first husband Piers Gaveston was banished for the third time in late 1311. Eleanor was not included in her husband’s exile, and although she may have travelled abroad with Hugh when he took part in jousting tournaments on the continent in 1310, she is unlikely to have participated in his piracy—though must have received some of the goods and money he stole.

On 16 August, 25 September and again on 28 November 1321, the king ordered Roger Damory and Hugh Audley to deliver Eleanor and Hugh Despenser’s lands in Glamorgan and Gwynllŵg into his own hands.^[20] They failed to do so. Damory wrote to Edward with the lame excuse that if he handed over Glamorgan, this would cause the inhabitants to believe that Despenser had remained in the country and that therefore they would rise in war, ‘which answer the king deems altogether insufficient and derisory’. Audley claimed not to have any of Despenser’s lands in his custody as Gwynllŵg was part of his wife’s inheritance and rightfully belonged to him, ‘which answer the king reputes as naught’. Edward seized Damory’s lands and goods in Essex, Suffolk and Hertfordshire on 22 November.^[21] The king’s former favourites were now counted among his deadliest enemies, and their marriages to his nieces would not save them. Over the next few months, Edward regularly ordered sheriffs to arrest Damory and Audley; the fact that he had to keep repeating the order either shows that sheriffs were reluctant to do so, or that the two men were adept at making themselves scarce. Hugh and Margaret Audley had no home and no income after April 1321, and as her uncle the king seems to have washed his hands of her and to have deemed her his enemy, Margaret perhaps stayed with her parents-in-law Hugh the Elder and Isolde. A later petition by Elizabeth Burgh and entries in the Chancery rolls make it apparent that Edward II seized her lands and goods as well on 19 November 1321.^[22] All three Clare sisters had now lost their income.