Chapter 12: Contrariants - Edward II’s Nieces, The Clare Sisters: Powerful Pawns of the Crown

Edward II recalled Hugh Despenser the Younger and his father from their supposedly perpetual exile in December 1321, and although it was the middle of winter, the king set out on campaign against the Marcher lords, including Audley and Damory, shortly after Christmas. Before Edward’s arrival in the west of England, the Marchers had seized Gloucester, and controlled its bridge over the Severn. When they heard that the king was approaching Gloucestershire, they fled from him rather than engage him in battle, burning and devastating the countryside as they went.^[1] Edward marched the forty miles to Worcester, where he arrived on New Year’s Eve, but was unable to cross the bridge because the Marcher army was on the other side holding it against him. On 7 January 1322, Edward left Worcester and headed farther north, and as soon as he had left, Roger Damory swooped in with an armed force and took the town back for the Marchers. Damory remained at Worcester, other Contrariants headed north, while the Earl of Hereford sacked the Worcestershire castles of Hanley and Elmley which belonged to Eleanor and Hugh Despenser the Younger.^[2] Elizabeth Burgh seems to have remained at Usk in Wales while all this was going on, though her sister Margaret Audley’s whereabouts are unclear. Evidence suggests that their uncle believed they had joined the rebellion against him and encouraged their husbands to do so, and other evidence suggests that both women may have been pregnant in 1321/22.

The king had most of his earls and a large number of his household knights with him, and the Contrariants’ cause was doomed. Hugh Audley’s father Hugh the Elder surrendered to the king in January 1322 and was incarcerated; he would die in prison in 1326. Maurice, Lord Berkeley, husband of the Clare sisters’ half-sister, also died in prison in 1326 after surrendering to Edward in early 1322. Roger Mortimer of Wigmore and his uncle Roger Mortimer of Chirk submitted to the king at Shrewsbury in late January and were sent to the Tower of London. The remaining Contrariants fled to Yorkshire to Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, their only hope. Among them was Roger Damory, whom Lancaster had once accused of trying to kill him, and Hugh Audley was another. The men made the terrible error of sending letters to Scotland, inviting its king, Robert Bruce, to send an army to help them fight against their own king.^[3] The letters were discovered, and this was clearly treason. Edward II’s fury at his former favourites Damory and Audley is apparent, and he called them ‘contrariant’ whenever he could and continued to order their arrest regularly in the early months of 1322.

Edward, openly joined by Hugh Despenser father and son in or before early March 1322 only five months after their supposedly perpetual exile from England, reached Burton-on-Trent and Tutbury in Staffordshire on 10/11 March. There he ordered the arrest of several leading Contrariants, including Hugh Audley, who had fled from Burton to join the Earl of Lancaster in Pontefract, Yorkshire before the king’s arrival.^[4] Roger Damory was, however, unable to join his allies’ flight: he had been badly wounded in Burton-on-Trent and had to be left behind at Tutbury Priory four miles from Burton. Damory’s wounds were sustained either while holding the bridge at Burton against the royal army, or shortly afterwards when Edward and his men managed to cross the river by a ford and faced the Contrariant forces outside the town. According to the king, the rebels ‘divided into battles in manner of war in a field’, but when they saw his enormous force, they ‘turned their backs, set fire to the town, and fled’.^[5] Damory’s injuries must have been severe as he was soon to die of them, and they prevented him fleeing from Edward; he surely expected little mercy from the king he had betrayed and who had been ordering his arrest for months, and from the powerful brother-in-law, Hugh Despenser the Younger, who was his deadliest rival.

Either with the captured and badly injured Damory present or not, judgement was rendered against him by Sir Fulk FitzWarin as constable of the royal army, Sir John Weston as marshal of the royal household, and Geoffrey Scrope, chief justice of the King’s Bench, on Saturday, 13 March 1322. Damory was sentenced to death, but then FitzWarin added surprisingly: ‘But, Roger, because our lord the king much loved you in the past and you were of his household and a confidant of his, and married his niece, our said lord the king by his grace and his royalty delays the execution of the said judgement, by his will.’^[6] This was a mercy Damory had perhaps not anticipated, though the stay of execution was to make little difference. Although the two men may well have been lovers, the statement that the king ‘much loved’ Damory does not automatically imply it; it was common in the early fourteenth century for men to declare love for another man in public. Also in March 1322, Thomas, Earl of Lancaster discovered that his closest ally and friend Sir Robert Holland had joined the king against him, and groaned ‘How could he find it in his heart to betray me, when I loved him so much?’^[7]

Sir Roger Damory died anyway, presumably of his injuries, still at Tutbury Priory. The date of his death is not entirely clear; chroniclers give 13 or 14 March 1322, but his widow Elizabeth Burgh kept it as the 12th, and she would seem to be in the best position to know.^[8] Then again, Elizabeth kept the date of her father Gilbert ‘the Red’ Clare’s death as 6 December (the feast of St Nicholas) when in fact he died on 7 December, and her brother Gilbert’s on 23 June when he died on the 24th, so she may have kept Damory’s anniversary on a convenient major saint’s day— 12 March is the feast of St Gregory—rather than on the exact date.^[9] Edward II moved from Tutbury to Derby on 12 March and thus seems to have missed Damory’s death, and how he felt about a man he had once ‘much loved’ dying in rebellion against him cannot be known. If Roger did die on 12 March, that was the day before the judgement against him and the respite of the death penalty, so perhaps the judges did not know he was already dead. Eleanor Despenser’s husband Hugh was surely triumphant at the demise of his rival.

The author of the Vita Edwardi Secundi, although he praised Roger Damory’s diligence and valour, condemned him for turning against the king who had done so much for him and stated that many people ‘marked him down as ungrateful’.^[10] Damory’s widow Elizabeth Burgh was to claim in 1326 that her husband was ‘pursued and oppressed until he died’.^[11] This was a highly disingenuous statement, given that Roger was in control of his own actions and freely decided to join a rebellion against Edward II, and to fight against the royal army at Burton. Elizabeth’s biographer has called Roger Damory ‘a grasping, reckless mediocrity with a petty crook’s mentality’, which seems a very harsh value judgement.^[12] Damory made the most of the chances which came his way thanks to Edward II’s infatuation with him, and none of his contemporaries would have turned down marriage to the king’s wealthy niece or refused all the appointments, grants, money and favours on offer. There seems no real reason to suppose that Damory was a thoroughly unpleasant or abusive person, or that he was more of a ‘crook’ or ‘grasping’ than any other fourteenth-century nobleman. He was an excellent soldier who first came to the king’s attention because of his bravery at Bannockburn, remained high in the king’s favour for several years, managed, unlike many others, to resist the ruthless Hugh Despenser the Younger’s encroachments on his lands, and in early 1322 captured the town of Worcester for the Contrariants and fought again for his allies at Burton a few weeks later. This all suggests a man who was courageous, competent and charming, and he did at least seek to gain Elizabeth’s consent to her marriage with him, rather than abducting and forcibly marrying her as Theobald Verdon had probably done. Damory’s influence over Edward II was certainly self-interested and on occasion even malign and dangerous, but not nearly as malign, dangerous and self-interested as that of the man who replaced him in the king’s favour, Hugh Despenser the Younger, who was to bring Edward and himself down a few years later.

Elizabeth Burgh had perhaps never wished to marry Roger Damory (though we do not know for sure whether she did or not), but he had been her husband for five years and they had at least two children together. In 1326, Elizabeth called herself ‘formerly the consort of Sir Roger Damory’, talked about him respectfully as ‘my lord, Sir Roger’ and complained that he had been oppressed to his death. The evidence we have implies that Elizabeth supported her husband during his rebellion against her uncle, which indicates sympathy with Damory and his aims, and there is much evidence of the way the two co-operated as a couple to further their interests. She fed the poor on the anniversary of his demise and left money in her will for Masses to be sung for his soul, as she did for her other two husbands, and was one of the executors of Damory’s will (which does not survive).^[13] Even if Damory had been her uncle’s lover and she had been pushed into marrying him, relationships are complex, and the couple may have developed an understanding and an affection during their years together. She may have disliked him, but there is no real evidence to suggest she did. Elizabeth was still only 26 years old in March 1322 and had now been widowed for the third time; she outlived Damory by almost forty years, but never married again. Sometime before 1343, she took a vow of chastity.^[14] As a widow she controlled her own lands, her own income and her own destiny, and evidently she liked it that way.

Roger Damory’s death left Elizabeth alone and vulnerable to her uncle and her brother-in-law Hugh Despenser. She was captured at Usk by the king’s men even before Roger’s death, and taken the 150 miles to Barking Abbey in Essex with her children. Elizabeth learned of her husband’s demise at Barking, and Edward II ordered her not to ‘go out of the abbey gates in any wise’ on 16 March and not to marry without his consent.^[15] As horrible as the command to stay within Barking Abbey might sound, in fairness Elizabeth was now a widow and her enormous lands reverted to her by right on Damory’s death, which made her once again very vulnerable to potential abduction and forced marriage. Edward may have been thinking of her safety as well as his own interests, at least partly. Eventually, the king paid £74 for Elizabeth’s expenses at Barking, restored her Welsh lands to her on 25 July 1322 and the English and Irish ones on 2 November that year.^[16] Elizabeth petitioned her cousin Edward III, Edward II’s son, in or after 1327, stating that she had lost £3,000 in income from her lands while they were in Edward II’s hands between November 1321 and November 1322, and another £3,000 from the ‘great loss of jewels, plate, remembrances and other things’ which she kept on her manors.^[17]

Unfortunately for Elizabeth, there was a price to pay and a brother-in-law to satisfy in return for receiving her lands, income and freedom, as she would soon find out. Roger Damory was buried at St Mary’s church in Ware, Hertfordshire, though by whom and on whose authority is not clear; presumably not on Elizabeth’s, as she was incarcerated at Barking Abbey. It seems a little strange that Roger Damory was buried more than 100 miles from the place where he died, in a town which belonged neither to his family nor his wife and which lay 65 miles from the Damorys’ main seat of Bletchingdon.^[18] His elder brother Richard Damory was arrested on 16 February 1322 and imprisoned at Banbury in Oxfordshire, but was released and restored to his lands on 16 March a few days after Roger’s death and was made steward of the king’s household in July 1322, a position he held for almost three years.^[19]

A battle was fought at Boroughbridge in Yorkshire on 16 March 1322 between the Contrariant army and a royalist army led by Sir Andrew Harclay, sheriff of Cumberland and soon to be made Earl of Carlisle. Edward II’s brother-in-law and the Clare sisters’ uncle Humphrey Bohun, Earl of Hereford, was killed during the battle fighting for the Contrariants, and Edward’s cousin Thomas, Earl of Lancaster captured and taken to his own castle of Pontefract, where the king was waiting for him. Lancaster was sentenced to death and beheaded on 22 March outside the castle; among those who sat in judgement on him were Hugh Despenser father and son and the earls of Kent, Surrey, Arundel, Pembroke, Richmond, Atholl and Angus. The Clare sisters’ stepfather Ralph Monthermer, their mother Joan of Acre’s widower and now Hugh Despenser the Younger’s brother-in-law, was also with Edward II at Pontefract at the time of Lancaster’s execution.^[20] About twenty other Contrariants were executed in March and April 1322, including the Clare siblings’ first cousin John, Lord Mowbray (son of their father’s sister Rohese Clare), their first cousin Maud Clifford’s son Roger, Lord Clifford, and their first cousin Margaret Badlesmere’s husband Bartholomew, the only Contrariant given the full horrors of the traitor’s death.

Sir Francis Aldham, an adherent of Hugh Audley, was one of those hanged, as were Sir Henry Wilington and Sir Henry Tyes, adherents of Roger Damory. A petition presented after the men’s deaths accused Henry Wilington of threatening to kill a man called Richard Apperley unless Apperley gave him his lands and tenements, and stated that Wilington ‘menaced Richard with the great force and power he had from Roger Damory’.^[21] Damory had wielded great influence in his years as a royal favourite, but now he was dead, disgraced and disinherited. Hugh Audley was captured after he fought for the Contrariants at the Battle of Boroughbridge and was imprisoned.^[22] His brother-in-law Ralph Greystoke, though pardoned as one of his followers in August 1321, fought against him at Boroughbridge, and three days after the battle Greystoke was summoned by Edward II to go on campaign in Scotland with him.^[23] Margaret Audley pleaded with her uncle to spare her husband’s life, and Edward II did—Audley would be the only one of the king’s favourites to survive the reign—but the Contrariant rebellion of 1321/22 marked the end of Margaret’s influence with her uncle, and the end of their previously close relationship. Almost nothing is known of Margaret and Elizabeth’s actions in 1321/22, but Edward II imprisoned both women and was clearly furiously angry with them, which strongly implies that both had played an active role in events and had supported their husbands against him.

Margaret Audley was, like her sister Elizabeth, incarcerated in a convent in 1322. Unlike Elizabeth, however, Margaret was to remain there until after her uncle and her brother-in-law Despenser’s downfall, and her lands remained in the king’s hands for the rest of his reign. She was sent to Sempringham Priory in Lincolnshire, where she had the company of her kinswoman Gwenllian ferch Llywelyn (1282–1337), who had been sent there as a baby by Margaret’s grandfather Edward I after the death of her father Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, Prince of Wales. Edward II paid Gwenllian, his second cousin, an allowance of £20 a year at Sempringham.^[24] Margaret may have recently given birth to her only child with Hugh Audley, a daughter also named Margaret, and she arrived at Sempringham probably with her little daughter on 16 May 1322.^[25] She was allowed three attendants and the king paid generous expenses of 5 shillings a day for her and for them, but as with her younger sister Elizabeth, he ordered the prioress not to let her out of the gates.^[26] Margaret’s elder daughter Joan Gaveston, now 10, presumably remained at Amesbury Priory in the care of Margaret’s aunt Mary.

Margaret was still at Sempringham Priory on 24 June 1326, when the king ordered the sheriff of Lincolnshire to continue paying her daily allowance of 5 shillings to her ‘without delay’. She still had servants with her, so it was not an overly harsh and onerous imprisonment, at least.^[27] This, of course, is not to say that it was not a traumatic experience for Margaret. She was only 28 years old in 1322 and had, as far as she knew, been condemned to lifelong incarceration in a convent by the uncle who had previously shown her only affection and favour. She was released after Edward II’s downfall in late 1326, but she could never have imagined that a king might be removed from power (it had never happened in England before) and she might well have believed that she would remain at Sempringham until Edward died. As her uncle was only ten years her senior, her situation from 1322 to 1326 must have seemed as permanent and hopeless as that of her kinswoman Gwenllian.

There is, however, an entry on the Patent Roll in April 1323 which might indicate that Margaret was then visiting court. Edward II, at Westminster, granted a favour to the priory of St Frideswide in Oxford ‘at the instance of Margaret, Countess of Cornwall, the king’s niece’.^[28] It is not clear when Margaret asked Edward to grant this favour and it may have been before she was sent to Sempringham, though the king’s calling her by her correct title and acknowledging her as his niece—which he pointedly refused to do with Elizabeth Burgh after the 1322 rebellion— does at least imply some measure of residual affection. But Edward II could be vindictive to the point of cruelty towards anyone he cared about who he believed had betrayed him, and he was not a forgiving man. Apart from this favour in 1323 and the regular payments to her at Sempringham, Margaret disappears from the record after the spring of 1322. Her uncle cut her out of his life entirely, banished her to a convent and refused to have anything more to do with her. Her husband Hugh Audley was also placed in Edward’s ‘unforgivable’ category; the king cared enough about his niece or about Audley himself to grant Margaret’s plea to spare Audley’s life, but he kept his former beloved companion in prison for years.