Chapter 14: Unequal Treatment - Edward II’s Nieces, The Clare Sisters: Powerful Pawns of the Crown

While Elizabeth Burgh was incarcerated at Barking, her sister Eleanor Despenser was placed in charge of the household of their first cousin John of Eltham, the king and queen’s second son, at least on occasion. This arrangement began on 3 July 1322 or earlier.^[1] John was born on 15 August 1316 and was twenty-four years Eleanor’s junior, and perhaps he spent time with some of his many Despenser cousins: Eleanor and Hugh’s third son Gilbert Despenser was probably about John’s age. It is often stated in modern books that Edward II and Hugh Despenser the Younger deliberately and cruelly removed Queen Isabella’s three younger children from her in 1324 in order to cause her emotional pain. This is nonsense, and merely an invention of the late twentieth century. Certain modern historians have created a narrative that Queen Isabella was a passive victim forced to stand by helplessly while her children were cruelly ripped from her care, which not only does a highly intelligent, able and influential woman a huge disservice, it makes no sense by the familial norms of fourteenth-century royals.

Queen Isabella must have been satisfied with Eleanor’s appointment as the guardian of her son in 1322 or before, as she made no complaints about it and there is no reason why she would not have been satisfied with it; Eleanor was of high birth and rank, the king’s eldest niece, and Isabella was evidently fond of her as Eleanor spent much time in her company for many years. Medieval queens were not the primary carers of their children, and it was entirely normal for royal offspring to live in their own household with a noblewoman appointed to look after them, and for the children of the nobility to be placed in a noblewoman’s household. The king and queen’s daughters Eleanor of Woodstock (b. 1318) and Joan of the Tower (b. 1321) had their own household, under the command of Isabella Hastings and later Joan Jermy. Both women were members of the king’s extended family: Isabella Hastings was Hugh Despenser the Younger’s sister and was married to Eleanor’s stepfather Ralph Monthermer, formerly the king’s brother-in-law; and Joan Jermy was the sister of Edward II’s sister-in-law Alice, Countess of Norfolk (his half-brother Thomas of Brotherton’s wife). Eleanor Despenser was apparently on good terms with Joan Jermy, as Joan’s chamberlain John was said to have ‘remained in her company’ in August 1326.^[2] One of Edward II and Isabella of France’s daughters, though which one is not clear, spent some time living at the priory of Ankerwick (or Ankerwycke) in Buckinghamshire in or before May 1325; a period of residency at a religious house was also entirely normal.^[3]

Eleanor Despenser spent a few weeks with the queen in London in early 1323. They sent almost identical letters on 17 February on behalf of the imprisoned Contrariant Roger Mortimer of Wigmore’s wife Joan, who was being held under house arrest with eight attendants and who was struggling to receive the allowance allocated to her from the exchequer promptly and regularly.^[4] On 5 March, Eleanor’s uncle the king ordered ‘various horses’ of hers to be transported from Knaresborough in Yorkshire (where he and Hugh Despenser were) to London, so presumably she was still with Isabella.^[5] To the queen’s credit, she did not hold Eleanor responsible for her husband’s misdeeds such as the Tynemouth Priory affair. There, Isabella accused Hugh Despenser of abandoning her in October 1322 and allowing her to come close to capture by a Scottish army. Eleanor was with her at Tynemouth Priory, however, which makes the queen’s claim that Hugh Despenser deliberately left her in danger extremely dubious.^[6] If it was indeed the case that Eleanor had an incestuous affair with her uncle the king, Isabella seems not to have heard about it in early 1323 when she spent much time with Eleanor. The two women were also together at Kenilworth Castle at the beginning of 1325 just weeks before the queen departed for her native France, and seem still to have been on excellent terms then.

At the beginning of 1327, however, not long after having Hugh Despenser executed, Isabella would show a measure of spite and cruelty to Eleanor by having three of her five daughters forcibly veiled as nuns, by having her eldest son besieged at Caerphilly Castle and threatening him with execution, and by imprisoning Eleanor herself in the Tower of London for fifteen months. In February 1330, Isabella would confiscate all Eleanor’s lands, use most of them to benefit her (Isabella’s) daughter-in-law and help herself to the rest, and imprison Eleanor again. Eleanor’s closeness to the queen for many years did not spare her children, or herself. It is possible, though this is only speculation, that while Isabella was overseas between March 1325 and September 1326 someone made her aware of rumours of a sexual relationship between her husband the king and his own niece, or perhaps even provided her with stronger evidence of such than mere rumours. One modern historian has suggested that the Flemish chronicle which states that Eleanor had a relationship with her uncle Edward II picked up the information from members of Isabella’s entourage when the queen was in Hainault in the summer of 1326.^[7] It is even possible that in her famous speech of late 1325 decrying the ‘Pharisee’ and ‘intruder’ who had come between herself and her husband and destroyed their marriage, Isabella was not referring to Hugh Despenser the Younger as generally assumed, but to his wife Eleanor.^[8] The Leicester chronicler Henry Knighton, writing decades later, stated that while Isabella was overseas in 1325/26, Eleanor Despenser behaved as though she were Edward II’s queen.^[9] Possibly this rather cryptic comment is a hint that Edward and Eleanor had a relationship which went beyond the usual uncle/niece connection, and if Isabella believed that Eleanor had usurped her position in some way—perhaps in Edward’s bed or because of the influence she wielded with the king or both—this would explain her anger towards her. Isabella was a woman with a profound sense of her own royalty, intensely proud of her birth and her position as the anointed queen of England, and may have felt that Eleanor’s behaviour detracted from her own unique and special status. Isabella would never, as a royal woman of the fourteenth century, have expected her husband to remain faithful to her, but an incestuous affair with his own niece, her own long-term companion, went far beyond what she would have been able to tolerate.

If Isabella had ever been hostile to her husband’s previous male favourites and perhaps lovers Roger Damory, Hugh Audley, William Montacute and even Piers Gaveston, there is no evidence of it, and indeed on one occasion she gave Damory splendid gifts for his chapel and seems to have aided Gaveston financially during his third exile in late 1311.^[10] She was also to grant Hugh Audley favours and appointments in and after late 1326 during her period of power early in her son’s reign, so evidently bore him no grudge for his close and perhaps intimate relationship with her husband years before. Hugh Despenser the Younger was, however, an entirely different proposition, and the queen loathed and feared him and was to claim in 1325/26 that her life was in danger because of him.

Both Hugh and Eleanor Despenser were almost always in the king’s company between 1322 and 1326, and were the dominant influence at court. The queen’s own influence was on the wane. Until 1322, she had often interceded with her husband on behalf of others and therefore obviously had frequent access to him, successfully mediated between the king and his barons on several occasions, and lobbied for the promotion of her clerks to bishoprics in opposition to Edward’s own choices. The king allowed his wife to have a say in politics and even to contradict his wishes in public. This all ended abruptly after the Contrariant rebellion, and Edward and Isabella appear to have had a serious quarrel in late 1322 when the king announced that his wife was going on a long pilgrimage around the country—probably a diplomatic excuse to explain her absence from court.^[11] In the context of the queen’s once frequent intercessions with her husband ceasing entirely in and after 1322 and of her possible belief that his niece usurped her position with Edward in some way, it is surely significant that while Isabella was in France in 1325/26, various grants by the king made ‘at the request of Eleanor Despenser’ appear in the Chancery rolls.^[12] Edward gave none of the Contrariants’ confiscated lands to his queen in and after 1322. He did give some of them to Eleanor personally, more to herself and her husband jointly, and even more to Hugh Despenser alone.^[13]

One of the leading Contrariants of 1321/22, Roger Mortimer of Wigmore, escaped from the Tower of London on 1 August 1323, and fled to the continent. A panicked Edward II sent out numerous orders demanding his recapture when he heard the news of the escape five days later, but it was too late. Some modern historians have speculated that Queen Isabella helped him escape and was secretly supporting him against her husband, but there is no evidence of this besides the letter she had sent six months earlier in support of Mortimer’s wife Joan. As Eleanor Despenser sent the exact same letter, if this is proof that the queen of England aided and supported Roger Mortimer, it must also be proof that Eleanor did the same thing. This seems incredibly unlikely, especially as Mortimer sent assassins into England to kill her husband Hugh Despenser the Younger, her father-in-law the Earl of Winchester, and Mortimer’s cousin Edmund Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel later that year.^[14]

On or just before 2 August 1323, perhaps even on the day of Mortimer’s escape, Eleanor gave birth to her fourth daughter Margaret Despenser at the royal manor of Cowick in Yorkshire. The king gave her a generous gift of £100 on that day for the expenses related to ‘her childbed’.^[15] Margaret may have been named after her Clare aunt—which is interesting, given that Margaret Audley was currently in disgrace at Sempringham and there is no record of her sister pleading for her—or perhaps after her father’s sister, Margaret St Amand née Despenser. Not long after her birth, little Margaret Despenser was sent to live in the household of the Yorkshire knight Sir Thomas Houk or Hook, whose manor of Hook lay eight miles from Cowick. Houk stated on 1 March 1327 that he had looked after the little girl for more than three years with a large retinue.^[16] This gives some insight into how the Despensers, and probably other noble families of the era, raised their children, or rather, sent them elsewhere to be raised. In June 1323, the Despensers’ second daughter Joan, who was born around the mid-1310s, was betrothed to John FitzGerald, born in 1314 and the son and heir of the Anglo-Irish nobleman the Earl of Kildare. John FitzGerald, who was one of the many grandsons of the Earl of Ulster and thus Elizabeth Burgh’s nephew, died mere months after his betrothal, and Joan Despenser ultimately never married but joined the Church. The Despensers’ eldest daughter Isabella was 11 in 1323, and had been married since early 1321. Edward II paid some of her expenses.^[17]

Eleanor was with Edward II and Queen Isabella at Kenilworth on 1 January 1324, and gave the king a cup as his New Year gift; the queen also gave her husband a cup on 1 January. Edward reciprocated by giving Eleanor two silver-gilt cups, and gave the queen one, more valuable, cup.^[18] The king and perhaps the queen were guests of Hugh and Eleanor Despenser at Hanley Castle in Worcestershire from about 9 to 15 January 1324. Hanley had been sacked and badly damaged in early 1322 by Eleanor’s uncle-in-law the Earl of Hereford (killed at the Battle of Boroughbridge in March 1322), and the king paid for the repairs. Edward II, with his niece and nephew-in-law apparently with him, moved on the eight miles to Hugh and Eleanor’s manor of Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire, where he visited the tomb of Eleanor’s late brother Gilbert, Earl of Gloucester, and laid an expensive cloth on it. Eleanor was still with the king and her husband at Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire—where a deposed Edward II would be incarcerated three years later—on 6 February 1324. She sent a letter from there to John Stonor, justice of the King’s Bench, on behalf of her chaplain John Sadington, whose affairs, she said, she had ‘much at heart’ (mout a cuer). Her name at the start of the letter was spelt Alianor la Despensiere and the letter is full of her usual courtesy, and she asked Stonor to act in such a ‘gracious manner’ that Sadington the chaplain would be pleased with her. Eleanor’s husband Hugh, prone to threatening even his faithful adherents with dire punishment if they failed him, was the last person on earth to care whether anyone besides Edward II was pleased with him or to take anyone’s affairs but his own to heart, and this letter reveals that although the couple got on very well, their personalities were completely different. Queen Isabella had also sent letters to John Stonor on John Sadington’s behalf, and Eleanor acknowledged her in her letter as ‘our very dear lady the queen’.^[19] This is yet more evidence that Eleanor and Isabella were still on perfectly good terms, despite the queen’s fear and loathing of Eleanor’s husband which, Isabella admitted later, she did her utmost to conceal for a long time to keep herself safe. Eleanor was probably also with her uncle and husband at Westminster on 10 May 1324, when Edward granted her the Bedfordshire manor of Bramingham, forfeited by a Contrariant called William FitzWarin, on top of the four forfeited manors he had given her in 1322.^[20]

Whatever was going on between Eleanor and Hugh Despenser and Edward II, Eleanor spent most of her time at court with the two men, so if the king and his chamberlain had a sexual relationship (and it seems almost certain that they did), it is hard to see how Eleanor could have been unaware of it. It is also hard to see how she could have been unaware of her husband’s penchant for extortion, false imprisonment and forced acknowledgement of large debts. One abbey petitioned Edward II’s son Edward III years later, claiming that they had been forced to accept two new monks ‘by the procurement of Hugh Despenser the younger, whom the petitioners dared not gainsay’.^[21] ‘Whom they dared not gainsay’ was a common theme during the regime of the 1320s; even the great English magnates were frightened of Hugh Despenser the Younger and Queen Isabella certainly was. Despenser’s own letters reveal that he threatened to have men executed or imprisoned or to harm them if they did not do what he wished. The king himself was certainly completely aware of what Despenser was doing, and often actively participated in his favourite’s blackmail and coercion of his own subjects. In March 1323, for example, Despenser took the manor of Iselhampstead (now called Chenies) in Buckinghamshire from John and Maud Botetourt. Despenser’s letter to John Botetourt still exists, and reveals that the king supported and aided him in the matter and wished him to have the manor. Despenser wrote confidently that the king would have John Botetourt hanged and drawn if he did not hand over his manor to Despenser. Despenser extorted the sum of £100 from one Thomas of Bishopstone in the summer of 1324, and Edward II’s itinerary and an order to one of his sergeants to arrest Bishopstone reveal that he was deeply implicated in the whole underhanded affair.^[22] Probably in 1323, Hugh Despenser imprisoned Sir John Inge, sheriff of Glamorgan—one of his most faithful and capable allies—in Southwark prison until Inge and some of his friends acknowledged a debt of £300 to him. Despenser had previously declared ‘we are very worried about having some reason for which we might be prepared to harm you’ in a letter to Inge of c. October 1322, and he duly found some reason to do so.^[23] One of Inge’s councillors, also imprisoned by Despenser, died in captivity. Eleanor Despenser had written to John Inge at least twice between 1318 and 1321 and knew him well, and must have been aware that her husband had imprisoned him and the members of his council.

Two days after her sister Eleanor Despenser wrote her letter on behalf of her chaplain in February 1324, Elizabeth Burgh was finally restored to her manor of Holton in Oxfordshire, and the king ordered the custodian of the Contrariants’ lands in Oxfordshire to allow her the income from the manor backdated to 2 November 1322 when he had granted her English lands back to her. The custodian had kept Holton in his own hands in the belief that it belonged solely to the late Roger Damory, when in fact it had been granted to Damory and Elizabeth jointly.^[24] Also in 1324, Elizabeth petitioned for the restoration of five other manors which she had held jointly with Damory and had been confiscated—Vauxhall in Surrey, Kennington in Middlesex, Sandford in Oxfordshire, Caythorpe in Lincolnshire and Sandal in Yorkshire. She was told to come before Chancery with the relevant documents. One of the five, Sandal, was in the king’s hands in June 1324 even though Edward had supposedly restored all Elizabeth’s English lands to her in November 1322, and Kennington had been granted to Eleanor Despenser’s father-in-law Hugh the Elder, Earl of Winchester, in April 1322.^[25] Elizabeth had also made one of her rare appearances on record during the period of her brother-in-law Despenser’s period of ascendancy in November 1323, when her uncle appointed commissioners of oyer et terminer (‘to hear and determine’) to investigate a theft on one of her manors in Essex. Her servants John Crowe and John Freberne were assaulted.^[26]

Otherwise, it is difficult to say much at all about what Elizabeth did in and after 1322. Unlike her sister Margaret Audley, she at least had a generous income from her own lands, even though her rich lordship of Usk and the manors she had held jointly with Roger Damory had been taken from her, and she had freedom of movement. Margaret had nothing, except the 5 shillings a day her uncle granted to her for her expenses at Sempringham Priory in May 1322 and which he continued to pay her until the end of his reign. Elizabeth seems to have spent much or most of her time at her castle of Clare in Suffolk. She was certainly there in May 1326, and most probably in 1324/25 when she spent over £14 having the castle repaired. She had a room called ‘the lady’s Great Chamber’ off the hall which had another chamber below it and had its own porch outside. Her son William Burgh had his own chamber at Clare, though spent much of his time in Ireland with his grandfather the Earl of Ulster, and Margaret Courtenay née Bohun also had her own chamber; she was one of Elizabeth’s first cousins and another niece of Edward II, daughter of the late Elizabeth (d. 1316) and Humphrey, Earl of Hereford, killed at the Battle of Boroughbridge in March 1322 fighting against the king. There was a cloister between the hall and the chapel at Clare and another, smaller chapel, and a ‘herber’ or herb garden with tiled paths.^[27] Clare Castle sounds as though it must have been a very pleasant residence for Elizabeth: as well as the herb garden she had her own private garden for which 120 stones were purchased in 1325, with a fountain and an aviary, securely within the castle walls.^[28] She often called herself ‘lady of Clare’. Even tucked away within the walls of Clare, however, Elizabeth cannot have felt safe from her uncle and brother-in-law.

Edward II, presumably with Hugh and Eleanor Despenser, stayed at Tonbridge Castle in Kent in late June 1324, and the Clare sisters’ cousin Jeanne de Bar, Countess of Surrey, also visited her uncle in early July 1324. Jeanne’s estranged husband John Warenne, Earl of Surrey, had supported the king during the Contrariant rebellion and was one of his most loyal allies for much of the reign, and sent Edward some salted venison at this time. The king was at Tonbridge again in late August 1324 and borrowed a boat from a local fisherman to go fishing (he also went fishing at Beaulieu Abbey in Hampshire the following May).^[29] Tonbridge rightfully belonged to Eleanor Despenser’s sister Margaret and brother-in-law Hugh Audley, but was currently in the king’s hands thanks to Audley’s forfeiture and imprisonment and Margaret’s ongoing captivity at Sempringham Priory. Elizabeth Burgh was to claim in 1326 that the king had also seized the woodland in the chase of Tonbridge which belonged by right to her.^[30] Eleanor staying at a castle forfeited by Margaret with nearby woodland which belonged to Elizabeth and had been taken from her—Eleanor was most probably at Tonbridge in June and August 1324 and certainly spent several weeks there with her husband in the autumn of 1325—does not seem to indicate any sympathy for her sisters’ plight. It is impossible to know Eleanor’s private thoughts, but appearances indicate that she was perfectly happy to ride high in her uncle’s favour while her two sisters languished in disgrace, and that she had no mind to try to change the situation.