Chapter 15: A Secret Lover - Edward II’s Nieces, The Clare Sisters: Powerful Pawns of the Crown

Edward II went to war against his brother-in-law Charles IV of France, Queen Isabella’s third and only surviving brother, in the summer of 1324. The king failed to travel to France to pay homage to Charles as his overlord for his lands in Gascony and Ponthieu, and the exasperated Charles invaded Gascony. It was not Edward himself who directed the war effort but Hugh Despenser the Younger, who reached the zenith of his power in and after 1324. For the first eleven years of Edward II’s reign, Despenser had wielded no influence whatsoever, and was now making up for lost time by controlling the government and foreign policy. Edward unkindly and unjustly confiscated Queen Isabella’s lands on 18 September 1324, as though his wife and the mother of his children were an enemy alien who would willingly aid and support a French invasion of his country, and gave her an income from the exchequer instead. The income was barely half of what Isabella received from her lands, and made her dependent on her husband’s goodwill and took away her ability to act as a great magnate in her own right. Not surprisingly, the queen was furious, and blamed Hugh Despenser the Younger. Although it is often claimed that Edward II failed to exempt Isabella’s French servants from the general order to arrest all French people living in England, he did in fact exempt eight.^[1] He certainly did not cruelly remove his and Isabella’s three younger children from her at this time as a means of inflicting further emotional pain on her as the popular modern narrative claims.

A most intriguing entry in Edward II’s chamber account of 26 October 1324, while he was staying at the Tower of London, reveals that he crossed the River Thames and ‘secretly took his pleasure’ (or ‘secretly made love’) opposite the Tower. The Anglo-Norman words used certainly mean sexual pleasure or lovemaking, and as it was done ‘secretly’, Queen Isabella cannot have been the lover in question. Afterwards, Edward’s chamber clerks William of Langley and Peter Pulford bought a quantity of fish and seafood—eels, lampreys, stockfish, unsmoked herring, oysters, roach, smelt—from three Thames fishermen plus butter and onions for him and his unnamed lover, as well as items which seem to indicate that the king himself made a fire on which to cook the food.^[2] His clerks simply called the location ‘this place’, but in October 1324 Edward purchased land opposite the Tower on which a house called La Rosere stood and on 21 February 1325 bought two further houses next to it, one called La Cage and another unnamed. A man called Robin Carter was paid 2 shillings because he ‘came promptly to the Tower of London with his boat to bring the king across the Thames to the place which the king bought there’.^[3] The location where Edward met his lover must have been La Rosere, where the king had his own chamber on an upper floor.

Hugh Despenser the Younger was certainly in Edward’s company around this time as he and his father Hugh the Elder both witnessed a royal charter in London on 22 October, and parliament which he attended was currently in session there.^[4] Eleanor Despenser’s whereabouts in late October 1324 are difficult to ascertain (as are the queen’s), but when her itinerary can be established in the 1320s she was almost always with the king and her husband, and her fourth son John Despenser was at court on 22 November 1324 when the king paid 13 shillings and 4 pence for a saddle for him.^[5] It is possible, of course, that the lover was neither of the two Despensers and someone else entirely, though the reference to the king making love ‘secretly’ and his leaving the Tower of London to do so strongly implies that he did not wish his lover’s identity to become known to anyone bar his two trusted clerks William of Langley and Peter Pulford. The king’s enormous household of around 500 people, including the bodyguard of archers who remained close to him at all times, his chamber valets, ushers, pages, clerks, squires and knights, and untold others, must normally have made privacy all but impossible, and many of Edward’s servants must have known exactly when, where and with whom he had intimate relations. It is revealing that the king felt the need to cross the Thames away from his household on this occasion to keep the matter private, and surely significant that the Tower of London and the bank of the river opposite it lie only a couple of miles from Westminster Abbey. A monk of Westminster thundered in the Flores Historiarum chronicle under the year 1324 that the king delighted in ‘illicit and sinful sexual intercourse’.^[6] Given Edward’s very public and obvious infatuation with Hugh Despenser the Younger which had begun in 1319, it seems unlikely that he would have gone to such lengths more than five years later just to have sex with him, whereas if he was involved in an incestuous affair with his own niece, it makes more sense that he would have tried to keep it as quiet and discreet as possible. Hugh Despenser, as chamberlain, was in charge of all the chamber staff including the two clerks who bought the fish and recorded the incident in the chamber account, and if he had been in the boat crossing the Thames with the king, his name would have been mentioned as well.

Eleanor Despenser gave her uncle a ‘robe of four garments’ made of medley cloth with expensive miniver fur shortly after the king’s assignation, on or soon before 1 November 1324, and Edward gave her wardrobe servant, who brought it to him, a large gift of 40 shillings or at least half a year’s wages.^[7] A ‘robe of/with garments’ meant a complete set of clothes; Elizabeth Burgh left ‘robes with the garments’ to five female servants in her will of 1355. One ‘robe with three garments’ she bequeathed consisted of a tunic (cote), a surcote or overtunic (an outer garment, sometimes sleeveless or with short sleeves), and a cloak (mantel).^[8] Thirteen months after the private meeting at La Rosere, on 2 December 1325, Edward II visited a heavily pregnant Eleanor Despenser at his manor-house of Sheen, west of London, where she was staying at his expense and gave her a gift of 100 marks. The day after, she again sent him ‘a robe of four garments’.^[9] On both occasions, the four garments she gave Edward were probably a tunic, an overtunic, a cloak and a shirt, though the fourth item might have been chaus, hose, i.e. a kind of leggings that everyone wore.

In July 1322, Edward had granted Eleanor Despenser the manors of Melton Mowbray and Crick forfeited by her cousin John, Lord Mowbray, and Eleanor was sometimes addressed as ‘lady of Melton Mowbray’.^[10] A John Deyville owned £20 of rent in Melton and Crick for life as a gift of John Mowbray, and at Nottingham on 26 December 1324, released those rents to Eleanor and her third son Gilbert Despenser.^[11] Deyville stated later that he had been imprisoned at the Tower of London by Eleanor’s husband Hugh until he agreed to do this, and indeed he is mentioned as a prisoner there on 27 June 1324.^[12] This is an example of Despenser’s extortions benefiting his wife and one of their children directly. Despenser’s numerous other exactions also benefited Eleanor indirectly as they made her husband wealthier, and by 1324 or so Despenser was the richest man in the country after Edward II himself. Eleanor was at Nottingham with her husband and uncle at this time, and clearly knew about Deyville’s rents being granted to her and her third son. She must also have known that her husband had imprisoned him in the Tower until he agreed to do so, but there is no record of her refusing the rents so apparently she was perfectly happy with the way she and her son had come by them. Historian T. B. Pugh wrote in the 1970s that Eleanor was ‘deeply involved in Hugh Despenser’s schemes’, a judgement with which it is hard to disagree.^[13]

The Despensers, husband and wife, spent Christmas 1324 with the king and queen at Nottingham. On Christmas Day, Edward II gave a gift of 40 shillings to Eleanor’s damsels, the mother and daughter pair Emma or ‘Emmote’ and Joan or ‘Jonette’ Prior. He also sent 20 marks to Sir Thomas Houk, the knight of Yorkshire who had the care of Eleanor and Hugh Despenser’s fourth daughter Margaret, then 17 months old.^[14] Another person present with the king that Christmas was young William Montacute, son and heir of the William Montacute who had been so prominent at Edward’s court some years before, and he and Edward played a game of dice called raffle with the king’s chamber squires Burgeys Tilh, Giles of Spain and Garsy Pomit on Christmas Eve and Christmas night. Montacute also received a gift of 40 marks from Edward, and the king did not forget his charitable obligations, giving 20 marks to his almoner John Denton to distribute among the poor.^[15] The late Roger Damory’s brother Sir Richard Damory, steward of the king’s household and Elizabeth Burgh’s brother-in-law, was also at Nottingham, as was Eleanor Despenser’s father-in-law, the Earl of Winchester.^[16] Queen Isabella sent her husband a gift via her servant Adam the blacksmith on 1 January 1325, as was the custom at his court on that date, and Eleanor Despenser sent a man called Robynet to the king for the same purpose on the same date. Edward generously rewarded Adam with 40 shillings and Robynet with 30.

The queen and Eleanor Despenser left court sometime after Christmas and by the New Year were together at Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire— which had been forfeited by Isabella’s uncle Thomas of Lancaster in 1322 and was now in the king’s hands—while Edward and Hugh Despenser went to Ravensdale in Derbyshire. Well over two years after Isabella had, or so she believed, deliberately been left in danger at Tynemouth Priory by Hugh Despenser, she still voluntarily spent much time with Despenser’s wife. This suggests that she was genuinely fond of Eleanor and enjoyed her company, as did the king, which further suggests that Eleanor was a charming and pleasant person, and good fun to be around. The few extant letters we have of hers reveal that she was polite and amicable, and although Eleanor was well aware of her own prominence and high status and surely revelled in it—she was a powerful person at Edward II’s court in the 1320s—her surviving correspondence reveals none of the haughty self-importance apparent in her husband Despenser’s many letters. The closeness between Queen Isabella and Eleanor Despenser is further implied by Eleanor’s praising of Isabella’s household squire Matthew Berenal to the king: she ‘talked great good of him’ in or before June 1325, and Edward gave him a gift of 20 shillings.^[17]

There is no real reason to believe that Eleanor was appointed as a kind of spy or jailer over the queen, authorised by the king and Despenser to monitor all her correspondence and watch over her, as two chroniclers— Lanercost in the far north-west of England and the Flores Historiarum of Westminster—claimed.^[18] (Two chroniclers also reported a rumour that Edward II was trying to annul his marriage to the queen around this time, which is untrue.) The idea that Isabella was forced to spend time with the niece-in-law who was her jailer and who caused her emotional pain by removing her second son John of Eltham from her custody against her will, paints the queen as a helpless victim, something she assuredly was not. Eleanor had had the charge of John of Eltham’s household, at least on occasion, since July 1322 or earlier, and Isabella had plenty of opportunity to complain if she was unhappy about it, but there is no record that she or anyone else ever did. Nor has it ever been explained how Eleanor somehow managed both to spy on the queen constantly so that Isabella had no privacy from her, and at the same time look after Isabella’s son away from court where the queen was seldom, if ever, able to see him. The two chroniclers who claimed that Eleanor was appointed as the queen’s guardian seem unaware that she had been attending Isabella regularly since at least 1310 and probably 1308, and that the two women had long been on excellent terms. Chroniclers writing about Edward II’s reign often tended to interpret events with hindsight after the king’s downfall and Hugh Despenser’s execution, and this seems to be another example. Isabella refused to return to England from France c. late October 1325, and although her elder son Edward of Windsor was with her, she voluntarily stayed away from her three younger children for almost a year. She was therefore hardly in a position to complain that other people looked after them during her absence, and indeed, there is no reason to suppose that she did complain.

During the festive season of 1324/25, Isabella was attended by her damsels Isabelle del Helde, Alisour Donand and Cecily Chaucomb, who received a total of 200 shillings from the king as their Christmas gifts. Edward II was always very careful to give his wife and her servants larger sums of money, a larger number of items, or more valuable items than he gave his niece Eleanor and her servants: in October 1322, for example, he gave Isabella twenty pieces of sturgeon and Eleanor thirteen pieces.^[19] Cecily Chaucomb was married to a John Chaucomb, who may be the man of this name whom Eleanor Despenser had sent to Edward II with news of herself in 1310; if so, this is yet another link between the queen and her niece-in-law.^[20] Queen Isabella sent her husband letters on 11 January 1325 and again on the 16th and 18th, from Kenilworth.^[21] Whatever was going on in the royal marriage, and although Isabella was surely angry with the king for her predicament at Tynemouth in October 1322 and especially for confiscating her lands in September 1324, the couple still spent time together, kept in touch and sent gifts. In 1325/26, Isabella wrote of her husband as her ‘very sweet heart’ and her ‘very dear and very sweet lord and friend’.^[22] The latter style especially is highly unconventional and reveals Isabella’s enormous affection for her husband.

Margaret Audley’s elder daughter Joan Gaveston died at Amesbury Priory on 13 January 1325, of an unspecified illness.^[23] Mother and daughter had probably not seen each other for some years, and if Edward II had any contact with the girl who was both his great-niece and the daughter and heir of his beloved Piers Gaveston, there is no known record of it. Nor is it known whether the king paid for the girl’s burial, nor whether he had any contact with Piers’ other daughter, who was illegitimate. It seems that Edward’s decades-long infatuation with Gaveston did not extend to any particular interest in Gaveston’s children, even though one of them was his own close relative. Edward did, however, send 100 shillings on 31 January 1325 to the Dominican friars of Langley in Hertfordshire, where Gaveston had been buried ten years previously, for them to keep Gaveston’s soul ‘more in remembrance’.^[24] Joan Gaveston had been betrothed to the Earl of Ulster’s grandson John Multon (b. 1308) in 1317, and in March 1332, seven years after her death, an inquisition was held in Wiltshire to determine what had happened to her. Thomas Multon had promised Edward II a payment of £10,000 if the marriage between his son John and Joan did not go ahead, which would have been a huge windfall for the young king Edward III had he been entitled to it (which he was not, as Joan’s death and not any default on the Multons’ part prevented the marriage taking place).^[25]

The jurors of the 1332 inquisition stated that Joan was 15 when she died. If she was the child born to Margaret in York in January 1312, she actually died just after her thirteenth birthday. Inquisitions were often very vague and inaccurate on people’s ages, so it is entirely possible that Joan was indeed the child born in January 1312, which is the only recorded birth of a child to Piers and Margaret, and that the jurors seven years after her death miscalculated her age by two years. As we have only one record of a child born to Margaret’s sister Elizabeth and Roger Damory, however, yet two daughters of Damory are mentioned in 1329, it is not impossible that Margaret gave birth to another child as well. Perhaps the infant born to Piers and Margaret in York in January 1312 died young, and Joan was born in 1309/10. If this is the case, her birth was not recorded in any known document, but this is not surprising: the births of most of Eleanor Despenser’s children were not recorded, the dates of Elizabeth and Roger Damory’s wedding in 1317 and the birth of their child in 1321/22 were not recorded, the birth of Margaret’s daughter Margaret from her second marriage to Hugh Audley was not recorded, nor those of any of Margaret’s six grandchildren. If Joan Gaveston was born when her parents were in Ireland until June 1309, there would have been no payments in Edward II’s accounts to celebrate her birth or her mother’s purification forty days afterwards. The balance of probabilities, however, would suggest that Joan was indeed the child born to Margaret in York in early 1312, and that twenty years later the jurors sitting on the inquisition estimated her age wrongly by two years. Joan Gaveston died unmarried and childless, and left her much younger half-sister Margaret Audley (later Stafford) as sole heir to their mother’s Clare fortune.

Joan left another half-sister: Amie, her father’s illegitimate daughter, whom Piers named after his own younger sister. Little is known of Amie Gaveston, except that she worked as a damsel in the household of Edward III’s queen Philippa in the 1330s, and married an archer called John Driby. Presumably the older Margaret knew of the existence of her first husband’s illegitimate daughter, though how Amie came to work in the household of Queen Philippa is not clear; she does not appear on known record until 1332. She used her father’s name, so Piers must have acknowledged her as his child. Edward II also fathered an illegitimate child, whom he called Adam and who died in the early autumn of 1322 aged somewhere between 12 and 17. So, apparently, did Hugh Despenser the Younger; an abbot of Westminster called Nicholas Litlington (c. 1312/15–86) is likely to have been his son. Roger Damory also appears to have had at least one or two illegitimate sons, and one of them was perhaps born during his marriage to Elizabeth Burgh. All the Clare sisters, therefore, had husbands who were unfaithful to them, but although they themselves would have had it impressed upon them from the earliest childhood that they must remain virgins until marriage and subsequently to be strictly monogamous, they would not have been raised to expect that their husbands had to follow the same rules.

In 1325 and perhaps before, Eleanor and Hugh Despenser’s third daughter Eleanor, born in the late 1310s or beginning of the 1320s, was in the official care of her paternal aunt Isabella née Despenser, Lady Hastings. Isabella’s damsel Margaret Costantyn looked after the girl, and in April 1325 received a gift of 50 shillings from Edward II, taken to her by the elder Eleanor’s damsel Emma ‘Emmote’ Prior, for taking good care of her.^[26] Isabella Hastings was also in charge of the household of Edward II’s daughters Eleanor of Woodstock (b. 1318) and Joan of the Tower (b. 1321) until February 1326, so it seems that the young Eleanor Despenser was raised with her royal cousins. Young Eleanor, no more than about 7 years old in 1325 and perhaps only 3 or 4, was betrothed by 27 July that year to her father’s ward Laurence Hastings, born in 1321 and the future Earl of Pembroke.^[27] The Despensers’ fourth daughter Margaret lived in Yorkshire in the household of Sir Thomas Houk, and their eldest, Isabella, was married to the Earl of Arundel’s son and heir Richard so perhaps lived in the Arundel household, at least sometimes. Hugh and Eleanor’s eldest son Huchon was often at court with his parents and Edward II and also spent time with his mother’s first cousin Edward of Windsor, the king’s elder son and the heir to the throne: in July 1324 the king sent letters to his son and Huchon at Shoreham. The boy was referred to in Edward’s accounts on this occasion as Huchoun, an alternative spelling of his nickname.^[28] Huchon was about four years Edward of Windsor’s senior. Hugh Despenser must have hired a man to oversee his eldest son’s military training, and by December 1325 Huchon’s weapons needed to be repaired. That month, his great-uncle paid for an aketon, a padded or quilted jerkin worn under armour, to be made for him; he was then probably 17.^[29] The whereabouts of the three younger Despenser sons Edward, Gilbert and John are unclear, though Edward II bought John a saddle in November 1324, which suggests that the Despensers’ fourth son was at court then, at least.^[30] In July 1322, the king talked of his ‘affection’ for the Despensers’ third son Gilbert, and perhaps all the Despenser boys were brought up at court.^[31] In 1324 the second Despenser son Edward was at least 11 and perhaps 14, Gilbert perhaps between 6 and 8, and John perhaps about 3 or 5.

England and France were still in a state of war in early 1325, and Edward II made the fateful decision to send his queen to her native land to negotiate a peace settlement with her brother Charles IV. Isabella sailed from Dover on 9 March 1325 with a large retinue and plenty of money, though later accused Hugh Despenser the Younger, rather unfairly, of sending her to France ‘meanly, against the dignity of her estate’. Isabella was with her husband at the Tower of London in late February and early March before she set off for Dover.^[32] As far as the evidence from English sources goes, this was the last time the king and queen ever saw each other, though one Flemish chronicle says that they met after Edward’s capture in November 1326 following Isabella’s invasion of Edward’s kingdom. The king, Hugh Despenser and probably Eleanor Despenser did not travel to the coast to see Isabella off, but remained at the Tower of London and at La Rosere and La Cage, the king’s houses opposite the Tower. ^[33] Eleanor Despenser gave birth to another child sometime soon before 14 December 1325, perhaps on 1 or 2 December, and a full-term pregnancy of thirty-eight weeks from conception would mean that she conceived around 11 March, just days after Queen Isabella left England. This was during Lent, a period when intercourse was forbidden by the Church, something which seems not to have bothered Eleanor. She was with Edward II and her husband at Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire on 25 March when one of the king’s servants gave her a sack of animal skins which Edward had bought for her in London, and her father-in-law Hugh Despenser the Elder, Earl of Winchester, was also with them. An entry in Edward’s chamber account records a generous payment on 22 March to one ‘Katherine of Langley, who talked privately with the king and Sir Hugh [Despenser the Younger]’, which sounds as if it might have been a rather intimate meeting.^[34]

Another entry in the king’s accounts dated 3 April 1325, when the king and Hugh Despenser and presumably Eleanor were at Eling near Southampton on their way to Beaulieu Abbey, describes Eling as ‘the place where the king frightened Sir Hugh’. Presumably this refers to a practical joke of some kind rather than the king genuinely terrifying Despenser. The 3rd of April 1325 was Holy Wednesday just before Easter, and in the Middle Ages there was a widespread belief that Judas Iscariot accepted 30 shillings on this day in exchange for betraying Jesus Christ. Perhaps Edward II thought it was a suitable day for a prank of some kind, and he was a particularly playful person who loved to laugh. Hugh Despenser, by contrast, although he was sarcastic and witty, did not have such a slapstick sense of humour. Then again, another entry in the king’s accounts on 22 April calls Eling ‘where the king and Sir Hugh were frightened’, so apparently he got his own back.^[35]

Eleanor and her sisters lost their stepfather Ralph Monthermer on 5 April 1325. Ralph’s heir was his elder son Thomas Monthermer, the Clare sisters’ half-brother, who was now well into his 20s but rarely appears on record during his uncle Edward II’s reign. Ralph also left his widow Isabella Hastings, Eleanor Despenser’s sister-in-law and the woman in charge of the household of the king’s two daughters Eleanor of Woodstock and Joan of the Tower and of the Despensers’ third daughter, Eleanor. Edward II gave the elder Eleanor Despenser a generous gift of 100 marks on 9 April 13 25.^[36] As Eleanor gave birth eight months later, perhaps she had already discovered that she was pregnant and this was the king’s reaction to the news (it was at least her tenth pregnancy, so she had surely grown accustomed to recognising the signs early). Beaulieu Abbey in Hampshire, where the king and Hugh Despenser stayed for more than three weeks in April 1325, belonged to the austere Cistercian order. It was prohibited for women to spend the night there, so Eleanor must have been staying somewhere else close by, and the money was given to her by the hands of Edward’s chamber squire John Harsik. Eleanor was almost certainly also at court on 28 May 1325 when Edward gave her a house and some land in Melton Mowbray, the Leicestershire town forfeited by her cousin John Mowbray in 1322 which Edward had granted to her.^[37] She was also with the king on 22 and 23 June 1325 when he gave her a gift of larks in an iron cage and she ‘talked great good’ of one of the queen’s squires to him, and on 8 July when he spent 3 shillings on two gallons of honey for her to make a sweet called sucre de plate. Perhaps the pregnant Eleanor craved something sweet.^[38]