Chapter 17: A Protest Against the Regime - Edward II’s Nieces, The Clare Sisters: Powerful Pawns of the Crown

Edward II and Hugh Despenser the Younger spent Christmas 1325 and New Year 1326 in Suffolk, while Eleanor Despenser remained at Sheen presumably with her new-born child and the infant’s wetnurse and other attendants, unless the girl had already been sent out to a foster family as her older sister Margaret Despenser had been in 1323. Eleanor sent her servant John Mot with letters for her uncle the king on 30 December, and sent Edward a gift of a dappled palfrey horse with saddle and equipment on 1 January 1326 (she might also have sent her husband a gift, but his accounts do not survive). Her carter Richard atte Grene led the horse to the king and was rewarded with a generous 20 shillings by Edward, and was accompanied to Suffolk by another servant of Eleanor’s called Walter ‘Watte’ Somery.^[1] Hugh Despenser continued his exactions. At the end of 1325 and beginning of 1326, he demanded an acknowledgement of a huge debt of 1,000 marks or £666 from the townspeople of Sudbury in Suffolk, one of his sister-in-law Elizabeth Burgh’s manors and only ten miles from her manor of Clare, where she spent much or most of her time. Many dozens of men and women of Sudbury including the mayor and two bailiffs acknowledged the joint debt to Despenser, and it was cancelled in Edward III’s reign because it had been made ‘under duress.’^[2] Despenser and Edward II were in Haughley, twenty miles from Sudbury, on this date, and the forced debt was another attack on Elizabeth.

Some of the men of Sudbury had been named as Roger Damory’s adherents in August 1321 when the king was forced to grant a pardon to the Marcher lords and their followers for their terrible destruction during the Despenser War.^[3] Edward II withdrew the sentence of outlawry on four of the Sudbury men on 3 January 1326 as ‘the king wills for certain reasons that no further proceedings shall be taken against’ them, presumably because three days earlier they had satisfied Despenser by acknowledging the huge debt to him.^[4] Despenser also ordered four of his men to ‘have the body of Robert Chedworth brought before him at a certain day’, and made the four acknowledge that they owed him £200 as his security that they would do so.^[5] Chedworth was a knight of Essex who acted as Elizabeth Burgh’s attorney, and was pardoned as a Contrariant and adherent of Roger Damory in July 1322.^[6] In October 1326, after the queen’s invasion, Elizabeth Burgh paid Robert Chedworth for taking her letters to the queen and ‘reporting rumours from the king’s court’.^[7] In May 1326 Elizabeth was certainly living at her castle of Clare, and it is possible that she was also there a few months earlier and thus was very near her uncle and brother-in-law while they were persecuting some of her people.

Edward II sent letters to Eleanor Despenser at Sheen on 10 February 1326 and to her husband Hugh in London on the 11th and 12th. On 12 February, Edward gave his niece custody of the Framland hundred, one of the six divisions of the county of Leicestershire.^[8] Since early February, the king had known that Queen Isabella had made an alliance in France with the remnant of the Contrariant faction who escaped and fled abroad in and after 1322, including Roger Mortimer of Wigmore, whom the exiles considered their leader. Hugh Despenser made a public disturbance with weapons (‘made a small affray’) of some kind in Rothwell, Northamptonshire in late February 1326, perhaps a sign of the stress he was under as a result of the queen making an alliance with his enemies and threatening to destroy him.^[9] The Despensers, husband and wife, were with the king at Kenilworth Castle on 28 March 1326, and Edward gave Eleanor a silver goblet with foot and cover.^[10] Eleanor was still, or again, with her uncle at Kenilworth on 28 April, when he gave her all the goods formerly belonging to a man called Alan Newenham who had been indicted ‘of diverse felonies’.^[11] On one of her trips to Kenilworth, Eleanor travelled with her 9-year-old first cousin, the king’s second son John of Eltham: she received £12 for her expenses in travelling from Sheen to Kenilworth and staying there with the boy for eighteen days, and the possessions of the two cousins required nine carts and fifty-two horses to transport them the 110 miles. John stayed at Kenilworth from 22 May to 20 July 1326, and in total, the cousins spent about 120 days together in 1325/26.^[12]

On 22 May 1326, in her private chapel next to her chamber at Clare Castle in Suffolk, Elizabeth Burgh bravely dictated a protest document detailing what her uncle and her brother-in-law Despenser had done to her, in the presence of her close advisers and clerks Thomas Chedworth and John Diccus and a notary called John Radenhale. If the king or Despenser had found out about it, Elizabeth would have been in serious trouble, and she must have known that her brother-in-law had informants and spies everywhere, so she took a great risk. She was surely aware that Edward II and Despenser—with Elizabeth’s sister Eleanor in tow—were currently in Wiltshire/Gloucestershire 125 miles from Clare, so perhaps this made her feel somewhat safer. Her clerk Thomas Chedworth was the brother of Sir Robert Chedworth, whom Despenser had ordered to be arrested and brought to him earlier in 1326, and perhaps these latest threats by Despenser—Chedworth’s arrest and the massive debt Despenser forced Elizabeth’s townspeople of Sudbury to acknowledge to him—were among the factors which prompted her to write the document.

Elizabeth wrote of Hugh as ‘Sir Hugh Despenser the son’ and Edward II as ‘our lord, Lord Edward, king of England, son of King Edward’ with more courtesy than they perhaps deserved, and without acknowledging her close familial relationships to both men. She described herself as ‘formerly the consort of Sir Roger Damory’ and claimed that her husband had been ‘pursued and oppressed until he died’, and went on to describe in detail how the king had threatened her in York at Christmas 1322. She claimed that Despenser was now ‘seeing the great calumny of the wrongs’ he had done to her, and to deceive and damage her and to mislead the people was offering her lands of much lower value in compensation for Gower; but it was far too little and far too late. There is no record of this offer in any extant document, so presumably Despenser had sent men to Elizabeth to discuss the matter orally, or even visited her in person: he and the king were in Suffolk/Norfolk from the end of 1325 until early February 1326. It is not impossible that Elizabeth had already regained her lordship of Usk from Despenser and her sister Eleanor in 1325 or 1326, but if so she was still obviously, and understandably, furious about its seizure from her in 1322.^[13] In France, Queen Isabella was refusing to return to her husband because she loathed and feared Hugh Despenser, and Elizabeth Burgh’s hatred of her sister’s husband and her anger towards her own uncle could hardly be more apparent. She wrote that she would never accept any lands in recompense for the lordship of Gower in South Wales except under duress because she feared the king and the malice of Hugh Despenser, and because of ‘the royal power which is in the hand of the said Sir Hugh’. Furthermore, she wrote, she was frightened to become one of ‘those whom the king deems his enemies’, of the loss of her children and all her lands and goods, and the disgrace of being humiliated and even physically harmed. Her last sentence declared that she would make her protest publicly but that the possibility of ‘peril’ prevented her.

Eleanor Despenser was in Wiltshire with her husband and uncle when her sister wrote this text, and on 18 May 1326 Edward II granted her custody of the Goscote hundred, another of the six divisions of Leicestershire.^[14] While Elizabeth talked of ‘the oppressions done by the king’ and the ‘great evil’ Edward had done to her at Christmas 1322 by threatening to take all her lands from her, Edward continued to dote on her sister. The day after the grant of Goscote, Eleanor’s teenage niece-in-law Margaret Martin née Hastings married her second husband, Hugh Despenser the Younger’s retainer Sir Robert Wateville, in Marlborough, Wiltshire. Eleanor’s sister-in-law Isabella Hastings also attended her daughter’s wedding, and Eleanor may have seen her third daughter Eleanor the younger, who had been in Lady Hastings’ custody in 1325 and perhaps still was. Edward II’s young daughters, Eleanor’s first cousins Eleanor of Woodstock and Joan of the Tower, also lived in Marlborough under the care of Joan Jermy, and the king sent them letters there two months later.^[15] The 26 May 1326 marked Eleanor and Hugh Despenser’s twentieth wedding anniversary. No direct evidence, such as private letters between the couple, exists to tell us what their intimate relationship was like, but seemingly they formed a solid and contented partnership over the years and certainly spent a lot of time together. Despenser had a knack for making women including Eleanor’s sisters and aunt-in-law the queen loathe him, but clearly his wife did not. There is every reason to suppose that Eleanor supported Despenser in his schemes and extortions, and no evidence that she ever tried to protect her sisters (or indeed anyone else) from her husband, possibly excepting Despenser’s comment c. October 1322 that he had been requested to allow Elizabeth’s wet-nurses to move with her. Eleanor was one of her husband and her uncle’s most loyal supporters.

Eleanor and Hugh Despenser, who were still only 33 and about 37 years old respectively, became grandparents sometime in 1326 when their eldest daughter Isabella’s son Edmund Fitzalan was born. Edmund was said to be 18 in December 1344 and 20 in early 1347, so was born in or before late 1326 and was only a few months younger than his aunt Elizabeth Despenser, born in December 1325 and the Despensers’ youngest child.^[16] Isabella was only 14 and her husband Richard Fitzalan probably even younger when they became parents, and Richard claimed in 1344 that they had been ‘forced by fear and blows to cohabit’ when they reached puberty, resulting in Edmund. He also said that they had been married against their will as children and renounced their vows on coming to puberty, but were made to sleep together anyway.^[17] This is likely to be a fake story invented by Richard when he wanted to rid himself of an inconvenient wife and marry Eleanor of Lancaster, daughter of the powerful Henry, Earl of Lancaster, instead. The unfortunate Edmund was made illegitimate by the annulment of his parents’ marriage, and his father sneeringly referred to him as ‘that certain Edmund who claims himself to be my son’.^[18] Both of the boy’s grandfathers would be executed within days of each other when he was only a few weeks or months old.