Chapter 20: Rebellion and Abduction - Edward II’s Nieces, The Clare Sisters: Powerful Pawns of the Crown

In 1328, it became increasingly obvious that the revolution of 1326/27 had merely replaced one greedy, despotic regime with another. Edward III’s mother Isabella ruled the country during her son’s minority with Roger Mortimer as her chief counsellor, though neither had been appointed to the regency council and hence appropriated royal power that was not theirs in the same way Hugh Despenser had. Isabella took the opportunity to grant herself an astonishingly large income and to take whatever lands she fancied, and Roger Mortimer also enriched himself hugely and treated the young king himself with increasing disrespect, remaining seated in his presence and walking ahead of him. Mortimer’s creation of the grandiose earldom of March for himself in October 1328, on top of the ‘shameful peace’ the pair and their allies made with Scotland that summer, proved the final straw for many. Henry, Earl of Lancaster, emerged as the leader of the opposition. Most of the men who joined him were already members of his affinity, such as his son-in-law Thomas, Lord Wake (who had, however, played an important role in Edward II’s deposition and was Roger Mortimer’s first cousin); David Strathbogie, Earl of Atholl; Henry, Lord Beaumont; Henry, Lord Ferrers of Groby; Sir William Blount; and Sir Thomas Wyther. A surprising addition to Lancaster’s circle of allies was Hugh Audley.^[1] He had played a part in the downfall of the Despensers and Edward II who had imprisoned him and his wife Margaret for years, but like many others, Audley had grown sick of Isabella and Mortimer’s unlawful wielding of power and endless greed.

Henry of Lancaster refused to attend the Salisbury parliament in October 1328 when Mortimer awarded himself the unprecedented earldom of March, and made a series of criticisms of the current state of the English government. Lancaster and his allies, including Audley, met at Winchester at the end of October 1328, and came close to clashing with the royal retinue as the king and his mother the dowager queen left Salisbury. Margaret Audley looked on as her husband joined another rebellion against the rulers of the kingdom, and her sister Elizabeth must also have found events alarming: her son William Burgh was Henry of Lancaster’s son-in-law, and her daughter Isabella Verdon and stepdaughter Margery Verdon were betrothed or already married to two of Lancaster’s important followers, Henry Ferrers of Groby and William Blount. In early 1329, Lancaster and his allies including Hugh Audley went to Bedford ‘armed to the terror of the people’, and on 16 January their lands and goods were seized.^[2]

Edward II’s half-brothers, the earls of Norfolk and Kent, abandoned the Earl of Lancaster at the last moment, and Roger Mortimer went to Lancaster’s town of Leicester and sacked it. The rebellion failed, and the chief rebels were forced to acknowledge liability for massive debts to the Crown and to swear humiliating oaths of future good behaviour. Henry of Lancaster’s liability was £30,000, and Hugh Audley’s £10,000, though they never paid any of it. (On 12 December 1330 after Edward III took over his own realm, the debts were cancelled, and soon afterwards he pardoned all the rebels.)^[3] Hugh Audley was given protection to go overseas on 3 March 1329 and appointed attorneys on 12 April to act in his absence; he perhaps judged it politic to leave England for a while. He and Margaret might have gone to Ireland, as a year later when Audley was back in England, he appointed another attorney to act for him there.^[4] Elizabeth Burgh, despite her strong connections to the Lancastrian faction, managed to remain in her aunt-in-law Queen Isabella’s favour: in October 1329 she was pardoned a debt of 2,000 marks which her late husband Roger Damory had owed to the Exchequer.^[5]

Eleanor Despenser was staying at her castle of Hanley in Worcestershire in early 1329 when she was abducted by the baron who had captured her uncle and husband in November 1326 and led the four-month siege of her son Huchon inside Caerphilly Castle: William Zouche, lord of Ashby in Leicestershire. The abduction took place shortly before 26 January 1329, when news of it reached the royal clerks who recorded it on the Patent Roll.^[6] The two married, though as with Theobald Verdon and Eleanor’s sister Elizabeth thirteen years before, it is unclear whether Eleanor consented to the marriage or not. Zouche had been appointed keeper of Eleanor’s lordship of Glamorgan in May 1327, and through his marriage to her would become the outright owner of it and of the rest of her large inheritance, so it is hard to imagine there was much romance involved in his wish to marry her.^[7] Somewhat bizarrely, the young nobleman Sir John Grey of Rotherfield (Oxfordshire) also began claiming to be married to Eleanor in early 1329, and the royal clerks recorded the abduction of his supposed wife from Hanley at the same time as recording the abduction of Hugh Despenser the Younger’s widow Eleanor also from Hanley, evidently without realising they were the same person. Almost as bizarrely, Eleanor and her new husband William Zouche immediately rode the sixty-five miles to her castle of Caerphilly and began besieging it, presumably because it had not been released to her a few months earlier as it should have been, or because Eleanor believed her son Huchon was being held prisoner inside. Huchon had in fact been sent to Bristol Castle in December 1328, but the location of his incarceration prior to that is unknown, and Eleanor might not have been informed where he was. The siege reached the ears of the ruling regime on 5 February 1329, and a man called John Gynes was sent to arrest Eleanor. Roger Mortimer appointed himself to defend Caerphilly. It was still under siege by Eleanor and William on 8 March.^[8]

William Zouche was the widower of Alice Toeni, Dowager Countess of Warwick, who had previously been married to Hugh Despenser the Younger’s uncle Guy Beauchamp (d. 1315). Alice, who died in 1324, was the mother of William’s children Alan and Joyce Zouche, half-siblings of the heir to the earldom of Warwick, Thomas Beauchamp. Marriage to the Dowager Countess of Warwick had been an excellent match for Zouche given that he was (like Eleanor’s brothers-in-law Roger Damory and Hugh Audley before him) a second son and not an heir, and now he had made an even better one with a woman who was granddaughter, niece and first cousin of kings and one of the richest women in the country. ‘Zouche’ was the family name of William’s mother Joyce, and he used it in preference to his father Robert’s name, Mortimer; in documents of the era, he is usually called ‘William la Zouche de Mortimer’, though he was only distantly related to Roger Mortimer of Wigmore. He was much older than Eleanor; his date of birth is not known but was probably sometime in the 1270s, and his elder brother Hugh Mortimer of Richard’s Castle in Herefordshire—who was apparently poisoned by his wife Maud in 1304— had two daughters the same age as William’s new wife. As ‘Sir William de Mortimer of Richard’s Castle’ before he adopted his mother’s name, he fought for Edward I at the Battle of Falkirk in July 1298 when Eleanor was not yet 6 years old, and by the autumn of 1304 had begun calling himself ‘William la Zouche’.^[9]

Eleanor Despenser’s marriage to William Zouche produced a son, the tenth and youngest of her children to survive into adulthood. He was named William after his father, and must have been born around 1330 when Eleanor was in her late 30s and her husband over 50. In the 1350s, William the younger rented the Oxfordshire manor of Bletchingdon from his aunt Elizabeth Burgh, and became a monk at Glastonbury Abbey in Somerset sometime before February 1361 when his kinsman Edward III granted the abbot of Glastonbury 10 marks a year during William’s lifetime. One of the Despensers, either Eleanor’s son Huchon or her grandson Edward (b. 1336), gave William an annual gift of 100 shillings. William Zouche the monk was still alive and a monk of Glastonbury— and still receiving the 100 shillings from his Despenser kin annually—on 6 December 1390 when he must have been about 60 years old; otherwise, he is entirely obscure, and nothing is known of him. The chronicle of Tewkesbury Abbey states that Eleanor had a son called Hugh Zouche, and although it would be fascinating if Eleanor defiantly named a child from her second marriage after her disgraced first husband, the chronicler’s statement seems to be a mix-up; her second husband’s son and heir Alan from his first marriage to Alice Toeni had a son called Hugh Zouche born in 1338.^[10]

Sir John Grey of Rotherfield began claiming Eleanor as his wife in early 1329, and continued to maintain for four-and-a-half years that they were married. Why he did so is not known; perhaps they had made an informal arrangement to wed, or had been having an affair. Born on 29 October 1300, Grey was eight years Eleanor’s junior, and was already a widower with one son. He first appears on record as an adult when he took part in Edward II’s last and disastrous campaign to Scotland in August 1322.^[11] Grey was determined to be the husband of Eleanor the wealthy and well-connected widow, even though she was now married to William Zouche. Bad feeling persisted between the two men. Early in 1332 they were involved in an altercation so acrimonious that Grey came close to drawing a dagger on Zouche in front of Edward III, whereupon he was imprisoned and his lands taken into Edward’s hands because of ‘grave excesses which he feared not to commit in the presence of the king’. In October 1331, Zouche accused Grey and his men of stealing his goods and six of his horses at Lechlade in Gloucestershire.^[12] In the middle of May 1333, more than four years after Eleanor’s marriage to Zouche, John Grey persisted in his claim that Eleanor was his rightful wife, and took the matter to Pope John XXII in Avignon. The bishop of Coventry and Lichfield found in William Zouche’s favour, and confirmed his marriage to Eleanor Despenser.^[13] Grey did marry again and had two more children with his second wife Avice, was a founder member of Edward III’s great chivalric order the Knights of the Garter in 1348, and was made steward of the king’s household in or before 1349, so in the end did not do too badly, despite losing out on marriage to the wealthy Eleanor Despenser.

Eleanor’s abduction and forced marriage, assuming that is what it was, was not the end of her woes. Sometime after 24 June 1329 when she was addressed as lady of Glamorgan and was seemingly in royal favour, and before 30 December 1329, she was arrested again. She was charged with removing cash, jewels, and other high-value goods from the Tower of London.^[14] This situation is somewhat mysterious. It may be that Eleanor had taken some of her late husband’s possessions, which belonged to Queen Isabella, out of the Tower; it may be that the matter had something to do with the late Thomas of Lancaster’s goods in her possession there, as in March 1327 she had been ordered to give them up to his executors; it may even be that the charge was fabricated as an excuse to deprive her of her lands again. It had become increasingly scandalous by late 1329 that Edward III’s wife Philippa of Hainault did not have any lands of her own—the young queen was deprived of her rightful position by her mother-in-law Isabella and had not even been crowned yet—and Eleanor’s lands were used to provide Philippa with a dower. Eleanor’s lordship of Glamorgan was confiscated again and given to Philippa on 12 February 1330, six days before Philippa’s belated coronation as queen of England when she was already five months pregnant with her first child, and more than two years after her wedding. Philippa also received the castle and town of Pontefract in Yorkshire which should have gone to Henry, Earl of Lancaster in 1327 but which was taken by his niece Queen Isabella. Isabella helped herself to Eleanor Despenser’s manors of Tewkesbury and Hanley in February 1330 as compensation for losing Pontefract to her daughter-in-law. Later in 1330, the dowager queen and her son Edward III stayed at various manors forfeited by Eleanor.^[15] Eleanor did not only lose lands to Queen Philippa (not, in fairness, by any doing of the young queen herself), her former damsel Emma Prior had entered Philippa’s household by 24 June 1328, and was joined there by Piers Gaveston’s illegitimate daughter Amie by 28 January 1332.^[16] Emma had, rather curiously, already retired and been sent to a convent (as was usually the case with retired royal servants) in 1325, but must have decided to come out of retirement and serve the new queen.^[17]

According to a petition Eleanor presented to Edward III after he overthrew his mother, she was imprisoned for a while at Devizes Castle in Wiltshire, though was free and at court—whether voluntarily or not— at Guildford in Surrey around mid or late February 1330 shortly after her lands were confiscated. Two servants accompanying her were named as Thomas Tyverton and Hugh Dalby.^[18] It may not be a coincidence, given the accusation of theft from the Tower of London, that her new husband William Zouche was constable of the Tower until 31 January 1329, when he was replaced by Sir John Cromwell a few days after the government found out that he had abducted and married Eleanor.^[19] Perhaps Zouche helped her remove the jewels and other items from the Tower, though he was only officially appointed to the position on 9 May 1328, a few weeks after her release.^[20]

Eleanor, who had been so safe for so long as King Edward II’s cosseted niece and as the wife of his despotic favourite, and who had certainly been a willing participant in Despenser’s crimes, was now experiencing what her younger sisters had gone through at the hands of her husband and uncle and realising how vulnerable wealthy women could be without a powerful male protector. Queen Isabella, her former close companion for so many years, not only did not lift a finger to help Eleanor but took two of her manors for herself and deprived her of her lordship of Glamorgan. Between 1322 and 1325 Isabella still voluntarily spent much time with Eleanor after Eleanor’s husband Hugh had, so Isabella believed, deliberately left her in danger at Tynemouth Priory and persuaded the king to confiscate her lands. This seems to demonstrate that she did not hold Eleanor responsible for her husband’s misdeeds. The actions of the dowager queen against Eleanor in 1326/27 and again in 1329/30, and her absolute refusal to protect her, were not, therefore, a consequence of Isabella’s loathing for the late Hugh Despenser the Younger but were based on something Eleanor herself had done which roused Isabella’s ire. Eleanor was pardoned for the theft of the goods from the Tower on 22 February 1330, ten days after her lands were given to Queen Philippa, and it was promised that the lands would be restored to her as soon as she and William Zouche or her heirs paid £50,000 in one instalment.^[21] This was, of course, completely impossible even for a woman of Eleanor’s means, the equivalent of asking someone in modern times to pay hundreds of millions or even billions in cash in one sum.