Chapter 21: The King Lives - Edward II’s Nieces, The Clare Sisters: Powerful Pawns of the Crown

How much contact the Clare sisters had with their younger Monthermer half-siblings at this stage of their lives is not known, but good news came in the late 1320s: their niece Margaret Monthermer, daughter and heir of Thomas Monthermer, was born at Thomas’s manor of Stokenham in Devon on 18 October 1329. The proud father celebrated by hunting two does in his park there.^[1] Margaret Monthermer and her cousin Isabella MacDuff, heir to the earldom of Fife, were the only two grandchildren of Joan of Acre and her second husband Ralph Monthermer. Margaret’s mother, also Margaret, had been married before she wed Thomas Monthermer; her first husband was Sir Henry Tyes, executed as an adherent of Roger Damory in 1322. This perhaps suggests that Thomas Monthermer had sympathised with his half-sister Elizabeth Burgh and her third husband during the Contrariant rebellion of 1321/22. Thomas also supported the rebellion of Henry, Earl of Lancaster and Leicester, in late 1328 and early 1329, with his brother-in-law Hugh Audley.^[2]

Elizabeth Burgh’s eldest daughter Isabella Verdon, another grandchild of Joan of Acre, married Henry, Lord Ferrers of Groby sometime in the late 1320s or 1330. Ferrers acknowledged a debt of 500 marks to Elizabeth Burgh on 4 May 1328, which probably had something to do with the marriage, and visited her.^[3] He was much his wife’s senior, born in 1304 at the latest and perhaps in the 1290s, while she was born in March 1317. At an unknown date, Henry Ferrers presented a petition complaining that the royal favourite Roger Mortimer, Earl of March, had engineered an unfair division of the Verdon estate to the benefit of Isabella’s older halfsisters Joan Furnival, Elizabeth Burghersh and Margery Blount.^[4] These three young women were Mortimer’s nieces, daughters of his late sister Maud, while Isabella herself was not. Isabella Ferrers née Verdon gave birth for the first time in February 1331 before she was even 14 years old, and Elizabeth Burgh sent a book costing £36 as a gift for her daughter’s purification in March 1331.^[5] Not surprisingly given Isabella’s extreme youth, the child did not survive, and it is unclear whether it was a boy or a girl. Henry Ferrers had claimed his marital rights very early, and he and Isabella were lucky that she was not damaged by this experience of pregnancy and childbirth at such a young age and went on to bear other, healthy children.

Edward II’s half-brother Edmund of Woodstock, Earl of Kent, had attended the former king’s funeral in Gloucester in December 1327. Probably in 1328, the young man became convinced that Edward was still alive and being held somewhere in captivity, probably at Corfe Castle in Dorset. Kent spent much of 1329 and early 1330 looking for allies to help him free his brother and perhaps restore him to the throne, and was joined by numerous important men such as the archbishop of York, the bishop, mayor and sheriff of London, the Earl of Mar (in Scotland), various lords and sheriffs, and numerous others including former members of Edward II’s household. Edward II’s old friend Sir William Aune was another man who came to believe that he was alive, and on 24 May 1329 Aune had been appointed constable of Eleanor Despenser’s castle of Caerphilly.^[6]

Eleanor’s son Huchon, in prison at Bristol Castle, offered his great-uncle the Earl of Kent his support, and so did the Clare sisters’ half-brother Edward Monthermer (b. 1304) and Eleanor’s son-in-law Richard Fitzalan (b. c. 1313), son of the Earl of Arundel executed in 1326. One surprising member of the Earl of Kent’s faction was Eleanor’s new husband William Zouche. There is no doubt that Zouche had been one of Queen Isabella’s staunchest allies during the revolution of 1326/27, but apparently his marriage to Eleanor caused him to switch sides, and probably he was, like so many of the queen’s former allies such as Hugh Audley, Thomas Wake and Henry Beaumont, dismayed by the grasping and self-interested regime of the late 1320s. The Earl of Kent, with numerous others, attended the belated coronation of the pregnant Queen Philippa at Westminster Abbey on 18 February 1330. Kent was dramatically arrested in Winchester on 13 March, and three days later made a long confession naming some of his important adherents in the matter of Edward of Caernarfon’s ongoing captivity. He stated that he had met some of them while staying at Kensington at the time of the queen’s coronation.

The Earl of Kent’s confession shows that Sir Ingelram Berenger, a former sheriff of Buckinghamshire who served in the retinue of Eleanor Despenser’s father-in-law Hugh Despenser the Elder for decades, vouched for the trustworthiness of William Zouche to him. Berenger and Zouche jointly acknowledged a debt to a rich merchant of London called John Pulteney on 15 March 1329, just days after Zouche and Eleanor Despenser had besieged her castle of Caerphilly. This might give some indication as to when the two men met and discussed the matter of Edward II’s potential survival.^[7] Kent and Zouche rode together the six miles between Woking and Guildford in Surrey on an unknown date as they discussed the issue, and Zouche told Kent to ‘avoid the town of Guildford by reason of his niece [Eleanor] Despenser who was in the same town of Guildford’.^[8] This is rather puzzling, as if Edward II were truly still alive, Eleanor would certainly have been one of the people most supportive of any efforts to help the uncle she had been so close to, and her eldest son, son-in-law, half-brother and husband were involved in the plot. Edward III was also at Guildford in Surrey from 23 to 28 February 1330, after his wife Philippa’s belated coronation.^[9] Eleanor Despenser’s lands were confiscated on 12 February and she was pardoned on the 22nd, so it makes sense that she would have been in the king’s company at this time. Her proximity to the king and his mother the dowager queen Isabella was presumably the reason why Kent was warned to avoid talking to her, and perhaps Zouche also wished to keep his wife out of further trouble given that she had enough problems already. The men secretly trying to aid Edward of Caernarfon and free him from captivity, perhaps even restore him to his lost throne, were risking a great deal—arrest or exile, forfeiture of all lands and goods, even execution—and they knew it.

An order was issued for the arrest of William Zouche and two other adherents of the Earl of Kent on 10 March 1330, three days before Kent himself was even arrested. The order was repeated on 18 March.^[10] Zouche’s lands and goods were seized, but restored to him on 10 April.^[11] The Earl of Kent himself, who was the son, brother and uncle of kings, was beheaded in Winchester on 19 March 1330 for the ‘crime’ of trying to free a dead man from captivity. Many of his allies, including his brother-in-law Thomas Wake, Ingelram Berenger, and Eleanor Despenser’s son-in-law Richard Fitzalan, fled the country, and Eleanor’s half-brother Edward Monthermer was imprisoned in Winchester.^[12] The archbishop of York was indicted before King’s Bench, the Earl of Kent’s heavily pregnant widow Margaret Wake and their young children were imprisoned, and some of the earl’s supporters who had fled abroad plotted an invasion of England from the continent in the summer of 1330. Whether Edward of Caernarfon truly was still alive is a matter for speculation, but certainly a lot of important men in 1329/30 acted as though they believed he was. Eleanor Despenser’s opinion on the matter cannot be determined, but to hear that her uncle might still be alive, after she had perhaps come to terms with his and her first husband’s downfall and death, must have been unsettling one way or the other. She may well have been pregnant at the time, given that her youngest child William Zouche the younger was born c. 1330.

In Ireland, meanwhile, Elizabeth Burgh’s 17-year-old son William, Earl of Ulster, was feuding with Thomas FitzMaurice, Earl of Desmond. Edward III, or someone in his name, ordered the two men to cease making assemblies of armed men and attacking each other’s lands on 19 June 1330.^[13] Four days earlier, Queen Philippa had given birth to her and the king’s first child, a son called Edward of Woodstock who immediately became heir to the throne. Edward III granted a yearly income of 40 marks to his servant Thomas Prior for bringing him news of his son’s birth.^[14] The young king, still only 17 (he was two months younger than William Burgh), visited his cousin Elizabeth Burgh on 22 August 1330 at Caythorpe in Lincolnshire, a manor she had held jointly with Roger Damory and which later passed to her and Roger’s daughter Elizabeth and her husband John Bardolf.^[15] Edward III was chafing against his mother Isabella’s rule and longing to rule in his own right. On 19 October 1330, he had Roger Mortimer dramatically arrested at Nottingham Castle: Edward and twenty or so young knights used a secret tunnel into the castle and rushed into the room where Queen Isabella was holding a meeting with Mortimer and their few remaining allies. Some of the young knights were, and for many years would continue to be, Edward III’s closest allies and friends. They included William Montacute, son of Edward II’s great favourite of the same name who died in Gascony in 1319, and Ralph Stafford, who in 1336 would become Hugh and Margaret Audley’s son-in-law.

Roger Mortimer was hanged at Tyburn on 29 November 1330, four years almost to the day since he had had Hugh Despenser the Younger grotesquely executed in Hereford. The dowager queen Isabella was committed to comfortable house arrest for a while, though spent Christmas 1330 with her son and daughter-in-law Philippa, and was made to give up her absurdly large income and the lands belonging to other people she had granted herself. Edward III invited all the adherents of the Earl of Kent who had fled from the country to come home, and pardoned everyone who had taken part in Kent’s plot earlier in the year, including William Zouche. Richard Fitzalan was one of them and was restored to his executed father Edmund’s inheritance, and days after the coup, the king appointed Hugh Audley’s brother-in-law Ralph Neville as the steward of his household. After the turbulent and dramatic decades of Edward II’s reign and its aftermath, things were finally returning to normal.