Chapter 24: A Third Abduction and a Death - Edward II’s Nieces, The Clare Sisters: Powerful Pawns of the Crown

Sometime not long before 28 February 1336, Margaret and Hugh Audley’s only child and heir Margaret Audley the younger was abducted from their manor of Thaxted in Essex. The abduction was recorded on the Patent Roll on 28 February, when Edward III ordered two men to investigate what had happened.^[1] It seems highly likely that at this point, neither Hugh and Margaret nor the king had any idea where their daughter was, or who was responsible for breaking into their manor and abducting her as well as stealing some of their goods. By 6 July 1336, Audley had learned what had happened: his daughter had been taken by, and forcibly married to, Sir Ralph Stafford (1301–72). Stafford had gone to Thaxted with eighteen named men and unnamed others, some of them his relatives, snatched Margaret Audley from her home, and married her without the consent of her father (or of herself, one assumes, though this was not recorded).^[2] Edward III, then on campaign in Scotland, gave a commission to four men to ‘hear and determine’ what had happened, but the problem for the Audleys was that Sir Ralph Stafford was a close ally and friend of the king; he had been one of the knights who helped Edward III arrest Roger Mortimer at Nottingham in October 1330, and was very high in his favour. It was going to be difficult for them to obtain justice for their daughter’s traumatic experience.

And so it proved: Stafford did not suffer so much as a slap on the wrist for his abduction of a noblewoman, the king’s close kinswoman. Margaret Stafford née Audley’s aunts Elizabeth Burgh and Eleanor Despenser had both been abducted and forcibly married for their wealth in 1316 and 1329, and now the nightmare scenario had befallen her too. It must have been obvious to Ralph Stafford by 1336 that the Audleys would never have more children—the older Margaret was now over 40—and that the younger Margaret would be their sole heir, and her third of the earldom of Gloucester would fall to him and his heirs if he married her. Yet again, the Clare inheritance had proved a poisoned chalice, and yet again, a man had forced himself into a share of it by abducting a woman. Margaret Stafford was probably only 13 or 14 when Ralph abducted her; she was possibly as old as 16, but it seems odd by the standards of her era and her class that she was not yet married if she was as old as 16. In fact, it even seems a little odd that she was not yet married at 14, given that she was one of the greatest heiresses in the country, and marrying her off very young—as horrible as this seems to modern sensibilities—would have protected her from abduction, forced marriage and what amounted to rape. Hugh Audley evidently overestimated his ability to keep his daughter safe, and perhaps he had not expected Ralph Stafford of all men to kidnap her: Stafford was given letters of protection to accompany Audley overseas in April 1332, so the two men had known each other well for a while. This most probably related to the journey to Nijmegen, when Edward III’s sister Eleanor of Woodstock married the Count of Guelders.^[3]

Margaret Stafford was not the only abducted noblewoman in England in the mid-1330s. It also happened to the Clare sisters’ kinswoman Alice Lacy, Countess of Lincoln in her own right and widow of Thomas, Earl of Lancaster and Eble Lestrange. Within months of her second husband’s death in September 1335 and at almost exactly the same time as the young Margaret’s ordeal, an obscure knight called Sir Hugh Frene captured Alice at her own home of Bolingbroke Castle in Lincolnshire, took her to Somerton Castle thirty miles away, and married her against her will. Frene subsequently took Alice to the Tower of London, and she remained there ‘in such confinement that none of her friends or well-wishers could go near her or talk to her’. She was in her mid-50s—her new husband Frene must have been at least a couple of decades younger—and a vow of chastity she had taken after her second husband Lestrange’s death did not protect her.^[4] A large inheritance and wealth could be, and frequently was, dangerous for medieval women.

Hugh Audley and Ralph Stafford jointly acknowledged a debt of 600 marks on 9 February 1339, so perhaps Hugh had come to terms with Stafford’s shocking act by then.^[5] He, his wife Margaret and their daughter had little other choice. Whether they wanted to or not, both Margaret Stafford and Alice Lacy had no choice but to remain married to Stafford and Frene. There was no way to undo the marriages, as divorce as such did not exist, only annulment which required a pre-existing impediment. Kidnap, rape and lack of consent to her marriage on the woman’s part did not count as impediments. Ralph Stafford was a widower who was a good twenty years his wife’s senior, and had two daughters from his first marriage. He and Margaret were to have two sons and four daughters, and had numerous descendants including the Stafford dukes of Buckingham in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, all the kings of France from Louis XIII (r. 1610–43) onwards, kings of Spain, Hungary, Bohemia and Poland, Holy Roman Emperors, and Marie Antoinette. Their first son Ralph died as a child in or before 1347, and their heir was their second son Hugh, named after his grandfather Hugh Audley and born sometime between 1342 and 1346.^[6]

The three Clare sisters collaborated for once, probably for the first time in many years, in or shortly before May 1336. They presented a joint petition to the king regarding the debts owed by their father Gilbert ‘the Red’ Clare to their grandfather Edward I which they claimed had been paid in full. Eleanor and Margaret’s husbands William Zouche and Hugh Audley added their names to the petition. Hugh and Margaret Audley were at their favourite castle of Tonbridge on 5 October 1336, when they granted two acres of land in Caerwent, Monmouthshire to the archdeacon of Llandaff.^[7] On 16 March 1337, Edward III made Hugh Audley Earl of Gloucester, the title formerly held by his wife’s brother Gilbert Clare and dormant since Gilbert’s death at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314. Other supporters of the king were rewarded: the king’s and the Clare sisters’ cousin William Bohun became Earl of Northampton, Robert Ufford became Earl of Suffolk, William Clinton Earl of Huntingdon, and another royal kinsman, Henry of Grosmont, Earl of Derby (he was in line to inherit the earldoms of Lancaster, Leicester and Lincoln as well). Margaret Audley, who had been Countess of Cornwall since her marriage to Piers Gaveston thirty years previously, was now a countess twice over. She must have been delighted that she and her husband held the earldom which had once belonged to her brother, father and grandfather.

Eleanor Despenser was surely considerably less thrilled at her sister and brother-in-law’s promotion, and may have considered that the earldom of Gloucester belonged by right to her son Huchon as the eldest nephew of the last earl. She died on 30 June 1337 at the age of 44, having lived for only four months after the death of her second husband William Zouche on 28 February 1337 (he left his teenage son Alan Zouche from his first marriage to Alice Toeni, the half-brother of the Earl of Warwick, as his heir).^[8] On 21 May 1337, just weeks before her death, her cousin Edward III sent the sheriff of Gloucestershire to obtain £328 from her which she owed him as an instalment of the debt of £5,000 she had acknowledged in 1331, but Eleanor died without paying the sum.^[9] There is unfortunately no way of knowing the cause of her death at the early age of 44. Eleanor had two grandchildren when she died: Edmund Fitzalan who was already 10 or 11 in 1337, and her second son Edward’s eldest son Edward, future lord of Glamorgan, born in March 1336. Her youngest child William Zouche the younger, future monk of Glastonbury, was at most 7 years old when he lost his mother. Not long before her own death, Eleanor had also buried William Zouche at Tewkesbury Abbey, and he had appointed her one of the executors of his will. This suggests that even if he had abducted and married her without her consent eight years earlier, and even if she objected to marrying a man who captured her first husband and her uncle and besieged her eldest son at Caerphilly with a view to handing him over to Queen Isabella for execution, they made something of a success of their marriage.

Eleanor Despenser née Clare was buried at Tewkesbury Abbey in Gloucestershire, where her first husband, brother, father, grandfather and other members of her family were buried, and where her eldest son, grandson and many other descendants would also be buried in later decades. Tewkesbury Abbey lies just ten miles from St Peter’s Abbey (later Gloucester Cathedral), where Eleanor’s beloved uncle Edward II had supposedly been buried in December 1327. Around the time of Eleanor’s death, however, an Italian papal notary and future bishop of Vercelli called Manuele Fieschi sent a letter to Edward III explaining in detail how Edward II had escaped from Berkeley Castle and made his way to Ireland, Avignon, Cologne and ultimately to a hermitage south of Milan. This story has never been proved, but there was something decidedly odd about Edward II’s sudden death in September 1327 and the circumstances around it, and it is not absolutely certain that he died at that time and was buried at Gloucester.

The church of Tewkesbury Abbey survived the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the sixteenth century and still exists, though the location of Eleanor’s grave there is not known, and nothing is known about her funeral or who attended. It is possible that she was buried in the Lady Chapel which was pulled down in the sixteenth century; according to the chronicle of Tewkesbury Abbey, she had William Zouche buried in that chapel.^[10] A small stained-glass image inside the abbey church of a kneeling naked woman, representing humility, may be a contemporary depiction of Eleanor, placed there either in her own lifetime or her son’s. Her heir to her vast landholdings, including Glamorgan, was Huchon, who was 28 or 29 years old in July 1337 when Eleanor’s Inquisition Post Mortem was held. Edward III ordered his officials on 21 July to give all Eleanor’s lands to Huchon even before her IPM officially returned him as Eleanor’s heir.^[11] Eleanor was lucky enough not to have outlived most of her children, though her fourth daughter Margaret Despenser died the same year she did at Watton Priory in Yorkshire, at only 13 or 14 years old. Margaret’s aunt Elizabeth Burgh, who often showed kindness to her Despenser nephews and nieces, sent wax images and a painting of the four evangelists for her sepulchre.^[12]