Chapter 26: The Last Sister - Edward II’s Nieces, The Clare Sisters: Powerful Pawns of the Crown

And so only Elizabeth Burgh was left of the three Clare sisters. She had prayers said for Margaret’s soul in the years 1351 to 1353, and presumably in other years as well, on the anniversary of her sister’s death.^[1] In the years after Margaret Audley died, Elizabeth invited her niece Margaret Stafford and her husband Ralph Stafford to stay with her; with her strong sense of family, she reached out to all her nieces and nephews after her sisters’ deaths.^[2] A few months after she lost her sister, in mid-August 1342, Elizabeth witnessed the wedding of her namesake granddaughter and heir Elizabeth Burgh to Edward III’s second son Lionel of Antwerp; the pair had been betrothed since May 1341. The younger Elizabeth was 10 when she married, and Lionel, born in late November 1338, was 3 years and 8-and-a-half months. The tiny couple subsequently lived in the care of Lionel’s mother Queen Philippa with Lionel’s older sisters Isabella and Joan and younger brothers John of Gaunt and Edmund of Langley.

The elder Elizabeth Burgh’s nephew Edward Despenser, second son of her late sister Eleanor, was killed at the Battle of Morlaix in Brittany on 30 September 1342. Edward was killed fighting under his elder brother Huchon’s banner and under the overall command of his cousin the Earl of Northampton, and the battle took place during the War of the Breton Succession when Edward III of England supported the claims of John Montfort to the duchy of Brittany against Montfort’s niece Jeanne de Penthièvre. Edward Despenser left his widow Anne née Ferrers, sister-in-law of Elizabeth Burgh’s daughter Isabella Verdon, and their four sons. Edward Despenser the eldest son (b. March 1336) was heir to his childless uncle Huchon Despenser and to his grandmother Eleanor Despenser’s share of the Clare inheritance, the middle two sons were Hugh and Thomas, and Henry the youngest was born in 1341 or early 1342 and became bishop of Norwich in 1370.^[3]

Elizabeth Burgh’s youngest child Elizabeth Bardolf née Damory seems to have spent most of her life in Norfolk where her husband’s estates were mostly concentrated, and often visited her mother in Cambridgeshire and Essex. Elizabeth Burgh, being much wealthier than her daughter, paid the travel costs. Elizabeth Bardolf usually spent time with her mother every Christmas and again in the summer, and she had her own chambers at Elizabeth’s manors; her chamber at Anglesey in Cambridgeshire had its own fireplace and chimney. The two Elizabeths, mother and daughter, seem to have been genuinely close and to have thoroughly enjoyed each other’s company, one happy result of the third marriage to Roger Damory which Elizabeth had undertaken, perhaps reluctantly, at her uncle Edward II’s behest in 1317. Margaret Damory, Roger and Elizabeth’s elder daughter, must have died sometime in the 1330s. The younger Elizabeth and her husband John Bardolf accompanied Elizabeth Burgh to Walsingham, where there had long been a great shrine to Our Lady and where Elizabeth Burgh founded a Franciscan friary in 1347, to the indignation of the Walsingham canons. Edward III sent a letter on 1 February 1347 stating that Elizabeth had been ‘inflamed by the fervour of charity and devotion’ to establish a Franciscan house in Walsingham.^[4]

Isabella Ferrers née Verdon’s daughter Elizabeth Ferrers—a confusingly large number of Elizabeth Burgh’s female descendants were named after her—married David Strathbogie, heir to the titular earldom of Atholl, sometime after 1 August 1342.^[5] David was born in the early 1330s, and lost his father David the elder in 1335. The Strathbogies lived permanently in England and adhered to the English kings, so their title was purely nominal and honorary; the real earldom of Atholl in Scotland and its lands were given to William Douglas and then to Robert Stewart in the 1340s. Elizabeth Strathbogie née Ferrers lived in her grandmother’s household after her father Henry Ferrers died in 1343, and was referred to as ‘Lady Elizabeth Atholl’ in her grandmother’s accounts. David Strathbogie himself, Elizabeth Burgh’s grandson-in-law, had become a squire of the lady’s household by 1343, as had his brother-in-law William Ferrers, Elizabeth’s grandson (William was 10 years old in 1343 and David probably a little older). Elizabeth had bought William a pony in 1339/40 when he was 6 or 7. The English nobility of the fourteenth century very often married in childhood: William Ferrers wed the Earl of Suffolk’s daughter Margaret Ufford in 1344 when he was 10 or 11 and she about the same age or younger.^[6] Elizabeth Strathbogie and William Ferrers’ sister Philippa, another granddaughter of Elizabeth Burgh, married Guy Beauchamp, heir to his father Thomas’s earldom of Warwick, in or before 1351. After their father Henry Ferrers’ death in September 1343, Elizabeth Burgh sent some of her household servants to Groby in Leicestershire to bring her widowed daughter Isabella née Verdon the 125 miles to her in Bardfield, Essex, and her granddaughters spent time with her after their father’s death as well. Elizabeth was deeply attached to both her daughters and their children.^[7]

Elizabeth Burgh’s brother-in-law Hugh Audley went to the duchy of Brittany on Edward III’s behalf sometime between January 1343 and January 1344, though was in England on 10 August 1343 and on 20 June 1344.^[8] Duke John III of Brittany, a great-grandson of King Henry III of England and thus a cousin of the Clare sisters, had died childless in 1341, and his half-brother John Montfort and his late full brother’s daughter Jeanne de Penthièvre battled for control of the duchy. The kings of both England and France took a keen interest in the War of the Breton Succession and both sent armies there, and ultimately Duke John III’s half-brother John Montfort, the candidate backed by England, and his son emerged victorious. According to the chronicler Geoffrey le Baker, Audley’s nephew Sir Hugh ‘Huchon’ Despenser was also one of the men sent to Brittany to aid John Montfort.^[9] His younger brother Edward Despenser was killed fighting in Brittany in 1342.

Hugh Audley was now about 50 or 52. His and Margaret Audley’s grandson and heir Ralph Stafford the younger, who cannot have been more than 8 years old and was probably younger, married the 4-year-old Maud of Lancaster, elder daughter and co-heir of Henry of Grosmont, Earl of Derby, in the town of Leicester on 30 November 1344. Grosmont held a jousting tournament in the town to mark the occasion. Hugh Audley, and Maud of Lancaster’s elderly grandfather Henry, Earl of Lancaster and Leicester, were surely present.^[10] It had been arranged in London on 10 October 1344 between Henry of Grosmont on one side, and Hugh Audley, his daughter Margaret Stafford and son-in-law the elder Ralph Stafford on the other, that Grosmont ‘will have the custody and upbringing’ of both his daughter Maud and young Ralph. Five manors were settled jointly on the young couple.^[11]

The marriage of the two children did not last long. Young Ralph Stafford was already dead when his maternal grandfather Hugh Audley died in November 1347, and his parents’ heir was his younger brother Hugh Stafford, who succeeded their father in 1372 as Earl of Stafford and inherited his grandmother Margaret Audley née Clare’s third of the earldom of Gloucester.^[12] The little widow Maud of Lancaster married her second husband Wilhelm of Bavaria in early 1352 when she was still not yet 12, and died childless in April 1362, leaving the entire vast Lancastrian inheritance to her younger sister Blanche of Lancaster, who married Edward III’s third son John of Gaunt and was the mother of King Henry IV. The marriage, had young Ralph lived longer, would ultimately have given him one half of the Lancastrian patrimony (which included the earldoms of Lancaster, Leicester, Derby and Lincoln), and arranging such a splendid match had been a great triumph for the Audley/Staffords, but it was not to be. Arranging an excellent marriage for his eldest daughter Isabella Despenser to the heir to the earldoms of Arundel and Surrey had also been a triumph for Hugh Despenser the Younger in 1321, but in December 1344 Richard Fitzalan had his marriage to Isabella annulled, and thereby made their son Edmund illegitimate. Richard married Eleanor of Lancaster, fifth of the six daughters of Henry, Earl of Lancaster and Leicester (and Henry of Grosmont’s sister), instead in early 1345. He gave Isabella Despenser six manors in Essex for her sustenance, and she lived in obscurity; almost nothing is known about Eleanor Despenser née Clare’s eldest daughter after the annulment of her marriage except that she was still alive in 1356 and seems to have been dead by 1369.^[13] Her son Edmund did not inherit his father’s huge wealth and earldoms, but as his much younger half-brother Richard, their father’s heir, ended up being beheaded by Edward III’s grandson and successor Richard II, perhaps he had reason to be glad of it.

Henry, Earl of Lancaster and Leicester himself, the last surviving grandchild of King Henry III, died on 22 September 1345 a few months after his granddaughter Maud’s wedding to young Ralph Stafford. The funeral of the greatest of English noblemen in Leicester in January 1346 was attended by his niece Queen Isabella, great-nephew Edward III, Queen Philippa, and much of the English nobility. Assuming he was well enough to travel there, Hugh Audley would certainly have been one of them, as would his sister-in-law Elizabeth Burgh, who had known Earl Henry well. Elizabeth Burgh the younger, Countess of Ulster and now Edward III’s daughter-in-law, was their mutual granddaughter. Henry’s heir was his only son Henry of Grosmont, now in his mid-30s or so, who at the time of his father’s death was leading a gloriously successful campaign in Gascony against the French. Edward III upgraded one of Grosmont’s titles in 1351 and made him the first Duke of Lancaster, and Grosmont showed great affection for his second cousin Elizabeth Burgh, who was a good fifteen years his senior: he visited her in January and May 1347, May 1350 and on another two occasions later that year, and wrote to her and sent her a gift of venison while he was crusading in Poland and Lithuania in 1351/52.^[14] She left him items in her will.

Elizabeth Burgh began to show a greater interest in the religious life in the 1340s. In 1343 or before, sometime during her almost four decades of widowhood, she took a vow of chastity, and might in fact have taken the vow much earlier to avoid being forced into yet another marriage by her uncle Edward II or cousin Edward III. Her vow of chastity probably required her to wear a nun’s habit and a ring, at least sometimes.^[15] Elizabeth demonstrated a fascination with the order of Minoresses or Franciscan nuns. The pope gave her permission to enter enclosed Minoress spaces with three female attendants in 1343, and she was later also permitted to stay the night in a Minoress house with two female attendants.^[16] Her close friend and kinswoman Marie de St Pol, Dowager Countess of Pembroke, founded a house of Minoresses at Denny in Cambridgeshire in 1342. Elizabeth herself would request burial at the Minoress house without Aldgate in London (also often called the ‘Minories’), where in 1352 she built and occupied a large house in the outer courtyard which was later lived in by the Dowager Countess of Kent, Queen Philippa’s niece Elisabeth of Jülich (d. 1411), and other noble ladies.^[17] In 1347, Elizabeth Burgh founded a house of Franciscan friars in Walsingham, Norfolk out of ‘charity and devotion’. Her daughter-in-law Maud of Lancaster, Dowager Countess of Ulster and William Burgh’s widow (and one of Henry of Grosmont’s six sisters), entered the religious life permanently in 1347 or 1348 after she was widowed from her second husband, and spent the remaining three decades of her life as a canoness at Campsea Ashe and Bruisyard priories in Suffolk. Elizabeth herself, however, though obviously finding the Minoresses’ lifestyle highly appealing, was too attached to her life as a great lady dispensing patronage and hospitality and enjoying her estates and wealth to wish to give it all up completely. In 1340 she went on a three-week pilgrimage from East Anglia to Canterbury taking a large retinue of servants and seventy horses, a prime example of both her devotion to religion and to her secular lifestyle.

King Edward III left England for the continent in July 1346 with a large force including his 16-year-old eldest son Edward of Woodstock, now Prince of Wales, and his and the Clare sisters’ cousin the Earl of Northampton. The king and his son inflicted a massive defeat on the forces of Philip VI of France at the Battle of Crécy on 26 August. On 8 July 1346, days before he departed from his kingdom, Edward III gave his kinsman Huchon Despenser permission that ‘as soon as he dies the executors of his will shall have full and free administration of his goods and chattels’, Huchon was pardoned on 30 October that year, in consideration of his good service in the wars against France, of ‘all homicides, felonies, robberies and trespasses in England’.^[18] Eleanor Despenser’s eldest son, now in his late 30s, played a vital role in the Crécy campaign just days before the battle by leading a small force of men across a ford of the River Somme. A large French force shot at them from the other side with crossbows and longbows, and it took Huchon and his men forty-five minutes to wade through a mile and a half of waist-deep water, under fire the whole time. This remarkably brave action freed a way through the French lines for the English army and prevented them becoming trapped and destroyed between the Seine and Somme rivers.^[19] Huchon Despenser had done his utmost to restore his and his family’s name over the previous fifteen years, and his deeds in France earned him accolades. He was not, however, chosen as a Knight of the Garter when the order was instituted in 1348 though perhaps would have been had he not died in February 1349, and his nephew and heir Edward Despenser became a member of the order a few years later. Huchon’s cousin Margaret Stafford née Audley’s husband Ralph Stafford was the fifth Knight of the Garter, his abduction of a young noblewoman not being deemed a serious enough reason to keep him out of the highly prestigious order. Another founder member of the Garter was Hugh Audley’s nephew James Audley, who also fought at Crécy.

For many years, Huchon’s aunt Elizabeth Burgh kept in touch with her cousin Jeanne de Bar, Countess of Surrey, another granddaughter of Edward I. Jeanne had married John Warenne, Earl of Surrey, in May 1306 just before her cousin Eleanor Clare married Hugh Despenser the Younger, but the marriage proved a childless disaster. Surrey had tried to annul it in the 1310s and make his illegitimate sons with his mistress Maud Nerford his heirs, but this failed. By the mid-1340s Surrey had another mistress, Isabella Holland, and tried again to have his marriage to Jeanne annulled so that he could marry her. He claimed, most implausibly, to have had an affair before he married Jeanne with her aunt Mary, nun of Amesbury, a transparent ploy which he hoped would persuade the pope to annul the marriage on the grounds of incest. This also failed, and when Surrey died the day before his sixty-first birthday at the end of June 1347, Jeanne de Bar was still his wife. He left her nothing at all in his will and failed even to mention her, and referred to his mistress Isabella Holland as his compaigne, companion or consort, a word otherwise only used for wives. Elizabeth Burgh did, however, leave Jeanne something in her will: a ‘gold image of St John the Baptist in the desert’.^[20] Jeanne, who by birth was French—her father Henri was Count of Bar in eastern France—often travelled abroad which Elizabeth did not.^[21] Elizabeth is not known to have travelled beyond England, Wales and Ireland at any time during her long life, unless she accompanied Roger Damory to France in the company of Edward II when Elizabeth’s uncle paid homage to Philip V for his French lands in June 1320.

Margaret Audley’s widower Hugh Audley, Earl of Gloucester, died on 10 November 1347, a few months after the Earl of Surrey, aged about 54 or 56.^[22] Elizabeth Burgh appears to have visited her brother-in-law some months before his death, taking her daughter Isabella Ferrers with her: on 4 June 1347 the two women were at Desning near Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, a manor which belonged to Hugh, and her younger daughter Elizabeth Bardolf probably also accompanied them.^[23] Hugh was buried at Tonbridge Priory in Kent next to his wife. His nephews Peter and James Audley, sons of his obscure older brother James, were famous warriors in the Hundred Years’ War, and his only daughter Margaret Stafford outlived him by less than two years. By the custom known as the ‘courtesy of England’ her widower Ralph Stafford kept her substantial inheritance in his own hands until his death in 1372 at the age of 71, when it passed to their only surviving son Hugh Stafford. Hugh Audley had risen high in and after 1315 as a result of Edward II’s infatuation with him, and he had done well to survive Edward’s reign after switching sides and rebelling against the king, and after taking part in another rebellion against Edward III’s mother and her chief counsellor in the late 1320s.