Chapter 27: The Final Years - Edward II’s Nieces, The Clare Sisters: Powerful Pawns of the Crown

The terrible years of 1348/49 saw the first mass outbreak of the Black Death in Europe which killed a huge percentage of the population, perhaps as many as half. Eleanor Despenser’s eldest child Hugh ‘Huchon’ Despenser, lord of Glamorgan, died on 8 February 1349 at the age of 40, perhaps of the Black Death. Huchon, who had visited his aunt Elizabeth Burgh in Wales with his brother Gilbert and youngest sister Elizabeth Berkeley a few months before his death, was buried at Tewkesbury Abbey. His and his wife Elizabeth née Montacute’s magnificent effigies can still be seen there. Elizabeth was buried next to Huchon ten years later, though had been married to and had children with her third husband Sir Guy Bryan (Bryan lived until 1390 and was also buried in Tewkesbury Abbey). As Huchon and Elizabeth had no children, his heir to Glamorgan and his other lands was his brother Edward’s eldest son Edward Despenser, who was not quite 13 in February 1349.

Huchon’s aunt Elizabeth Burgh lost her daughter Isabella Ferrers née Verdon on 25 July 1349, when Isabella was only 32 years old. Elizabeth made offerings on the anniversary of Isabella’s death every year, and Isabella’s teenaged daughters Elizabeth and Philippa stayed with their grandmother in the winter of 1349/50 after their mother’s death.^[1] Isabella’s heir, also the heir of her late husband Henry Ferrers of Groby, was her 16-year-old son William, who passed into royal wardship and who was granted an annual income of £50 for his sustenance by the king in October 1349.^[2] And Margaret Audley’s only child to live into adulthood, Margaret Stafford, died sometime before 7 September 1349 leaving her son Hugh Stafford and her daughters Elizabeth, Joan, Beatrice and Katherine. She was only about 27. Her much older abductor and widower Ralph Stafford survived her by twenty-three years.

Elizabeth Burgh’s youngest child Elizabeth Bardolf née Damory gave birth to her only son William Bardolf at Wormegay in Norfolk on Monday, 21 October 1349. William was baptised in the parish church of Wormegay on the same day as his birth. The boy’s father John Bardolf had a chamberlain named Richard Rysyng, who rode so hurriedly to fetch William’s godfather for the baptism that his horse stumbled into a pit and he fell and broke his leg. A violent altercation of some kind took place in the church of Wormegay on the day of William’s baptism which led to the shedding of blood, and after his baptism the church was therefore ‘suspended from the celebration of all divine offices’.^[3] Elizabeth Bardolf had been pregnant with her son when she lost her half-sister Isabella Ferrers, and while the Black Death was raging in England and elsewhere; it can hardly have been a happy pregnancy. As well as their son William, Elizabeth and John Bardolf had two daughters, Agnes and Isabella Bardolf, presumably named after John’s mother Agnes Beauchamp and Elizabeth’s half-sister Isabella Ferrers respectively. Both girls or young women were left bequests in their grandmother Elizabeth Burgh’s will of 1355, but do not appear on any other known record, and do not seem to have married and had children. It is likely, therefore, that they died young.

Elizabeth Burgh, who was now 54 years old, spent the festive season of 1349/50 at her Welsh castle of Usk.^[4] As well as her Ferrers grand-daughters, she was visited there on 5 December 1349 by Marie de St Pol, Dowager Countess of Pembroke, and in early January by her recently widowed nephew-in-law Ralph, Lord Stafford, and niece-in-law Elizabeth Despenser née Montacute, widow of Huchon Despenser (who married her third husband Guy Bryan in 1350). Elizabeth Burgh spent a few days in mid-April 1350 at Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire where her sister Eleanor, brother Gilbert Clare, father Gilbert ‘the Red’, brother-in-law Hugh Despenser the Younger and nephew Huchon were buried in the abbey church. The manor of Tewkesbury passed from Huchon to his nephew Edward Despenser, though as Edward was still underage, it was currently in the king’s hands. Elizabeth passed through Bletchingdon in Oxfordshire on 21 April, which she held herself and rented out to her nephew William Zouche (Eleanor Despenser’s youngest child) some years later, though by right it should probably have belonged to her third husband Roger Damory’s nephew Richard Damory.^[5] She spent the period from early May to early June 1350 at her manor of Clare. Her guests here included her son-in-law John Bardolf, Edward III’s eldest daughter Isabella of Woodstock and the king’s first and third sons Edward of Woodstock and John of Gaunt (aged 20 and 10 respectively), Elizabeth’s cousin the Earl of Northampton and his wife Elizabeth Badlesmere, her kinsman Henry of Grosmont, and her granddaughter and heir the young Elizabeth Burgh, Countess of Ulster, who came for two weeks. Now in her mid-50s, Elizabeth entertained as often and as lavishly as she always had.

Countess Elizabeth of Ulster was now almost 18, though still had a few years to wait for her young husband Lionel of Antwerp, the king’s second son, to mature enough to be her partner in more than name only: he was still only 11 in the summer of 1350, though they had now been married for eight years. Countess Elizabeth’s mother Maud of Lancaster appears to have been on good terms with her mother-in-law Elizabeth Burgh the elder, and on one occasion before Maud entered a religious house in 1347/48, Elizabeth returned Maud’s ‘two lost spaniels’ to her, implying that Maud had visited her and brought her dogs with her.^[6] Until his death in September 1345, Elizabeth had also often kept in touch with the wealthy and influential Henry, Earl of Lancaster and Leicester, father of Henry of Grosmont and Maud of Lancaster. Henry hunted on Elizabeth’s lands before he went blind probably sometime in the early or mid-1330s.^[7]

Elizabeth’s daughter Elizabeth Bardolf and granddaughter Elizabeth Strathbogie née Ferrers, titular Countess of Atholl, spent the festive season of 1351/52 with her. All three women made offerings on the feasts of St Stephen, or 26 December, and St Thomas Becket, or 29 December. Elizabeth’s granddaughter the Countess of Ulster was not present, but her grandmother wrote to her on 30 December.^[8] Elizabeth Burgh the elder became a great-grandmother probably in 1353 when she was in her late 50s, when her daughter Isabella Ferrers’ daughter Philippa Beauchamp gave birth to the elder of her two daughters, Katherine Beauchamp (Katherine’s sister, Philippa Beauchamp’s younger daughter, was yet another Elizabeth). Philippa’s husband Guy Beauchamp, heir to the earldom of Warwick, died in 1360 in his father’s lifetime, and their two little daughters became nuns at Shouldham Priory; this disinherited them so that their uncle Thomas Beauchamp could succeed his father as Earl of Warwick.

Philippa of Ulster, daughter and ultimately the heir of the younger Elizabeth Burgh and her husband Lionel of Antwerp, Earl and Countess of Ulster, another great-granddaughter of the elder Elizabeth Burgh, was born at the royal palace of Eltham in Kent on 16 August 1355. She was named after her paternal grandmother Philippa of Hainault, queen of England, who was also her godmother. Little Philippa was born thirty-seven weeks after her father’s sixteenth birthday, and perhaps he and his wife Elizabeth, who was 23 when her daughter was born, had finally consummated their marriage because he had turned 16. On 5 March 1356, when she was a few months old, Edward III sent his granddaughter Philippa to live at the priory of Campsea Ashe in Suffolk with her maternal grandmother Maud of Lancaster, William Burgh’s widow.^[9] Philippa married Edmund Mortimer, heir to the earldom of March, in or before December 1358 when she was 3 and he 6; Edmund was the great-grandson of the Roger Mortimer whom Edward III had had executed in 1330.^[10] Elizabeth Burgh had, remarkably, lived long enough to see the marriage of one of her great-grandchildren. Another great-grandchild born in her lifetime was Henry Ferrers in February 1356, son of William Ferrers and grandson of Isabella Verdon, and Henry’s sisters Margaret and Elizabeth Ferrers were probably born before Elizabeth died in November 1360 as well.

Elizabeth Burgh wrote her very long will on 25 September 1355, a few weeks after the birth of her great-granddaughter Philippa of Ulster. (If her sisters Eleanor Despenser and Margaret Audley also made wills, they no longer exist.) She was now 60 years old, and although she lived for another five years, making her will suggests she was ill at the time; in the fourteenth century, people generally only made their wills when they thought they might be dying. Elizabeth asked to be buried at the house of the Minoresses outside Aldgate in London, which had been founded in 1293 by Edward I’s younger brother Edmund of Lancaster and his wife Blanche of Artois, Elizabeth’s great-uncle and great-aunt. Perhaps it is revealing that she did not wish to be buried beside any of her three husbands, though she did leave £140 for prayers to be said for their souls in perpetuity, and for her own soul and for those of everyone who had died in her service. She also left 100 marks for five men-at-arms to go on crusade to the Holy Land, and to pray there for the souls of her three husbands and her own. Elizabeth was indeed buried some years later, as she had requested, at the house of the Minoresses outside Aldgate. It was once believed that she was buried in Ware, Hertfordshire next to Roger Damory, and an epitaph in Latin to that effect was seen and preserved by an eighteenth-century writer.^[11] In May 1372, however, John Hastings, Earl of Pembroke, wrote in his will that he wished his tomb to be ‘made as like as possible to the tomb of Elizabeth de Burgh who lies in the Minories, London, without Aldgate’.^[12] As that was less than a dozen years after Elizabeth’s death, and as Pembroke was a nobleman who must have known Elizabeth well, this is direct evidence of her correct burial site. As well as requesting burial at the Minories, Elizabeth gave them £20 and numerous items including five cloths of gold, a bed ‘of black tartarin’ (a kind of silk), and ‘twelve green hangings with the border powdered with owls’. Her great-granddaughter Elizabeth Ferrers, one of the three children of her grandson William, Lord Ferrers of Groby (1333–71), became a nun at the Minoresses without Aldgate sometime before June 1368.^[13]

The very first person mentioned in Elizabeth’s will was her longterm official, adviser, attorney and perhaps friend Sir Nichol Damory, who may have been her third husband’s illegitimate son, and Elizabeth left him several bequests. She also appointed Nichol as one of her fifteen executors, and he was named first among them. Elizabeth left items to her only surviving child Elizabeth Bardolf, perhaps Nichol Damory’s half-sister, including her ‘great coach’ with all equipment and cushions. This was a generous gift as such coaches, in which wealthy noble ladies travelled, were hugely expensive. Elizabeth Bardolf’s daughters Agnes and Isabella Bardolf received rich bequests ‘to help [them] to marry’, including a goblet of gold, a bed of sendal (expensive silk) with a coverlet lined with miniver (expensive white fur), an indigo bed with a blue coverlet, a silver cross, candlesticks and salt-cellars. Both Bardolf girls disappear from the record after this, and evidently did not marry and probably died young, unless they joined religious houses. Several of Elizabeth’s other grandchildren received bequests: William, Lord Ferrers was left all the items in her Leicestershire manor of Lutterworth, including carthorses, oxen, wheat and rye, and William’s sister Elizabeth Strathbogie, Countess of Atholl, was bequeathed two ‘beds of tawny’. Elizabeth Burgh’s granddaughter, namesake and primary heir Elizabeth Burgh, Countess of Ulster, was only bequeathed ‘all the debt which my son, her father, owed me on the day he died’. Elizabeth probably intended this statement to be less sarcastic than it sounds, and the countess was heir to her grandmother’s large landholdings. As the younger Elizabeth was a wealthy heiress and the king’s daughter-in-law, Elizabeth Burgh did not feel the need to leave her items similar to those she left her other grandchildren, who had greater need of them.

Elizabeth also left generous sums of money and gifts to numerous religious houses, including £10 to the Augustinians of Clare where her mother Joan of Acre was buried, £5 and two cloths of gold to Croxden Abbey in Staffordshire where her second husband Theobald Verdon was buried in 1316, £2 to the Franciscans of Ware in Hertfordshire where her third husband Roger Damory may have been buried, and two reliquaries, and a cross and two cloths of gold to Tewkesbury Abbey in Gloucestershire, the mausoleum of her natal family the Clares. She also left £10 and two cloths of gold to Amesbury Priory in Wiltshire where her aunt Mary and half-sister Joan Monthermer had been nuns, and where she herself had lived in 1308/09 and 1316/17 (her daughter Isabella Verdon was born there). She bequeathed to her cousin the Countess of Surrey an image of John the Baptist, to her friend the Countess of Pembroke a ‘little gold cross with a sapphire in the centre’ and a gold diamond ring, to her kinsman the Prince of Wales a ‘gold tabernacle with the image of Our Lady’, two ‘little angels’ of shaped gold and other items, and to her kinsman Henry of Grosmont, Duke of Lancaster, her ‘little psalter’ and a square cross with a piece of the True Cross inside. Elizabeth also bequeathed items or gifts of money to numerous servants, including robes and the matching garments to her damsels: Suzanne Neketon received Elizabeth’s best robe, Elizabeth Torel her second best, Margaret Banchon her third best, Isabel Morley her fourth best, Agnes Southern the fifth best and Alison Wodeham the sixth best. Near the end of her will Elizabeth commented on ‘the peril which comes to wrongful occupiers of the goods of the dead and disturbers of their last wills’ as a dire warning to anyone who might try to deprive anyone of their rightful bequests, and her opinion of the tumultuous century she lived in is apparent from her statement that ‘diverse hindrances are often made through malice, and man’s subtlety is greater than was usual before this time’.^[14]

In the last years of her life, Elizabeth ceased to visit her Welsh properties, presumably finding the journey there too long and difficult. She divided her time between London, Clare and Bardfield (in Essex), and was in London from 9 July to 16 October 1355 when she wrote her will, with a short trip to Greenwich on 28 and 29 August. Elizabeth’s guests in London at this time included Henry of Grosmont, Duke of Lancaster, and her much younger first cousin Joan, Countess of Kent (1326/27–85), daughter of Edward I’s youngest son Edmund of Woodstock, Earl of Kent. Joan became her father’s heir when her younger brother John, Earl of Kent died in late 1352, and in 1361 would marry Edward III’s eldest son and heir the Prince of Wales and become the mother of Richard II. Elizabeth stayed in the capital again from 12 May to 10 September 1358, and her guests included her cousins the Earl of Northampton and the Countess of Surrey, her nephew-in-law Ralph, Earl of Stafford, the bishop of London, and the ‘bishops of Armenia’. Her grandson-in-law Lionel of Antwerp also visited her three times in July and again on 21 August 1358.^[15]

Elizabeth’s aunt-in-law and Lionel’s grandmother the Dowager Queen Isabella of France, who was almost exactly Elizabeth’s own age, died at Hertford Castle on 22 August 1358. She was buried at the Greyfriars church in London on 27 November. Isabella’s youngest child Joan of the Tower, queen of Scotland, who spent much time with Isabella— her marriage to David II was unhappy and childless and Joan lived in England for the last few years of her life—would be buried in the same church in 1362. Elizabeth did not stay in London long enough in 1358 to attend Isabella’s funeral, and the two women do not appear to have visited each other, though did keep in occasional touch via letter. Elizabeth also lost the cousin she had long been close to, William Bohun, Earl of Northampton, on 16 September 1360.

Elizabeth Burgh died on 4 November 1360 at the age of 65, a few weeks after her cousin Northampton, probably at one of her East Anglian properties.^[16] She was buried as she had requested at the Minoresses without Aldgate in London, though nothing is known about her funeral. Her landholdings passed to her granddaughter Elizabeth Burgh the younger and Elizabeth’s husband Lionel of Antwerp, who were made Duke and Duchess of Clarence in November 1362 when Lionel’s father the king celebrated his fiftieth birthday. Duchess Elizabeth died in Dublin on 10 December 1363, aged only 31, leaving her 8-year-old daughter Philippa Mortimer as her heir. Lionel of Antwerp married his second wife Violante Visconti of Milan in May 1368, but died less than five months after his wedding, a few weeks before his thirtieth birthday. His daughter Philippa gave birth to her first child and the elder Elizabeth Burgh’s eldest great-great-grandchild, Elizabeth Mortimer, later Percy, in February 1371 when she was 15.

Elizabeth Bardolf née Damory did not survive her mother very long; the date of her death is unknown, but she had already passed away when her husband John Bardolf died on or around 3 August 1363 in Assisi, Italy.^[17] There is no record of Elizabeth Bardolf receiving dower after John’s death so she must have predeceased him, and perhaps died in 1361 or 1362. Sir Nichol Damory, Elizabeth Burgh’s adviser and retainer for decades, died at Depden, Suffolk in 1381 when he must have been well into his 70s. After he lost his first wife Eleanor, widow of Eleanor Despenser’s stepson Alan Zouche (d. 1346), he married a woman named Joan Cotesford in or before 1363; her brother John, a Master of Arts, was a canon of Lincoln.^[18] In early 1359, Damory had been appointed steward of the household of Edward III’s eldest daughter Isabella of Woodstock, and performed so well in the role that seven months later Edward III granted him £40 a year in gratitude for his ‘good service’ to her.^[19]

Elizabeth Burgh’s cousin and friend Jeanne de Bar, Countess of Surrey, another granddaughter of Edward I, died on 29 August 1361 in her mid-60s.^[20] Henry of Grosmont, Duke of Lancaster, Elizabeth’s second cousin and a man with whom she had enjoyed a very close friendship, did not have long to enjoy the psalter and cross she had bequeathed him, as he died in Leicester on 23 March 1361 only a few months after Elizabeth. Marie de St Pol, arguably Elizabeth’s closest friend and about eight years Elizabeth’s junior, lived until May 1377 when she was over 70—neither she nor Jeanne de Bar left any children—and Elizabeth’s first cousin King Edward III died the month after Marie, on 21 June 1377 at the age of 64. His eldest son Edward of Woodstock, Prince of Wales, had died the year before, and so Edward was succeeded as king by his 10-year-old grandson Richard II.

Sadly, it is impossible to visit any of the Clare sisters’ graves today. Tonbridge Priory in Kent, where Margaret and Hugh Audley were buried in 1342 and 1347, was dissolved as early as 1525, and the few remaining ruins were knocked down in 1842 when a railway line was built across the site. Margaret’s first husband Piers Gaveston was buried at the Dominican priory in Kings Langley, Hertfordshire, and his tomb was also lost at the Dissolution, though the tomb of Edward III’s fourth son Edmund, first Duke of York (d. 1402) at Langley was saved and still exists. Elizabeth Burgh’s burial place of the Minoresses outside Aldgate in London was closed down in 1539 and nothing survives—a few ruins were destroyed by fire at the end of the 1700s—though the street where it once stood near the Tower of London still bears the name ‘Minories’. Eleanor Despenser was luckier than her sisters: the church of Tewkesbury Abbey in Gloucestershire survived the Dissolution because the townspeople bought it from Henry VIII’s commissioners in 1539 to use as their parish church, and thus the mausoleum of the Clares and the Despensers still exists, as do the tombs of Eleanor’s first husband Hugh Despenser and their eldest son Huchon. The exact location of Eleanor’s final resting place in the church is, however, not known.

All three of Elizabeth Burgh’s children had offspring of their own, and their lines of descent continued in the late fourteenth century and into the fifteenth, and far beyond. King Edward IV (r. 1461–83) and his younger brother Richard III (r. 1483–85) were Elizabeth’s descendants, via her son William Burgh, Earl of Ulster, his granddaughter Philippa Mortimer, Countess of March (1355–80), and Philippa’s great-grandson Richard, Duke of York (1411–60), the kings’ father. Elizabeth’s elder daughter Isabella Ferrers née Verdon was the great-grandmother of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick (1382–1439), and Isabella had numerous other descendants including Henry Beaufort, Duke of Somerset (1436–64) and Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham (1455–83). The grandson of Elizabeth’s second daughter Elizabeth Bardolf née Damory, Thomas, Lord Bardolf (b. 1369), died in rebellion against King Henry IV (r. 1399–1413) in 1408. Elizabeth Bardolf was also an ancestor of Richard III’s great friend Francis Lovell (d. 1487) and of Henry Norris, executed in 1536 supposedly for being one of the lovers of Queen Anne Boleyn. Margaret Audley née Clare had only one child who lived into adulthood, but her five Stafford grandchildren had many children, and via her descendant Margaret de Foix née Kerdeston (d. 1486), Margaret Audley became the ancestor of numerous kings and queens of France, Spain, Poland, Bohemia and Hungary and Holy Roman Emperors. Margaret’s Stafford descendants included Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham (also a descendant of her sister Elizabeth), executed by Richard III in 1483, and Henry’s son Edward, Duke of Buckingham, executed by Henry VIII in 1521. Only three of Eleanor Despenser’s ten children, Edward, Isabella and Elizabeth Despenser, had children of their own who outlived them. Her third son Gilbert (d. 1382) had a son John who died at age 14, her fourth son John Despenser (d. 1366) is oddly obscure and it is not clear whether he married and had children or not, and her middle three Despenser daughters and her youngest son William Zouche entered the religious life. Her eldest son Huchon was married but left no children. Eleanor’s great-grandson Thomas Despenser (1373–1400), grandson of her second son Edward Despenser (c. 1310–42), was made Earl of Gloucester in 1397, and Thomas’s posthumous daughter and heir Isabelle (1400–39) was Countess of Worcester and Warwick by her two marriages and the grandmother of Richard III’s queen, Anne Neville (1456–85). Eleanor’s youngest daughter Elizabeth Berkeley née Despenser was the mother of Thomas, Lord Berkeley (1353–1417) and was an ancestor of Henry Beaufort, Duke of Somerset (1436–64) and Eleanor Butler née Talbot (d. 1468), alleged to have married Edward IV before he married his queen Elizabeth Woodville. Elizabeth Despenser’s second son James Berkeley (c. 1354/5–1405) is the ancestor of the later Berkeley family who own Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire to this day. The Clare sisters all have millions of modern-day descendants; their fascinating, turbulent stories are part of our own history.