Chapter 1: The Clare Sisters - Edward II’s Nieces, The Clare Sisters: Powerful Pawns of the Crown

Westminster Abbey, Sunday, 30 April 1290

(Eighteenth year of the reign of King Edward I)

The bride wore a second-hand dress, the groom was a divorcé almost thirty years her senior, and she spent the days before the wedding squabbling with her sisters. Not, perhaps, the most auspicious-sounding of occasions, yet this was a wedding of great significance: that of the king of England’s daughter and the most powerful nobleman in the country.

Joan of Acre, the bride, was the second eldest of the five surviving daughters of King Edward I (1239–1307) and his Spanish queen Leonor of Castile (c. 1241–90), and the first of them to marry. At the time of her wedding, Joan had either recently turned 18 or was shortly to turn 18: she was born in the spring of 1272 when her father, accompanied by her mother, was leading the last major Christian crusade to the Holy Land. Joan’s birthplace of Acre or Akko was then the sole remaining important port and stronghold of the Crusader kingdom of Jerusalem, and is now a town in northern Israel and one of the oldest continuously inhabited sites in the world, first mentioned around 2000BC. Just over a year after Joan’s wedding, in May 1291, her birthplace fell to the Mamluks, a Muslim dynasty of former slaves who ruled Egypt and Syria from the middle of the thirteenth century until overthrown by the Ottomans in 1517. A few weeks after her birth, in fact on his thirty-third birthday on 17 June 1272, Joan’s father Edward had survived an assassination attempt in Acre by an emissary sent to him by the Egyptian general Sultan al-Zahir Baibars. Edward was stabbed with a poisoned dagger and sustained serious injury, but survived and managed to kill his attacker. The knife used to stab him was kept and was still held in the English treasury at Westminster in the early 1340s.^[1] On 16 November 1272 when Joan of Acre was about 6 months old, her grandfather Henry III (b. 1207) died after a reign of fifty-six years and her father succeeded to the English throne, though he did not return to his realm until 2 August 1274. He and Leonor were crowned king and queen of England at Westminster Abbey seventeen days later.

Joan did not travel to England with her parents in 1274 but stayed for some years in northern France with her maternal grandmother Jeanne (or ‘Joan’ in English) of Ponthieu, dowager-queen of the Spanish kingdoms of Castile and Leon, and Countess of Ponthieu in her own right. Joan of Acre was presumably named after her grandmother. Queen Jeanne (c. 1217/20–79) had left Castile in 1254 two years after the death of her husband Fernando III (r. 1217–52), following a dispute with her stepson Alfonso X (r. 1252–84). She returned to her own county of Ponthieu, bordering Normandy, which she had inherited from her mother Marie and would bequeath on her death in 1279 to her daughter Leonor of Castile and ultimately to her grandson Edward II of England (r. 1307–27), Joan of Acre’s younger brother and their father’s successor. Joan arrived in England for the first time when she was 6 years old in 1278, when her father had already begun arranging a future marriage for her with one of the sons of the German king Rudolf I (r. 1273–91). Sadly, her 18-year-old husband-to-be, Hartmann von Habsburg, drowned in the Rhine in 1281 before their wedding could go ahead.

The man Joan married instead was Gilbert ‘the Red’ Clare, Earl of Gloucester and Hertford, born on 2 September 1243 in Christchurch, Dorset and hence 46 when they married in April 1290.^[2] He was known as ‘the Red’ as much for his choleric disposition and touchiness as for his flaming hair, and he and his new father-in-law Edward I, only four years his senior, had long had an uneasy relationship. During the baronial wars of the 1260s, Gilbert had at first supported Henry III’s brother-in-law Simon Montfort, Earl of Leicester (c. 1208–65), against the king and his son Edward, though switched sides and played an important role in the royalist victory of 1265. He commanded one of the divisions which defeated the Earl of Leicester at the Battle of Evesham in August that year; Leicester, who fell during the battle, supposedly exclaimed ‘This red dog will eat us today.’^[3] When he was only 9 years old in the early 1250s, Gilbert had been married to Edward I’s French cousin Alice Lusignan (c. late 1230s/early 1240s–1290), whose father Hugues, Count of La Marche, was a younger half-brother of Henry III. This was a famously unhappy match which resulted in the couple living apart for many years from about 1267 onwards and ultimately in the annulment of their marriage in 1285. Gilbert and Alice’s daughters Isabella and Joan, born in 1262 and c. 1264, were a few years older than their new stepmother. At the time of Gilbert’s wedding to Joan of Acre, his second daughter Joan MacDuff née Clare, Countess of Fife in Scotland, had already borne at least one child, Duncan MacDuff; Gilbert was already a grandfather.

Gilbert surrendered his many lands to Edward I before his wedding to the king’s daughter, and on 27 May 1290 they were granted back to him and Joan jointly with the condition that any children Gilbert had with Joan would inherit them. This grant gave precedence to any children Gilbert might have with his second wife over his two daughters with his first, who had probably been disinherited anyway by the 1285 annulment of their parents’ marriage, and the question of who exactly the correct Clare heirs were became a pressing matter in and after 1314. Well into the 1400s, 150 years after Gilbert Clare and Joan of Acre’s wedding, royal officials often examined and confirmed Edward I’s May 1290 grant of Gilbert’s lands back to him, the birth order of Gilbert’s three daughters with Joan, and the subsequent ownership of his lands by his daughters, their husbands and their descendants.^[4]

The Clares were one of the greatest families of medieval England. They had held the earldom of Hertford since the twelfth century and the earldom of Gloucester since the early thirteenth, and owned lands in England—in every county of the south of England—Wales and Ireland. Gilbert ‘the Red’ was the second child and eldest son of Richard Clare, Earl of Gloucester and Hertford (1222–62), and Maud Lacy (b. 1223), daughter of Margaret Quincy (c. 1206–66), Countess of Lincoln in her own right. Maud Clare née Lacy appears to have had a personality as prickly, difficult and hostile as that of her eldest son, and Gilbert had an ongoing feud with her over her dower lands (Henry III unfairly assigned Usk in Wales and Clare in Suffolk, two of Gilbert’s chief lordships, to Maud as part of her dower in 1262 which was a major factor in Gilbert’s decision to join Simon Montfort against Henry and his son Edward in 1263/64). Mother and son went so far as to sue each other on occasion, and although Gilbert had five daughters he named none of them after his mother. This is so unusual and unconventional for the era that it reveals much about their unamicable relationship. Maud played favourites among her children, going out of her way to promote the career of her third son Bogo, a rich cleric who held numerous offices, to the exclusion of Gilbert, her daughters Isabella, Margaret and Rohese, and the remaining son Thomas, lord of Thomond in Ireland. Gilbert was perhaps not too distraught when Maud died in early 1289, and he could finally, in his mid-40s, take possession of his entire inheritance including the third of it she had held as dower.^[5]

The April 1290 wedding of Joan of Acre and Gilbert Clare was a private affair, only attended by Joan’s parents the king and queen, her elder sister Eleanor and younger sisters Margaret and Elizabeth, and her much younger brother Edward of Caernarfon, the future King Edward II and the only survivor of Edward I and Leonor of Castile’s four sons, who turned 6 years old five days before the wedding. (The remaining royal sister, Mary, who was 11, had been veiled at Amesbury Priory in Wiltshire in 1285 and was not present.) The gowns of Joan and her sisters were not new, but a tailor had spent a full nine days making them ready for the wedding, and a magnificent headdress with rubies and emeralds and a belt of gold also with rubies and emeralds had been especially made for Joan in Paris. Joan gave 3 shillings as an offering at a Mass she attended on her wedding day, and the three of her sisters who were present each gave a shilling to ‘poor widows’ in alms.^[6] A wedding party was held afterwards in a temporary hall built at Westminster for the occasion, at which one guest enjoyed himself so much he somehow managed to break several tables.^[7]

Soon after the wedding, Joan and Gilbert left court without royal permission and took themselves off to Gilbert’s castle of Tonbridge in Kent, to the annoyance of her parents: an example of Joan’s determination to do what she wanted to do rather than what she was told to do, which she would demonstrate again and again. The king and queen retaliated by confiscating seven gowns laid aside for her and giving them instead to her 15-year-old sister Margaret, whose wedding to the future Duke John II of Brabant took place also at Westminster a few weeks later.^[8] The couple eventually returned: Gilbert the Red held a banquet at his mansion in Clerkenwell to celebrate his marriage on 3 July 1290, and a few days later rode with 103 knights in the wedding procession of his sister-in-law Margaret and John of Brabant.^[9] Edward I, who loved his daughters dearly and was often very indulgent towards them, had obviously forgiven Joan by then for leaving court without permission. He gave her a large amount of plate and other equipment for her household at Clerkenwell, including four beds, forty-six golden cups, sixty silver spoons, many bowls of silver and one of pure gold.^[10] The daughters of Edward I and Queen Leonor were headstrong and independent women. As well as the numerous examples of this demonstrated by Joan of Acre, the third daughter Margaret decided to stay in England for more than three years between 1294 and 1297 without her husband the Duke of Brabant, and the fifth and youngest daughter Elizabeth also flatly refused to join her own husband in the county of Holland in 1297, to her father’s annoyance. The fourth daughter Mary, although veiled as a nun at a young age, did what she wanted and went where she pleased, incurred numerous gambling debts, and lived a luxurious life at Amesbury Priory with servants and hunting-dogs. She also spent much time as an adult at the court of her brother Edward II.

Joan of Acre became pregnant around late July or early August 1290, about three months after her wedding. Unfortunately, the queen of England did not live long enough to see the birth of her first grandchild. Leonor of Castile died at Harby in Nottinghamshire on 28 November 1290, at the age of 49. Joan, despite her pregnancy, rushed to see her mother before she died.^[11] Leonor was buried at Westminster Abbey on 17 December. Her grieving widower, the 51-year-old king to whom she had been married for thirty-six years, poignantly referred to her in a letter to the abbot of Cluny in France as ‘whom in life we dearly cherished, and whom in death we cannot cease to love’.^[12] He remained a widower for nine years, only remarrying Philip IV of France’s half-sister Marguerite (1278/9–1318) when it became necessary to do so as a means of ending a war against Philip. Philip’s only daughter Isabella was betrothed to Joan of Acre’s brother Edward of Caernarfon at the same time and for the same purpose.

Joan gave birth to her first child sometime between 23 April and 13 May 1291, a year after her wedding and just before her birthplace of Acre fell to the Mamluk besiegers and the Holy Land was lost to the Christians, on 18 May 1291.^[13] It was a boy, called Gilbert after his father (though it would have been more conventional by the standards of the era to have named him Richard after his paternal grandfather Richard Clare, Earl of Gloucester and Hertford) and who, from the moment of his birth, was heir to Gilbert the Red’s earldoms and vast landholdings in three countries. Edward I, delighted at the news of his first grandchild, gave a hugely generous gift of £100 on 21 May to Joan’s messenger ‘William son of Glay’ who informed him.^[14] Young Gilbert was only seven years younger than his uncle the future king, Edward of Caernarfon, and when he was 10 years old in 1301, his grandfather sent Gilbert to live in the household of the boy’s step-grandmother Queen Marguerite, whom the king married in September 1299. Edward I also granted the queen the right to arrange Gilbert’s future marriage.^[15] The king’s order had to be repeated to make a reluctant Joan of Acre give up custody of her son to the queen, and Marguerite informed Edward that she had sent two men to find Gilbert and bring him to her.^[16] It seems that Joan’s relationship with the stepmother who was about seven years her junior may not have been particularly harmonious. Gilbert, however, as grandson of the king and heir of the great Earl of Gloucester, lived in some style: he was attended by five squires, five valets and sixteen other servants, and was given six greyhounds, ten running dogs and thirteen horses.^[17]

Between 1290 and early 1292, Gilbert ‘the Red’ Clare (b. 1243) clashed violently with Humphrey Bohun, Earl of Hereford, concerning their rights in the Marches (Wales and the English-Welsh borderlands), and both men were summoned to parliament in January 1292 and condemned to temporary imprisonment.^[18] The king also made Gilbert acknowledge a huge debt to him of £10,000 which he pardoned Gilbert’s executors after the earl’s death at Joan of Acre’s request.^[19] Edward I could not long imprison his own son-in-law, however, and the matter did not impede Gilbert and Joan’s marital relations: their second child and first daughter was born on or a little after 14 October 1292 at the earl’s mighty South Wales stronghold of Caerphilly. Gilbert himself had built the castle twenty years previously to aid his conquest of Glamorgan and his struggle against Llywelyn ap Gruffudd (d. 1282), the last native Prince of Wales.^[20] Caerphilly Castle still exists and broods magnificently, the second largest castle in Britain after Windsor and the first of concentric design. Gilbert designed it to be surrounded by two artificial lakes and to be virtually impregnable.

Gilbert and Joan named their second child Eleanor after her maternal grandmother Leonor of Castile and great-grandmother Eleanor of Provence (Edward I’s mother and Henry III’s widow, who had died the year before), and she was the king’s first granddaughter. In contemporary spelling, her name was Alianor, Alianore or occasionally Alienore. Shortly after Eleanor Clare’s birth, Gilbert ‘the Red’ sent a letter to Robert Burnell, chancellor of England and a close ally of Edward I, apologising for being unable to attend the king as he should. He explained that he had been forced to remain in Glamorgan for longer than anticipated as when he had travelled there from London, he had found one of his children ill.^[21] Wishing to keep this reason private, however, he asked Burnell to make excuses for him in public. Whether the earl meant his son Gilbert, now 18 months, or the newborn Eleanor, is unclear, but the letter lends a pleasantly affectionate touch to a famously irascible man.

Not long after Eleanor Clare was born at Caerphilly, Gilbert ‘the Red’ was driven out of Wales by a rebellion there; Edward I finally suppressed it the following June. In the early summer of 1293, Gilbert and Joan of Acre began making plans to visit Ireland, where they stayed until April 1294.^[22] Before they left, Joan probably attended the wedding of her elder sister Eleanor in Bristol on 20 September 1293. Eleanor was now 24, and married Henri III, Count of Bar, a part of the Holy Roman Empire in eastern France, with its capital at Bar-le-Duc, in the region of Lorraine. She had long been betrothed to King Alfonso III of Aragon, second largest of the four Spanish kingdoms, who died suddenly in June 1291; perhaps it was something of a disappointment for Eleanor to marry a mere count when she should have married a king. Eleanor and Henri’s marriage produced two children: Edouard, born probably in 1294 and his father’s successor to the county of Bar, and Jeanne or Joan, later Countess of Surrey, born in 1295 or 1296. Edouard and Jeanne de Bar were the cousins closest in age to Joan of Acre’s daughters, the Clare sisters. The three girls never knew their aunt Eleanor, who died in 1298, and probably had little if any contact with their cousin Count Edouard in eastern France, but knew their cousin Jeanne de Bar well. She came to England in the early 1300s after the death of her father, and spent most of the rest of her life there.

Joan of Acre and Gilbert’s third child, Margaret Clare, was born sometime between the autumn of 1293 and the autumn of 1294; she is the only one of the four Clare siblings for whom we have no recorded date of birth. Perhaps a date in the spring or summer of 1294 is most likely which would assume a regular spacing between the Clare children, and Margaret may have been born in Ireland. In her own lifetime, her name was usually spelt ‘Margarete’, and she was presumably named after her mother’s sister the Duchess of Brabant, or after her father’s grandmother Margaret Quincy, Countess of Lincoln, and his sister Margaret, Countess of Cornwall. Around Christmas 1294, Gilbert ‘the Red’ and Joan conceived their last child, who was born at Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire on 16 September 1295, two weeks after Gilbert’s fifty-second birthday.^[23] It was another daughter, Gilbert’s fifth and Joan’s third, and they named her Elizabeth after Joan of Acre’s youngest sister. In the fourteenth century, the name was spelt Elizabet, Elizabeth, Elizabethe or Elyzabeth.

Gilbert ‘the Red’ Clare, Earl of Gloucester and Hertford, the wealthiest and most influential English nobleman of the era, died on 7 December 1295 just two-and-a-half months after the birth of his youngest child. His son and sole heir Gilbert the younger was only 4-and-a-half years old, and when a tenant-in-chief died with his heir underage, the revenues of his lands went to the king until the boy turned 21. None of the four Clare children except perhaps Gilbert can have had any memories of their father, though they would have been raised to know exactly who he was and to recognise their own exalted birth and importance. The sisters would also have been very aware of the strong, capable and independent women in their family: their mother and aunts, both their grandmothers, and their great-grandmother Margaret Quincy, one of the greatest English noblewomen of the thirteenth century.

Edward I granted Bristol Castle to his daughter for her and her children’s sustenance, so possibly the Clare sisters grew up there, at least part of the time. They may also have spent time at Amesbury Priory in Wiltshire, where their aunt Mary, the king’s fourth daughter, was a nun. It was not planned to give any of them to the Church, but Amesbury was a place where they could be educated and where they—and, crudely but importantly by the standards of the era, their virginity—would be safe. Nothing at all is known of the sisters’ upbringing and education, but in likelihood they learned to read, and perhaps to write, in French, and would have learnt some Latin, though not to the extent of being able to read it fluently. Later in life, there is evidence that Elizabeth, the third sister, enjoyed books, and perhaps Eleanor and Margaret did as well. They must also have spoken English, but the written language of the nobility in their era was French. Sometime in about early 1297, their mother Joan of Acre caused a huge scandal when she wed a squire named Ralph Monthermer without her father’s permission and while the king was negotiating a second marriage for her with Amadeus, Count of Savoy. On 16 March 1297 the future marriage to Amadeus was still under discussion, even though Edward had already heard about his daughter’s illicit wedding.^[24] Ralph was of obscure parentage, and apparently illegitimate; the London annalist called him ‘the bastard of Monthermer’.^[25] It was unheard of for a great royal lady to marry a man of such low birth and standing, and Edward I raged when he heard about it. Ralph Monthermer was briefly imprisoned, but as the king could not unmarry the couple and as Joan was probably already pregnant, he eventually had to accept the situation, and Monthermer was released and acknowledged as Earl of Gloucester by right of his wife. Supposedly, Joan sent her three little Clare daughters to the king to soften him up before she approached him in person.^[26]

Joan and Ralph’s first child Mary Monthermer was born around October 1297, only two years after her half-sister Elizabeth Clare, and later married the Scottish nobleman Duncan MacDuff, Earl of Fife, who grew up in England. Most confusingly, Duncan was the grandson of Gilbert ‘the Red’ Clare via his mother Joan MacDuff née Clare, Gilbert’s second daughter from his first marriage to Alice Lusignan. For the three Clare sisters Eleanor, Margaret and Elizabeth, this meant that their half-sister married their half-nephew, who was born in 1289 and was older than they were. Joan of Acre and Ralph Monthermer had three younger children: Joan, who became a nun at Amesbury Priory, probably born in 1299; Thomas, born in 1301; and Edward, born in 1304.

Eleanor Clare was the first of the four Clare siblings to marry, and her wedding took place on Thursday, 26 May 1306 when she was 13 years 7 months old. Her grandfather Edward I had arranged the marriage and attended the wedding in his own chapel at Westminster Palace, and paid for the minstrels who entertained the guests, including two harpists called Richard Whiteacre and Richard Leyland. The king gave Eleanor a generous £29 for clothes and jewels and another £10 to dress her attendants, and also gave her three pieces of red silk to line a quilt and sixteen more pieces to make a dorsal curtain round her bed.^[27] Eleanor’s mother Joan of Acre and almost certainly Joan’s much younger brother Edward of Caernarfon, Prince of Wales, Duke of Aquitaine, Earl of Chester and Count of Ponthieu, heir to the throne of their aged father, also attended the wedding. The Prince of Wales was then 22, and all four Clare siblings were closer in age to their uncle than their mother, his sister, was.

Eleanor’s groom was Hugh Despenser, known to history as Hugh Despenser the Younger to distinguish him from his father of the same name. He was about four years Eleanor’s senior, born in the late 1280s and probably 17 or 18 years old in May 1306, and was the maternal grandson of the late Earl and Countess of Warwick, William Beauchamp (d. 1298) and Maud FitzJohn (d. 1301). Hugh’s paternal grandmother Aline Basset (d. 1281) was Countess of Norfolk by her second marriage, and his older half-sister Maud Chaworth (b. 1282) married Edward I’s nephew Henry of Lancaster (b. c. 1280/81) in early 1297, so Hugh had some impressive family connections, yet would not himself inherit an earldom. Warwick passed to his uncle Guy Beauchamp in 1298, and Norfolk escheated to the Crown on the death of his childless step-grandfather Roger Bigod later in 1306.

As the eldest granddaughter of the king and daughter of the great Earl of Gloucester and Hertford, Eleanor Clare might have expected to make a rather better match and to marry an earl, but Edward I paid Hugh Despenser the Elder £2,000 for his son’s marriage and evidently believed the young man to be a satisfactory husband for his granddaughter.^[28] Eleanor’s first cousin Jeanne de Bar, who was no more than 11 years old and perhaps younger, married John Warenne, Earl of Surrey, also at Westminster the day before Eleanor wed Hugh Despenser. The Surrey marriage would prove to be an unhappy and childless disaster, and the couple lived apart from 1313, perhaps earlier. By contrast, Eleanor and Hugh Despenser formed a good and solid partnership over the years, and certainly a fruitful one. Their marriage of two decades produced at least ten children, the first of whom was a boy born sometime before July 1309 and probably in 1308, and named Hugh after his father, grandfather and great-grandfather. Their second child was Edward Despenser, named after Eleanor’s maternal grandfather and uncle, and altogether they had four sons and five daughters who survived childhood. Eleanor was as fertile as her mother and her aunt Elizabeth, Countess of Holland and Hereford (b. 1282, the youngest daughter of Edward I and Leonor of Castile), who between them had eighteen children. Her grandmother Queen Leonor also gave birth to at least fourteen children, perhaps more. Depending how physically and emotionally mature Eleanor was in 1306, her marriage may not have been consummated, and she may have remained with her mother for some time yet or retreated to Amesbury Priory. Eleanor turned 15 in October 1307, and either became pregnant not long afterwards or perhaps already was.

Hugh Despenser the Younger, Eleanor’s uncle Edward of Caernarfon and 265 other men had been knighted in Westminster Abbey four days before her wedding. One of the new young knights was Edward of Caernarfon’s beloved friend (and probably lover) Piers Gaveston, a nobleman of Béarn in the far south-west of France and a subject of the English Crown who arrived in England with his father in late 1297.^[29] Gaveston would be exiled from England in April 1307 by Eleanor’s grandfather the king, who was concerned about the young man’s relationship with his son. Edward of Caernarfon, however, recalled him as soon as he possibly could, and Gaveston would become Eleanor’s brother-in-law later in 1307. Gaveston probably also attended the Clare-Despenser wedding on 26 May 1306, as he had become the inseparable companion of the heir to the throne. Eleanor’s father-in-law Hugh Despenser the Elder was present at her wedding and she may have briefly met her mother-in-law Isabella Despenser née Beauchamp, elder sister of Guy Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, but Isabella died a little before 30 May 1306 just after the wedding.

Eleanor Despenser née Clare’s wealthy, indomitable and immensely capable mother also did not have long to live. Joan of Acre, Countess of Gloucester and Hertford, died on 23 April 1307 at the age of 35 or almost. Given her age and the pattern of her childbearing, it is possible that she died during pregnancy or during or after childbirth, though this is only speculation, and if she did have a child in 1307 it is not mentioned in any known extant record. Edward I had prayers said for his daughter’s soul on 6 May, when he heard the news.^[30] Joan was buried at the Augustinian priory in Clare, Suffolk, in a chapel dedicated to St Vincent of Zaragoza (died c. 304) which she herself had founded.^[31] This perhaps reveals Joan’s interest in her Spanish heritage. Clare Priory itself was founded in 1248 by Richard Clare, Earl of Gloucester, father of Joan’s first husband Gilbert ‘the Red’ and grandfather of her Clare daughters. It was a pity for Joan’s younger brother, the future king, that she died before his reign began; Edward of Caernarfon loved and trusted her, and perhaps her advice might have gone some way to preventing his reign slipping into disaster quite as soon as it did.

Joan left her eight children; Gilbert Clare the eldest was not quite 16, and Edward Monthermer the youngest was barely 3. Joan’s Clare daughters Eleanor, Margaret and Elizabeth were 14-and-a-half, 12 or 13, and 11 when they lost their mother. Not long afterwards, they also lost their maternal grandfather, the only grandparent they had known. King Edward I died at Burgh-by-Sands near Carlisle on 7 July 1307, aged 68. Only six of his many children outlived him: Margaret, Duchess of Brabant, Mary the nun, Elizabeth, Countess of Hereford, and Edward of Caernarfon from his first marriage, and the young children Thomas of Brotherton (b. June 1300) and Edmund of Woodstock (b. August 1301) from his second to Marguerite of France. The Clare sisters’ uncle succeeded his father as King Edward II, and a new era was about to begin.