Chapter 2: The New King - Edward II’s Nieces, The Clare Sisters: Powerful Pawns of the Crown

Probably Edward II’s very first act as king, when he heard of his father’s death four days after it happened, was to recall his beloved Piers Gaveston to England from the exile imposed on him by Edward I some months before. At Dumfries on 6 August 1307, Edward made Piers Earl of Cornwall. It has often been stated by later writers that Edward I had intended the earldom of Cornwall to go to his youngest son Edmund of Woodstock, but the arrangements he made in 1306 for his children with his second queen Marguerite of France do not mention this, though the king did specify the earldom of Norfolk for his son Thomas of Brotherton.^[1] The earldom of Cornwall belonged to Edward I and subsequently to Edward II personally: the last earl, Edmund, had died in 1300, and as he had no children, siblings, nieces or nephews, Cornwall passed by right to his first cousin Edward I as his nearest male relative and then to Edward II on his father’s death.^[2] The charter granting Cornwall to Piers Gaveston in August 1307 was sealed by all the English earls except Hugh Despenser the Younger’s uncle the Earl of Warwick, and it reveals that the new king was already intending to marry his friend, or lover, to his niece Margaret Clare: it is decorated with the Clare arms as well as Gaveston’s.^[3] Edward was determined to bring Gaveston into the royal family, and Margaret was its oldest available female member in 1307. How much choice Margaret herself had in marrying Piers Gaveston is not clear; almost certainly little or none, but she would not have been raised to expect to have any say in the matter of her marriage. Even her formidable mother Joan of Acre, who chose her own second husband, had obeyed her father and married the decades-older Gilbert ‘the Red’ in 1290 as Edward I wished. Margaret’s parents and grandfather were dead and her brother was only 16 and still underage, and therefore Edward II controlled her destiny both as her king and as her nearest adult male relative.

The wedding of Margaret Clare and Piers Gaveston, Earl of Cornwall, went ahead on 1 November 1307, five days after her grandfather Edward I’s funeral at Westminster Abbey, and six months after the death of her mother. The location was Berkhamsted, a manor which belonged to the dowager queen Marguerite, who was the Clare sisters’ step-grandmother though was only a few years older than they were. Edward II was to grant custody of Berkhamsted to Piers Gaveston himself in March 1308.^[4] The bride was about 13-and-a-half, and the groom much older: Gaveston was born by July 1283 at the latest and perhaps even in the 1270s, and was thus in his mid- to late-20s when he married Margaret.^[5] The 23-year-old king gave his niece a fine ‘roan-coloured palfrey’ horse as a wedding gift, and paid £30 for rich silk cloth for her attendants and for a chaplet for Margaret. Edward also paid the large sum of £20 for minstrels to entertain Piers and Margaret and their wedding guests, and it must have been quite a wild celebration as he had to pay compensation to a local resident for damage done to his property by the guests.^[6] Piers Gaveston, no doubt delighted with the marriage which made him the king’s nephew-in-law, held a jousting tournament at his castle of Wallingford near Oxford on 2 December 1307 to celebrate it. He and his team of young knights—perhaps including Eleanor Clare’s teenage husband Hugh Despenser the Younger, a keen jouster—defeated some of the great earls of the realm. The king was not present, being then at Langley in Hertfordshire dealing with the awkward situation of the mass arrest of the Knights Templar in England, though Piers and Margaret had joined him by 13 December.^[7]

A historian claimed in 1979 that Margaret Clare was ‘tragically married’ to Piers Gaveston, but there is no real evidence for such a value judgement.^[8] Gaveston was a nobleman by birth, wealthy, witty and clever, a renowned and brilliant jouster and soldier, and a capable administrator and leader. His modern reputation as little more than a flamboyant court fop is unfair and inaccurate, though it is surely true that he had the kind of personality which alienated a lot of people. Contemporary chroniclers were, with few exceptions, hostile to him, and there was considerable rejoicing throughout England at his death. It is difficult to understand the widespread and unrelenting hatred for Gaveston except by assuming that on a personal level he managed to repel and irritate people, as his behaviour, excepting the haughty arrogance he often displayed, does not otherwise seem to merit it. Edward II, by contrast, adored him and everything about him, and was infatuated with him from his teens onwards and for many years after Gaveston’s death. One of the few chroniclers who had a good word for Gaveston was Sir Thomas Gray: in his Scalacronica he called Gaveston ‘very magnificent, liberal and well-bred’, though also ‘haughty and supercilious’, a common description of the royal favourite.^[9] The Vita Edwardi Secundi described Gaveston thus: ‘scornfully rolling his upraised eyes in pride and in abuse, he looked down upon all with pompous and supercilious countenance’.^[10]

Geoffrey le Baker, a later chronicler who in fact never saw him, called Gaveston ‘graceful and agile in body, sharp-witted, refined in manners’.^[11] Edward I supposedly initially promoted Gaveston because he came from Gascony, the region de bele manere, ‘of beautiful manners’.^[12] It is worth bearing in mind that Edward I himself placed Gaveston in Edward of Caernarfon’s household in 1300 or earlier when his son was a teenager, and for many years found him a suitable companion and role model for the heir to the throne. He removed Gaveston from England in April 1307 because he was concerned about the extremely close relationship that had developed between the two men, not because Gaveston had done anything wrong. Piers Gaveston enjoyed poking fun at the powerful and pompous and ‘his arrogance was intolerable to the barons and a prime cause of hatred and rancour’, but he was not malicious, and there is no reason to suppose that he treated Margaret poorly or unkindly.^[13] Perhaps Margaret found him as irritating as many other people did; perhaps she found him amusing, and admired his athletic prowess on the jousting field; we do not know.

Piers Gaveston was, beyond doubt, the great love of Edward II’s life, and now he was married to the king’s barely pubescent niece. Whether Margaret knew about her husband’s relationship with her uncle— whatever there was to know about it—cannot be established. From a modern perspective, the marriage of a girl barely into her teens to a much older man who was involved in an intense and probably sexual relationship with her uncle perhaps seems revolting and callous, but we do not know Margaret’s own feelings on the matter. Gaveston was well-versed in courtly manners, and it seems highly unlikely that he would have humiliated her by flaunting his relationship with the king in her face. Margaret became a countess at marriage and thus outranked her older sister Eleanor, and this might have overcome any doubts she had about marrying a man who by birth was several ranks beneath her (albeit still a nobleman). Gaveston enjoyed an income of about £4,000 a year, whereas Margaret’s brother-in-law Hugh Despenser the Younger only received about £200, and even that was as a gift of his father Hugh the Elder; Eleanor and Hugh owned no lands at all for the first few years of Edward’s reign. As well as becoming a countess, 13-year-old Margaret thus became much richer than her elder sister. She was probably too young for her marriage to be consummated yet or to live with Gaveston as his full wife, and in sharp contrast to Eleanor—who had at least eleven pregnancies between 1308 and c. 1330 and gave birth to ten children who survived childhood—Margaret seems to have been not particularly fertile. She was to have one child each from her two marriages.

In January 1308, Edward II left England to marry Philip IV of France’s daughter Isabella, his long-term fiancée, in Boulogne. Scandalously, on 26 December 1307 he appointed Piers Gaveston as his regent while he was outside England. The king had spent the festive season of 1307/08 at Westminster with Gaveston and perhaps also with his niece, Gaveston’s new wife Margaret, unless Margaret had retreated to Amesbury Priory in Wiltshire or elsewhere until she was old enough to live with her husband. It would have been far more conventional to appoint one of his little half-brothers Thomas or Edmund as nominal regent, or his royal first cousin Thomas, Earl of Lancaster (d. 1322), but Edward cared little for convention. He brought his new bride back to England on 7 February 1308. Piers Gaveston and probably his wife Margaret, and the king’s sisters Mary the nun and Elizabeth, Countess of Hereford, were among the welcoming party who greeted them at Dover. Isabella of France was much her husband’s junior and only 12 years old, born probably in the second half of 1295 and thus about the same age as the third Clare sister Elizabeth, but was now the Clare sisters’ aunt by marriage. One French chronicler who saw Isabella when she and her husband visited Paris in 1313 called her ‘the fairest of the fair’ (des belles la plus belle) and the most beautiful woman who could be found in the kingdom of France or the Holy Roman Empire.^[14] Edward II himself was tall—probably at least 6ft—fair-haired, bearded and immensely strong. Numerous contemporary chroniclers comment on his enormous physical strength, and the Scalacronica says that he was ‘one of the strongest men of his realm’. Unfortunately we have no idea what the Clare sisters looked like; perhaps they inherited their father’s red hair, or were tall and fair like their uncle. Eleanor Despenser’s seal of early 1329 depicts her wearing a floor-length gown, and her long hair falls either side of her face, topped with some kind of simple headdress.^[15]

Edward allowed his 16-year-old nephew Gilbert Clare to have his earldoms of Gloucester and Hertford in March 1308, more than four years early, probably because an earl in control of his large inheritance was much more useful to him politically than an underage ward. He also gave Gilbert permission to marry whomever he wanted, which represents the king punishing his stepmother Queen Marguerite, as her husband Edward I had given her the rights to Gilbert’s marriage in 1301.^[16] In 1308, the dowager queen joined the baronial opposition to Piers Gaveston and even helped them financially, and Edward II never forgave her and had virtually no contact with her for the remaining ten years of her life. He deliberately gave custody of her manor of Berkhamsted to Gaveston four days after he gave Gilbert Clare permission to take a bride of his own choice.^[17] The king’s excessive favouritism towards Piers Gaveston was already creating much jealousy and hostility. Mere months into his reign, Edward II had lost the goodwill he had enjoyed at its start, and although he had shown considerable promise as Prince of Wales and heir to the throne, it was starting to become apparent that his leadership was definitely not all it could be. Gilbert Clare’s relations with his uncle, and with his brother-in-law Gaveston, waxed and waned over the next few years: sometimes they were on good terms and sometimes not.

Piers Gaveston’s baronial enemies forced him into exile for a second time in June 1308, though Edward II ensured he left the country in triumph by making him lord lieutenant of Ireland, just a day after he had appointed Richard Burgh, Earl of Ulster, to the position. Gaveston was forced to give up his earldom of Cornwall, but in compensation, Edward granted him £2,000 worth of lands in his homeland of Gascony, including the city of Bayonne and the island of Oléron, and lands worth another £2,000 in England jointly to Gaveston and his wife Margaret, so they suffered no loss of income.^[18] Fourteen-year-old Margaret was not included in her husband’s exile, and was to be granted £2,000 a year from the revenues of Cornwall for her sustenance if she remained in England.^[19] She was the granddaughter of the old king and the sister of the Earl of Gloucester, and nobody intended her harm or insult. However, Margaret accompanied Gaveston to Ireland, and they sailed from Bristol at the end of June 1308, waved off by the king.^[20] Edward gave his beloved Gaveston a generous gift of £1,180 in cash on departure, and his itinerary reveals that he travelled with Piers and Margaret to Bristol to see them off.^[21]

The marital norms of the early fourteenth century mean that it is far more likely to have been Gaveston’s decision that Margaret should accompany him, rather than Margaret’s own; as his wife she owed him obedience, and could not remain behind in England if he ordered her to travel to Ireland with him. Still, Piers’ wish for her to go with him seems to indicate that he was fond of her and desired her company, and perhaps Margaret was pleased to have her husband to herself for once. In travelling to Ireland she may have been returning to her birthplace for the first time since she was an infant, and as she was now 14 she and Gaveston might have consummated their marriage. She and Piers spent a year in Ireland, and Gaveston excelled in his role there. There was far more to him than the useless, greedy court fop of popular imagination, and he was, or could be given the opportunity, an able and intelligent man.^[22] Edward II, in England, immediately began a campaign to bring about Gaveston’s return by coaxing Pope Clement V (r. 1305–14) onto his side and by manipulating his barons until one by one they consented to Gaveston coming back. It took a year, but his strategy paid off: Edward, like Gaveston, could be clever and competent when he put his mind to it, and it was a pity for his kingdom and his subjects that he only used his undoubted talents when his own personal feelings were involved.

The double wedding of the two unmarried Clare siblings to two children of the Anglo-Irish nobleman Richard Burgh, Earl of Ulster, took place at Waltham Abbey in Essex on 29 and 30 September 1308, in the presence of Edward II. Elizabeth, who had turned 13 two weeks before, married the earl’s eldest son and heir John Burgh. The 17-year-old Earl of Gloucester married Maud, one of John Burgh’s many sisters, who also included Robert Bruce’s wife Elizabeth (d. 1327), queen of Scotland (held under house arrest in England from 1306 to 1314) and the Countesses of Kildare and Desmond. Elizabeth Burgh née Clare was, at barely 13, considered too young to travel to Ireland with her new husband, and appears to have retired to Amesbury Priory in the company of her aunt Mary the nun for just over a year.^[23] She moved to Ireland to live with her husband when she was 14, and became pregnant with her first child when she was 16. Her marriage was intended to make her Countess of Ulster, but did not as her father-in-law outlived his eldest son, and John Burgh is, like almost all medieval noblemen who died before their fathers, obscure. He was born around 1290, so was some years Elizabeth’s senior and 18 or so at marriage. Probably Gilbert and Elizabeth’s sister Eleanor Despenser attended the wedding, as her father-in-law’s manor of North Weald Bassett lay only ten miles from Waltham Abbey, and Hugh Despenser the Elder had given the issues of it to Eleanor and Hugh the Younger. Eleanor can hardly have been pleased that her two younger sisters were both now countesses or set to become such, whereas her own husband would not inherit an earldom, and thus both Margaret and Elizabeth outranked her.

Eleanor Despenser née Clare gave birth to her eldest child sometime in 1308 or the first half of 1309, when she was 15 or 16 (she turned 16 in mid-October 1308 two weeks after the joint wedding of her two siblings) and her husband about 19 or 20. It was a boy, inevitably named Hugh, though in Edward II’s household accounts his name always appears as Huchon or Huchoun, obviously his family nickname. The Anonimalle chronicler gave the young man the name Hughelyn or ‘little Hugh’ when talking about him in 1326.^[24] Evidently, modern writers are not the only ones who struggle with generation after generation of medieval noblemen with the same name. It became especially confusing in the 1320s when Huchon’s father and grandfather were still alive and there were three generations of Hugh Despensers active in England, and the boy was called ‘Hugh Despenser, son of Hugh Despenser the son’ or ‘Huchon Despenser, son of the son’. Huchon was Joan of Acre’s eldest grandchild and Edward I’s eldest great-grandchild. Very little is known about his parents’ life in the first few years of Edward II’s reign, where Eleanor and Hugh the Younger lived or what they did or if they were happy together. Hugh’s father Hugh the Elder gave the couple the issues of six of his manors in Essex, Cambridgeshire and Suffolk, and they had an income of around £200 a year, in line with a promise made by Hugh the Elder to Edward I in June 1306 to provide them with such.^[25] This was a large income by the standards of most of the English population in the early 1300s and in modern terms is several hundred thousand pounds, but it was a small income by the standards of their class and family: Eleanor’s brother Gilbert earned about £7,000 a year and her brother-in-law Piers Gaveston about £4,000. Hugh Despenser the Younger’s relative poverty for more than half of his uncle-in-law’s reign may be a factor in the almost pathological greed he was to demonstrate in later years when he became the king’s favourite and perhaps lover.