Chapter 5: The Earl of Gloucester’s Heirs - Edward II’s Nieces, The Clare Sisters: Powerful Pawns of the Crown

Edward II marched north with a great army in June 1314 to face Robert Bruce, king of Scotland (r. 1306–29) in battle, and the two forces met near Stirling on 23 and 24 June at the Battle of Bannockburn. Gilbert Clare, Earl of Gloucester, was one of only three English earls who fought, the others being Edward’s brother-in-law Humphrey Bohun, Earl of Hereford, and his cousin Aymer Valence, Earl of Pembroke. The king and his nephew Gloucester argued fiercely the evening before the battle and Edward unreasonably taunted the earl as a coward. Come the morning, Gloucester was desperate to prove himself in battle, and argued with the Earl of Hereford over which of them had the right to command the vanguard. Gloucester and his men rode full tilt at the Scottish soldiers without waiting for an order to advance, and the young earl was killed. He had made the horrible mistake of forgetting to put on the surcoat identifying him as an earl; had the Scots known who he was, they would have captured him for a large ransom. The greatest of all English noblemen (excepting Edward II’s cousin, Thomas of Lancaster) lay dead on a Scottish battlefield at the age of only 23. Gloucester’s second cousin and his wife Maud’s brother-in-law Robert Bruce personally kept an overnight vigil over his body in a nearby church, and sent it back to England with full honours. The young earl was buried at Tewkesbury Abbey in Gloucestershire, the mausoleum of the Clares, with his father, grandfather and other family members, though his heart was buried separately at Shelford in Nottinghamshire. Edward II passed through Shelford three years later, and attended Masses and distributed 5 shillings and sixpence in oblations at the conventual church for his nephew’s soul.^[1] The great Clare family was now extinct in its senior male line.^[2] Gilbert’s brother-in-law Hugh Despenser the Younger and Despenser’s father Hugh the Elder were two of the English noblemen who fought for the king at Bannockburn, and Hugh the Younger must have acquitted himself bravely, as Edward II made him a knight banneret shortly afterwards (a reward for valour on the field of battle). Elizabeth Burgh’s future husband Roger Damory also fought well at Bannockburn in Gloucester’s retinue, though the battle ended in a humiliating defeat for the English.

The Earl of Gloucester’s Inquisition Post Mortem was held in July/ August 1314 in the many English counties where he had held lands, and in Wales and Ireland. Dower was granted to his widow Maud on 5 December, amounting to well in excess of £2,000 a year (i.e. more than ten times Eleanor and Hugh Despenser’s annual income).^[3] On 14 July, Edward II admitted that his nephew had died without an heir of his body.^[4] In the absence of any surviving children, Gloucester’s heirs were his three full sisters Eleanor, Margaret and Elizabeth, in accordance with contemporary English inheritance law: the system of primogeniture, whereby the eldest son inherited everything, did not apply to female heirs, who inherited equally. Their older half-sisters Isabella and Joan Clare, who had probably been made illegitimate by the annulment of their parents’ marriage in 1285, and their younger half-siblings Mary, Joan, Thomas and Edward Monthermer, who were the children of Joan of Acre but not of Gilbert ‘the Red’, were not Gloucester’s heirs.

Unfortunately, the earl’s Inquisition Post Mortem was inaccurate and something of a mess. The jurors of five counties (Suffolk, Hertfordshire, Berkshire, Oxfordshire and Devon) called his youngest sister Elizabeth ‘Isabella’ in error, and the Suffolk jurors also got her late husband John’s name wrong and called him ‘Thomas Burgh’. The jurors of Suffolk, Worcestershire, Wiltshire and London cautiously added that the earl’s three sisters were his heirs only if his widow the countess was not pregnant, and the Gloucestershire, Hampshire and Wales jurors went further and declared that they had heard Maud was indeed expecting a child. Given the huge significance and wealth of the Earl of Gloucester’s landholdings and his important political position, it was most unfortunate that his Inquisition Post Mortem left a delicate situation unclear. All the confusion caused a long delay while the matter was clarified, and further inquisitions had to be held in all the counties which wrongly named Elizabeth as Isabella a year later in August 1315.^[5] The dowager countess Maud Clare had begun to claim that she was pregnant with her husband’s posthumous child, and for a few months it was not clear whether Gloucester’s three sisters were his heirs or not.

Isabella Clare, wrongly named as one of Gloucester’s heirs in his IPM, was the siblings’ decades-older half-sister, born in 1262 as the eldest child of Gilbert ‘the Red’ Clare from his first marriage to Alice Lusignan. Isabella seems to have been briefly married to Hugh Despenser the Younger’s uncle Guy Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, in 1297, but the marriage must have been annulled, and around 1316 she wed Maurice Berkeley. He was the heir to his elderly father Lord Berkeley, an important nobleman of Gloucestershire, and was a widower about nine years her junior. Maurice Berkeley was trying to force himself into a share of the Clare inheritance, but his plan was doomed to fail as Isabella Clare was not one of her half-brother’s rightful heirs, even if the earl’s IPM left some room for doubt on the matter by confusing Elizabeth and Isabella. The vast wealth the three sisters would inherit as Gloucester’s heirs made Margaret and Elizabeth vulnerable, as they were widows and did not have a husband and protector: in the Middle Ages, abduction and forced marriage of heiresses was sadly all too common. Women could and often did inherit lands in their own right, but if they married, their husbands would control the lands and would swear homage to the king for them. If a married couple had at least one child together who lived long enough to take a breath, the husband would own and control his wife’s lands for the rest of his own lifetime even if she died before him, by a custom called ‘the courtesy of England’. Eleanor Despenser was safe as she had a husband, though many years later after she had been widowed would be abducted and forcibly married to a second spouse, and Elizabeth Burgh was, at least for the moment, also safe under the protection of her former father-in-law, the Earl of Ulster, in Ireland. Sometime not long after Bannockburn, Edward II took Margaret Gaveston into his own household, partly to protect her, and surely also to keep an eye on her and ensure that she did not marry without his permission; one of his wealthy nieces marrying an enemy of his was a nightmare scenario for the king.

On 24 December 1314, Edward II appointed Elizabeth Burgh’s future third husband Sir Roger Damory or d’Amory as the constable of Knares-borough Castle in Yorkshire, an important strategic location and one which had formerly belonged to Piers Gaveston. He repeated the appointment on 5 January 1315, just days after he finally had Gaveston buried two-and-a-half years after his death.^[6] Damory had fought bravely with the Earl of Gloucester at Bannockburn: Edward praised him for ‘his good service against the Scots at Strivelyn [Stirling, i.e. Bannockburn] and elsewhere’, promised him an income of 100 marks a year, and took him into the royal household as a retainer in his eighth regnal year, July 1314 to July 1315.^[7] The king also began to give Damory appointments, lands and gifts in 1315, 1316 and 1317, including custody of the castles of Corfe in Dorset and St Briavels in Gloucestershire, and of the Forest of Dean also in Gloucestershire.^[8]

The Damory family was neither particularly rich nor influential, though they had a noble pedigree stretching back to the early twelfth century and probably earlier, and Roger’s older brother Richard inherited a respectable dozen manors in four counties (Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Northamptonshire and Somerset) from their father Robert (d. 1285).^[9] Roger Damory is almost completely obscure for the first few years of Edward II’s reign, but Richard was high in the king’s favour and received numerous appointments from him, notably on various occasions which make it apparent that Richard loyally supported the king during his many political crises, such as in the aftermath of Gaveston’s death. The author of the Vita called Roger Damory a ‘poor and needy knight’ (though also praised his ‘industry and valour’), and Roger was landless until he came to Edward II’s attention and rose high in his favour, with two exceptions. These were a gift of the Oxfordshire manor of Bletchingdon for life from his brother Richard on 7 August 1312, and a gift of the Somerset manor of Easton-in-Gordano from the Earl of Gloucester.^[10] Roger Damory already had enough money in February 1315 to purchase custody of two manors from Edward II for £140 each, and by early September 1315 was owed £200 by a Thomas Stokesby, so was perhaps not quite as poor as the Vita assumed.^[11] He would later marry Elizabeth Burgh and become a beneficiary of her late brother’s wealth as a direct result of her uncle the king’s infatuation with him.

Margaret Gaveston attended her husband’s funeral at Langley Priory, Hertfordshire (which Edward II had founded in 1308) at the beginning of 1315. Piers Gaveston’s embalmed body had remained with the Dominicans of Oxford since his death in June 1312. Margaret’s brother-in-law Hugh Despenser the Younger was also present with his father Hugh the Elder and presumably his wife Eleanor, but most of the English nobility pointedly stayed away. Edward II spent the vast sum of £300 on three cloths of gold to dress Gaveston’s body, and paid £15 for food and £64 for twenty-three tuns of wine, around 26,500 litres.^[12] A few days before the funeral, the king gave the chancellor and scholars of Oxford University £20 to pray for Gaveston’s soul, and spent another £15 on the wages of two men guarding Gaveston’s body for twenty-eight days in December 1314. Edward also spent almost £150 between 8 July 1312 and 7 July 1313, the sixth year of his reign, which included payment for 5,000lbs of wax for candles to burn around the embalmed body.^[13] At the time of the funeral, the king ordered a hundred Dominican friars to say Masses for Gaveston and his ancestors; between October 1315 and October 1316 he ordered every Augustinian house in England and Ireland to celebrate a daily Mass for Gaveston’s soul; in 1319 he paid for a Turkish cloth to be placed over the tomb, which was replaced later by gold cloth; in 1324 he sent his confessor to Langley to mark the anniversary of Gaveston’s death, and in 1325 he sent a man there with 100 shillings for the friars to keep Gaveston’s soul ‘more in remembrance’. In 1326, the last year of his reign, he made provision for numerous clerks at numerous houses to pray for the soul of his lost friend, or lover.^[14]

Edward II’s infatuation with Piers Gaveston and his intense grief at his death is so overwhelming and so blazingly obvious, even more than 700 years later, that it blots out his niece’s feelings entirely; the role Margaret played in the story of the man who was her husband for four and a half years and the father of her daughter Joan is lost. One can very easily gain the impression that Edward, not Margaret, was the one burying his spouse in the depths of winter 1314/15, and perhaps that was exactly how the king – and even Margaret herself – felt. Several fourteenth-century chroniclers state that Edward delayed burying Gaveston for years because he wished to take revenge on Gaveston’s killers first (though this had proved impossible). Perhaps Margaret had wished to bury her husband much earlier, and on her own lands rather than at her uncle’s manor of Langley, but if she was ever consulted on the matter, Edward ignored any wishes she might have expressed. It is difficult to gain much sense of Margaret’s feelings and opinions, and nowhere is this more the case than at the funeral of her husband. Whether or to what extent Margaret grieved for Gaveston, and whether she resented her uncle taking control and deciding when, where and how her husband should be buried, can only be matters for speculation.