Chapter 7: Widowed Again - Edward II’s Nieces, The Clare Sisters: Powerful Pawns of the Crown

Elizabeth Burgh retained her first husband John’s family name throughout her two subsequent marriages and for the rest of her life, but this was usually the case for fourteenth-century noblewomen whose second (and third) husbands were of lower rank than their first, and her choice does not necessarily reveal anything about her personal feelings. Her second marriage to Theobald Verdon lasted less than six months: he died on 27 July 1316 a few weeks before his thirty-eighth birthday, leaving her about one month pregnant.^[1] Almost nothing is known about their very short marriage, except that Elizabeth probably lived at Theobald’s chief seat of Alton in Staffordshire. Edward II gave custody of all Verdon’s lands minus Elizabeth’s dower to his latest infatuation Sir Roger Damory on 7 August, to hold until Verdon’s children came of age (evidently the Chancery clerks did not know at this point that he had three daughters, as the grant to Damory talks vaguely of him holding the lands ‘until the full age of the heir’).^[2] Verdon never benefited from his marriage to Elizabeth as he died before her late brother’s lands were partitioned. His early death seems curiously convenient for Edward II and for Elizabeth’s next husband, though in the absence of any evidence or accusations it would seem unfair to accuse the king of foul play. Edward now became determined to marry Elizabeth to Roger Damory, and wrote to her on 12 September 1316, even before Verdon was buried.^[3] Probably Edward did not know yet that Elizabeth was pregnant with Verdon’s posthumous child.

The letter, in French, ran:

Edward by the grace of God king of England, lord of Ireland and duke of Aquitaine, to our very dear and beloved niece Elizabeth Burgh, greetings. Very dear and well-beloved niece, because of the special affection we have for you above all our other nieces, we wholeheartedly desire your well-being and your honour, and we are sending to you our dear bachelor Sir John Charlton, our chamberlain, who is one of our closest confidants and whom we trust most with our personal affairs, to tell you certain things with which we have entrusted him concerning your estate and your honour. And we beseech you that you sincerely give credence to what he tells you from us [the last six words were crossed out and altered to ‘give credence to him’] and do willingly what he requests of you on our behalf if you wish to have generous lordship from us and wish us to take to heart all matters which concern you, and [we beseech you] that you send back to us, via him, your will on the aforesaid matters. Given under our privy seal at Beverley the twelfth day of September in the tenth year of our reign [1316].^[4]

Edward’s statement that Elizabeth was his favourite niece was a blatant lie – her eldest sister Eleanor was – and a transparent attempt to flatter and manipulate her into doing what he wished, though the letter does not explicitly mention Roger Damory or a possible marriage to him. The lack of any closing salutation such as ‘Very dear niece, may the Holy Spirit have you in his keeping’ or even a more abrupt ‘May God keep you’, as would have been conventional, polite and friendly, tends to give the lie to Edward’s claim that he felt great affection for Elizabeth. The letter contains words which were crossed out and two sentences were added above the line, and it was written in three different hands. This reveals that Edward thought hard about what he wanted to say and edited his text, dictating parts of it to three scribes on three separate occasions. One long addition written above the line was the entire sentence about Elizabeth finding him a generous lord who would take her affairs to heart if she willingly assented to his request, clearly a veiled threat that he would not be a good lord to her if she did not. The more amicable sentence about giving credence to what Charlton told her on Edward’s behalf was struck out, and the king’s revisions to his letter made it sterner and more menacing. Elizabeth’s second marriage to Theobald Verdon had infuriated him, and perhaps he held her responsible for marrying the baron without his consent.

Elizabeth might already have known Roger Damory: he had been in her brother the Earl of Gloucester’s retinue since October 1308 or earlier, and was with Gloucester at a jousting tournament held in Dunstable, Bedfordshire c. April 1309.^[5] She might have seen him at the joint wedding of herself and her brother to the Burgh siblings at the end of September 1308. No doubt Elizabeth and her sisters were told what happened to their brother on the battlefield of Bannockburn, and therefore she would also have been aware of Roger’s bravery in Gloucester’s service. But whatever she might have felt about Damory, her brother was dead, her parents were dead, her two husbands were dead, and her nearest male relative was her uncle the king, the man who wished to see her married to his close friend, or perhaps lover. As a widow and now in her early 20s, Elizabeth might have expected more control over her own choice of third husband (or to remain a widow, as the case may be), but at some point before April 1317 she agreed to marry Roger Damory.

There is little doubt that her uncle put pressure on her to do so, and he probably made her feel that she had little choice. On the other hand, she may have been happy enough to marry Damory. We do not know for sure, and as she never revealed her feelings on the matter in writing, any opinions on her third marriage (as is the case with her second) can only ever be speculation and assumption. Damory was, as previously noted, from a solid Oxfordshire family with a noble pedigree stretching back centuries, but he was far beneath Elizabeth in rank. She was the granddaughter and niece of kings and daughter and sister of earls, and would have been Countess of Ulster if her first husband had lived longer, whereas Damory was not even his father’s heir and was a knight bachelor who spent his career in the service of greater lords. He was set to gain far more advantages from the marriage than Elizabeth would. As well as giving Damory control of Elizabeth’s third of the Gloucester inheritance, the marriage would also give him control of the large part of the late Theobald Verdon’s lands she held in dower and the dower and jointure lands she held from her first husband John Burgh. Elizabeth Burgh was probably the richest woman in the country after Queen Isabella, and she was being given to a mere knight and younger son; it is hard to imagine that many people were happy about it, and the marriage surely caused much envy and resentment. Whenever Elizabeth agreed to marry Damory – perhaps she sent word back to the king via his chamberlain John Charlton in or soon after September 1316, as Edward had ordered her to – their wedding would have to wait until after she had given birth to Theobald Verdon’s posthumous child.

Edward II arrived in York on 16 August 1316, accompanied by his niece Margaret Gaveston, and stayed in the convent of the Franciscans (Greyfriars, or Friars Minor) near the river Ouse. There is every reason to suppose that the king and Margaret enjoyed cordial relations for many years, even if he was perhaps not as fond of her as he was of her older sister Eleanor and even though he was refusing to give the Clare sisters their lands and pretending that their sister-in-law Maud was pregnant. The king stayed in York for five weeks and gave the Franciscans £10 for the expenses of himself and his household – as I have been marking. a sum which only covered a fraction of them—and paid Margaret’s chamber valet Walter Dymmok 8 shillings and 10 pence for ‘certain work done in the chamber of the said countess [of Cornwall]’ at the convent.^[6]

The king and queen’s second son John was born at the palace of Eltham in Kent on 15 August 1316, and Edward heard the news on 24 August when he asked the Dominicans of York to say prayers for himself, his wife, their elder son and especially the newly born John.^[7] Margaret Gaveston was on hand to witness her uncle’s joy at the birth of his second son; the St Albans’ chronicler makes a point of commenting on the king’s delight, and Edward gave the queen’s messenger £100 for bringing him the news.^[8] Less happily, the king had a furious row with his cousin Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, in York in August 1316, which Margaret might have witnessed first-hand.^[9] Lancaster was her grandfather Edward I’s nephew and thus closely related to her, but was also the man chiefly responsible for the death of her husband Piers Gaveston. Lancaster’s main ally among the English barons and Gaveston’s kidnapper had been Guy Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, uncle of Margaret’s brother-in-law Hugh Despenser the Younger, but Warwick died in August 1315, leaving his baby son Thomas as his heir.

Margaret was still with the king at Clipstone in Nottinghamshire just before Christmas 1316, when Edward confirmed numerous grants of land to her and detailed various land exchanges they had made, ‘for her sustenance and until the king should see fit to make other provision for her estate’. She had given the royal manor of Burstwick back to him in exchange for other manors sometime after November 1315.^[10] Edward surely already had it in mind to marry her to the second of his three current court favourites, Sir Hugh Audley. Hugh had been a member of the royal retinue since late 1311, and surely Margaret almost certainly knew him already. Audley was not as high in the king’s favour as Roger Damory, but evidently Edward was very fond of him, and in June 1315 ordered the chancellor to complete some of Audley’s business as soon as possible, so that Audley ‘can return to us as quickly as we have instructed him to do’.^[11] At the beginning of August 1314, a few weeks after the Battle of Bannockburn—at which he, like Hugh Despenser the Younger and Roger Damory, might have fought—Hugh Audley received the lands and marriage rights of Mary, younger of the two daughters and co-heirs of the Scottish nobleman Sir Edmund Comyn.^[12] Audley swore an oath sometime in 1317 that he would ‘aid him [Edward II] in all things throughout his whole life, and in no wise depart from him come what might, on pain of forfeiture of all his lands’, an oath he broke in 1321 after he and Roger Damory became the king’s enemies.^[13]

Sir William Montacute, from a noble family of Somerset and one of the men knighted with Edward, Piers Gaveston, Hugh Despenser the Younger and the rest in May 1306, was the third of the three influential court favourites of the mid-1310s. He was appointed steward of Edward II’s household in 1316, though as he was already married could not be rewarded with the grand prize of a Clare bride. Montacute, Roger Damory and Eleanor Despenser’s husband Hugh Despenser the Younger all witnessed royal charters at Nottingham on 27 December 1316 and at Clipstone on 3 January 1317, so apparently Eleanor spent the festive season of 1316/17 with her uncle the king and her sister Margaret (the royal retinue moved from Clipstone to Nottingham on Christmas Eve).^[14] The Clare sisters’ aunt Mary, nun of Amesbury Priory, also spent Christmas at the royal court and departed afterwards with a gift of fifteen tapestries worth 40 marks from her fond brother the king.^[15] It is possible that Elizabeth Burgh travelled to the Christmas court with her aunt and saw her uncle and sisters—and Roger Damory—there, and returned to Amesbury with Mary. She was now more than six months pregnant, and would spend the last trimester in the peace of the convent with her aunt.