09 October, 2016

Hugh Despenser the Younger's Daughters, Forced to become Nuns

Edward II's powerful favourite Hugh Despenser the Younger, lord of Glamorgan, was executed in Hereford on 24 November 1326. His widow Eleanor de Clare, Edward's eldest and favourite niece, was imprisoned in the Tower of London on 17 November, and his eldest son Huchon held out at Caerphilly Castle until 20 March 1327 and then was imprisoned at Bristol Castle until after the downfall of Isabella of France and Roger Mortimer. Hugh's eldest daughter Isabel, who was probably thirteen or fourteen in 1326, was married to the son and heir of his ally the earl of Arundel, executed on 16 November, and his youngest daughter Elizabeth, future Lady Berkeley, was either a baby at this time or still in utero. Hugh's younger three sons Edward, Gilbert and John may have been kept in the Tower of London with their mother, but I don't know.

That left Hugh and Eleanor's middle three daughters Joan, Eleanor and Margaret. Their dates of birth are not known, but Joan, eldest of the three, is unlikely to have been more than twelve in late 1326 and may only have been nine or ten. Margaret, youngest of the three, may have been little more than a toddler. (Eleanor de Clare gave birth in 1323 and in December 1325; this may have been John and Elizabeth, or Margaret and John, with Elizabeth born posthumously in 1327.) On 1 January 1327, an order appears on the Close Roll relating to Eleanor and Margaret Despenser:

"To the prior and convent of Watton. Order to cause Margaret, daughter of Hugh le Despenser the younger, whom the king [i.e. Edward II, who was imprisoned and had nothing to do with this] is sending to them, to be admitted and veiled without delay, to remain forever under the order and regular habit of that house, and to cause her to be professed in the same as speedily as possible. The like to the prior and convent of Sempryngham, for Eleanor, daughter of the said Hugh. To the master of the order of Sempryngham. Order to cause the aforesaid Eleanor and Margaret to be admitted and veiled in the said houses, and to cause them to be professed as speedily as possible." [Calendar of Close Rolls 1323-1327, p. 624.]

The order is missing for Joan Despenser, but she was also veiled at Shaftesbury Abbey. Joan had previously been betrothed to the earl of Kildare's son, and Eleanor to Laurence Hastings (b. 1320), future earl of Pembroke, who married instead Roger Mortimer's daughter Agnes a couple of years later. See also Susan Higginbotham's excellent blog post on this topic from a few years ago. (My goodness, I remember reading and commenting on it as though it was yesterday, and she wrote it almost ten years ago! Scary.)

In 1324, Edward II had sent three of his greatest enemy Roger Mortimer's eight daughters to live at convents with a pittance to live on, but the girls or young women were not veiled as nuns and were later released. Edward sent his own niece Margaret de Clare to live at Sempringham Priory in May 1322 after her husband Hugh Audley joined the Contrariant rebellion against him, and her sister Elizabeth was sent to live at Barking Abbey for a few months also in 1322. Edward's father Edward I had placed the daughters of the last princes of Wales in Lincolnshire convents in the early 1280s: Gwenllian (a great-granddaughter of Edward I's grandfather King John) and Llywelyn the Last's only child, and her cousin Gwladys, daughter of Llywelyn's brother Dafydd. This, callous and cruel as it doubtless was, did at least make a cold kind of sense: it was done to prevent the girls marrying, having children and passing on a claim to the principality of Wales to their children. Dafydd's young sons were also imprisoned for the rest of their lives.

Frances Underhill is the only historian of the fourteenth century I know of besides myself who has dealt with the forced veiling of the Despenser girls in print, in her 1999 biography of Elizabeth de Clare, For Her Good Estate (pp. 39-40). Otherwise the situation is either ignored or we get disingenuous claims that "the girls later became nuns," as though they did it by their own choice. Underhill says that Isabella's aim must have been to prevent anyone claiming the Despenser lands via the girls. This doesn't really work. The Despenser inheritance was forfeit to the Crown after the girls' father and grandfather were executed for treason. The vastly larger de Clare inheritance belonged by right to the girls' mother Eleanor de Clare, who was very much alive. Besides, the girls had four brothers so their chances of inheriting anything from their parents were remote, and it is hard to escape the conclusion that the order to veil the girls was issued out of spite and a desire for revenge on Isabella's part because of her loathing of their dead father. In the chaotic and unprecedented state in which England found itself at the beginning of 1327, when Edward II was imprisoned but still officially king and it was unclear what was going to happen, Isabella still found the time to ponder the fate of three children and to deem their veiling as nuns, their forced acceptance of lifelong binding vows, so important that she required it to be done "as speedily as possible" and "without delay." Both Isabella and her husband Edward II could be remarkably vindictive, and innocent people suffered because of it. Hugh Despenser and Eleanor de Clare's other two daughters Isabel and Elizabeth, who survived the queen's order because they were a) already married and b) a baby or not yet born, both had children, and so did their second son Edward, grandfather of Thomas Despenser who was made earl of Gloucester late in Richard II's reign. Edward Despenser was also the ancestor of Richard III's queen Anne Neville.

15 comments:

Anonymous said...

What a terribly sad story Kathryn. Enforced confinement in a convent for innocent children; I can see why Edward and his father (and others) did it - keep your enemies where you can control them, but awful for them being deprived of a 'normal' life. I can't imagine it would be much fun in a cold and draughty nunnery and all the strict rules regarding diet and prayers as well as being parted from your relatives and home. Slightly off topic - wasn't it traditional for a younger child of a reigning monarch to be placed in the Church? If so, and history had taken another course with one of Edward's elder brothers inheriting the throne perhaps he would have been joyously happy with praying/gardening/farming etc etc in the monastery before being elevated to a Cardinal's post (or whatever position). Might have been a better outcome all round. Amanda

Kathryn Warner said...

Hi Amanda! Edward II's sister Mary was basically forced to become a nun as a child, though she clearly had no vocation for it. I find it very sad.

Anonymous said...

I'm curious ... would it have been possible for any of the girls to be relieved of their vows due to the duress? It seems to me that the Church would determine the validity of their vows at any time, and if not, after Isabella was removed from power, Edward III might have helped. Also, was "forced veiling" as a nun all that cruel by the standards of the day? IIRC, Edward I kept some female relatives of his Scottish enemies in cages!

Esther

Kathryn Warner said...

I've no idea, I'm not an expert on medieval canon law.

Well, OK, if we really want to rank fourteenth-century cruelty, then forced veiling (don't know why you've put inverted commas round it?) comes lower than imprisonment in cages but higher than, I don't know, imprisoning someone in a convent for years without forcibly veiling them? More cruel than X but less cruel than Y? Does it really matter? They were children, incidentally, and Mary Bruce and Isabella MacDuff were adults. I think forcing children to take lifelong vows and be shut up in a convent for the rest of their lives is more on the cruel side than not.

Anerje said...

I can find no other reason than spite for Isabella's actions. With their father disgraced and their mother in the Tower, they were not heiresses and it was to no-one's advantage to marry them. They had no vocation to be nuns - after all, they were children. They were separated from their mother, and had lost their father in a brutal execution. It's a small point to consider, but they weren't even sent to the same convent. Surely a more kinder act would be to make them wards ?

Anonymous said...

I think a worse fate would have been to be married as a child to an older man who may have been brutal. Maybe daughters of the nobility wouldn't have been treated that badly in a convent? Do we really know?

These children had no choices about their futures anyway. Perhaps Eleanor de Clare would have tried to marry them off in order to form alliances against the new regime, and Isabella had to act quickly to prevent that. If spite played a part, it may have been against Eleanor because she was the hated Despenser's wife and had been close to Edward.

Kathryn Warner said...

Eleanor would have been trying to form marriage alliances against Isabella while spending years in prison at the Tower? That would have been an achievement. And fails to explain why her three younger sons, who could also have been used in marriage alliances with powerful families against the regime according to this theory, were left alone.


sami parkkonen said...

I think this just shows how personalized things could become and how cruel and hard times were. If you happened to be on the losing side of any power struggle anything could and did happen, even if you had not been actively participating on the struggle. This incident also shows us that Isabella could be pretty cruel when she wanted.

I wonder if she did this to scare others who had children? This reminds me little of the practices of some dictators/rulers who made examples just to scare others or to remind others that this could happen to your children as well.

sami parkkonen said...

As for the church having much of say in this matter...

The archbishops had just seen an anointed king removed from his God given office. What bishop would have said to Isabella or Mortimer that "sorry, but we decide who gets veiled and who does not, not you."? I think the church in England must have been as dumbstruck as everyone else and no one in their right mind would or could have opposed a popular queen (yes, Isabella was a queen too) and her ruthless man at arms at this time.

Sonetka said...

Separating them was a particularly classy move. I know that children often grew up separate from their parents and it wasn't necessarily a bad thing, depending on the circumstances, but splitting all three sisters up is hard to interpret in a positive way, unless "They'll adapt faster without anyone from their old lives to depend on" is a positive. I wonder if, like Sami speculates, it was intended as a demonstration to other families: she didn't dislike the Despenser daughters personally (which, considering their ages, would be unlikely anyway) but she did it "pour encourager les autres."

Anerje said...

Let's not forget that the Church was often a career move for some - mostly men. It was a suitable 'dumping ground ' for families with too many daughters as well. Some women who'd been married, had children and been widowed often retired to a religious house - like Elizabeth Woodveiile. I think Isabella 's forcing these girls into convents was a cheap, easy way to put .them in prison , as well as an act of spite.

Anonymous said...

I apologize for not making myself clear: I was wondering if it would have been possible for the Despenser girls to be relieved of their vows after Isabella had been removed from power.

Esther

Anonymous said...

Crikey, that topic got the debate going! I think it horrific to do that to innocent children. The times were different, what had to be done to save yourself, your family, inheritance etc was I suppose acceptable in those days. I disagree with a reader here: some adults going into the Church (veiled or not) were voluntary but again, debatable that the example Elizabeth Woodville did that and I think spent her last years in an abbey (not veiled, in relative comfort but not by her choice). So, back to Edward - looking forward to the next post about the glorious, funny, complicated, intriguing Edward. Amanda

sami parkkonen said...

To Anonymous:
Given that the girls were very young, I doubt they even considered that after growing up inside the walls. Plus: where they would have or could have gone?

Once someone entered monastary, that was it. It was up to the abbedissa if she would let anyone go, and above her the leaders of the order and above them the archbishop and above him the Holy Father, all of whom had other things in their minds. And I very much doubt if any of them would have released the girls anyway. That would have been a bad example. God knows how many monks or nuns would have flocked to the offices to renounce their oaths after that.

We have to remember that the monks and nuns in the middle ages were not like the ones we have today. Kirklees in Yorkshire was very notorious place and it was said it's nuns were actually running a sort of brothel or sorts up there, and there might be some truth in it.

Some abbots hired famous outlaws such as Coterels and Folvilles to burn down a wind mill which was competing the monastaries own etc. Several monks were arrested for disturbing the public order, some were famous drunks and fighters, some were known trouble makers and at least one in Essex a famous outlaw and Eustace the Monk one of the most famous pirates and mercenaries of his times.

So the institution had it's hand full of all sorts of problems in running the day to day business. In that context such minor but important thing in principle as letting some nuns go because they were brought in as minors was indeed a minor thing and better to be left alone.

Anonymous said...

Giving a child to God was a standard and l believe that Queens under coronation oath gave a female child to God to do holy work. With them came a dowry and the land granted was kept in the seed of the family for ever. This land actually comes under the 1953 Human Rights Laws. Land given by Queens belongs to the monasteries. Parliament in the 19th c debated trying to break this inheritance right. The land belonged to the heirs of the gift to God. It was a clever move in law because it
Protected the inheritance rights of the other family lands. Magna Carta plays a role.