Hugh grinned with relief. “Rest easy, Lizzie. He will be a model of good behavior by the time you go to live with him, and if he comes near you with a spider, I will get an annulment for you. Settled?”
Lizzie smiled. “Settled.”
The barge was turning back toward Hanley Castle. As he had promised, Hugh went to wake his mother so that she could see the sun set on the river. “Lizzie, William, isn't this pretty?”
“Yes, Mama.”
“The king would have me on his royal barge and we would watch the sunset together. Quite a few times.”
Neither Lizzie nor William had to ask their mother which king she meant; these days when she spoke of the king, it was always her uncle. William said, “He must have liked you very much, Mama.”
“He did, William. And I him.”
She smiled, and none of her children caught the glint of mischief in her smile. “He was very dear to me, and very kind.”
“But not kinder than Papa!”
“No, William dear. Not kinder than your papa. Did you know that he and I were married upon this very barge?”
William did, but he enjoyed hearing the (considerably redacted) story again. Lizzie, who had regarded Lord Zouche as her father in all but name, also liked hearing the story of her mother's second marriage. For the rest of the way back to Hanley they talked of Lord Zouche, and then Hugh told them some amusing stories about his own father, Lord Despenser. The four were in good spirits when the barge moored. “Thank you, Hugh,” Eleanor said as her son helped her off it. “It was a perfect day.”
That was the last time Eleanor left her chamber. Several days before, Hugh had quietly sent for his other brothers and sisters, and soon they arrived at Hanley Castle, Joan, Nora, and Margaret escorted from the convents by some of his mother's men, Edward and Anne (pregnant again) with their baby and men, the Countess of Arundel and Edmund with their men, Gilbert and John in their Warwick livery. On the last day of June, all of them gathered around Eleanor's bed.
Eleanor had been drifting in and out of sleep all morning, and after a long doze she opened her eyes wide and stared around her. “Hugh?” she called in a worried tone. She smiled with relief as he stepped forward, unabashedly weeping, and kissed her cheek. “You should—”
Her voice was very faint, and Hugh saw out of the corner of his eye that a priest was pushing toward the bed with the Sacrament. But he continued to bend over his mother as she struggled to speak. “You should get married,” she said finally, for the last time in her life. “It is an incomparable adventure.”
ELEANOR'S SON HUGH LE DESPENSER MARRIED ELIZABETH, A WIDOWED daughter of the Earl of Salisbury, sometime after May 1341, when they received a dispensation to marry. He played a notable part in Edward III's French wars, particularly at the battle of Crécy, where he led the English forces across the Somme. He died in 1349, possibly a victim of that year's plague, without children. His widow remarried but elected to be buried beside him in Tewkesbury Abbey, where their canopied tomb (often confused with that of Hugh's father) can be seen today.
Edward le Despenser died in battle in France in 1342, survived by his wife and four sons. The youngest son, Henry, had a rather controversial career as the “Fighting Bishop of Norwich” and led an ill-starred crusade, although he spent most of his time performing more conventional bishopric duties and died in the midst of performing a church service. The eldest son, Edward, inherited his uncle Hugh's estates. He was created a Knight of the Garter by Edward III, fought in France and Italy, and was lavishly praised by the chronicler Jean Froissart as a gallant knight without whom no feast was complete. His chantry chapel, topped by a figure of Edward kneeling in prayer, is also at Tewkesbury Abbey.
Gilbert le Despenser died in 1381, having apparently had a wife and son who predeceased him. He served as a knight in Edward III's household.
John le Despenser was murdered in 1366, for reasons that do not appear in the records. His murderers were hung. He might be the John le Despenser who was granted an annuity in 1363, apparently at Queen Philippa's behest. This suggests he might have been connected with her household at some point.
Richard Fitz Alan, Earl of Arundel, annulled his marriage to Isabel le Despenser in 1344, rather belatedly, on the highly dubious ground that the couple had been forced by blows to cohabit. He promptly married his mistress, a widowed daughter of Henry, Earl of Lancaster. Isabel le Despenser, who was provided with some estates by her former husband, was alive in 1355; it is unknown whether she remarried or when she died. Edmund Arundel was bastardized by the annulment, which he fought unsuccessfully, but was able to attain knighthood and marry a daughter of the Earl of Salisbury, Sybil, by whom he had several daughters. Perhaps his bastardization benefited him in the long run; his younger half brother inherited what became the massive Arundel fortune and the accompanying earldom, ran afoul of Richard II, and was beheaded.
Margaret le Despenser died in 1337; her aunt Elizabeth de Burgh sent items to be used in her burial. Eleanor le Despenser was living in Sempringham in 1351, when the crown ordered that she receive an allowance. Joan le Despenser died at Shaftesbury Abbey in 1384.
Elizabeth le Despenser married young Maurice de Berkeley in 1338, spending some time at Wix priory and with Elizabeth de Burgh before joining the Berkeley family. She bore her husband a number of children before his death, after which she married Sir Maurice Wyth, whom she also outlived. She died in 1389.
William la Zouche, Eleanor's son by her second husband, became a monk at Glastonbury. He was alive in 1381, when the abbot there was granted money during William's life.
Alan la Zouche, William la Zouche's son by his first wife, died in 1346, several months after fighting as a banneret at Crécy.
Among many other good works, Elizabeth de Burgh founded Clare Hall at Cambridge University. She died in 1360, leaving behind a set of household records that have been invaluable to researchers. Margaret d'Audley died in 1342.
Amie de Gaveston, Piers Gaveston's natural daughter, married John de Driby, a royal yeoman, having been granted some lands for life by Queen Philippa.
Nicholas de Litlyngton became abbot of Westminster Abbey, the famous Jerusalem Chamber of which was built for him. With a bequest from his predecessor, he resumed construction of the abbey's nave, the work on which was still ongoing when he died in 1386.
Roger Mortimer's widow, Joan, never remarried. She died at age seventy in 1356, having lived to see her grandson, another Roger Mortimer, become the second Earl of March and a Knight of the Garter.
John de Grey's luck improved after his unsuccessful attempt to claim Eleanor as his wife. He was a founding member of the Order of the Garter and served for a considerable time as Edward III's steward. He remarried, fathering two sons by his second wife, and died in 1359.
Princess Gwenllian died at Sempringham in June 1337, several weeks before Eleanor. She was age fifty-four and had been in the convent since infancy. In 1993 a memorial was erected to her memory near the site of Sempringham; it is now tended by the Princess Gwenllian Society.
Mary, Edward II's sister the nun, died in 1332. She was buried at Amesbury.
Edward III and Philippa produced a dozen children during Edward's lengthy, mostly popular reign. Their eldest son, Edward, later known as the Black Prince, was renowned for his military prowess. He married Joan, daughter of the Earl of Kent executed by Roger Mortimer, and predeceased his father. The prince's only surviving son, Richard, succeeded Edward III as king. Richard II's reign was as ill-starred as Edward II's and ended similarly, with Richard II deposed and dying in captivity. One of Richard II's unsuccessful endeavors was an attempt to canonize his great-grandfather Edward II. It fell flat, as did the efforts throughout the fourteenth century to canonize Thomas, Earl of Lancaster.
Isabella died in 1358. She was neither her son's prisoner, a nun, nor a madwoman as is frequently reported even today, but lived a comfortable, conventional existence as dowager queen, traveling between her estates, rece
iving visits from relatives and friends, going on pilgrimages, and giving to charity. Joan of Bar and the Countess of Pembroke visited her in her last days. She was buried in the Church of the Friars Minor in London, a fashionable resting place that Isabella had patronized and that was also the burial place of her aunt Margaret, Edward I's second wife. Isabella was buried in her wedding garments, apparently preserved for that purpose. Construction of her splendid tomb, long since destroyed, was overseen by a woman artisan. Edward II's heart was placed inside the tomb.
Isabella's daughter Joan, Queen of Scotland, lived an unsatisfactory life with her philandering husband and eventually chose to live in England alone. She was with her mother during the last months of Isabella's life and was buried near her in 1362. Eleanor, Countess of Guelders, was widowed in 1343. Impoverished for a time by her feuding sons, she retired to Deventer Abbey, which she had founded during her marriage. She was engaged in establishing another religious house when she died in 1355. She was probably buried at Deventer.
Thomas Gurney was captured in Naples by a royal agent but died, probably of natural causes, as he was being transported to England. William Ogle (or Ockley) was never found. John Maltravers ended up in Flanders, where he eventually regained Edward III's favor.
The characters in this book are mainly real men and women, though Eleanor's midwife Janet, Eleanor's named jailors, Eleanor's French admirer Jean, John de Grey's squires Fulk and Henry, and Master Geoffrey Preston are fictional. Gladys is based on a damsel of Eleanor's named Joan, whose name I changed as a concession to reader sanity.
Readers accustomed to thinking of Piers Gaveston and Edward II as gay icons may have been surprised to learn that both men fathered out-of-wedlock children. Their existence is established by documentary evidence, though nothing is known about their mothers and very little about the children themselves. Amie does not appear in records until 1331, when she is noted as being one of Queen Philippa's damsels. Adam appears in the records only in 1322, when he was being outfitted for the Scottish war; as F. D. Blackley pointed out, the fact that he was mentioned as being in the care of a master at the time suggests that he was still in his teens. Lucy, therefore, has an invented name and background, as does Amie's unnamed mother.
Nicholas de Litlyngton has been identified by historians, notably Barbara Harvey and Chris Given-Wilson, as likely being an illegitimate member of the Despenser family, and he certainly used a differenced version of the Despenser arms. He called his parents “Hugh and Joan,” leading Given-Wilson to suggest that he was a son of Hugh le Despenser the younger. There seemed no good reason to me why he could not instead be a son of Hugh le Despenser the elder, Hugh the younger being more than busy elsewhere.
Allegations of a sexual relationship between Edward II and Eleanor le Despenser are contained in a contemporary Hainaulter chronicle and have been given some credence by Roy Martin Haines, Edward II's recent scholarly biographer. Whether there is truth to them is unknown, and probably unknowable, but records indicate that Eleanor's relationship with the king, whatever its nature, was a close one that predated Edward's relationship with Eleanor's husband. Novelists have often discovered their characters taking on minds of their own as their work progresses; in this case, I left the decision whether to bed together to the king and Eleanor, who finally found it impossible to resist temptation.
Most historians believe that the relationships of Edward II with Piers Gaveston and Hugh le Despenser were homosexual in nature, although Pierre Chaplais has argued that Gaveston and the king were not lovers but adoptive brothers. The evidence as to Edward II's sexuality rests mainly on contemporary innuendo, some of it quite ambiguous, and the reported manner of his death. Froissart, however, stated explicitly that the genitals of Hugh le Despenser were severed because he was a heretic and a sodomite. As Froissart was friendly with Hugh's grandson Edward le Despenser, it seems unlikely that he would have made such a statement lightly. Whatever the nature of Edward II's relationships with his favorites, they were extraordinarily close and proved to be severable only by death.
The procedural steps of the marriage controversy between Eleanor, William la Zouche, and John de Grey are sketched in the Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland, but little is known of the basis for John de Grey's allegations. I therefore invented a scenario that seemed plausible in light of canon law at the time. (Much as I would have liked to write a courtroom battle of the sort familiar in domestic cases today, medieval marriage litigation was a rather staid proceeding, with most testimony taken in private by examiners and no opportunity for stinging cross-examination.)
In a petition brought after Mortimer's execution, Eleanor claimed that she had been imprisoned in the Tower of London, and later Devizes Castle, despite the order of the king's council that she be released, and that Mortimer told her that she would not be released until she gave up her lands. She also stated that she feared for her life if she did not agree to his demands. The king's rapid granting of her petition to have her lands restored (“to ease the king's conscience” as he himself put it) is strong evidence that he believed her allegations. I have invented the details of her removal to Devizes Castle and her treatment there, but by 1329 Roger Mortimer, drunk with power, was probably quite capable of the actions I have ascribed to him. In his speech at the scaffold, he did confess to the entrapment of the hapless Earl of Kent.
After Mortimer's fall, William la Zouche told the king that much of the treasure removed from the Tower by Eleanor had come into the hands of Benedict de Fulsham. This suggests that Eleanor admitted to stealing the jewels, but again the details of how and when she obtained them are unknown, necessitating invention on my part. Benedict de Fulsham is known to have lent money to a number of people, so it seems likely that the jewels came to him as security for a loan. He, and a Thomas of Tyverton and a Hugh Dalby, the latter two associated with Eleanor, all were arrested, seemingly in connection with Eleanor's theft.
Maud de Clare, Gilbert's widow, did claim to be pregnant for three years, leading the king's council to advise Hugh le Despenser the younger that he should have obtained a writ to have her belly inspected. Whether she suffered from a physical or a psychological condition that caused a false pregnancy, whether she had a real pregnancy that ended badly, or whether she was simply lying is unknown.
Froissart, though not always reliable, reported that Queen Isabella became pregnant by Roger Mortimer. Ian Mortimer, the latter's biographer, has discussed the possibility of such a pregnancy and found it likely. If a child did result from the relationship, he or she has been lost to history.
There is no record of Hugh le Despenser engaging in piracy before his exile, but as his brief career as a pirate was a successful one, it seemed fair enough to allow him the opportunity to gain some practice at it in his youth.
The exact birth dates of Eleanor's ten surviving children are unknown, or at least have yet to be unearthed, but they can be narrowed by records of land grants, marriage agreements, papal dispensations, and the like. The dates I give for their births here, while never deliberately inconsistent with this documentary evidence, are for the most part my own approximations. There is no evidence supporting a posthumous birth for Elizabeth le Despenser in the Tower, but an in utero status in January 1327 seemed the most likely explanation for her having escaped the forced veiling of her older sisters. Evidence that Eleanor bore a fifth son who died young can be found in Thomas Stapleton, “A Brief Summary of the Wardrobe Accounts of the Tenth, Eleventh, and Fourteenth Years of King Edward the Second” in the 1836 volume of the journal Archaeologia. There the king is stated to have given Hugh le Despenser a cloth of gold for his son; this appears in conjunction with gifts of fine cloth to others that are explicitly stated as being for burial purposes.
In the nineteenth century, what has become known as the “Fieschi letter” was discovered. The letter, supposedly written by a papal notary to Edward III, details the escape of Edward II from Berke
ley Castle and his eventual life as a hermit in Italy. The letter and the ensuing debate about the possibility of Edward II's survival has attracted keen interest from historians. Most (along with myself) still believe that Edward II did die in Berkeley Castle (though perhaps not by the horrific means of a red-hot spit), but Paul Doherty and Ian Mortimer have each recently argued with great vigor the case for Edward II's survival.
Caerphilly Castle, where Eleanor was born and where her son Hugh was besieged by her second husband, still stands in Wales. It had become somewhat of a white elephant and was allowed to deteriorate until the nineteenth century, when restoration began. It is now maintained by Welsh Historic Monuments. The great hall that Hugh le Despenser the younger renovated can be hired out for functions, including weddings—a splendid piece of irony given that one of the chief charges against the executed Hugh was that of coming between the king and the queen.
Much of Tewkesbury Abbey escaped destruction during the Dissolution of the Monasteries, though the Lady Chapel, where William la Zouche was buried, was pulled down. Fortunately, Zouche's tomb was one of the few survivals from the Lady Chapel and was moved to nearby Forthampton Court. Eleanor's burial place in Tewkesbury is unrecorded. Hugh le Despenser the younger's tomb with its statues of saints and apostles attracted the disapproval of the Puritans, who stripped it of those ornaments. Minus them and Hugh's effigy, it remains at Tewkesbury. At some point, Abbot John Coles' slab was placed in the space where Hugh's effigy had rested; this odd arrangement still exists.
Edward II was eventually given a canopied tomb at Gloucester Abbey, now Gloucester Cathedral, though it is unclear whether Edward III or the abbey itself funded it. The king's alabaster effigy is beautiful and marvelously detailed.
In one respect, Edward II and Hugh le Despenser triumphed over their enemies—architecturally. The work Hugh and his descendants commissioned at Tewkesbury Abbey is considered a fine example of the Decorated style and can still be seen today, as can the stained glass evidently paid for by Eleanor, including figures of Eleanor's ancestors, brother, and husbands. The nude, kneeling woman watching the Last Judgment in Tewkesbury's east window may be a representation of Eleanor herself. Meanwhile, the offerings accruing from Edward II's burial at Gloucester Abbey enabled the monks there to remodel it extensively, making the abbey a splendid example of the Perpendicular style of architecture. By contrast, nothing remains of Isabella's and Mortimer's tombs or of the buildings that contained them. Isabella's tomb and its neighbors were sold during the Dissolution, and the church in which the queen rested was destroyed in the Great Fire. Mortimer's burial place is uncertain, but Wigmore Abbey, where the regicide was likely buried, was among the many dismantled by another ruthless man with a troubled marital history, Henry VIII.
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