The History Lady

The de Clare sisters Eleanor, Margaret and Elizabeth were born in the 1290s as the eldest granddaughters of King Edward I of England and his Spanish queen Eleanor of Castile, and were the daughters of the greatest nobleman in England, Gilbert the Red’ de Clare, earl of Gloucester.

They grew to adulthood during the turbulent reign of their uncle Edward II, and all three of them were married to men involved in intense, probably romantic or sexual, relationships with their uncle. When their elder brother Gilbert de Clare, earl of Gloucester, was killed during their uncle’s catastrophic defeat at the battle of Bannockburn in June 1314, the three sisters inherited and shared his vast wealth and lands in three countries, but their inheritance proved a poisoned chalice.

Eleanor and Elizabeth, and Margaret’s daughter and heir, were all abducted and forcibly married by men desperate for a share of their riches, and all three sisters were imprisoned at some point either by their uncle Edward II or his queen Isabella of France during the tumultuous decade of the 1320s.
Elizabeth was widowed for the third time at twenty-six, lived as a widow for just under forty years, and founded Clare College at the University of Cambridge.

This book was the first attempt at a full-length biography of three medieval sisters. The Clare sisters were the daughters of Joan of Acre, the famous daughter of King Edward I and Gilbert de Clare Earl of Gloucester.

Elizabeth de Clare, the youngest, has received some attention before as her surviving household accounts are a valuable historical source and because she stands out among her sisters as a woman who remained a widow for many decades and ran her own estates for some time.

Warner’s book is a great joint biography and provides a valuable resource for historians. She has drawn extensively on the available sources to trace the movements and activities of the sisters, as well as their relationships with their husbands and children. However, readers seeking an account of the everyday lives of these women, or insights into their personalities might be disappointed.
This is more of an academic work then one which would appeal to the general reader.

 It is almost impossible for historians to tease out the kind of intimate details that some expect in modern biographies. We have to examine such things as the churches and charitable foundations which people gave money to, the places they visited, the things they spent money on and the places they visited.

Two of the Clare sisters were married to men who were favourites of Edward II: Hugh Despenser and Piers Gaveston. This was where I must admit to some personal divergence from the author’s opinion. I’m not entirely convinced that Edward has a sexual relationship with either man, as is commonly claimed. Just because some said he loved them, or they were close it doesn’t mean they were involved in that way. Conceptions of love have differed over the centuries, and the notion that people of the same gender who are close must inevitably be gay is largely a modern one.

Warner presents another interesting theory: that King Edward was sexually involved with not Hugh Despenser, but Eleanor his wife. Eleanor was Edward’s niece, and such an incestuous relationship could have been alluded to by contemporaries who accused the King of having “unnatural and perverted” liaisons. The author suggests this might have been the reason why Queen Isabella turned against Eleanor Despenser nee Clare so dramatically in the years following her husband’s fall from grace.

To her credit, she does not demand the reader accept her assertions as fact. They are presented as a theory, speculation. The things we are certain of are clearly distinguished from those we don’t know about with absolute certainty. That’s a good approach.

Thanks to Rosie Crofts for sending me a copy of this title when I requested it through the Marketing Programme for review. This did not influence my opinions, which are impartial and entirely my own.