Eleanor de Clare should not be an obscure figure in medieval history. Granddaughter to the mighty Edward I, niece to the unfortunate Edward II, and wife to Hugh le Despenser the younger, virtual ruler of England for several years prior to his horrid death in November 1326, she at various times was a lady-in-waiting to Queen Isabella, a prisoner in the Tower of London, an accused thief, the subject of heated litigation between two men claiming to be her husband, and a patron of Tewkesbury Abbey. She deserves not a footnote or two in biographies of Edward II, but a novel to herself. In 2005, I wrote it: The Traitor’s Wife: A Novel of the Reign of Edward II. 

Eleanor de Clare was a member of one of the most powerful dynasties in medieval England, the Clare family. Her father, Gilbert de Clare, was active in the Barons’ Wars of the thirteenth century, siding with Simon de Montfort before switching his allegiance to Henry III and his son, the future Edward I. Even though Gilbert de Clare would become Edward I’s son-in-law through his marriage to Edward I’s daughter Joan of Acre, the relationship between king and mighty subject would never be an easy one. 

Joan of Acre, Countess of Gloucester, Eleanor’s mother, was the heroine of one of the great—and happy—love stories of the medieval world. Left a young widow by the death of Gilbert de Clare, she spurned the second match that Edward I made for her. Instead, she defied her father, an act that took no small amount of courage when one’s father was Edward I, and married Ralph de Monthermer, a squire of Gilbert de Clare’s of obscure origins and no fortune. Edward I imprisoned Ralph in Bristol Castle for a time, but eventually relented and gave Ralph the honors due to a king’s son-in-law. Joan and Ralph had four children together before Joan died in 1306. 

Gilbert de Clare, son and heir to Gilbert de Clare and Joan of Acre, was only in his twenties when he died at the Battle of Bannockburn. Furious about Edward II’s accusations of cowardice, he charged into a line of Scottish soldiers without the surcoat that would have identified him as a windfall to anyone lucky enough to take him alive as a hostage. Despite his youth, he had done a great deal to attempt to ease the troubled relations between Edward II and his political enemies, and his death both ended the Clares’ male line and precipitated the events that were to lead to the downfall of Edward II. 

Elizabeth de Burgh, Eleanor’s youngest sister, was one of the wealthiest noblewomen of her time. Married three times, she nonetheless spent most of her long life as a widow. Founder of Clare College at Cambridge University, she left behind household records that have been invaluable to historians of medieval society and of medieval women’s history. Cheated out of her best lands by her brother-in-law Hugh le Despenser, she remained defiant and doggedly attempted to get them back until Despenser’s execution resulted in the restoration of her fortune. 

Fascinating as Eleanor’s family members were to me, I chose to write about Eleanor herself. Married at age thirteen to Hugh le Despenser the younger, apparently as a royal reward for Hugh le Despenser the elder’s long service to Edward I, she bore at least nine children to the man who by 1326 had become the most hated man in England. She was close to her uncle, Edward II, throughout his reign and was even said by one chronicler to have been his mistress. Loyal to her husband to the very last, she nonetheless married one of his captors, William la Zouche, in 1329, under circumstances that could have been either an abduction or an elopement. She immortalized both men, along with her brother, her father, and various ancestors in the stained-glass windows that can still be seen in the choir of Tewkesbury Abbey. 

It was Eleanor’s marriage to Zouche that piqued my interest in her. Why would a woman marry a man who had not only been one of her husband’s captors, but who had also besieged the castle held by her eldest son? Based on a wrong date in one of the first sources I consulted, I assumed, incorrectly, that the marriage had been forced upon her by Queen Isabella and Roger Mortimer, the de facto rulers of England after Edward II had been deposed and his teenage son, Edward III, proclaimed king in his place. 

I soon discovered my mistake as to the Zouche marriage, though it is still unclear whether it was voluntary on Eleanor’s part. By then, I was heading to the university library nearly every week, looking through every book I could find on Edward I, Edward II, Edward III, and their contemporaries to find some reference to Eleanor. Sometimes I went home empty-handed, but on other days my tote bag was spilling over with photocopies. It was a grand day, I recall, when I discovered two translated letters of Eleanor’s in Letters of Medieval Women by Anne Crawford. 

Having no background in historical or genealogical research, I at first had no idea where to find information about Eleanor other than in biographies of Edward II and histories of his time. Gradually, though, I blundered into the Complete Peerage, then into the Close Rolls, then into the Patent Rolls, then into the Calendar of Inquisitions. Surfing the Internet also acquainted me with two very useful resources: http://www.medievalgenealogy.org.uk/ and http://www.rootsweb.com/~medieval/ . Through those resources, particularly the postings of Brad Verity, I gained invaluable information about Eleanor’s children by Despenser and Zouche. 

Despite Hugh le Despenser’s pivotal role in the downfall of his king, no biography has been published about him, though Edward II’s most notorious favorite, Piers Gaveston, has merited no less than three, two of them in recent years. Nonetheless, several historians unwittingly came to my aid: within a short period, Roy Haines published a scholarly biography of Edward II, Paul Doherty published a popular history of Isabella, and Ian Mortimer published a biography of Roger Mortimer (no relation, according to Ian Mortimer). Another piece of luck came when the Parliament Rolls from Edward II’s and Edward III’s time, available in my library only in Latin and on a very-hard-to-read roll of microfilm, were translated into English and put on a CD-ROM. Excellent studies also have been published about the Earl of Pembroke, the Earl of Lancaster, and Bishop Stapeldon, all leading figures in Edward II’s reign. Even those that contained nothing specifically about Eleanor were invaluable for understanding the politics of Edward II’s reign. 

By far one of the most helpful books I found was Frances Underhill’s biography of Eleanor’s younger sister Elizabeth de Burgh, For Her Good Estate, based on the records mentioned above. Although Elizabeth and Eleanor had little documented contact as adults, the details about the workings of Elizabeth’s household and the people who visited her were invaluable in gaining an understanding about what Eleanor’s own daily life must have been like, what objects she might have owned or valued, what she might have done to amuse herself, and how she might have reared her children. 

For a writer who takes historical research seriously, it’s hard to know when to say enough is enough. Finally, after many trips to the library over many, many months, I had to face the fact that I had exhausted the sources available to me in English and in the United States. Without hiring a researcher to dig through the records at the UK’s Public Record Office for me, or teaching myself Latin and Norman French, flying to England, and doing the digging myself, neither of which was remotely feasible for a working mother of two with a middle income, I had gone as far as I could. I think, on the whole, that my research was thorough. But I still look for references to Eleanor in every new book on fourteenth-century England that I come across—and each time I do, I hope that I didn’t miss something grossly obvious. (So far, I haven’t.) 

How close is the Eleanor of The Traitor’s Wife to the Eleanor of reality? It’s quite hard to say, for even with medieval people far better known than Eleanor, it’s often difficult to get an idea of what a person was like in his or her private life. I imagined at the start that a woman who survived the horrid death of her husband, the deposition of her uncle, the imprisonment of her eldest son, the forced veiling of three of her daughters, her own two imprisonments, and humiliating marriage litigation would have to have been tough, resilient, and most likely of strong religious faith, and nothing I encountered in my research disabused me of those ideas. The two letters I read of hers, though of a routine business nature, nonetheless had a charming ring to them that I like to think reflected Eleanor’s own manner of speaking. (But of course Eleanor likely had a clerk do her writing for her, so it’s difficult if not impossible to tell when the lady’s voice ends and when the servant’s begins.) Nonetheless, the Eleanor who took shape in my mind had her uncle Edward’s sense of humor, her mother’s determination, her brother’s impulsiveness, and her sister’s tenacity—and when all is said and done, although it’s quite certain that Eleanor wouldn’t have had the slightest idea of how to use a keyboard and a mouse, I think she was guiding both of mine. 

Further reading about Eleanor de Clare, Edward II, and their families can be found at http://www.susanhigginbotham.com/furtherreading.htm.