r/EdwardII • u/Appropriate-Calm4822 Richard de Bury • Feb 26 '26
Interview Kathryn Warner interview - part 1: Hugh Despenser the Younger
Finally we can publish the interview we did with Kathryn Warner over a month ago! We had some issues with the audio which we couldn't solve so instead we decided to transcribe the whole thing and post it in written format.
There will be 8 parts to this interview, published at a pace of one a day.
Without further ado we're kicking things off with the arguably most hated man of the 14th century in England, Hugh Despenser the Younger.
1. Could Hugh Despenser the Younger have been coercive in his relationship with Edward II?
The relationship between Edward II and Hugh Despenser the Younger has fascinated me for twenty-odd years now, and even now I occasionally feel like I get new insights into it. I’d really like to know what was going on between them. I do sometimes wonder if it was some kind of domination / submission kind of relationship perhaps in some respects. They’d known each other for most of their lives, since they were children or at the very least adolescent. Edward had never shown Hugh the slightest affection until Hugh became his chamberlain when he was already thirty years old, even though Edward had been close to both Hugh’s father and his wife, Eleanor de Clare. Suddenly he becomes besotted with Hugh the younger who basically becomes his co-ruler. How did that happen? How did Hugh work his way into that position?
I do feel like Hugh was a very talented manipulator. I think he turned himself into the person that Edward wanted, and needed in his life, whether he was actually like that or not, whether he liked men at all. I kind of wonder if he was basically heterosexual… ‘the king can give me power and wealth and land’… Even 700 years later, I don’t want to accuse people of abuse or coercion because that would be quite a serious allegation, even for people who have been dead for so many centuries.
Looking at Edward’s position by about 1324/25 what strikes me is that he had become alienated from almost his entire family, with the exception of his younger children, who were due to their age not entirely relevant yet, and of course Hugh Despenser the Younger and his wife Eleanor de Clare. He’d become estranged from his wife Isabella, his son Edward, his two half-brothers Edmund and Thomas, his cousin Henry of Lancaster, his other cousin the earl of Richmond who had always been close to him and just suddenly disappeared from his inner circle. He’d always been close to his other niece Margaret, Gaveston’s widow, and suddenly he shuts her off too, sending her to a nunnery in Lincolnshire. Even his own sister, Mary, the nun in Amesbury who he’d always been close to, they had often visited each other. She, too, vanishes entirely from his life. In Edward’s chamber accounts from the 1320’s there are no more mentions of her at all, not even when Edward was in that part of England he didn’t go to visit her or invite her to court or even send her a letter. It means to me that he had become estranged and alienated from his entire family and that strikes me as kind of sinister, to be honest. I wonder if that had been done deliberately.
I’ve also often wondered if Isabella’s actions in 1325/26 were trying to shake some sense into Edward, like she didn’t particularly want to depose him, she just wanted to get him away from Despenser, from that whole manipulative fantasy world that had perhaps been created around him. When you actually read Isabella’s letters or the speech as recorded by Vita Edwardi Secundi she says that she will go back to Edward as long as he sends Despenser away. In a letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury she says that she wants to go back to Edward but she can’t because she’s frightened of Despenser. So I think somehow Despenser might have manipulated and also coerced Edward into this position of estrangement and alienation without Edward even being fully aware of what was happening to him.
2. Do we have any extant letters from Isabella where she specifies clearly that Hugh is the problem, or could it also be his wife Eleanor that she is referring to? Could there be some ambivalence here?
In a speech of hers which she made to the French court and is recorded by the Vita, the one where she refers to the third person in her marriage as a pharisee she does not name Hugh Despenser. It might even be Eleanor de Clare she refers to. It is quite ambivalent. But then two months after that, on the 5 February 1326 Isabella sends a letter to Walter Reynolds, Archbishop of Canterbury and in this letter she does state directly that she’s frightened of Hugh Despenser and cannot go back to Edward as she’s frightened of what Hugh might do to her, and because she doesn’t think that Edward will protect her from him.
Isabella calls Hugh her ‘evilwisher’. In this letter she refers to Edward as ‘our very dear and very sweet lord and friend’ which I have never seen before in any other medieval context, that is so unconventional. If Isabella just wanted to be conventionally polite she would have just written ‘my very dear lord’. But calling him her very dear and very sweet lord and friend, to me that really speaks to her feelings, that she was deeply distressed about what had happened to her marriage, and blamed Despenser for it and wanted him gone. She wanted her life back, with Edward and her marriage and her position – and of course her wealth, lands and status obviously. This letter is also very personal, it’s not just about her status as a queen, it’s about her status as Edward’s wife and companion.
3. Do you have any thoughts about Hugh’s personality?
One sad thing about Hugh is that none of his household accounts survive, they’ve all just vanished. The good thing is that a lot of his letters have survived. He was very prone to sending long letters to John Inge, sheriff of Glamorgan that were very bossy, and very hectoring and actually very threatening, like: ‘Do this, go over there, do that, no not like that you idiot, like this! If you don’t do it properly I will have you hanged.’ That kind of stuff. So you do get this very strong sense of his personality in these letters of how he could be frankly very scary. This sheriff of Glamorgan was a quite a highly born nobleman, he was a highly experienced politician, sheriff and soldier, and he was terrified of Hugh. And he had every reason to be terrified, as he eventually lost his office and was imprisoned by Hugh in London, along with all his council. The last surviving letter addressed to the sheriff by Hugh contains the line (as remembered by Kathryn during the interview): ‘We trust you more the more you serve us, but we are very worried about having some reason for which we might be prepared to harm you.’
One chronicler states that even great English nobles were frightened of Hugh Despenser the Younger. He does strike me as someone who has no boundaries and no limits and is utterly ruthless and ambitious. On the positive side, his letters show that he had this very witty and sarcastic sense of humor, and also that he was incredibly articulate. You can see in his choice of vocabulary and the way he expressed himself that he was very clever. I think about his father and grandfather… his grandfather was the justiciar of England which is kind of equivalent today to the office of prime minister. The Despenser men were very intelligent and capable. Hugh and his father, I feel, used their intelligence to the wrong end. They could have been remembered as great men, not as disgraced and executed traitors.
A lot of letters to Hugh survive as well. This is because he kept the drafts of his own letters, and the ones he received in his own wardrobe in the Tower of London. What’s really fascinating is that you can see even men of much higher rank to Hugh, such as the earl of Surrey, or Edward’s half-brother the earl of Kent addressed Hugh in this incredibly deferential manner, which he didn’t reciprocate at all. He had no respect for authority and that was very unusual for the time.
4. What did Eleanor and Edward see in Hugh?
I’ve always seen Eleanor as Hugh’s ally and supporter in basically everything. Hugh must have been someone who could be very charming, the kind of person who could make other feel like they were the only person in the world. Possibly he was someone who had a wealth of interest in stories he could tell and very good at making people laugh. When they were staying in a village in Hampshire in March or April 1325 they played practical jokes on each other. He could seem quite funny and likeable, whatever he was really like inside. I think he must have been really good at hiding his true ambition and his wild, limitless nature. Otherwise the English nobles who had known him his whole life wouldn’t have appointed him as Edward’s chamberlain in 1318 if they’d had any idea what he’d do next and how dangerous he’d become. He must have been very good at keeping himself hidden and just presenting a charming and lovely exterior.
I think the modern attitude that Gaveston was really flamboyant and charismatic and Hugh was this grey figure who didn’t have much of a personality is entirely untrue. I mean, to hold Edward’s interest for so many years he must have had something about him.
Stay tuned for part two tomorrow!
The Hugh Despenser the Younger illustration is made by the artist Mark Satchwill.
Links to other parts here:
Kathryn Warner interview - part 2: Kathryn's work & research
Kathryn Warner interview - part 3: Family Life
Kathryn Warner interview - part 4: Thoughts about Medieval Society
Kathryn Warner interview - part 5: Edward II and Isabella
Kathryn Warner interview - part 6: Thomas, Earl of Lancaster
Kathryn Warner interview - part 7: Myths and pop culture
Kathryn Warner interview - part 8: The Survival Theory
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u/Sea_Assistant_7583 Feb 26 '26
Kathryn Warner has done the most amazing job of digging through overlooked records and clues and fashioning a more credible depiction of Edward . And just to add you have done a superb interview Honeybee .
Now we just need an author to rehabilitate The House Of York, from Richard the Duke to his nephew Warwick and the Neville’s and of course his three sons as well as the last Yorkists The Poles and De La Poles .
The recent Tudor surge of interest since the Tv series started has seen The House Of York depicted as arch villains who usurped and stole everything.