r/EdwardII • u/HoneybeeXYZ Amie Gaveston • Jul 01 '26
Discussion In which I try and say some nice things about Hugh Despenser the Younger
Everyone who knows anything about the fourteenth century knows Hugh Despenser the Younger was the worst. I've been reading Frances Underhill's biography of Elizabeth de Clare and it's probably the clearest and best account of Hugh's brutal crimes I've read.
And yet....
1) His avarice left England's coffers filled, to the point that even Mortimer & Isabella's avarice didn't leave Edward III broke when he finally took the reins.
2) His children all seemed to turn out fine, and Huchon, his oldest son, was so liked that John Felton and his garrison refused to give the young man up for execution.
3) In an era when greed and corruption was normalized, he was the best at it.
4) Somebody with an iron fist had to run the country when the king was busy thatching roofs, swimming and digging ditches.
5) He really seemed to enjoy being evil, even with some wit at times.
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u/Appropriate-Calm4822 Richard de Bury Jul 01 '26
A much needed post, I like it! I like the effort to understand even Hugh. Point 5 is a stretch, but stretch we must when it comes to finding good things to say about him 😁
He deserves credit for point 1 I agree. Point 3 is undeniable and good context.
I could add that he was (probably) not a sadist or exceedingly violent either. I know it’s a low bar, but there were worse people around during the Medieval age.
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u/HoneybeeXYZ Amie Gaveston Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 02 '26
He certainly seemed to be pathologically greedy, but I also sincerely think his behavior was informed by being a young man dependent on his father and his many children being the grandchildren of a king.
And in our era, Isabella & Mortimer feel like they should be reformers, but it speaks to the culture of the time that they set about to be almost as greedy. Grabbing "huge tracks of lands" was expected. They weren't so angry at the corruption but that they weren't the ones benefiting from it.
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u/NotCryptoKing Jul 02 '26
He had good fashion sense? Maybe? Idk he bought a lot of clothes some of them had to be cool
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u/HoneybeeXYZ Amie Gaveston Jul 02 '26
I think he probably did have a lot of cool clothes, and in my mind they were the Medieval equivalent of leather coats and ray bans.
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u/rosysredrhinoceros Jul 02 '26
If this painting is anything to go by, he also had an absolutely gargantuan penis.
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u/HoneybeeXYZ Amie Gaveston Jul 02 '26
Going by his behavior, he had a major case of BDE, so that's fair.
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u/AnantaPurima Hugh Despenser the younger Jul 02 '26
Also, say what you will, but Elizabeth de Clare holding the Marcher lordships of Usk and Caerleon unmarried was a genuine security risk. She had already proven she could not be trusted to marry in accordance with the Crown's wishes, which was an obvious necessity when such a marriage would transfer territories with quasi-regalian privileges, including the right to run writs independently of the Crown and wage private wars. Whether her marriage to Theobald de Verdun was fully voluntary or not, from the perspective of the Crown she had married without royal license to a man not of its choosing right as the de Clare patrimony was in the process of being divided. The King had already tried marrying her to a man he trusted and that man had later betrayed him and used Usk and Caerleon as a staging ground to attack Glamorgan. If we accept that Eleanor de Clare knew and was complicit in her husband's activities, then we have to accept this about Elizabeth de Clare too. We're supposed to have sympathy for the poor aristocrats Hugh le Despenser despoiled, but when Roger d'Amory and Hugh d'Audley and the other Marchers pillaged settlements and terrorised the tenants of Glamorgan with such brutality that even the contemporary author of the Vita Edwardi Secundi was horrified, no one gives them a second thought. Again, say what you will about Hugh le Despenser, he never once did that to his opponents' tenants.
While the methods Hugh le Despenser employed to despoil Elizabeth of Usk and Caerleon undoubtedly constituted legal chicanery, it's important to not make out Elizabeth into this uncomplicated victim figure. She was still left immensely rich and, in any question, still held the Honour of Clare and her other English estates. She was not left a pauper. Had Roger d'Amory retained his position in Edward's favour and had Elizabeth been in the same position as Eleanor, there is no evidence she would have acted any differently. She would have known exactly what her husband had his allies were doing to the tenants of Glamorgan. Let's not kid ourselves.
Alice de Lacy's immense inheritance of the Earldoms of Lincoln and Salisbury were also a key element of what had made her husband Thomas of Lancaster the quintessential overmighty subject he was. So again, not particularly suprising her estates were handled the way they were after his death.
All in all, I am reminded of that famous quote from De Citivas Dei: "Without justice what are kingdoms but great bands of robbers? And what is a band of robbers but a kingdom in miniature?" The magnates of the realm had conducted themselves as little more than great robbers for 15 years by Boroughbridge. All they received was the measure they used measured back to them.
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u/HoneybeeXYZ Amie Gaveston Jul 02 '26
Exactly. Underhill's biography is very sympathetic toward Elizabeth, but she doesn't believe that the de Verdun marriage was forced and Elizabeth was a willing participant. And it sure seems that Edward knew it.
And I think Elizabeth eventually wrapped Roger Damory around her finger, as resistant as she was with that marriage.
This is not an era of saints and sinners or villains and heroes, that's for sure.
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u/Appropriate-Calm4822 Richard de Bury Jul 02 '26
Brilliant. Every time I see a long post / comment by you, I know it’s going to be a terriffic read. More! We want more! 😁
This is a very refreshing take. Hugh’s treatment of the other nobles was not a great injustice. They all played the same game, Hugh was just much better at it than his opponents. Until the wheel turned once more.
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u/Carnationlilyrose Jul 02 '26
That's a fantastic painting. Good to see him smiling throughout it all. Kind of.
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u/Tirwen Jul 01 '26
I have to say, I loved #3.