♂Hugh le Despenser

Hugh le Despenser (died 24 November 1326), styled “the younger”, was an English knight and the King’s Chamberlain who directed the government of England for Edward II^W from 1322 to 1326 and was put to death when that government fell. He was the twentieth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Elizabeth le Despenser (died 1389).

Marriage and inheritance

Hugh was the son and heir of Sir Hugh le Despenser^W, later Earl of Winchester, and his wife Isabel de Beauchamp. Shortly after 14 June 1306 he married, at Westminster, Eleanor de Clare^W, the daughter of Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester and Hertford, and of Joan of Acre^W, a daughter of King Edward I. Hugh and Eleanor had four sons and five daughters; three of the daughters, Joan, Eleanor and Margaret, became nuns, at Shaftesbury, Sempringham and Whatton.

Hugh went with the king to Pontoise in 1313. In 1314 Eleanor became one of the heiresses of her brother Gilbert, Earl of Gloucester and Hertford, and her share brought the lordship of Glamorgan^W in Wales, with the castles of Llanblethian, Kenfeg, Neath, Llantrisant, Caerphilly and Whitchurch. Hugh was summoned to Parliament from 29 July 1314 to 10 October 1325.

The king’s favorite

From November 1317 Hugh’s influence at court grew quickly, and by the end of the next year he had won a lasting hold over the king’s mind. In 1320 the king seized the lordship of Gower in Wales in order to give it to him. The seizure united a powerful group of Welsh marcher lords^W against Hugh, whose rule in Glamorgan was already deeply unpopular with the Welsh. Civil war^W broke out on 4 May 1321, Glamorgan was overrun and laid waste, and on 14 August 1321 Parliament banished Hugh and his father.

The king struck back that October. After the royalist victory at the Battle of Boroughbridge^W on 16 March 1321/2, Parliament reversed the sentences in May 1322 and the Despensers came home. Hugh recovered Glamorgan and Gower, and for the next four years he directed England’s policy at home and abroad. He is said to have gathered enormous possessions in England and Wales in those years, much of it by fraud and violence.

Fall and death

In September 1326 Queen Isabel^W and Roger de Mortimer^W landed at Orwell in Suffolk with 700 mercenaries hired from the Count of Hainault, and within weeks the Despenser government collapsed. On 2 October the king left London and fled into south Wales, with Hugh beside him. Hugh’s father, sent to hold Bristol, surrendered it to the queen, and on 27 October he was tried, condemned as a traitor and hanged. The king and Hugh were captured near Llantrisant in Glamorgan on 16 November 1326. Hugh was taken to Hereford and executed there on 24 November 1326. In 1330 his bones were gathered and buried at Tewkesbury Abbey^W in Gloucestershire. His widow, Eleanor, recovered her inheritance in 1328 and married again.

Notes

Sources

Hugh’s parentage, offices, marriage, children, career, fall and death, and the burial of his bones, are from Douglas Richardson, Magna Carta Ancestry (2005), DESPENSER 5–6, pp. 275–277, with his daughter Elizabeth at BERKELEY 7, p. 72; Richardson’s Plantagenet Ancestry (2nd ed., 2011), vol. I, pp. 642–645, gives the same account. Both are printed genealogies of the medieval nobility, citing the Complete Peerage, the patent and charter rolls, the chancery warrants and the Dictionary of National Biography. Richardson gives no date or place of birth for Hugh. The phrase “by fraud and violence” is Richardson’s own judgment of how the estates were gathered.

Hanged or beheaded

Magna Carta Ancestry says Hugh was “executed” at Hereford in its Despenser chapter and “hanged” in its Beauchamp chapter (p. 55). A herald’s visitation of Warwickshire of 1619, which Richardson quotes, has “decollatus 1326”, beheaded.

The children

Magna Carta Ancestry names four sons, Hugh, Edward, Gilbert and John, and five daughters, Isabel, Joan, Eleanor, Margaret and Elizabeth. Plantagenet Ancestry adds a fifth son, Philip.