Free Hugh and Bess by Susan Higginbotham Page B

father and grandfather, and Hugh often wondered what he had thought about the experience. It was a question he would never ask, though. “Good work,” the king concluded.
      The king had been right that day; the Scots continued to keep the English busy. Hugh spent much of the next few years fighting in Scotland. Gradually he came to be trusted by his fellow men; he saved their skins a time or two and had his saved in return. His brother Edward married and had a son; his brother Gilbert became a squire in the king's household. The king granted Hugh a bit more land.
      Eleanor, his mother, encouraged by this improvement in the family's fortunes, had begun urging Hugh to marry, subtly at first, less so as the years went by. Was it Hugh's comparative lack of land that was holding him back? Surely he could find an heiress to remedy this, and perhaps the king would allow Eleanor to grant some of her land to him now that Hugh had proven his loyalty. Was it that no one wanted their daughter to marry him? That could not be so; he was handsome and brave and destined to be Lord of Glamorgan! Was it that he did not want to be married? But that was his duty! Why, his younger brother had married before him! This last thread of her argument was unanswerable as far as Eleanor was concerned, and she never missed a chance to bring it up, especially after Edward's wife bore her first son. When was Hugh planning on begetting his own legitimate heir?
      Hugh fended off this questioning (it would have been called nagging had Eleanor been of less exalted bloodline) as deftly as he could. After his aborted attempt to marry Emma, he had not proposed to anyone else, suitable or otherwise. He sensed, as his more isolated mother perhaps did not, that there was still a certain wariness toward him. Moreover, he had inherited his share of the family pride; though passion had made him propose to Emma, in a cooler moment, when he was ruled by his head and not by his groin, he realized that he should marry a woman of his own rank. A rich merchant's daughter would not do; neither would an ordinary knight's. She would have to be a great lord's daughter, as Emma had said. In the meantime—and it was probably his main reason for staying single—he was more than content with Emma. Sometimes he visited her at her own home; sometimes she traveled to one of his own manors. Hugh often wondered whether word of their affair had reached his mother's ears, for though he and Emma did not flaunt their relationship, they had occasionally been spotted on their horseback rides together. It was a subject, however, on which his lady mother remained silent.
      The king, meanwhile, was beginning to turn his attention away from the Scots and toward France. Recognizing the importance of a vigorous young nobility who supported his war efforts, at the Parliament in the spring of 1337 he created seven men earls, most of them the men who had been with him that night in 1330 when Roger Mortimer was surprised and taken prisoner. Hugh, of course, heard this from a distance, for no Despenser had sat in Parliament since 1326. He held no grudge against William de Montacute, the new Earl of Salisbury, or his kinsman William de Bohun, the new Earl of Northampton, or most of the other new earls. Had they not helped the king overthrow Mortimer, Hugh knew, he himself might still be in prison or dead by now. No, what rankled Hugh was the naming of Hugh d’Audley, his uncle by marriage, to the earldom of Gloucester, an earldom held by Hugh's own grandfather Gilbert de Clare. It was Hugh le Despenser who was the late Gilbert de Clare's eldest grandson, and he could not help but feel slighted and resentful that Audley, married to a Clare but not of Clare blood, should have the earldom. Six years had passed since Hugh le Despenser's release from prison, and the luster of those early tokens of royal favor, his manors and his knighthood, had long since faded. He was a knight with two hundred