♀Adelise of Louvain

Adelise of Louvain (died 23 April 1151) was Queen of England as the second wife of King Henry I, and in her widowhood the wife of William d’Aubigny, who came to be known as Earl of Arundel through the castle she brought him. She was the twenty-fifth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Alice d’Aubigny.

Queen

Adelise was the eldest daughter of Godefroy “à la Barbe”, Duke of Lower Lorraine and Count of Brabant and Louvain^W, and of his first wife, Ide, the daughter of Albert III, Count of Namur. She became the second wife of King Henry I of England. They had no children, and the king died on 1 December 1135.

The earl’s wife

In 1138, the third year of her widowhood, Adelise of Louvain married William d’Aubigny, and with her came the castle and honor of Arundel in Sussex, which had been settled on her in dower. He was the son and heir of William d’Aubigny of Buckenham in Norfolk, the king’s butler. In 1139 William gave shelter at Arundel Castle to the Empress Maud^W, Henry I’s daughter and Adelise’s stepdaughter, though he held to King Stephen ever after. In a charter that she gave to Reading Abbey^W before 1150, the Queen Dowager styled her husband Earl of Chichester.

In 1150 Adelise retired to a nunnery at Afflighem, in South Brabant, where she died and was buried on 23 April 1151, aged about 48. William survived her by 25 years and died in 1176.

The family

The couple’s children included William, the earl’s son and heir; Godfrey; and Alice, who became Countess of Eu. William was confirmed as Earl of Sussex in 1176 or 1177, but under Henry II’s policy the castle and honor of Arundel were kept by the Crown until Richard I granted them back to him after his coronation in 1189.

Notes

Sources

Adelise’s parentage, second marriage, dower, charter to Reading, retirement, death and burial are given in the Complete Peerage (2nd edition, vol. 1, 1910, under Arundel, pp. 233–235), which names no other wife of William d’Aubigny. Her marriage to Henry I, the want of children by him and the date of his death come from Burke’s Peerage (1869). The son Godfrey and the daughter Alice are named in Alice’s charters to Robertsbridge Abbey (Complete Peerage, 2nd edition, vol. 5, 1926, under Eu, p. 157).

Her names

The Complete Peerage calls her Adeliz, Burke’s Peerage Adeliza, and her daughter’s charter “Aliz Regine”, Queen Aliz; the Complete Peerage, under Eu, names her “Adelise, the Queen”. “Of Louvain” is the name historians give her, after her father’s county.

The descent through John Washburn

The line from Adelise to Nancy Jane Blanchard runs through her daughter Alice and her descendants to John Washburn of Bengeworth, who died in 1547. That the John Washburn of the pedigrees was this man is the identification of the Washbournes’ historian, James Davenport, not a record’s, so the descent through him is probable.