♀Amice of Gloucester

Amice of Gloucester (died about 1225) was an English noblewoman, a daughter of William FitzRobert, Earl of Gloucester^W, who was the wife of Richard de Clare, Earl of Hertford, and in her last years Countess of Gloucester. Before 1200 she and her husband were separated by order of the Pope, because they were too closely related. She was an ancestor of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by four separate lines of descent, all through her son Gilbert de Clare (died 1230): by three of them she was her twenty-fourth great-grandmother, and by the fourth her twenty-fifth.

Marriage

Amice was the second of the three daughters and coheirs of William FitzRobert, Earl of Gloucester, and his wife Hawise, a daughter of Robert de Beaumont, Earl of Leicester. She married Richard de Clare, Earl of Hertford, generally called the Earl of Clare, and the town of Sudbury in Suffolk was given with her as her marriage portion^W. The couple had four sons, Gilbert, Richard, Roger and Henry, and three daughters, one of them named Maud.

In a lawsuit of 1200 over land at Sudbury, Amice told the court that after the separation she had come to Sudbury and called her own court there. In the same roll she is “Amicia que fuit comitissa de Clare”, Amice who was Countess of Clare. In 1211, still styling herself Countess of Clare, she offered the king 40 marks to recover lands of which Guy de Chanceaus had dispossessed her, and her son Gilbert then held six and a half knights’ fees in Kent from her marriage portion.

Countess of Gloucester

The earldom of Gloucester passed first to the son of Amice’s elder sister Mabel, who died without children, and then to her younger sister Isabel, Countess of Gloucester^W, who had been the first wife of King John. When Isabel died childless on 14 October 1217, Amice became the sole heir of her father. Richard died a few weeks later, between 30 October and 28 November 1217, and writs went out ordering all his lands into the king’s hand, saving his reasonable testament. Their eldest son, Gilbert, inherited the Clare estates. Amice was recognized as Countess of Gloucester for the rest of her life, though her son Gilbert was also acknowledged as earl.

As a widow she founded a hospital at Sudbury, which was part of the Gloucester inheritance. Her charters to Stoke Priory name her as Amice, Countess of Clare, or simply as the daughter of William, Earl of Gloucester; they speak of her father and mother and of Gilbert, her son and heir, but never of her husband. She is said to have died on 1 January 1224/5.

Lines of descent

The lines meet again in Maurice Berkeley (about 1435–1506), whose parents James Berkeley (about 1394–1463) and Isabel Mowbray (died 1452) both descend from Richard and Amice; in Sarah Dudley (1795–1839), whose parents Nathaniel Dudley (1763–1844) and Anna Smith (1764–1825) both do; and in Wesley Blanchard (1844–1908), whose parents Joseph Knapp Blanchard (1820–1885) and Elizabeth Trueworthy Blanchard (1825–1884) both do.

Notes

Sources

Amice’s parentage, marriage, children and death are from Douglas Richardson, Magna Carta Ancestry (2005), CLARE 1, pp. 192–193, and G. E. Cokayne, The Complete Peerage, 2nd ed., vol. VI (1926), HERTFORD, pp. 502–503, with vol. V (1926) under GLOUCESTER for her sisters, the descent of the earldom and the suit of 1211. Both are printed accounts of the medieval nobility. The lawsuit of 1200 is from the Curia Regis Roll and her charters from the register of Stoke Priory, both quoted in the Complete Peerage’s notes.

The separation

Amice’s words in the Curia Regis Roll are that she had been separated from her husband, the Earl of Clare, “per lineam consanguinitatis per preceptum summi pontificis” (by the line of kinship, by command of the Pope). The Complete Peerage adds that the couple “appear to have been separated (perhaps pending a dispensation) prior to 1200”; whether they came together again is not recorded.

Her title and death

The Complete Peerage says that in 1217 she “became apparently suo jure Countess of Gloucester”, that is, in her own right, and that she “appears to have been recognised as Countess of Gloucester up to her death”. It gives her death as “circa 1 Jan. 1224/5” and in another place says she “is stated to have” died on that day; Richardson writes that she “allegedly died 1 January 1224/5”. The year is in the old style, when the year began on 25 March, so by modern reckoning the date is 1 January 1225.

The children

Richardson gives the four sons and three daughters; the third daughter is unnamed, and a second is given only doubtfully as Joan. Gilbert, the eldest, is the only one of them in the family tree.