♂Geoffrey of Anjou

Geoffrey of Anjou (24 August 1113 – 7 September 1151), nicknamed le Bel (“the Fair”), was Count of Anjou and Maine, the husband of the Empress Maud and the father of King Henry II of England, and in the 1140s he won the duchy of Normandy in his wife’s cause. He was the twenty-fifth, twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), by three separate lines of descent: one through his illegitimate son Hamelin of Warenne, and two through his son Henry of England (1133–1189).

Count of Anjou

Geoffrey was born on 24 August 1113, the son and heir of Foulques V, Count of Anjou and King of Jerusalem^W, by his first wife, Eremburge of Maine^W, the daughter and heiress of Hélie, Count of Maine. His bride was Maud of England, the widow of the Emperor Heinrich V^W and the daughter and heiress of Henry I, King of England^W. Geoffrey and Maud were married at Le Mans on 17 June 1128. The bridegroom was fourteen; the bride, already an empress, was twenty-six. Their eldest son, Henry, was born at Le Mans on 5 March 1133.

The winning of Normandy

When Henry I died in 1135, Maud, whom he had declared his heir in 1126, at once entered Normandy to claim her inheritance. The border districts submitted to her, but England chose her cousin Stephen^W as its king, and Normandy soon followed. While Maud fought for the English crown in the civil war^W that followed, Geoffrey fought for the duchy. In 1142 and 1143 he secured all of Normandy west and south of the Seine, and on 14 January 1144 he crossed the Seine and entered Rouen. He took the title of Duke of Normandy that summer, and in the same year he founded an Augustinian priory at Chateau-l’Ermitage in Anjou. In 1149 Geoffrey and Maud together ceded the duchy to their son Henry, and the King of France ratified the cession the following year.

Death

Geoffrey died at Chateau-du-Loir on 7 September 1151, on his way back from the French king’s court at Paris, and he was buried in St. Julien’s at Le Mans^W. He was thirty-eight. Besides his three sons by Maud, he had an illegitimate son, Hamelin, who became Earl of Surrey, and two illegitimate daughters, Emme and Mary, who became Abbess of Shaftesbury; the name of their mother, or mothers, is not known.

The family

Geoffrey and Maud had three sons. Henry, the eldest, became King Henry II of England^W. Geoffrey, born at Rouen on 1 June 1134, became Count of Nantes^W and held three castles in France as his share; he died without children on 26 July 1158. William Longespée^W, born at Argentan on 22 July 1136, sought to marry the widowed Isabel de Warenne, Countess of Surrey, but Archbishop Thomas Becket^W opposed the match because William was related to her first husband in the third degree; William died at Rouen on 30 January 1163/4 and was buried in the cathedral there.

Lines of descent

All three lines from Geoffrey to Nancy Jane Blanchard run down her father’s side, through Kenneth Blanchard (1897–1975). One runs through his illegitimate son Hamelin of Warenne. The other two run through his son Henry of England (1133–1189) and meet again in Joan of England (1272–1307), whose parents, Edward of England (1239–1307) and Eleanor of Castile (died 1290), both descended from Geoffrey. The Hamelin line and the royal lines meet once more in Polly Knapp (1798–1863), whose parents, Joseph Knapp (1763–1839) and Eunice Carver (1763–1845), both descended from him.

Notes

Sources

Geoffrey’s birth, parentage, marriage, the winning of Normandy, his death and burial, and his children legitimate and illegitimate are from Douglas Richardson, Plantagenet Ancestry (2nd ed., 2011), vol. I, ENGLAND 1, pp. 1–3, a printed genealogy of the medieval royal family that cites the Angevin chronicles, charters and seals. Henry’s birth is from ENGLAND 2, p. 5. The journey from Paris is in the chronicle of Ralph de Diceto, which Richardson quotes: “Dum Gaufridus Plantegenest comes Andegavorum rediret Parisius a curia regis Francorum, concessit in fata apud Castrum Lidii” (as Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou, was returning from Paris from the court of the King of the French, he died at Chateau-du-Loir); Diceto places it under 1150. The first edition of the Complete Peerage (vol. 7, 1896, under Surrey, p. 326) names Geoffrey as the father of King Henry II and of Hamelin, and gives Hamelin’s marriage to Isabel de Warenne in 1164.

The name Plantagenet

Diceto already calls Geoffrey “Plantegenest”, but the family itself did not use the name. Richardson quotes the Dictionary of National Biography (1909): “Inveterate usage has attached the surname Plantagenet to the great house which occupied the English throne from 1154 to 1485, but the family did not assume the surname until the middle of the fifteenth century.”

The date of the marriage

Burke’s Peerage (1869, p. xviii) dates the marriage of Geoffrey and Maud to 3 April 1127. Richardson gives Le Mans, 17 June 1128, the date followed here.