♂Gilbert de Clare

Gilbert de Clare (2 September 1243 – 7 December 1295) was an English nobleman, Earl of Gloucester and Hertford, who fought on both sides of the Barons’ War of the 1260s and in later life married a daughter of King Edward I. He was the twenty-first great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Eleanor de Clare (1292–1337).

Early life and the Barons’ War

Gilbert was born at Christchurch in Hampshire on 2 September 1243, the son and heir of Richard de Clare, Earl of Gloucester and Hertford, and his wife Maud de Lacy. In the spring of 1253, when he was nine, he was married to Alice de Lusignan, a daughter of Hugh le Brun, Count of La Marche and Angoulême, who was a half-brother of King Henry III. Gilbert and Alice had two daughters, Isabel and Joan. His father died in July 1262, and Gilbert succeeded him as earl.

In the Barons’ War^W of 1258–1267 Gilbert at first took the barons’ side. In 1264 he led the massacre of the Jews at Canterbury, and on 12 May that year the king denounced him and Simon de Montfort^W as traitors. At the Battle of Lewes^W that month Gilbert commanded the second line, and he took King Henry III prisoner.

A year later he changed sides. In May 1265 the king’s son, Prince Edward, escaped from Montfort and met Gilbert at Ludlow, where the prince swore to observe the “good old laws” and to remove foreigners from the royal councils. The next month Montfort denounced them both as rebels. At the Battle of Evesham^W on 4 August 1265 Gilbert commanded the second division and did much to win the victory.

The king’s service and a royal marriage

Gilbert and Alice were legally separated at Norwich on 18 July 1271. That year he had license to ditch his new castle at Caerphilly^W in Wales. When Henry III died on 16 November 1272, Edward was in Sicily on his way home from crusade, and Gilbert took the lead in swearing fealty to the new king and was one of the guardians of England in his absence. He went to France in 1275 to negotiate a peace, was summoned to serve against the Welsh in 1277 and 1282, and in 1278 was among those chosen to escort King Alexander III of Scotland to the king.

In May 1283 Gilbert contracted to marry the king’s daughter Joan, on condition that he be formally divorced from Alice and obtain a papal dispensation, since Joan was Alice’s first cousin once removed. In 1285 he was “wholly absolved” from his first marriage, and he granted Alice manors for her support, among them Thaxted in Essex and Wells and Warham in Norfolk.

Gilbert and Joan were married at Westminster Abbey on 23 April 1290, by a papal dispensation dated 16 November 1289. On the marriage Gilbert surrendered most of his estates to the king, who granted them back to Gilbert and Joan and their children, and that July he gave a great banquet at Clerkenwell to celebrate the wedding. Gilbert and Joan had one son, Gilbert, and three daughters, Eleanor, Margaret and Elizabeth.

Last years

In 1291 Gilbert’s quarrels with the Earl of Hereford over Brecknock ended in a private war between them. The king imprisoned both earls and fined Gilbert, as the aggressor, 10,000 marks^W. In June 1293 he was made captain of the forces in Ireland, and he lived there with Joan from that October until some time in 1294. After they came back, their Welsh tenants rose against him and drove the couple out of Wales.

Gilbert died at Monmouth Castle on 7 December 1295, when Eleanor was three, and was buried at Tewkesbury Abbey^W in Gloucestershire. His widow later won the remission of his fine.

Notes

Sources

Gilbert’s birth, parentage, both marriages, his children, his part in the Barons’ War, his service to Edward I, the private war and its fine, his command in Ireland, and his death and burial are from Douglas Richardson, Magna Carta Ancestry (2005), CLARE 4, p. 198, with his father at CLARE 3, p. 196, and his titles at DESPENSER 5–6, pp. 275–277. The regrant of his estates to Gilbert and Joan, the banquet at Clerkenwell, Joan’s stay with him in Ireland, the Welsh rising and the remission of the fine are from G. E. Cokayne, The Complete Peerage, 2nd ed., vol. V (1926), GLOUCESTER, pp. 706–707. Both are printed accounts of the medieval nobility, citing the patent, close and charter rolls, the papal registers and the monastic annals. The quoted words “good old laws” and “wholly absolved” are Richardson’s.

The wedding date

Magna Carta Ancestry dates the wedding at Westminster Abbey 23 April 1290. The first edition of the Complete Peerage gives 30 April 1290 at Westminster Abbey in one volume (vol. IV, 1892, p. 41) and 2 May 1290 in another (vol. II, 1889, p. 268), and the second edition places the banquet of 3 July 1290 after a marriage “in the previous May”.

His numbering

Richardson calls Gilbert the sixth Earl of Gloucester and sixth Earl of Hertford, and so does the pedigree chart in the second edition of the Complete Peerage. Wikipedia’s article on him counts him the seventh Earl of Gloucester.