♀Hawise de Beaumont

Hawise de Beaumont (died 24 April 1197) was an English noblewoman, a daughter of the Earl of Leicester; she married William Fitz Robert, Earl of Gloucester and lord of Glamorgan. In 1158 she, her husband and their son were seized in Cardiff Castle by a Welsh lord and carried off into the woods. She was an ancestor of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by four separate lines of descent, all through her daughter Amice of Gloucester: by three of them she was her twenty-fifth great-grandmother, and by the fourth her twenty-sixth.

Countess of Gloucester

Hawise was a daughter of Robert de Beaumont, Earl of Leicester^W, and his wife Amice, a daughter of Ralph, lord of Montfort-de-Gael in Brittany. About 1150 she married William Fitz Robert, Earl of Gloucester, who lived chiefly at Cardiff. Their son witnessed a charter with his father and mother in 1155. Three years later Ivor the Little^W took the earl, Hawise and the boy prisoner in Cardiff Castle and held them in the woods until William put right Ivor’s grievances. The couple had a son, Robert, born at Cardiff, who died there unmarried in 1166, and three daughters, Mabel, Amice and Isabel, who became their father’s coheirs.

Widowhood

William died on his birthday, 23 November 1183, and was buried at Keynsham Priory^W in Somerset, which he had founded. As a widow Hawise witnessed a charter in 1185 and gave land at Pimperne to the abbey of Fontevrault^W in France. She made gifts to the canons of Dureford^W in Sussex to keep an anniversary for herself and her late husband, and in one of her charters she names her son Robert, long dead, and her daughter the Countess. Her seal names her Countess of Gloucester. She died on 24 April 1197.

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 William and Hawise; 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

Hawise’s parentage, marriage, children, gifts, seal and death are from G. E. Cokayne, The Complete Peerage, 2nd ed., vol. V (1926), GLOUCESTER, pp. 687–689, which cites the monastic annals for her death, J. H. Round’s Calendar of Documents Preserved in France for the charter of 1185 and her seal, and the Dureford cartulary for her gifts there. Douglas Richardson, Magna Carta Ancestry (2005), CLARE 1, p. 192, also names her as the daughter of Robert de Beaumont, Earl of Leicester, and the mother of Amice of Gloucester. The first edition of the Complete Peerage (vol. V, 1893, pp. 41 and 429) names her as a sister of the next Earl of Leicester, married to William, Earl of Gloucester.