♀Isabel de Beauchamp

Isabel de Beauchamp (died 1306) was an English noblewoman, a daughter of the Earl of Warwick, who was widowed by Patrick de Chaworth, lord of Kidwelly in Wales, and then married Hugh le Despenser, later Earl of Winchester. She was the twenty-first great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son Hugh le Despenser the younger (died 1326).

First marriage

Isabel was a daughter of William de Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick^W, and Maud FitzJohn. She married Patrick de Chaworth, lord of Kidwelly in Carmarthenshire and of Kempsford in Gloucestershire, and the manor of Chedworth in Gloucestershire came with her in free marriage^W, a gift of land to the couple and their heirs. Their only child, Maud, was born on 2 February 1282 and became her father’s heiress. Patrick fought in Wales in 1282 and died shortly before 7 July 1283.

Second marriage

After Patrick de Chaworth’s death in 1283, and by 1287, Isabel married Hugh le Despenser^W. Hugh and Isabel had two sons, Hugh and Philip, and three daughters, Aline, Isabel and Margaret. Her husband was often abroad on Edward I’s business in these years, as an envoy and on embassies.

A later dispute gives a glimpse of her. In 1327 William Fitz Matthew, once keeper of the park at Odiham, claimed that her son Hugh the younger had removed him from his post because he “levied hue and cry”^W upon Isabel when she was taking five bucks in the park without a warrant.

Isabel died shortly before 30 May 1306, a few weeks before her son Hugh married Eleanor de Clare at Westminster. Her husband outlived her by twenty years; he was created Earl of Winchester in 1322 and hanged as a traitor at Bristol on 27 October 1326.

Notes

Sources

Isabel’s parentage, both marriages, her daughter Maud, the manor of Chedworth, her children by Hugh and her death are from Douglas Richardson, Magna Carta Ancestry (2005), BEAUCHAMP 4, p. 54, DESPENSER 5, pp. 275–276, and LANCASTER 5, p. 483, a printed genealogy of the medieval nobility citing the inquisitions post mortem, the patent rolls and the Complete Peerage. The Odiham story is the keeper’s claim, from the Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous, vol. 2 (1916), p. 245, as Richardson summarizes it; the words “levied hue and cry” are as Richardson quotes them.

The date of the second marriage

Richardson’s Despenser chapter says Isabel married Hugh “after 28 May 1281”, the date of a grant of his marriage; his Lancaster chapter says before 8 November 1287. The Complete Peerage, 1st ed., vol. III (1890), p. 91, places it shortly after 1 March 1283 and before 8 November 1286. Her first husband died shortly before 7 July 1283.