♀Isabel de Clare

Isabel de Clare (died after July 1219) was an English noblewoman, the daughter and heir of Richard FitzGilbert, Earl of Pembroke, known as Strongbow^W, whose great inheritance in Wales, Ireland and Normandy made her husband, William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke. She was four years old when her father died and left her his heir, and she grew up as a ward of the king. She was an ancestor of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by five separate lines of descent: four through her daughter Isabel Marshal (died 1240), by three of which she was her twenty-fourth great-grandmother and by the fourth her twenty-fifth, and one through her daughter Maud Marshal (died 1248), by which she was her twenty-fifth.

The heiress of Striguil

Isabel’s father died on 5 April 1176, and she passed into the wardship of Henry II. The French poem on her husband’s life calls her “la damissele d’Estregoil”, the damsel of Striguil, after her father’s castle at Chepstow on the Welsh border. Henry II granted her marriage to the knight William Marshal, Richard I confirmed the grant, and William and Isabel were married in August 1189. Through her William became Earl of Pembroke and Marshal of England.

In 1191 Richard I restored to William and Isabel the Giffard lands at Longueville in Normandy, which came to her by descent from Rohais, a sister of Walter Giffard, Earl of Buckingham. In 1208 William crossed to Ireland to secure her great possessions there, as Steward of Leinster.

Widowhood

William died at Caversham on 14 May 1219. In July that year, as “Ysabellis, comitissa de Pembroc”, the widow of William Marshal, Isabel made an agreement with the French king at Pont de l’Arche. By it the king gave back to her and her children their land in Normandy, as her husband had held it on the day he died, and allowed her sons William and Richard to come into France and return as they wished. She was still living then.

The family

William and Isabel had five sons, William, Richard, Gilbert, Walter and Anselm, and five daughters, Maud, Isabel, Sibyl, Eva and Joan. All five sons held the earldom of Pembroke in turn, and none of them left a child. William, born about 1190, was one of the twenty-five barons chosen in 1215 to enforce Magna Carta and died in April 1231. Richard rose against the king’s foreign advisers and died of a wound at Kilkenny Castle on 16 April 1234. Gilbert died on 27 June 1241 after a fall from his horse in a tournament at Ware, Walter died at Goodrich Castle in November 1245, and Anselm died on 5 December 1245, within a month of succeeding.

The Bishop of Ferns, from whom the elder William had taken some manors, is said to have cursed the family and foretold its end. When Anselm died the earldom went back to the Crown, and the great inheritance was divided among the five daughters or their heirs. Maud received the office of Marshal of England, Hempstead Marshal, Striguil Castle and the Irish honor of Carlow; Isabel’s share was the honor of Kilkenny and the castles of Usk and Caerleon.

Lines of descent

The lines meet again in Elizabeth le Despenser (died 1389), whose parents Hugh le Despenser (died 1326) and Eleanor de Clare (1292–1337) both descend from William and Isabel; in Maurice Berkeley (about 1435–1506), whose parents James Berkeley (about 1394–1463) and Isabel Mowbray (died 1452) both do; 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

Isabel’s parentage, wardship, marriage, the Longueville grant and her agreement of 1219 are from G. E. Cokayne, The Complete Peerage, 1st ed., vol. VI (1895), PEMBROKE, pp. 197–199, whose notes by G. W. Watson cite the French poem L’Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal and the agreement itself among the treaties in the French royal archives; her sons’ careers and the division of the inheritance are from pp. 200–204. Vol. V (1893), MARSHAL, p. 261, says that William Marshal became Marshal of England and Earl of Pembroke “in her right”. Douglas Richardson, Magna Carta Ancestry (2005), BIGOD 2, p. 85, and CLARE 2, p. 194, names her as Isabel, daughter of Richard Fitz Gilbert, called “Strongbow”, second Earl of Pembroke (or Striguil), and the mother of Maud and Isabel Marshal.

Her title

The Complete Peerage says she “possibly may be considered as, suo jure, Countess of Pembroke”, that is, countess in her own right; it numbers her the third holder of the earldom, between her father and her husband.

Her mother

The Complete Peerage gives her father’s only known wife as Eva, the only child of Dermot Mac Murrough, King of Leinster, whom he married in 1170 and who inherited her father’s rights in Leinster; it does not name Isabel’s mother directly.

Her birth

She was “aged 4 years” at her father’s death in 1176, which places her birth about 1172.