♀Isabel Marshal

Isabel Marshal (died 17 January 1239/40) was an English noblewoman, a daughter of William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke^W, who was Countess of Gloucester and Hertford by her first marriage and Countess of Cornwall by her second. She was an ancestor of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by four separate lines of descent, all through her son Richard de Clare (1222–1262): by three of them she was her twenty-third great-grandmother, and by the fourth her twenty-fourth.

Her first marriage

Isabel was the second daughter of William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, hereditary Master Marshal, and his wife Isabel de Clare, and she inherited a tenth of the barony of Long Crendon in Buckinghamshire. In the First Barons’ War^W her father took Gilbert de Clare prisoner at the Battle of Lincoln^W on 19 May 1217, where Gilbert had fought for Louis of France^W. He was released, his lands were restored, and on 9 October 1217 Isabel married her father’s prisoner. That November Gilbert was recognized as Earl of Gloucester.

Her daughter Amice was born on 27 May 1220, her heir Richard on 4 August 1222, and her youngest son Gilbert in September 1229. Early in 1230 her husband crossed into Brittany with the king, and he died on the way back, at Penros in Brittany, on 25 October 1230, when their heir Richard was eight. He was buried before the high altar of Tewkesbury Abbey^W in November 1230, and Isabel raised a monument to him there.

Countess of Cornwall

On 30 March 1231, five months after Gilbert’s death, Isabel married Richard, Earl of Cornwall^W, Count of Poitou, the younger son of King John and later King of the Romans^W.

Isabel died in childbed, of jaundice, at Berkhampstead on 17 January 1239/40, and was buried at Beaulieu Abbey^W in Hampshire. Her heart was sent to Tewkesbury Abbey to be buried in her first husband’s grave.

The family

Gilbert and Isabel had three sons, Richard, William and Gilbert, and three daughters, Amice, Agnes and Isabel. William, born on 18 May 1228, and his brother Richard were poisoned in 1258 while at breakfast with Prince Edward at Winchester; William died of it at Retherford and was buried at Durford Abbey^W on 23 July 1258, and Walter de Scotenay was executed for the crime on 26 May 1259. The youngest son, Gilbert, born in September 1229, became a clerk; in 1241, while still a minor, he was granted a pension of 16 marks from the church of Great Marlow, and in 1244 his stepfather, Richard of Cornwall, obtained a papal dispensation for him to hold church livings.

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 Gilbert and Isabel; 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, both marriages, her children, her death and burial are from Douglas Richardson, Magna Carta Ancestry (2005), CLARE 2, pp. 194–195, and G. E. Cokayne, The Complete Peerage, 2nd ed., vol. V (1926), GLOUCESTER, pp. 694–696. Both are printed accounts of the medieval nobility, citing the patent and close rolls, the chronicle of Matthew Paris and the annals of Tewkesbury. Her share of Long Crendon is from Richardson; the monument to Gilbert is from the Complete Peerage, which says Gilbert was taken prisoner by William Marshal, “whose daughter he married later”. Both name her mother as Isabel, daughter of Richard Fitz Gilbert, Earl of Pembroke, called Strongbow.

Her death date

Both accounts give 17 January 1239/40, the year written in the old style, when the year began on 25 March; by the modern reckoning she died in January 1240.

Her children’s dates

Amice’s birth on 27 May 1220 is in both accounts; Gilbert’s is 13 September 1229 in Richardson and 12 September in the Complete Peerage. Her daughter Isabel was born on 2 November 1226 by Richardson’s account and on 8 November by the Complete Peerage.