♀Margaret de Beaumont

Margaret de Beaumont (died 12 January 1234/5) was an English noblewoman, a daughter of the Earl of Leicester and co-heiress to half of her family’s great estates, whose inheritance made her husband, Saher de Quincy, Earl of Winchester, and who outlived him by fifteen years as Countess of Winchester. She was an ancestor of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by six separate lines of descent: by two of them, through her daughter Orabella Quincy (1202–1258), she was her twenty-third great-grandmother; by the other four, through her son Robert de Quincy (died 1217), she was her twenty-fifth great-grandmother by three and her twenty-sixth by the fourth.

Marriage and inheritance

Margaret, also called Margery, was a daughter of Robert de Beaumont, Earl of Leicester^W, and of Pernel, the heiress of the Grandmesnil family. Before 1173 she married Saher de Quincy, a young knight of Long Buckby in Northamptonshire, who that year joined Henry the Young King^W in his rebellion against Henry II.

Her brother Robert, Earl of Leicester^W, died without children in 1204, and the vast Beaumont and Grandmesnil estates were divided equally between Margaret and the son of her elder sister Amice, Simon de Montfort^W. The king and his barons sanctioned the division in 1207, and Saher, who held the lands in her right, was made Earl of Winchester. Her own lands included Brackley in Northamptonshire.

Countess and widow

Saher went on crusade in 1219 and died at Damietta in Egypt on 3 November that year. Margaret kept her inheritance in her own hands for the rest of her life, and because she held the estates that had won the earldom, her son Roger seems not to have been recognized as Earl of Winchester until after she died.

As countess she granted charters in her own name. Her seal of about 1220 showed her standing beneath an arched, battlemented doorway, in a close-fitting gown patterned with the Quincy arms and a fur cloak, holding a fleur-de-lis. A cinquefoil carved on the doorway recalled her father’s Beaumont arms. In 1231 Robert Grosseteste^W wrote to her about a complaint against the conduct of her bailiffs in his prebend.

Margaret died on 12 January 1234/5. The monks of the Abbey of Saint-Evroul^W in Normandy kept her obit on that day.

The family

Saher and Margaret had five sons, Robert, Roger, a second Robert, John and Reynold, and three daughters, Lorette, Hawise and Orabella. The eldest son, Robert de Quincy, married Hawise of Chester^W, later Countess of Lincoln, and died in London in 1217, two years before his father, leaving a daughter, Margaret de Quincy; he was buried in the church of the Hospitallers at Clerkenwell. The earldom passed to the second son, Roger, who had been excommunicated with his father. Orabella Quincy married Richard de Harcourt of Stanton Harcourt in Oxfordshire.

Lines of descent

Two of the six lines run through Orabella Quincy and her son William Harcourt; the other four run through Robert de Quincy and his daughter Margaret de Quincy. They meet again in Alice Harcourt (died 1526), whose parents Richard Harcourt (died 1486) and Edith Saint Clair (born about 1423) both descend from Saher and Margaret; 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

Margaret’s parentage, marriage, inheritance, letter, seal, death and obit, and the names of her children, are from Douglas Richardson, Magna Carta Ancestry (2005), QUINCY 1, pp. 683–684, which cites her charters printed in Nichols’s history of Leicestershire, the letters of Robert Grosseteste, the British Museum catalog of seals (her seal of about 1220) and the necrology of Saint-Evroul. Her brother’s death without children, the division of the estates and her son’s recognition as earl only after her death are from G. E. Cokayne, The Complete Peerage, 1st ed., vol. VIII (1898), WINCHESTER, p. 169, which says Roger “does not appear to have been recognised as Earl of Winchester till after her death”. The 2nd ed., vol. VII (1929), LEICESTER, names Amice and Margaret as the coheirs of Robert FitzPernel. Orabella’s marriage to Richard de Harcourt is from Richardson’s HARCOURT descent, p. 48.

Her death

Richardson gives 12 January 1234/5. The Complete Peerage, 1st ed., vol. VIII, p. 169, gives 12 January 1235/6, and vol. V (1893), p. 45, note, says she died in 1236.

Her mother

Richardson calls her mother Pernel, daughter and heiress of William de Grandmesnil; the Complete Peerage, 1st ed., vol. VIII, calls her Petronilla, daughter and probably sole heir of Hugh de Grentemesnil. Richardson calls Margaret the younger daughter; the 2nd ed., vol. VII, names her the second of four.

Orabella’s birth

The year 1202 given for Orabella Quincy comes from a WikiTree profile, not from Richardson or the Complete Peerage. It is late for a daughter of a marriage made before 1173, and may be too late.