♂Richard Beauchamp

Richard Beauchamp^W (about 1435 – 19 January 1502/3) was an English nobleman, the second and last Lord Beauchamp of Powick, in Worcestershire, who served as Treasurer of the King’s Household^W. He was the sixteenth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Anne Beauchamp (died 1534).

Marriage

As the peerage histories tell it, Richard was the son and heir of John Beauchamp, 1st Lord Beauchamp of Powick, and his wife, Margaret Ferrers. On 27 January 1446/7, by special license, Richard and Elizabeth Stafford were married in the private chapel at Beauchamp’s Court, in Alcester, Warwickshire. The bridegroom was about eleven years old. The couple had three daughters, Elizabeth, Anne and Margaret; Anne, the second, married Richard Lygon of Madresfield.

In the king’s service

In the spring of 1471 Richard held the city of Gloucester for King Edward IV against Queen Margaret of Anjou^W. Refused the crossing of the Severn there, the queen’s army was forced on toward Tewkesbury, where Edward overtook and defeated it, and Richard was knighted at the battle^W. In 1474 the king granted him the manors of Duntesbourne and Hurscombe, in Gloucestershire.

He succeeded his father as Lord Beauchamp of Powick in April 1475. His lands lay in Worcestershire, Gloucestershire and Lincolnshire, among them Powick and Acton Beauchamp, Down Hatherley and Kemerton. In 1478, and again in the reign of Richard III, he was confirmed in several stewardships and masterships in Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, and he is said to have been at the coronation of Richard III on 6 July 1483.

Death and the inheritance

Richard died at Broomhill, in Kent, on 19 January 1502/3 without a surviving son, and his barony died with him. His lands were divided among his heirs, his daughter Anne and the sons of her two sisters.

Notes

Sources

His parentage, birth, marriage, daughters, offices, lands, the holding of Gloucester, his knighthood, the grant of 1474, the stewardships, the coronation and his death are from Douglas Richardson, Magna Carta Ancestry (2005), p. 678, with the line of his forebears in the chart at the head of p. 510. G.E.C., Complete Peerage, 2nd ed., vol. 2 (1912), p. 47, gives the same wedding day, “by spec. lic., in his private chapel at Beauchamp’s Court”, and his age as forty at his father’s death, which it places between 9 and 19 April 1475. It also gives his death at Broomhill without surviving male issue, “when the Barony became extinct”, with inquisitions post mortem^W held at Tewkesbury and at Spittlegate by Grantham in 1512. It names his coheirs as his grandson Edward Willoughby, son of his eldest daughter, Elizabeth; his daughter Anne, wife of Richard Lygon; and his grandson Richard Rede, son of his youngest daughter, Margaret. The Gloucester passage of 1471 and its outcome follow the standard account of the Battle of Tewkesbury.

Richardson styles him K.B., a Knight of the Bath^W, and gives his offices without dates. Complete Peerage is more cautious about 1483: he “appears to have been the ‘Lord Beauchamp’” present at the coronation of Richard III.

His age at the wedding

Richardson and Complete Peerage both make him forty in 1475, which puts his birth about 1435 and his age at the wedding of January 1446/7 at about eleven. His father was created Lord Beauchamp of Powick by patent on 2 May 1447, three months after the wedding.

A son who died before him

Complete Peerage notes that among the knights made at the marriage of Richard, Duke of York, on 18 January 1477/8 was “John, son and heire to the Lord Beauchamp”, presumably a son of Richard who died before his father and without children.

Other accounts

Burke’s Peerage (1869), under Beauchamp, calls his wife Eleanor, daughter of Sir Humphry Stafford, and gives his death as 1496. Richardson and Complete Peerage name her Elizabeth and date his death 19 January 1502/3.