♂Richard de Clare

Richard de Clare (died 1217) was an English nobleman, Earl of Hertford and Baron of Clare in Suffolk, who served Richard I, turned against King John, and helped to negotiate Magna Carta in 1215. He was an ancestor of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by four separate lines of descent, all through his son Gilbert de Clare (died 1230): by three of them he was her twenty-fourth great-grandfather, and by the fourth her twenty-fifth.

In the service of Richard I

Richard was the son and heir of Roger de Clare, Earl of Hertford^W, and his wife Maud de Saint Hilary. Like his father before him he was Earl of Hertford in title but was more generally called the Earl of Clare, after the family’s chief barony. Richard I granted him half of the great Giffard estates, which came to him by descent from his ancestress Rohese Giffard; the other half went to William Marshal^W and his wife Isabel, and Richard paid 1,000 marks for his share.

He was at the coronation of Richard I at Westminster on 3 September 1189. In 1191 he was one of the eleven men named by the Chancellor to settle, with eleven chosen for Prince John, the questions between them, and in 1193 he was ordered to go with the Chancellor to the king, then a prisoner in Germany. In 1194 or 1195 he was with the king’s army in Normandy.

A story preserved at Bury St Edmunds is probably about him: the Earl of Clare came with a company of knights and barons to a great meeting of the hundred of Risbridge at Witham and claimed five shillings a year from the hundred, as the fee for carrying the banner of St Edmund in the army, and when the abbot pointed out that Earl Bigod claimed the same service, the earl said he would talk the matter over with his kinsman Earl Roger.

Against King John

When John came to the throne in 1199, Richard was one of the lords whose loyalty the new king’s party most doubted, and he was summoned to Northampton to swear to keep the peace in return for the king’s promise to give every man his right. He attended John’s coronation at Westminster on 27 May 1199 and the homage of William, King of Scotland, at Lincoln.

In the end he sided with the barons against John, and his castle of Tonbridge^W was taken. He played a leading part in the negotiations for Magna Carta, and both he and his son Gilbert were among the twenty-five barons chosen to guarantee that the king kept it. In November 1215 he was one of the barons’ commissioners sent to treat for peace with the king. On 4 March 1215/6 his lands in Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex were granted to Robert de Betun, and his lands in other counties soon after, and Pope Innocent III^W excommunicated father and son.

Marriage and death

Richard married Amice of Gloucester, the second daughter and coheir of William FitzRobert, Earl of Gloucester, and the town of Sudbury in Suffolk was given with her as her marriage portion. Before 1200 the couple were separated by order of the Pope, because they were too closely related. In October 1217 Amice became the sole heir of her father’s earldom. Richard died a few weeks later, between 30 October and 28 November 1217, and writs went out ordering all his lands into the king’s hand, saving his reasonable testament. Their eldest son, Gilbert, inherited the Clare estates. The couple had four sons, Gilbert, Richard, Roger and Henry, and three daughters, one of them named Maud.

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 Richard and Amice; 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

Richard’s parentage, titles, marriage, children and death are from Douglas Richardson, Magna Carta Ancestry (2005), CLARE 1, pp. 192–193, and G. E. Cokayne, The Complete Peerage, 2nd ed., vol. VI (1926), HERTFORD, pp. 501–503. Both are printed accounts of the medieval nobility. The Giffard grant, his service under Richard I, the events of 1199, his part in 1215, the grant of his lands to Robert de Betun, the separation and the writs at his death are from the Complete Peerage, whose notes cite the Pipe Rolls, the chronicles of Roger of Hoveden and Matthew Paris, the patent and close rolls and the Curia Regis Roll. The Complete Peerage adds, from William Farrer, that “it is unlikely that these grants had much effect in the then condition of the country”. Richardson styles him the third Earl of Hertford, “generally styled Earl of Clare”, and Baron of Clare.

The banner of St Edmund

The story of the claim on the hundred of Risbridge is printed in the Memorials of St Edmund’s Abbey and quoted in a note to the Complete Peerage, which says only that “it was probably he whose claim was heard”; the chronicle calls the claimant the Earl of Clare and does not give his first name.

The separation

Amice’s own words in a lawsuit of 1200 over land at Sudbury, recorded in the Curia Regis Roll, say that she had been separated from her husband, the Earl of Clare, “per lineam consanguinitatis per preceptum summi pontificis” (by the line of kinship, by command of the Pope). The Complete Peerage adds that they “appear to have been separated (perhaps pending a dispensation) prior to 1200”; whether they came together again is not recorded.

The children

Richardson gives the four sons and three daughters; the third daughter is unnamed, and a second is given only doubtfully as Joan. Gilbert, the eldest, is the only one of them in the family tree.