♂Richard de Clare

Richard de Clare (4 August 1222 – 15 July 1262) was an English nobleman, Earl of Gloucester and Hertford, who sat on the barons’ council of twelve that set out to reform King Henry III’s government in 1258. He was an ancestor of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by four separate lines of descent: by three of them he was her twenty-second great-grandfather, two through his son Thomas Clare (1245–1287) and one through his son Gilbert de Clare (1243–1295), and by the fourth, also through Thomas, her twenty-third.

Wardship and two marriages

Richard was the eldest son and heir of Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester and Hertford, and Isabel Marshal. His father died in October 1230, when Richard was eight, and his lands, wardship and marriage were given to Hubert de Burgh^W, the king’s justiciar; when Hubert fell from power in July 1232 the king took the wardship back. Before Michaelmas 1236, at fourteen, Richard secretly married Hubert’s daughter Margaret at St Edmund’s Bury, without her father’s knowledge. When the marriage came to light the couple were parted at once, and Richard was confined in his own castle at Bletchingley in Surrey. Margaret died in November 1237.

Richard’s second marriage was a royal bargain. In October 1237 King Henry III, who held the young Richard as his ward, proposed to marry him to a daughter of the Count of La Marche, the king’s own half-sister, or else to let the Earl of Lincoln have the marriage for 3,000 marks. Richard de Clare married Maud de Lacy, a daughter of John de Lacy, Earl of Lincoln^W, and Margaret de Quincy, on or about 25 January 1237/8.

An earl at court

Richard came of age in 1243 and was given his lands, served against the Welsh in 1244–45, and was knighted by the king in London on 4 June 1245. Through his mother he inherited a fifth of the great Marshal estates, among them Kilkenny and other lordships in Ireland. He made a pilgrimage to the shrine of St Edmund at Pontigny, and in 1250, after visiting the pope at Lyons with his stepfather Richard of Cornwall^W, went on to Santiago.

In 1251 he demanded an aid from his men for the marriage of his daughter, though he had no husband in view for her. In 1253 he matched his heir Gilbert, then nine, with Alice de Lusignan, a niece of the king’s half-brothers, but that August, to the king’s great indignation, he refused to follow Henry to Gascony and went to Ireland instead. Matthew Paris^W, writing in 1253, called him “young, graceful, eloquent, careful, well skilled in the laws,” a man on whom “the hope of all the English nobles might well rest,” but added that “base avarice grievously obscured his nobility.”

Edinburgh and the reform of 1258

In August 1255 the king sent Richard and John Maunsel to Edinburgh, on reports that his son-in-law, the young King Alexander of Scotland, was being coerced by Robert de Ros and John Balliol. Pretending to be two of Ros’s knights, the earl and his companion got into Edinburgh Castle, brought in their attendants a few at a time until they had a force able to defend itself, and reached the Scottish queen, who complained that she and her husband had been kept apart. The Scottish magnates proposed to besiege the castle, but gave up when they found they would be besieging their own king and queen.

In 1256 Richard went to Germany to prepare the way for the election of Richard of Cornwall as King of the Romans. Two years later he joined the confederated barons ahead of the parliament at Oxford, and on 22 June 1258 he was one of the council of twelve the barons appointed to reform the realm, under the Provisions of Oxford^W. That July he and his brother William fell ill, poisoned, it was supposed, by their steward Walter de Scotenay; Richard recovered with the loss of his hair and nails, but William died. In 1259 he helped negotiate a peace with France and quarreled with Simon de Montfort^W on the embassy. In 1261 the two men set their differences aside against the king, and that November both were reconciled to him.

Death and burial

Richard died at John de Criol’s manor of Ashenfield in Waltham, near Canterbury in Kent, on 15 July 1262, and it was rumored that he had been poisoned at the table of Peter of Savoy^W, the queen’s uncle. His entrails were buried before the altar of St Edward the Confessor at Canterbury and his heart at Tonbridge, and on 28 July 1262 his body was buried in the choir of Tewkesbury Abbey^W, at his father’s right hand, before two bishops and eight abbots. Maud raised a splendid tomb for him there, and his son Gilbert succeeded him as earl.

The family

Richard and Maud had three sons, Gilbert, Thomas and Bogo, and four daughters, Isabel, Margaret, Rose and Eglantine. Isabel, born in May 1240, was married at Lyons in June 1257 to the Marquess of Montferrat, and Margaret, born in 1249, married Edmund, Earl of Cornwall, in 1272. Bogo, born on 21 July 1248, became a clerk at Oxford, held church livings from 1259 on, rose to be Treasurer of York, and died suddenly in October 1294. Eglantine died in 1257 at fifteen weeks old and was buried at Tewkesbury.

Lines of descent

Three of the lines run through Thomas Clare and his daughter Margaret de Clare, and one through Gilbert de Clare and his daughter Eleanor de Clare (1292–1337). They 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 Maud; 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 life, both marriages, his children, his death and burial are from G. E. Cokayne, The Complete Peerage, 2nd ed., vol. V (1926), GLOUCESTER, pp. 696–702, and Douglas Richardson, Magna Carta Ancestry (2005), CLARE 3, p. 196; his father’s death in 1230 and his mother’s second marriage, to Richard of Cornwall, are at CLARE 2, p. 194. Both are printed accounts of the medieval nobility, citing the patent and close rolls, the chronicle of Matthew Paris and the annals of Tewkesbury. The secret first marriage, his confinement at Bletchingley, the loss of his hair and nails, and the burial of his heart at Tonbridge are as Richardson gives them; the king’s offer of his marriage in 1237, the Edinburgh errand and the words of Matthew Paris, in English, are from the Complete Peerage. The children’s births, marriages and deaths are from the Complete Peerage, p. 701, with Bogo’s office from Richardson, who also names an illegitimate son, Guy.

His death date

The Complete Peerage follows the Tewkesbury annals in giving 15 July 1262 and notes that another chronicle gives 22 July; Richardson gives “15 (or 22) July 1262”, and the obituary of the abbey of Lyre kept his anniversary on 22 July.

His second marriage

Richardson dates the marriage “about 25 Jan. 1237/8”; the Complete Peerage says “on or before” that day, from the patent rolls, and adds that the Tewkesbury annalist placed it about Candlemas, 2 February.

His numbering and his son’s name

Richardson styles Richard the second Earl of Gloucester and fifth Earl of Hertford; the Complete Peerage numbers him the fifth in its line of earls of Gloucester, and Wikipedia’s article on him counts him the sixth. His third son is written Boges or Beges by Richardson and Bevis or Benet (Bovo) in the Complete Peerage.