♀Rose de Monmouth

Rose de Monmouth was an ancestor of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by three separate lines of descent, all through her son Walter de Lacy (died 1241): her twenty-third great-grandmother by one line and her twenty-fourth great-grandmother by the other two. Rose was the first wife of Hugh de Lacy^W, an Anglo-Norman baron of Herefordshire who became one of the conquerors of Ireland and Lord of Meath.

Hugh and Rose had two sons, Walter and Hugh, and a daughter, Elayne, who married Richard de Beaufo. Walter followed his father as Lord of Meath. Hugh married again, to a daughter of Roderic O’Connor^W, and is said to have been murdered in 1186. When Rose died is not known.

The family

Their younger son, Hugh de Lacy^W, settled in Ulster after his father’s death and became the chief opponent of John de Courcy^W, lord of Ulster, whom he defeated and took prisoner early in 1204. In May 1205 he was made Earl of Ulster, which is said to be the earliest Anglo-Norman title in Ireland of which any record survives. He was driven out of Ireland in 1210, came back about 1218, and died late in 1242 or early in 1243; he was buried in the church of the Dominican friars at Carrickfergus.

Lines of descent

All three lines run through her son Walter de Lacy (died 1241) and come down on the father’s side of Nancy Jane Blanchard, through her father, Kenneth Blanchard (1897–1975). They meet again in Wesley Blanchard (1844–1908), whose parents, Joseph Knapp Blanchard (1820–1885) and Elizabeth Trueworthy Blanchard (1825–1884), both descended from Hugh and Rose, and in Sarah Dudley (1795–1839), whose parents, Nathaniel Dudley (1763–1844) and Anna Smith (1764–1825), both descended from them too.

Notes

Her name

C. L. Kingsford’s article “Lacy, Walter de (d. 1241)” in the Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 31 (1892), calls Walter the “elder son of Hugh de Lacy (d. 1186) [q. v.], by Roysya de Monemue (Monmouth)”. The Complete Peerage, 1st ed., vol. 8 (1898), Ulster, p. 4, names her as Hugh’s “first wife Rose de Monmouth” and the mother of the younger Hugh. Her parents are not named in either. Elayne’s marriage to Richard de Beaufo and Hugh’s second marriage are from Kingsford’s article “Lacy, Hugh de (d. 1186)” in the same volume.

The Earl of Ulster

The younger Hugh’s career is from the Complete Peerage, 1st ed., vol. 8, Ulster, p. 4, which quotes Kingsford’s description of the earldom as the “earliest creation of an Anglo-Norman dignity in Ireland, of which there is any extant record.”