♂William Fitz Robert

William Fitz Robert (died 23 November 1183) was an English nobleman, the second Earl of Gloucester and lord of Glamorgan, who stood beside his father through the civil war of King Stephen’s reign and later served Henry II. In 1158 he, his wife and their son were seized in Cardiff Castle by a Welsh lord and carried off into the woods. He was an ancestor of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by four separate lines of descent, all through his daughter Amice of Gloucester: by three of them he was her twenty-fifth great-grandfather, and by the fourth her twenty-sixth.

The civil war

William was the eldest son and heir of Robert, Earl of Gloucester, the leading captain on the Empress Maud’s side in the war with King Stephen known as the Anarchy^W. He appears as a young man in his father’s charters, witnessing an agreement with the Abbot of Fécamp in 1128 and joining in the foundation of Neath Abbey the next year. In February 1141 his father captured Stephen at Lincoln, and was himself taken prisoner later that year; when the two captives were exchanged that October, William stood surety for his father, who was then held at Rochester. While Robert was in Normandy in 1144, William was governor of Wareham, and in 1147 he overthrew Henry de Tracy at Castle Cary. His father died that year, and William succeeded him as earl. About 1150 he married Hawise de Beaumont, a daughter of Robert de Beaumont, Earl of Leicester^W.

Lord of Glamorgan

In 1153 William witnessed the agreement between Stephen and Henry, Duke of Normandy, that ended the war. As lord of Glamorgan^W he ruled almost as a king within its borders, and he also held the lordship of Caerleon. He lived chiefly at Cardiff, and there, in 1158, Ivor the Little^W took William, Hawise and their son prisoner and held them in the woods until the earl put right Ivor’s grievances. In 1169 he founded Keynsham Priory^W in Somerset, and he gave to many other religious houses. The couple had a son, Robert, born at Cardiff, who died there unmarried in 1166, and three daughters, Mabel, Amice and Isabel, who became their father’s coheirs.

The king’s suspicion

When Henry II’s sons rebelled against him in 1173^W, William took the king’s part and went to the help of the royal forces at the Battle of Fornham^W on 16 October, where the Earl of Leicester was taken prisoner. Even so he seems to have fallen under suspicion: he submitted to the king the next year, and in 1175 surrendered Bristol Castle to him. In 1176, it is said, the king had him make his younger son John heir to the earldom, with the promise that John would marry one of William’s daughters. In April 1183, during a new quarrel with his sons, the king imprisoned a number of lords whose loyalty he doubted, and William was among them. He died that year on his birthday, 23 November, and was buried at Keynsham.

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 William and Hawise; 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

William’s career, marriage, son, coheirs, death and burial are from G. E. Cokayne, The Complete Peerage, 2nd ed., vol. V (1926), GLOUCESTER, pp. 687–689, which cites the chronicles of the period, the cartularies of Glamorgan and Gloucester, and the Pipe Rolls. The Complete Peerage dates his earldom 1147–1183. His title and his daughter Amice are also in Douglas Richardson, Magna Carta Ancestry (2005), CLARE 1, p. 192, which calls him the 2nd Earl of Gloucester. The Complete Peerage notes that the annals of Waverley, Margam, Tewkesbury and Worcester all agree on the date of his death, and the Pipe Roll confirms it.

The capture at Cardiff

The story of Ivor the Little comes from Giraldus Cambrensis, cited by the Complete Peerage; William’s own Welsh contemporaries, in the chronicle Brut y Tywysogion, called him Earl of Bristol.

The Earl of Leicester at Fornham

The earl taken at Fornham in 1173 was Robert, third Earl of Leicester. The first edition of the Complete Peerage (vol. V, 1893, p. 429) names Hawise among that earl’s sisters, so William’s side captured his wife’s brother.

The inheritance

The Complete Peerage doubts the chronicler’s account of the 1176 arrangement and thinks it “more probable” that the king meant to turn the earldom from the eldest daughter, who by custom had the right to it, to the youngest, Isabel, whom John married in 1189. A hostile writer of the time called William “vir mollis et thalamorum magis quam militiae appetitior”, a soft man, fonder of the bedchamber than of soldiering.