| Notes |
- Earl of Gloucester; Earl of Hertford; High Marshal and Chief Butler to the Archbishop of Canterbury; Privy Councillor 1255, 1258; Warden of the Isle of Portland, Weymouth, and Wyke, 1257.
From the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography:
Richard de Clare was a minor at the time of his father's death, and heir to one of the greatest collections of estates and lordships in all of England and Wales. His wardship and marriage were thus matters of the keenest interest to the politically powerful and ambitious of the day. The justiciar Hubert de Burgh, using his position in the government of Henry III, managed to have custody of Richard assigned to himself. On Hubert's fall from power in 1232, the king transferred custody of both Richard and his lands to the new royal favourites, Peter des Roches, bishop of Winchester, and his nephew Peter des Rivaux. Hubert de Burgh's wife, in an apparent effort to rescue the family fortunes, secretly married Richard de Clare to her daughter Margaret; but the marriage was apparently never consummated, and was in any event mooted by Margaret's death in 1237. In the meantime both Peter des Roches and Peter des Rivaux had themselves fallen from power in 1234, and thereafter King Henry kept the wardship in his own hands, although allowing custody of at least some of the Clare lands to be secured by Richard de Clare's uncle Gilbert Marshal, earl of Pembroke. During this time the king began searching for a suitable marriage. A proposed arrangement with the great French comital family, the Lusignans, fell through, and in 1238 Richard de Clare was married to Maud, daughter of John de Lacy, earl of Lincoln. The prime mover in the marriage negotiations seems to have been the king's brother, Richard of Cornwall, who was Richard de Clare's stepfather, having married the widowed Isabel Marshal in 1231. Notwithstanding his marriage Clare remained the ward of the king until 1243, when he came of age and received both official seisin of his inheritance and formal dubbing to knighthood.
The complexities, intricacies, and rivalries involved in the story of Richard de Clare's wardship are an excellent case study of the stakes and resources at issue when contemplating the lives of the upper aristocracy in the thirteenth century. A connection to Richard de Clare was a prize well worth pursuing at full tilt. His inheritance was vast. [...] Richard de Clare was, by every criterion--annual income (close to £4000), knight's fees (nearly 500), and both the sheer number of and the strategic location of his estates and lordships--easily the richest and potentially the most powerful baron, next to the members of the immediate royal family, in the British Isles (excluding Scotland) as a whole.
From Wikipedia:
He joined in the Barons' letter to the Pope in 1246 against the exactions of the Curia in England. He was among those in opposition to the King's half-brothers, who in 1247 visited England, where they were very unpopular, but afterwards he was reconciled to them.
In August 1252/3 the King crossed over to Gascony with his army, and to his great indignation the Earl refused to accompany him and went to Ireland instead. In August 1255 he and John Maunsel were sent to Edinburgh by the King to find out the truth regarding reports which had reached the King that his son-in-law, Alexander III, King of Scotland, was being coerced by Robert de Roos and John Balliol. If possible, they were to bring the young King and Queen to him. The Earl and his companion, pretending to be two of Roos's knights, obtained entry to Edinburgh Castle, and gradually introduced their attendants, so that they had a force sufficient for their defense. They gained access to the Scottish Queen, who made her complaints to them that she and her husband had been kept apart. They threatened Roos with dire punishments, so that he promised to go to the King.
Meanwhile the Scottish magnates, indignant at their Castle of Edinburgh's being in English hands, proposed to besiege it, but they desisted when they found they would be besieging their King and Queen. The King of Scotland apparently traveled South with the Earl, for on 24 September they were with King Henry III at Newminster, Northumberland."
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In July 1258 Richard de Clare and his brother William both fell ill. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes contemporary reports that this was due to an attempted poisoning, "supposedly instigated by King Henry's uncle, William de Valence, earl of Pembroke, in retaliation for Clare's support of the baronial reform movement; and Valence's purported agent in the plot, Clare's seneschal, Walter de Scoteny, was tried and hanged." William died, but Richard survived with the loss of his hair and nails. In 1259 Richard was appointed chief ambassador to the Duke of Brittany, presumably in hopes of frightening the duke by sending a hairless, nailless creature to his court. Three years later, Richard died at Ashenfield, Waltham, Kent, on the 15th, the 16th, or the 22nd of July 1262. It was again bruited about that he had been poisoned, this time by the Queen's uncle Peter of Savoy, but the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, noting that "the annals of Tewkesbury Abbey are the single most valuable literary source for the reconstruction of [de Clare] family history for this period", points out that "the silence of the Tewkesbury account on this point strongly indicates that such rumours were unfounded."
In a perfectly medieval series of postmortem events, Richard de Clare's body was borne to the Cathedral Church of Christ at Canterbury, where his entrails were buried before the altar of St. Edward the Confessor; it was then taken to the Collegiate Church of Tonbridge, Kent, where his heart was buried; finally, what remained of his body was taken to Tewkesbury Abbey in Gloucestershire where it was buried in the choir at his father's right hand.
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Nielsen Hayden genealogy
1222 - 1262 (39 years)
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]