(French-Latin) belonging to Beauc(h)amp = the Fair Field. [French beau, bel, Latin bell-us + French c(h)amp, Latin camp-us] William de Beauchamp.—Testa de Nevill.

Didot-Bottin enumerates 3 Beauchamps and 3 Beaucamps in France, the latter, of course, all in the north.

This name was Latinized in mediaeval documents de Bello Campo.

Hugo de Belcamp (as it is written in Domesday), who in 1086 held a great barony in Herts, Bucks, and Bedfordshire, was the ancestor of “the god-like brood of Beauchamps,” as Drayton calls them, whose family history would fill volumes. He derived his name from Beauchamp of Avranches, seated between that city and Granville, which formed part of the barony of St. Denis le Gaste (De Gerville, Anciens Châteaux de la Manche). It has consequently been suggested that the Beauchamps were a branch of the barons of St. Denis; but this is only a conjecture.“He was most probably a kinsman of the Robert de Beauchamp, Viscount of Arques, in the reign of Henry I., who is first mentioned by Orderic under the year 1171, when by the King’s order he seized the castle of Elias de Saint-Saens, who had the guardianship of the young heir of Normandy, William Clito, with the object of arresting that prince and consigning him to captivity.” —Planché. Nor is the name of Hugh’s wife known; but he certainly left three sons; Simon, Pain (Paganus), and Milo, the ancestor of the Beauchamps of Eaton. Simon died childless, and probably early in life; for in the time of William Rufus his brother Pain had succeeded him, and obtained from that King the barony of Bedford, “which was,” says Dugdale, “a Capital Honour; and also the strong castle of Bedford, the Head of that Barony,” afterwards so nobly defended against King Stephen. Pain’s wife was the widowed Countess of Essex, Rohais, daughter of Alberic de Vere, Lord Justiciary temp. Henry I., with whom he founded Chicksand Priory, Bedfordshire, where she lies buried. It was during the life of their son Simon II. that Bedford Castle stood its famous siege. Stephen had given Simon’s daughter, with the whole barony of Bedford, to Hugh de Mellent, and commanded the Beauchamps to hold it of him, and do him service as their suzerain. Milo, who by royal license had then the custody of the fortress, refused obedience, and with his disinherited nephews, or, as Orderic calls them, the sons of Robert de Beauchamp, garrisoned it against the Royal forces. The pedigree is rather confused; and Mr. Planché maintains that it must have been the daughter of the elder Simon (hitherto believed to have died s. p.), of whom Orderic speaks as the cause of the feud; “for that she could not be the daughter of the second Simon, son of Pain, first Baron of Bedford, is clear, as he was living in 1207.” Now it is equally clear that the grandson of the Hugh of Domesday could not be living one hundred and forty-one years after the Conquest, nor be the father of William de Beauchamp, who died about 1256. Dugdale has evidently skipped a generation in the pedigree, and merged two successive Simons into one.

Bedford Castle was a formidable stronghold. It stood on high ground, “a Fort of great Strength, environed with a mighty Rampire of Earth, and an high wall within which was an impregnable Tower,” and the King raised an army for its assault; “but,” Orderic tells us, “as it was the season of Christmas, and the weather very rainy, after great exertions he had no success.” He was at last wearied out, and withdrew, leaving orders that the leaguer should be continued till the place was reduced by famine; and the gallant garrison, after holding out for five weeks, finally yielded it by the mediation of the King’s brother, and marched out upon honourable terms. The castle was demolished by Henry III. in 1223, for William de Beauchamp, who was then its possessor, “as he had been an active person in those turbulent Times against King John, so did he continue against King Henry III., as is manifest from his being taken prisoner at the battle of Lincoln.” But Ida his wife was the King’s cousin; and he obtained permission to rebuild his house and surround it with a wall, though “without any battlement” The line terminated with his three sons, of whom John, the last, was slain at Evesham, and his lands were divided between his daughters, Maud de Moubray, Beatrix Fitz Otes, and Ela de Wake.

Two junior branches remained; the Barons of Eaton descended (as I have said) from Milo; and the Barons of Elmley, to whom were apportioned the most brilliant destinies of the race. Of the former was Hugh de Beauchamp, who founded the priory of Besmade near his park at Eaton; and “in 32 Henry III. being at Jerusalem, on pilgrimage, he was the year next following slain in the Holy Land, in that battle wherein Guy, King of Jerusalem was taken prisoner.” The last of these Lords of Eaton mentioned by Dugdale is Roger in 21 Edward I., for, “in regard that they were not of the degree of Barons,” nothing is said of his posterity.

Walter de Beauchamp of Elmley Castle in Worcestershire, whose exact relationship to the parent stock has never been clearly made out, married Emmeline, the heiress of Urso de Abitot, and received from Henry I. the hereditary Shrievalty of Worcester “to hold as freely as any of his ancestors had done.” His son William was, as he himself had been, Despenser to the King, and termed “King of the Weste Partes,” for he was sheriff of four neighbouring counties, and held fifteen knights’ fees. His descendants—all of them stout soldiers—served as Barons-Marcher, till, in the middle of the thirteenth century, another William de Beauchamp, obtained the hand of Isabel de Mauduit, who brought to her son not only the Barony of Hanslape, but the famous Earldom of Warwick and its splendid castle, “the most Princely seat there is within the midland parts of the Realm.” The second Earl was christened Guy in memory of his celebrated predecessor, and valiantly upheld the ancient glory of the name. He fought in the Scottish wars under the eye of Edward I.; receiving from him the forfeited lands of the Baliols, and when the great King lay on his death-bed at Burgh-on-the-Sands in Cumberland, “calling divers of his Nobility unto him, and among them this Earl Guy, he desired them to be good to his son, and not to suffer Piers Gaveston to return to England.” Accordingly, in the next reign, Earl Guy was conspicuous among the barons who took part against the favourite; and in 1311, as he was travelling across Oxfordshire, came in the night time with a number of men, seized him, carried him to Warwick, and cut off his head. He avenged a private as well as a public quarrel; for “Piers,” says Dugdale, “had much angered the Earl of Warwick by calling him the Black Dog of Arderne, because of his black and swarthy complexion.” But he paid the penalty with his own life, for he died of poison administered by one of Gaveston’s partizans. His wife, Alice de Toeni, the widow of Thomas de Leyborne, was again a great heiress; and their two sons—left fatherless in very tender years—each became renowned in arms. Both brothers were founder Knights of the Garter. John, the younger, was Captain of Calais, Admiral of the Fleet, and Standard Bearer at Cressy, and had summons to parliament as a baron, but died s. p.: while Thomas, the third Earl, a soldier from his earliest boyhood, followed Edward III. throughout his triumphant campaigns. He was one of the principal commanders that, with the Black Prince, led the van of the army at Cressy, and fought there till “his hand was galled with the exercise of his sword and pole-axe.”

Before that, in 1346, followed only by a single squire and six archers, he had been the first man who set foot on shore at Hogue in Normandy, and “tho’ he had but these few men, and a weak Horse under him, he encountered with one hundred Normans, whereof they slew sixty, making way for the Army to land.” Again, on another occasion, hearing that the English lay idly encamped near Calais, “he hasted away with some choyce men,” sailed across the Channel, and “highly blamed those that occasioned the English to forbear fighting, saying, ‘I will goe on and fighte before the English bread which we have eaten be digested:’ and thereupon presently entered the Isle of Caus, which he wasted. But, alas! on his return towards Caleys he fell sick of the pestilence, and dyed on the 13th November, 1369.” He it was who built the existing castle of Warwick, founded the choir of the collegiate church of St. Mary’s (where the curiously drawn likenesses of his nine daughters are placed in the S. windows), and made the town toll-free.

But the fame of all his fore-fathers paled before the star of Earl Thomas’ grandson, Richard, “the very plume and pride of his martial race, who travelled to Russia, Poland, Venice, and Jerusalem, and whose livery the Soldan’s Lieutenant coveted to wear.” This latter story is so curious that it deserves to be given in detail. The Earl’s journey to the Holy Land seems to have been more like a royal progress than a pilgrimage; and when “he had perform’d his offerings at the Sepulchre of our blessed Saviour, he set up his Armes on the N. side of the Temple, which continued there many years after. At the time of his being thus at Hierusalem, a noble person call’d Baltredam, the Souldan’s Lieutenant, hearing that he was descended from the famous Sir Guy de Warwick, whose story they had in books of their own language, invited him to his Palace; and royally feasting him, presented him with three pretious stones of great value, besides divers clothes of silk and gold. Where this Baltredam told him privately that he faithfully believed as he did, tho’ he durst not discover himself, and rehearsed the Articles of the Creed. And on the morrow he feasted Sir Baltredam’s servants, and gave them scarlet with other English Cloth; which being showed Sir Baltredam, he return’d again to him, and said he would wear his livery, and be Marshal of his Hall. Whereupon he gave Sir Baltredam a gown of black puke furred, and had much discourse with him, for he was skilful in sundry languages.” It is strange to note how one of the favourite tales of Christendom had thus struck root in the far East. On another occasion, when Earl Richard, being sent to the great Council of Constance, had overthrown and slain his challenger (“a greate Duke”) in the lists, the Empress, moved to admiration, took his badge (or, as Dugdale calls it, his livery), the Bear, from the shoulder of one of his knights, and placed it on her own; whereupon the Earl, not to be outdone, presented to her the Badge wrought in pearls and precious stones. When he was Captain of Calais, he entertained the Emperor there on his way from England, “his comportment being such, that the Emperour told King Henry 'that no Christian Prince had such another knight for Wisdom, Nurture, and Manhood:' adding, ‘that if all courtesie were lost, yet might it be found again in him,’ insomuch as ever after, by the same Emperor’s authority, he was called the Father of Courtesie.” It was at Calais that, in 1415, he held his splendid tournament, having sent letters to the French Court, “offering to joust with any knight of France twelve courses.” The first day he came into the lists with closed visor; his horse trapped with the red maunch of Toeni on its silver field; the second day accoutred in the scarlet and silver bars of Hanslape, and again with his visor down; but on the third day he made himself known, for he came with his face open, with the chaplet on his helm rich with pearls and precious stones, and in his coat of arms of Guy and Beauchamp quarterly, having the arms of Toeni and Hanslape on his trappers, and said, “That as he had in his own person performed the service the two days before, so, with God’s grace, he would the 3rd.” He overthrew all his three opponents, unhorsing them so easily, that the discomfited Frenchmen “declared that he himself was bound to his saddle; whereupon he alighted and presently got up again; but all being ended, he returned to his pavilion, feasted all the people, gave to those three knights great rewards, and so rode to Calais with great honour.”

His first battle was against Owen Glendower in 1402, when he captured his banner and put him to flight; his next against the Percys at Shrewsbury; but it was in the French wars under Henry V. that the “victorious Warwick” won his great military renown. He had been in the King’s service from the time he was Prince of Wales, officiated as High Steward of England at his coronation, and was appointed guardian to his infant son, Henry VI., by his will. It does not, however, appear that he was with him at Agincourt. In 1417 “he attended the Duke of Clarence into France, took Dampfront, and was the first to enter Caen, and set the King’s arms on the walls with the Duke’s, crying a Clarence! a Clarence! laid siege to Caudebec, blockt up the city of Roan by land and by water, and won Mont St. Michel, and other strong places, for which the King created him Earl of Aumarle, and on the death of the Duke of Bedford, Lieutenant-General of the whole realm of France and Normandy.” He died in his French government, at Rouen Castle, in 1439; but desired that his body might be brought home, and lies buried in the Lady Chapel at Warwick, under a tomb second in magnificence only to that of Henry VII. in Westminster Abbey.

He had been twice married. By his first wife, Elizabeth de Berkeley, the heiress of Thomas, Viscount Lisle, he had three daughters; 1. Margaret, married to the Earl of Shrewsbury, from whose son, John Talbot, the Dudleys, Earls of Warwick, derived; 2. Alianor, wife of Thomas, Lord de Ros, ancestor of the Dukes of Rutland; and 3. Elizabeth, wife of George Nevill, Lord Latimer. By his second Countess (again an heiress), Isabel le Despencer, daughter of the Earl of Gloucester, and widow of his cousin, the Earl of Worcester, he left another daughter and a son, each of them married to a Nevill; for Anne de Beauchamp, “was wedded to Richard, Earl of Salisbury, on the same year that Henry, her brother” (then scarce ten years old) “wedded Cecily, his sister.”

The young heir, Henry, sixth Earl of Warwick, was loaded with such manifold honours from his very boyhood, that it is hard to conceive what further illustra­tion could have been reserved for his maturer years. Before he was nineteen, true to the war-like instincts of his race, he had proffered his services for the defence of Aquitaine, and been created Premier Earl of England, with per­mission for himself and his heirs male to wear a gold coronet “in the presence of the King and elsewhere.” Not more than three days later, he was made Duke of Warwick, with a grant of precedence immediately after the Duke of Norfolk; which last mark of Royal favour so bitterly angered the Duke of Buckingham, that an Act of Parliament was required, and actually passed, to adjust their rela­tive rank. Further, he received a grant of the Islands of Guernsey, Jersey, Sark, Erme, and Alderney, to be held for the annual rent of a rose; with the hundred and manor of Bristol, and all the Royal castles and manors in the Forest of Dean; and was crowned King of the Isle of Wight by the King’s own hands. “But, alas! this hopefull branch, the onely heir male to these great Earls, was cropt in the flower of his youth, and dyed at 22.” He left only a little daughter of two years old, Anne, in her own right Countess of Warwick, who was com­mitted to the care of Queen Margaret, but did not long survive. On her death, in 1449, the honours and possessions of her house reverted to her aunt Anne, Countess of Salisbury, the wife of the great mediaeval prince known as the King Maker, to whom the Earldom was confirmed by letters patent in the same year. When, after the fatal battle of Barnet, Lady Warwick was left a widow in 1471, she underwent great distress; the heiress of the Beauchamps “being constrained to take sanctuary in the abbey of Beaulieu in Hampshire, where she continued a long time in a very mean condition.” The whole of her vast property had been taken from her by Act of Parliament, and settled upon her two daughters, as if she had been already dead. She, however, outlived them both; and in 1487 received back her inheritance from Henry VII., but evidently on the under­standing that it should be passed on to him; for she lost no time in transferring the whole Warwick estate, and the Channel Islands—every shred of her birthright—by a special deed to the King.

Of the many ennobled offsets of this princely house, none proved of long continuance, and few outlasted the second generation.

The Lords Beauchamp of Hache, a Somersetshire branch, first summoned to Parliament in 1299, ended in 1360 with three heiresses, of whom Cecily, the eldest, carried the lion’s share of the property to the Seymours. The first Duke of Somerset, among his other titles, consequently received that of Viscount Beauchamp, now borne by the Marquesses of Hertford. The Lords of Kydder- minster continued for only two generations, from 1387 to 1420; and Margaret, their heiress, married first, John Pauncefort, and then John Wysham. There were four Barons of Bletshoe. The first was Roger de Beauchamp, an eminent soldier in the French wars, Captain of Calais, and Chamberlain to Edward III., who acquired Bletshoe by marrying Sybil de Patshul, and died in 1379; the last, his great-grandson John, whose sister, Margaret, carried the barony to the St Johns. She was three times married; first, to Sir Oliver St. John; secondly, to John Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, by whom she was mother of Margaret, Countess of Richmond, and grandmother of Henry VII.; and thirdly, to Sir Leo de Welles. The Lords St. Amand, descended from William de Beauchamp, who in 1449 had summons to Parliament by that title in right of his wife, again ended in the second generation in 1580, leaving no posterity; while the Lords Beauchamp of Powyke, from whom they derived, had already become extinct in 1496. Here, also, we find not more than two Lords of the name. They were seated at Beauchamp’s Court, near Alcester; and the first baron by writ, Sir John de Beauchamp, a Knight of the Garter, was appointed by Henry VI. Justice of South Wales, and Lord Treasurer of England. His son left three daughters: 1. Elizabeth, married to Lord Willoughby de Broke; 2. Anne, married to Richard Lygon; and 3. Margaret, married to Richard Rede. From the second daughter, Anne, are derived the Earls Beauchamp, whose ancestor, Reginald Pyndar, married the heiress of the Lygons in the last century.

Not a single heir-male now remains of this historical house. Not one of the many fair branches put forth by the stately and far-spreading tree survives. The name is indeed borne by a Norfolk baronet, but his pedigree only begins in the middle of the last century with Ephraim Beauchamp, “Citizen and Mason of London” (as he is termed on his tombstone), whose son married Anne Proctor, an heiress. In the following generation William Beauchamp Proctor became a baronet. Yet the multiplicity of manors retaining the name, proves how freely they once extended, and how wide a space they occupied in mediaeval England. The following long list probably gives but an imperfect impression of their number. In Worcestershire, Neshington-Beauchamp, Sheldesley-Beauchamp, Acton-Beauchamp, and Naunton-Beauchamp; in Somersetshire, Shepton-Beauchamp, Hatch-Beauchamp, and Beauchamp-Stoke; in Essex, Beauchamp-Roding or Roding-Beauchamp; Beauchamp-Otes, Beauchamp-Walter, Beauchamp-St. Paul’s, Beauchamp-St. Ethelbert, and Beauchamp-Prediton; in Buckinghamshire, Dray­ton-Beauchamp; in Berkshire, Compton-Beauchamp; and in Leicestershire, Kibworth-Beauchamp.