| Nationality | Roger, second earl of Warwick (d. 1153), magnate, was the eldest son of Henry de Beaumont, earl of Warwick (d. 1119), and his wife, Margaret (d. after 1156), daughter of Geoffroy, count of Perche. He succeeded to his father's earldom in 1119, when he was already of age. He married before 1135 Gundreda, daughter of William (II) de Warenne, earl of Surrey; they had three sons, William, Waleran (successive earls), and Henry, and a daughter, Agnes.
Roger's early career was dominated by conflict with the Clinton family in Warwickshire. Between 1120 and 1124, responding to the rebellions by Roger's brother, Robert, and cousin, Waleran, count of Meulan, Henry I employed Geoffrey of Clinton to humble Roger, who was required to surrender a substantial part of his earldom to Clinton. The king also imposed on him a number of large fines, which were still being paid off in 1130. The lordship of Gower also came into royal hands at this time. When Henry I died in 1135, and was followed on the throne by Stephen, who relied heavily on the support of the earl's kinsfolk, Roger mobilized his followers to attack the Clintons and their imported tenants. There was a siege of Kenilworth Castle; Kenilworth Priory's lands were pillaged by the earl's men; but the Clinton party apparently fought back hard enough for the king to feel called upon to intervene. The written peace treaty survives. The young Geoffrey of Clinton made a formal submission to the earl and accepted his daughter, still only an infant, in marriage.
Because Roger's cousins were now important at court, he himself was close to the centre of events for a brief period after 1138. On the capture of King Stephen in 1141, he vacillated and (with the aid of his son-in-law Geoffrey) supported the Empress Matilda for a while in the summer of 1141, but he then veered back to the king's side after Stephen had been released from Bristol Castle. Although he stayed loyal to the king thereafter, Stephen disregarded him, apart from making sure that Warwick Castle was handed over to a royal garrison. Roger's brothers made things worse for him. His younger brother, Henry, retook the lordship of Gower from the Welsh about 1137 and held on to it. Another brother, Rotrou, bishop of Évreux, fell out with the earl in 1143, claiming that he had promised him exclusive patronage of the family minster, St Mary, Warwick. Rotrou was not shy of making trouble for his brother, and brought him to the brink of papal excommunication. Elsewhere, the outlying estates of the earldom were picked off by surrounding magnates. The earl of Hereford abstracted Roger's lucrative Gloucestershire possessions.
Contemporaries were of the opinion that Roger of Warwick was an unimpressive figure as earl. To Henry of Huntingdon, writing in the 1120s, Roger was 'debased in spirit'. In the 1140s the Gesta Stephani called him and the castellan of Oxford 'feeble men, rejoicing more in pleasure than in resolution of mind'. The Gesta described Roger's ignominious end on 12 June 1153: he died of shock at the royal court when he heard that his wife had tricked the royal garrison at Warwick into surrendering the castle to the supporters of the future Henry II. Although the Gesta kindly added that the earl was 'hardly to blame', the comments on Roger are patronizing and slighting, and do not spare him the ultimate medieval sarcasm, that he could not manage his wife. However, he did compel the Clintons to acknowledge his local dominance, and, what is more, there is evidence that he maintained an ascendancy over the other barons of Warwickshire. After his death his widow married William of Lancaster, lord of Kendal. |