Rosamund Clifford

Rosamund Clifford (c.1150- c.1176), often called "The Fair Rosamund" or the "Rose of the World", was famed for her beauty and was a mistress of King Henry II of England, famous in English folklore.

Rosamund was the daughter of marcher lord Walter Clifford and his wife Margaret, who had adopted the surname after taking possession of Clifford Castle on the River Wye. She had two sisters, Amice and Lucy.

Clifford first met the King when her father performed some service for him in the course of Henry's campaigns in Wales.

Did she have any children?

Historians are divided over whether or not Rosamund's relationship with the King produced children. The question is complicated by the difficulty of separating the facts of Rosamund's life from the profusion of legends surrounding it. Many historians have concluded that Rosamund most likely bore Henry a single child but cannot identify it or even provide a specific date of birth. Some modern writers, including Alison Weir, are of the opinion that Rosamund had no children; but whether this means she never gave birth or merely that none of her children survived remains unclear.

Legend has attributed to Rosamund two of King Henry's favourite illegitimate sons: Geoffrey Plantagenet (1151-1212), Archbishop of York, and William Longsword (1176-1226), Earl of Salisbury. Her maternity in these two cases was not widely believed at the time but was claimed centuries later. Geoffrey is now not accepted as Rosamund's son. Henry and Rosamund met about 1166, and their relationship lasted until 1176. Geoffrey and Rosamund would therefore have been about the same age, and Geoffrey was therefore almost certainly the son of Ykenai, another mistress of Henry.

William de Longespee's maternity was a mystery for many years but the truth was discovered when charters issued by him were found to contain references to "Comitissa Ida, mater mea." (Bradenstoke Cartulary, 1979). This Ida is now known to be Ida, Countess of Norfolk.

Other stories

Little is known about Rosamund, but she is discussed in books about Eleanor of Aquitaine, Henry's Queen. The legends concerning her life are many, but few hard facts are available. The story that she was poisoned by a jealous Eleanor is certainly untrue, and so is the tale that Henry constructed the hunting lodge at Woodstock for her and surrounded it with a garden that was a labyrinth ("Rosamund's Bower," which was pulled down when Blenheim Palace was built nearby). In the 'French Chronicle of London', she is, oddly enough, described as having been roasted by the wife of Henry III, Eleanor of Provence. During the Elizabethan era, stories claiming that she had been murdered by Eleanor of Aquitaine gained popularity; but the Ballad of Fair Rosamund by Thomas Delaney and the Complaint of Rosamund by Samuel Daniel (1592) are both purely fictional.

She is known to have entered Henry's life just as Eleanor was pregnant with her final child, John. Indeed, Eleanor is known to have given birth to John at Beaumont Palace rather than at Woodstock: because, it is speculated, having planned to give birth at Woodstock, she refused to do so upon finding Rosamund there.

Authorities differ over whether Rosamund stayed quietly in seclusion at Woodstock while Henry went back and forth between England and his continental possessions, or whether she traveled with him as a member of his household. If the former, the two of them could not have spent more than about a quarter of the time between 1166 and 1176 together (as historian Marion Meade puts it: "For all her subsequent fame, Rosamond must be one of the most neglected concubines in history"). Historians do seem to agree, however, that Rosamund was Eleanor's opposite in personality and that Henry and Rosamund appear to have shared a deep love.

Death and thereafter

Henry's liaison with Rosamund became public knowledge in 1174; it ended when she retired to the nunnery at Godstow near Oxford in 1176, shortly before her death.

Henry and the Clifford family paid for her tomb at Godstow in the choir of the convent's church and for an endowment that would ensure care of the tomb by the nuns. It became a popular local shrine until 1191, two years after Henry's death. Hugh of Lincoln, Bishop of Lincoln, while visiting Godstow, noticed Rosamund's tomb right in front of the high altar. The tomb was laden with flowers and candles, demonstrating that the local people were still praying there. Unsurprisingly calling Rosamund a harlot, the bishop ordered her remains removed from the church: instead, she was to be buried outside the church 'with the rest, that the Christian religion may not grow into contempt, and that other women, warned by her example, may abstain from illicit and adulterous intercourse'. Her tomb was moved to the cemetery by the nuns' chapter house, where it could be visited until it was destroyed in the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII of England. The remains of Godstow Priory still stand and are open to the public.

Author Bertrice Small's book "Rosamund" (2004) is a fictional story about a woman named Rosamund, who had a similar affair with King Henry VIII and was friends with his wife Catherine of Aragon, while seeking love at Friarsgate. Sharon Kay Penman also writes about the liaison in her "Time and Chance".

Sources

• Biography from Who's Who in British History (1998), H. W. Wilson Company. Who's Who in British History, Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1998.
• W. L. Warren, Henry II, 1973.

Fiction

• Rosamund Clifford is mentioned in Virginia Henley's historical romance, "The Falcon and the Flower." (1988)
• The affairs with Henry II is also detailed in Sharon Penman's historical novelisation "Time and Chance". This represents the life of the King based on scholarly research.

External link

• Photo of Godstow Priory