Isabel le Despenser

Isabel le Despenser was the name of several women of the aristocratic family of Despenser during the Middle Ages.

Countess of Arundel

Isabel le Despenser (1312 – 1356) was the eldest daughter of Hugh the younger Despenser and Eleanor de Clare.

On February 9, 1321 Isabel was married to Richard Fitzalan, the heir to the earldom of Arundel. After their father was executed for treason in 1326, Isabel and her youngest sister Elizabeth le Despenser were the only daughters of Hugh the Younger to escape being confined in nunneries, Isabel because she was already married and Elizabeth because of her youth.

Richard and Isabel had one son, Edmund Fitzalan, born in 1327, and in 1331 Isabel's husband became earl of Arundel. However in December 1344 Richard Fitzalan had their marriage annulled on the grounds that he had never freely consented to marry Isabel. Isabel retired to several manors in Essex that were given to her by her ex-husband.

Richard and Isabel's only child, Edmund Fitzalan, was rendered illegitimate by this annulment and so was unable to inherit his father's earldom. When his father died in 1376 Edmund quarrelled with his half-siblings, the children of his father's second marriage, over inheritance rights. Edmund was imprisoned in the Tower of London until he was released in 1377 by request of his brothers-in-law.

Countess of Worcester and Warwick

Isabel le Despenser (July 26, 1400 – 1439) was the posthumous daughter and eventually the sole heiress of Thomas le Despenser and his wife, Constance of York. She was born several months after her father had been beheaded for plotting against King Henry IV of England.

Isabel married Richard de Beauchamp, 1st Earl of Worcester who died in 1422 after being mortally wounded at the siege of Meaux. They had a daughter, Elizabeth de Beauchamp, Lady of Abergavenny, born 1415.

After her first husband's death, Isabel married again, to Richard de Beauchamp, 13th Earl of Warwick (her 1st husband's cousin), by whom she had two children:

* Henry, who succeeded his father as Earl of Warwick, and later became Duke of Warwick;
* Anne Beauchamp, who was theoretically Countess of Warwick in her own right after the death of her infant niece and namesake, and who married Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick.