Eustace of Boulogne Count/Earl of Boulogne [7558] ²⁴

  General Notes:

Acceded: 25 DEC 1152
Crowned King of England 1152. Earl of Huntingdon.
The Complete Peerage vol.V,p.644.

http://www.hull.ac.uk/php/cssbct/cgi-bin/gedlkup.php/n=royal?royal01400

http://www.tudorplace.com.ar/PLANTAGENET.htm#Eustace%20of%20Blois%20(Count%20of%20Boulogne)

http://www.rpi.edu/~holmes/Hobbies/Genealogy/ps08/ps08_032.htm

French EUSTACHE, count of Boulogne (from 1150) and eldest son of King Stephen of England and his wife Matilda, daughter and heiress of the previous count of Boulogne (Eustace III).

Eustace IV did homage for Normandy (1137) to Louis VII, king of France, whose sister Constance he later married (1140), and he was several times used by the king as an opponent to the claims on the Norman duchy made by the counts of Anjou.

At a council held in London on April 6, 1152, King Stephen induced some English barons to pay homage to his son Eustace as their future king, but Theobald, archbishop of Canterbury, on the command of Pope Eugenius III, refused to crown him. Eustace, whom contemporaries respected only as a soldier, was killed while plundering the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk. His death made possible a settlement of the civil war between Stephen and the empress Matilda. Stephen designated as his heir Matilda's son Henry of Anjou, afterward Henry II of England.



As eldest son, he would have become King of England, but he was slain while plundering church lands near Bury St. His disrespect for the church may have stemmed from the refusal, in April of 1152, of Theobald, archbishop of Canterbury, to recognize him as the future king

Eustace m. 02-1140 at Paris, to Constance, Princess of France. He is buried in Faversham Abbey, Faversham, Kent. "Ancestral Roots..." (Balt., 1992) 169A: "Eustace had by unknown mistress: Eustache de Champagne, m. (1) Geoffrey de Mandeville, d.s.p., Earl of Essex, div.; m. (2) Anselme Candavaine, Count of Saint-Pol, d. 1164. She had three sons: Hugh, count of St. Pol, Engerrand, Guy. ...[Eustache de Champagne also] had Beatrice Candavaine, de Saint-Pol, m. as (3) wife, John I, Count of Ponthieu, d. 1191."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count_of_Boulogne

  Noted events in his life were:

• Acceded, 25 Dec 1152.

Eustace married Constance of Toulouse Capet Countess Boulogne [4564] [MRIN: 2976], daughter of Louis VI The Fat of France Capet King of France [4557] and Adelaide of Savoy de Maurienne [4558], after Feb 1140 in Paris, France. (Constance of Toulouse Capet Countess Boulogne [4564] was born about 1128 in Reims, France and died on 16 Aug 1176 in Rheims, Champagne-Ardenne, France.)