We know quite a lot about Louis’s tomb, in Durham cathedral, which
was clearly very grand. It featured not only an ‘excellent and lively
picture’of the bishop but also a Latin inscription, which made the most
of Louis’s good points:‘[he was] a man of royal birth, lavish, gleeful, and
a constant enemy to sadness’.^98
This was, of course, far from the end of the house of Beaumont in
England. The male line, in descent from Henry, survived all the way
through the Hundred Years’War. Indeed, during the conflict, the Beau-
monts did not merely contrive to get their baronage upgraded into a
viscounty (thefirst, in fact, in England). They also managed to acquire
their family’s old patrimony in Anjou and Maine, even though they did
not hold onto the latter for very long. The dynastyfinally died out in the
early sixteenth century. The barony of Beaumont then went into abey-
ance for several hundreds of years, until it was recreated for the family’s
descendants, the Stapletons, who later married into the house of the duke
of Norfolk.^99 It is worth noting that not just the Beaumonts, but their
successors as well, readily recalled their illustrious Brienne ancestry.
Figure 5.2 The badge of the‘Beaumont Herald of Arms Extraordinary’
(established 1982). Image by Sodacan (2011):https://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Beaumont_Herald_Extraordinary#/media/File:Badge_of_the_
Beaumont_Herald_Extraordinary.svg(^98) See the oldDictionary of National Biography, ed. L. Stephen and S. Lee, 66 vols.
99 (London, 1885–1901), iv, 64.
For the history of the baronage down to the late nineteenth century, see G. E. Cockayne
et al., The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United
Kingdom: Extant, Extinct or Dormant, 13 vols. (London, 1910–59), ii, 60–7.
162 Hubris and Nemesis (c. 1311–1356)