Thus in the four centuries after the Conquest we find Fitz-Hamon, the second founder, connected by marriage with the great Norman soldier. In the civil wars of Stephen, Robert Earl of Gloucester and Lord of Tewkesbury, and his half-sister, Maud or Matilda, played the parts we know so well. Again, Gilbert de Clare, who is buried in the Abbey, was one of the chief signatories of Magna Charta. The last of the three Gilberts de Clare fell at Bannockburn in 1314, at the age of twenty-three. The heiress of the latter married a Despenser, a family closely connected with Tewkesbury, two prominent members of which, viz., the favoured ministers of Edward II., will be remembered as by-words in history. Sir Guy de Brien, the valiant standard-bearer of Edward III., was the second husband of the widow of the fifth Lord Despenser, and, with her, helped to rebuild the choir, in the ambulatory of which his splendid monument is still to be seen. The Despensers in turn passed away, the last heiress marrying in succession two cousins, each named Richard Beauchamp. Of her second marriage were born two children--a son, who married the sister of Warwick the king-maker, and a daughter, who became the wife of the Earl of Warwick himself. The king-maker's two daughters were unfortunate in their husbands, one of them having been married to the luckless Duke of Clarence, and the other to the young Prince Edward, who fell in 1471 at the battle of Tewkesbury. Of these noble patrons of the Abbey from the first Tewkesbury De Clare to the time of the ill-fated Duke of Clarence, all save two, _i.e._, the second Richard Beauchamp and the great king-maker, Richard Neville, who are both buried at Warwick, found their last resting-place in Tewkesbury. [Illustration: TILE SHOWING THE ARMS OF FITZ-HAMON AND THE ABBEY IMPALED.] [Illustration: _Photo. D. Gwynne._ TEWKESBURY ABBEY, FROM THE NORTH.] FOOTNOTES: [1] The original stone is in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. [2] Mr. Blunt, in his "Tewkesbury and its Associations," assigns the northernmost chapel to St. James, and the one between it and the choir aisle to St. Nicholas, but in his plan he reverses them. The plan in the _Builder_ of December, 1894, follows Mr. Blunt's plan in so naming the two chapels. Some have thought the present Northern Chapel to be that dedicated to St. Eustachius. CHAPTER II. THE EXTERIOR. One of the most characteristic views of the exterior is to be got from the iron gates which give admission to the churchyard. The view thus obtained presents to us, with the exception of the windows and the pinnacles on the tower, features almost entirely Norman.