ilege of intermarriage with the great reigning families of Europe,
and neither Edward III. nor the French king could resist the temptation
of alliance with a family that was able to endow its daughters so
richly. Accordingly, the Duke of Clarence became in 1368 the husband of
Violante Visconti, the daughter of Galeazzo, lord of Pavia, and the
niece of Bernabo, signor of Milan, the bitter foe of the Avignon
papacy. Five months later, Lionel was carried away by a sudden
sickness, and thus the Visconti marriage brought little fruit to
England. Lionel's only child, Philippa, the offspring of his first
marriage, was married, just before her father's death, to Edmund
Mortimer, Earl of March, great-grandson of the traitor earl beheaded in
1330. Lionel's death added to the vast inheritance of the Mortimers and
Joinvilles the lands and claims of Ulster and Clarence, and so Edward
III.'s magnanimity in reviving the earldom of March after the disgrace
of 1330 was rewarded by the devolution of its estates to his
grand-daughter's child. The Earl of March was invested with a new
political importance, for his wife was the nearest representative of
Edward III, save for the dying Black Prince and his sickly son. The
fierce blood and broad estates of the great marcher family continued to
give importance to Philippa's descendants; and finally the house of
Mortimer mounted the throne in the person of Edward IV.

The estates of Lancaster were annexed to the reigning branch of the
royal house by the marriage in 1359 of John of Gaunt, Edward's third
surviving son, with Blanche of Lancaster, the heiress of Duke Henry,
who became, after her sister Maud's death, the sole inheritor of the
duchy of Lancaster. In 1362 John, who had hitherto been Earl of
Richmond, yielded up this dignity to the younger John of Montfort, its
rightful heir, and was created Duke of Lancaster at the same time that
Lionel was made Duke of Clarence. Ten years after her marriage Blanche
died, leaving John a son, Henry of Derby, the future Henry IV., whose
wedding, after his grandfather's death, to one of the Bohun
co-heiresses brought part of the estates of another great house within
the grasp of Edward III.'s descendants. Moreover, the other Bohun
co-heiress became in 1376 the wife of Thomas of Woodstock, the youngest
of Edward's sons, the Gloucester of the next reign. The three Bohun
earldoms of Hereford, Essex, and Northampton were thus absorbed by the
old king's childr