Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 25.djvu/247

H incessant attacks, and offered battle at Tizzana in September. Dal Verme retreated towards Lucca. Hawkwood pursued, and during the night of the 23rd cut off his rearguard. In the following month he drove him into Liguria. Florence was thus enabled to make peace early in 1392 on honourable terms.

During the rest of his life Hawkwood resided chiefly at Florence, where he had a house called Polverosa in the suburb San Donato di Torre. There he died after a short illness on the night of 16–17 March 1394. On the 20th the republic gave him a magnificent funeral in the Duomo. An elegy on the occasion by an anonymous poet, which minutely describes the obsequies, was long a favourite with the populace (see Archivio Storico Italiano, 4ta serie, xvii. 172–7). The tomb was on the north side of the choir. An elaborate marble monument had been designed while Hawkwood was alive, and the design was painted in fresco on the wall above the tomb by Taddeo Gaddi and Giuliano d'Arrigo. This design, which was never carried out, was in 1436 replaced by a fresco in terra-verde by Paolo Uccello, representing Hawkwood on an ambling charger in complete armour, except that for the helmet was substituted a light cap or berrettone, a short cloak depending from his shoulders, and the bâton of a general in his right hand. The painting was transferred to canvas about 1845, and placed at the west end of the church. The figure is that of a man above the middle height, broad-shouldered and deep-chested. The features are regular and handsome, and the mouth, chin, and cheeks clean-shaven. According to Paolo Giovio (Elogia Virorum bellica virtute illustrium), a doubtful authority, Hawkwood's complexion was ruddy, and his hair and eyes chestnut-coloured. These traits do not appear in the picture. The engraving published by Giovio, and reproduced in Wright's ‘Bibliotheca Topographica Britannica,’ vol. vi., is not authentic.

Hawkwood is mentioned by Stow (Annals, ed. 1615, p. 335) as one of the founders of the English Hospital at Rome in 1380. During his later life he was much troubled by pecuniary embarrassment. In April 1391, however, the Florentine government raised his pension to the sum of 3,200 florins of gold, settled a jointure on his wife of one thousand florins of gold per annum, voted a marriage portion of two thousand florins of gold for each of his three daughters by his second wife, and conferred on himself and his issue male the freedom of the city, saving only capacity to hold office. Some estates at Naples, Capua, and Aversa, which he had acquired while in the Neapolitan service, he parted with in 1387. Besides the house at San Donato di Torre, he had an estate called La Rochetta at Poggibonzi, with villas and grounds at San Lorenzo a Campi. These he appears to have sold before his death, with the intention of returning to England, reserving only the right of occupying the house in San Donato di Torre until his departure. He had also contracted to sell the castles which, as already mentioned, belonged to him in the Aretino to the Florentine republic for six thousand florins of gold, giving up at the same time his pension, his wife's jointure, and the marriage portion of his third daughter. The contract was carried out by his widow.

Neither the date nor the fact of Hawkwood's first marriage has been established. Before his marriage with Bernabò Visconti's natural daughter, Donnina, Hawkwood had, besides two sons, a daughter, Antiocha, or Mary, who resided in 1379 at Milan with her husband, Sir William de Coggeshall, afterwards of Codham Hall, Essex (for the descendants of this union see Notes and Queries, 7th ser. x. 101–2). Corio (Storia di Milano, ed. 1856, ii. 277) mentions another daughter, Fiorentina, married to a Milanese noble, Lancellotto del Mayno, and a third daughter, Beatrice, appears in Berry's ‘County Genealogies, Sussex,’ p. 62, as the wife of John Shelley, M.P. for Rye between 1415 and 1423, an ancestor of the poet Shelley. By Donnina Hawkwood had one son, John, and three daughters, viz. Janet, Catherine, and Anne. The first daughter married, on 7 Sept. 1392, Brezaglia, son of Count Lodovico di Porciglia, commander of the Bolognese forces, podestà of Ferrara, and for a brief period after Hawkwood's death commander of the Florentine forces. The second married, in January 1393, Conrad Prospergh, a German condottiero, who had served under Hawkwood. The third married after her father's death Ambrogiuolo di Piero della Torre of Milan. In 1395 the republic, at the special request of Richard II, granted Lady Hawkwood the right of transferring her husband's body to England. Whether she did so, or what was her subsequent history, is not clear; but her son John came home, was naturalised in 1407, and settled on the ancestral estate of Hedingham Sibil, in the church of which parish a cenotaph, a fragment of which still exists, had already been placed to Hawkwood's memory, and a chantry founded by some friends, and where in all likelihood his bones were laid to rest (, Essex, ii. 262, 287, 291, 373; Visitation of Essex, Harl. Soc. i. 38;, Baronetage, vol. iii. pt. ii. p. 511; , Ancient Funerall Monuments, p. 623).