♀Ada de Warenne

Ada de Warenne^W (died 1178) was Countess of Huntingdon by her marriage to Henry of Scotland, Earl of Huntingdon and Northumberland and the son of King David I of Scotland, and the mother of two Kings of Scots; in the year of her death, a widow of twenty-six years, she founded the nunnery of Haddington. She was the twenty-fourth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Margaret of Scotland.

Countess of Huntingdon

Ada, also called Adeline, was a daughter of William de Warenne^W, Earl of Surrey, and of Isabel of Vermandois^W, the daughter of Hugh, Count of Vermandois. She married Henry of Scotland, who held the earldom of Huntingdon from 1136 and that of Northumberland from 1139. Their daughter Margaret of Scotland later married Humphrey de Bohun, hereditary Constable of England. Margaret’s descendant John Washburn (died 1547) probably lies on that line to Nancy Jane Blanchard.

Widowhood

Henry died on 12 June 1152, in his father’s lifetime, and was buried at Kelso. Because he died first, the Scottish crown passed to their sons Malcolm and William, who became one after the other Kings of Scotland. Ada outlived her husband by twenty-six years. She died in 1178, having founded that same year a nunnery at Haddington.

Notes

Sources

Ada’s parentage, her marriage, her husband’s earldoms, death and burial, her sons’ reigns, and her death and founding of the nunnery of Haddington in 1178 are given in the Complete Peerage (2nd ed., vol. 6, 1926, p. 642 and notes, under Huntingdon), citing the Vita et Passio of Waltheof, William of Jumièges, the Chronicle of Melrose, the Holyrood Chronicle and Fordun’s Scotichronicon. The same volume (p. 457, under Hereford) names Margaret as the daughter of “Prince Henry of Scotland, Earl of Huntingdon, by Ada, da. of William (de Warenne), Earl of Surrey”.

The descent through John Washburn

That the John whom the pedigrees give as a son of Joyce Botetourt’s great-granddaughter Joan Mitton was John Washburn of Bengeworth, who died in 1547, is the identification of the Washbournes’ historian, James Davenport, not a record’s, so the descent through him is given here as probable.