♀Dame Alice Harcourt

Alice Harcourt (died 1526) was an English gentlewoman of Bessels Leigh in Berkshire. She outlived her husband, William Bessiles, by eleven years, and in her widowhood she took a widow’s vow of chastity; her will of 1526 calls her “Dame Alice Besellis vowes”. She was the fourteenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through her daughter Elizabeth Bessiles.

Early life and marriage

William Bessiles’s father had placed the boy in the keeping of William Warbelton and Margery Hannys, his marriage included. With his consent, and by Richard Harcourt’s later account, William was married at the age of fourteen to Alice, a daughter of Richard Harcourt of Witham. Her father was later knighted, and her mother is said to have been Edith Saint Clair. William’s mother, Clemence, who had married John Nowers, claimed that Thomas’s will gave her the disposal of the boy’s marriage, and she and her husband sued Richard Harcourt in Chancery^W; how the suit ended is not known.

Alice was William’s wife by 16 July 1461, when the manors of Radcot and Grafton in Oxfordshire were settled on the Warbeltons for life and then on William and Alice and their children. William Warbelton died in 1469, and on 16 June 1476 Margery surrendered Radcot and Grafton to William and Alice, who took possession. Their only child, Elizabeth, is said to have been born about 1475.

Wife and widow

Alice’s father remembered her in his will of 25 September 1486 as “Alice, my daughter”, the wife of William Bessiles, and named her among the heirs who might one day take his lands. William provided for her before his death: by a deed of 16 December 1510 he set aside lands at Longworth to keep a priest of the Friars Preachers at Oxford saying mass for the souls of himself and Alice for eighty years, and he settled Bessels Leigh, Radcot and Grafton on her for her life. He died on 5 May 1515 and was buried with the friars at Oxford.

As a widow Alice took a solemn vow of chastity and attached herself to Syon Abbey^W, the house of Bridgettine nuns on the Thames in Middlesex. She made her will on “the xxiiij day of may” 1526 and asked to be buried in the church of Syon, unless she died “within xxvi myles of Besellesly”, in which case she was to lie beside her husband with the friars at Oxford. Her bequests went to her Fettiplace grandchildren, and her executrix was Susan Kingston, a vowess like herself and most likely her granddaughter. The will was proved on 19 June 1526, so she died within those four weeks.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through her daughter Elizabeth, Elizabeth’s daughter Anne Fettiplace, Anne’s daughter Mary Purefoy, Mary’s daughter Susanna Thorne, Susanna’s son Thomas Dudley^W (1576–1653), later governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and Thomas’s son Samuel Dudley (1608–1683). One comes down through Samuel’s son Stephen Dudley (1654–1735) to Nathaniel Dudley (1763–1844), and the other to Nathaniel’s wife, Anna Smith (1764–1825); the two lines meet again in their daughter Sarah Dudley (1795–1839).

Notes

Sources for her life

Her will is entered in the registers of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury (PROB 11/22, quire “Porche”; cited by Douglas Richardson as P.C.C. 8 Porche). It is dated 24 May 1526 and calls her “Dame Alice Besellis vowes”; it names no Harcourt kin. Richardson’s Plantagenet Ancestry (pp. 263–264) gives the probate date, 19 June 1526, makes her a vowess of Syon, and names her parents as Sir Richard Harcourt of Witham and Edith Saint Clair. The marriage story, the Radcot settlements and William’s provisions for her come from J. Renton Dunlop’s abstracts of the inquisitions and Chancery proceedings in his account of the Besils family (Miscellanea Genealogica et Heraldica, 5th series, vol. 5, 1923–25); the inquisition taken at Bampton in 1484 calls her “Alice his wife, daughter of Sir Richard Harcourt, knight, lately esquire”. Her father’s will of 1486 is quoted in E. W. Harcourt’s The Harcourt Papers, vol. 1 (1880).

Her name and her father

Dunlop calls her father Sir Richard Harcourt of Stanton Harcourt; his own will styles him “Richard Harecourte, of Witham in Berks”. The pedigree printed in The Harcourt Papers calls the wife of William Bessiles Isabel, but her father’s will names a daughter Isabel and, separately, “Alice, my daughter” as William’s wife, and the 1485 inquisition also calls her Alice.

Susan Kingston

The will names the executrix as “my doughter Susan Kyngeston, vowes”. Alice had only one child, Elizabeth, and Richardson lists a Susan among Elizabeth’s daughters, the wife of John Kingston and afterwards a vowess of Syon, so the executrix was most likely this granddaughter.