♀Anne Beauchamp

Anne Beauchamp (died 22 July 1534) was the second daughter and a co-heiress of the last Lord Beauchamp of Powick, and the wife of Richard Lygon of Madresfield, in Worcestershire, England. She was the fifteenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son Richard Lygon (about 1491–1556).

Family

Anne was born about 1472–75, the second of the three daughters of Richard Beauchamp, 2nd Lord Beauchamp of Powick^W, and his wife, Elizabeth Stafford. Douglas Richardson’s Magna Carta Ancestry traces her father’s line back to Henry de Bohun, Earl of Hereford^W, one of the barons who stood surety for Magna Carta.

Marriage and inheritance

Richard and Anne probably married about 1490. Richard was the son of Thomas Lygon of Great Malvern and Madresfield, and held Madresfield and Little Mitton, in Worcestershire, and Matson and Giffardes (in Broadwell), in Gloucestershire. The couple had eight sons, Richard, John, George, William, Roger, Michael, Thomas and Edward; George became a clergyman.

Her father died at Broomhill, in Kent, on 19 January 1502/3 without a surviving son, and his barony died with him. His lands were divided among his heirs, Anne and the sons of her two sisters. Anne’s portion of her father’s estates included the manors of Down Hatherley and Kemerton, in Gloucestershire, and Acton Beauchamp, in Worcestershire.

Widowhood

Richard died at Madresfield on 1 May 1512, when their son and heir, Richard, was twenty-one. Anne outlived her husband by twenty-two years and died on 22 July 1534, leaving a will.

Notes

Sources

Anne’s parents, birth, marriage, children, inheritance and death, and her husband’s family and lands, are from Douglas Richardson, Magna Carta Ancestry (2005), p. 510, with her father at p. 678; the line back to Henry de Bohun is Richardson’s chart at the head of p. 510. Richardson cites Nash’s Collections for the History of Worcestershire (1782), the heralds’ visitation^W of Worcestershire of 1569, the Complete Peerage, the Victoria County History of Worcestershire and of Gloucestershire, the Madresfield muniments of the Lygon family (1929) and the William and Mary Quarterly, 2nd series, vol. 16 (1936). The Complete Peerage, 2nd edition, vol. 2 (1912), p. 47, names Anne as the second daughter and one of her father’s co-heirs, the others being the sons of her sisters Elizabeth and Margaret; it records that his barony became extinct at his death, and names Anne as the ancestress, through Richard Lygon, of the Barons Beauchamp of Powyk, a title created in 1806 for William Lygon of Madresfield, who became Earl Beauchamp in 1815.

Dates

Richardson puts Anne’s birth about 1472–75, from her age, given as thirty in 1505 or forty in 1512. The Complete Peerage gives her age in 1512 as “40 or 50”, and the year of her death as 1535, against Richardson’s 22 July 1534. The year of the marriage is Richardson’s own estimate: he writes that they married “probably about 1490”. Richardson marks her son George as a clerk, that is, a clergyman.

Her husband’s name

Burke’s Peerage (1869) makes Anne the wife of a Thomas Lygon, “grandson of Thomas Lygon, who acquired the estate of Madresfield with the heiress of Bracy”, and the mother of Sir Richard Lygon; it also calls her mother Eleanor. Richardson, the Complete Peerage and the 1569 Visitation of Worcestershire, which records “Richard Lygon … = Anne da. & coeheire to Rich. Bewchamp of Powike”, all name her husband Richard.