♀Anne Berkeley

Anne Berkeley was the only daughter of Sir Maurice Berkeley, whose elder brother, the Marquess of Berkeley, had disinherited him, and the wife of Sir William Dennis of Dyrham, in Gloucestershire, England, with whom she had thirteen children. She was the fifteenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Isabel Dennis.

Family

Anne’s father, Sir Maurice Berkeley^W, was a younger son of James, Lord Berkeley. In 1465 he married Isabel Meade, the daughter of Philip Meade^W, a Bristol merchant who was three times mayor of the city. They had three sons, Maurice, Thomas and James, and one daughter, Anne.

Her father’s elder brother, William, Marquess of Berkeley^W, disinherited him completely. When William died in 1492, Maurice was his heir all the same, and he went on to recover more than fifty manors and other lands that his brother had illegally disposed of. He was never summoned to Parliament, but he is counted Lord Berkeley by right, and the heralds styled him so. Douglas Richardson’s Plantagenet Ancestry, a study of colonial families descended from the medieval kings of England, traces Anne’s descent from King Edward I; her father’s mother, Isabel Mowbray, was a daughter of Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk^W.

Marriage

Anne married Sir William Dennis^W of Dyrham, Olveston and Iscote, the son and heir of Sir Walter Dennis of Olveston; William served as sheriff of Gloucestershire in 1519–20. In the Dennis family’s pedigree the heralds entered Anne as “Lady Anne d. of Morris Lord Barkley brother to Wm. Marquis Barkley”. The couple had thirteen children, six sons and seven daughters. According to the family pedigrees, their daughter Isabel married first Sir John Berkeley of Stoke Gifford and, after his death in 1545, Arthur Porter of Newent.

A fine^W, a conveyance of land made through the courts, shows Anne still living in the Easter term of 1523; when she died is not known. Sir William, who was also married to Edith Twinihoe and had one more daughter by her, died on 22 June 1533.

The family

Two of the couple’s six sons, Walter^W and Maurice^W, were knighted. Their daughter Mary became a nun at Lacock Abbey^W, in Wiltshire.

Notes

Sources

Anne’s parents, her marriage, her children and the fine of 1523 are from Douglas Richardson, Plantagenet Ancestry, 2nd edition (2011), vol. 1, pp. 256–260 and 637–638, and from the same author’s Magna Carta Ancestry (2005), pp. 75 and 272–273. Richardson cites John Smyth’s Berkeley manuscripts and the heralds’ visitations^W of Gloucestershire (1623, 1569 and 1582–83, printed together in 1885) and of Shropshire (1623, printed in 1889). The Shropshire visitation’s Berkeley pedigree, as he quotes it, names her as “Anne [Berkeley] wife to Sir Wm. Dennis of Dirham Kt.”

First or second wife

Richardson makes Anne Sir William’s first wife and Edith Twinihoe his second, as does the Dennis pedigree as he quotes it. Wikipedia’s article on Sir William puts the marriages the other way round. It cites a settlement of 1481, recorded after his father’s death, that names Edith as William’s wife, and it dates his marriage to Anne to about 1508. Its article on their son Maurice likewise calls Anne his father’s second wife.

Dates

Richardson gives no date for Anne’s birth, marriage or death. Her parents married in 1465, and she was living in the Easter term of 1523. Wikipedia’s article on her husband quotes the inquisition taken after his death, under which land was settled in 1532 on William and his wife Anne, which would mean that she was still living then.