♀Beatrice de Braose

Beatrice de Braose (died 1440) was an Englishwoman of a Sussex knightly family who was widowed when her husband, Sir Hugh Shirley, was killed fighting for Henry IV at the Battle of Shrewsbury^W in 1403, and who in 1426 became the heir of her brother, Sir John de Braose of Wiston. She was the seventeenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through her son Ralph Shirley.

Marriage

Hugh Shirley married Beatrice de Braose, daughter of Sir Peter de Braose and Joan de Percy, and their son Ralph Shirley succeeded to the Shirley estates. Hugh was a knight of Lower Ettington in Warwickshire, and his uncle, the last Lord Basset of Drayton^W, had settled his lands on Hugh and his male heirs, bringing the Shirleys large estates in Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire and Warwickshire.

Widowhood

In the summer of 1403 the Percys rose against Henry IV, and Hugh fought on the king’s side against the rebels under Henry Percy, called Hotspur^W, outside Shrewsbury. He was killed in the battle, and is said to have been one of the knights who wore the king’s arms that day and were taken for him by the rebels.

Beatrice outlived Hugh by many years. When her brother Sir John de Braose died in 1426, Beatrice was his heir, and his manor of Wiston in Sussex came through her to her Shirley descendants: her grandson Ralph Shirley was “of Wiston in 1449”. She probably died in 1440.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through her son Ralph Shirley and Ralph’s daughter Beatrix Shirley (died 1483), and from Beatrix through the Bromes, Dentons, Purefoys and Thornes to Thomas Dudley (1576–1653), later governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and his 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

Her parents

A table in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register (vol. 150, July 1996, “Whose Son was Peter de Braose?”, p. 324) places Beatrice, wife of Hugh Shirley, among the children of Sir Peter de Braose (died 1377–8) and Joan de Percy (died 1369–70), beside Richard, Thomas and Philippa; the article’s text (p. 320) shows that this row of the table is Peter’s family, and that her brother John was also Peter’s son. Another compiled genealogy names her mother as Peter’s second wife, Joan Howard. This page follows the Register’s table.

Her brother’s heir

William Dugdale’s Antiquities of Warwickshire (1656), p. 466, calls her “Beatrix soror & haeres Joh de Brews”; Burke’s Peerage and Baronetage (31st ed., 1869), under Ferrers, “Beatrix, sister and heir of John de Braose, of West Neston, co. Sussex”; and James William Hawes (1914) “Beatrix, sister and heiress of Sir John de Brews”. The Register article (p. 319, note 30) says that John “died in 1426 holding it and Wiston”, and its table shows her grandson Ralph Shirley “of Wiston in 1449”. Her death in 1440 rests on the same table.

Her name

The Complete Peerage (2nd ed., vol. 1, 1910, p. 21) notes that the family spelt its name Brewes, and that in some twenty-five early references outside charter Latin it appears as Breouse, Breuse or Brewys but never as Braose, “the form adopted in peerages”. This page keeps the familiar form.