♀Clemence (surname unknown)

Clemence (living in 1458) married Thomas Bessiles of Carswell in Berkshire and, after his death, John Nowers of Tackley in Oxfordshire. With her second husband she sued Richard Harcourt in Chancery over the marriage of her son William, claiming that Thomas’s will had given her the disposal of it. She was the fifteenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through her son William Bessiles (1444–1515).

Life

Clemence married Thomas Bessiles, a son of the knight Sir Peter Bessiles, and their son William was born about 1444; three more sons of Thomas, Humfrey, George and Christopher, are named in a family settlement of 1461. John Lydyard granted the manors of Carswell and Longworth in Berkshire to Thomas and Clemence and Thomas’s heirs, and William Warbelton and his wife Margery, Sir Peter’s widow, provided for Thomas’s children for as long as he lived.

Thomas died on 29 September 1458, and the inquisition^W held after his death recorded that Clemence survived him. Before he died, Thomas had given William into the Warbeltons’ rule “as well in his marriage as otherwise”, and with the boy’s consent they married him at fourteen to Alice, a daughter of Richard Harcourt. Clemence, who had married John Nowers of Tackley in Oxfordshire, later sued Richard Harcourt in Chancery^W, claiming that Thomas’s will gave her the disposal of her son’s marriage. In their bill she and John said that, trusting William Warbelton, they had delivered the boy into his keeping; Harcourt answered that Thomas himself had placed William with the Warbeltons in his lifetime. How the suit ended is not known. Nearly sixty years later, when William made his will on 4 May 1515, he asked for prayers for the souls of “my ffather and moder Thomas and Clemens”.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through her son William, William’s daughter Elizabeth Bessiles, her 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 life is known from J. Renton Dunlop’s account of the Besils family in Miscellanea Genealogica et Heraldica, 5th series, vol. 5 (1923–25), which abstracts the inquisition taken at Twyford, Berkshire, on 31 October 1458 after Thomas’s death (C 139/172: “Clemence survives”), Richard Harcourt’s answer to “the bill of John Nowers and Clemence his wife” (Early Chancery Proceedings, bundle 28, no. 384), and the 1484 inquisition that recites the 1461 settlement naming Thomas’s sons. Her son William’s will (Prerogative Court of Canterbury, PROB 11/18) names her as his mother. Dunlop’s pedigree chart shows her marriages to Thomas Besyles and to John Nowers; he places Nowers at Tackley.

Her family

No record names her parents or her own surname. Douglas Richardson’s Plantagenet Ancestry (p. 263) calls her “Clemence, perhaps daughter of John Lydyard, Esq.”; John Lydyard was the surviving feoffee who granted Carswell and Longworth to her and Thomas, which may be what lies behind the suggestion.