♂Edward Bassett

Edward Bassett (about 1558 – 1602) was a gentleman of Uley, in Gloucestershire, England, and the son and heir of William Basset of Uley and Highfield. He was the twelfth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Jane Bassett (1585–1631).

Family

Edward was the son of William Basset and his wife, Jane Ashe, a daughter of John Ashe, and was probably born at Uley about 1558. Douglas Richardson’s Plantagenet Ancestry, a study of colonial families descended from the medieval kings of England, traces his mother’s ancestry back to King John.

Edward married Isabel Lygon, a daughter of Henry Ligon of Upton St Leonards and his wife, Elizabeth Berkeley. The couple had four sons, William, Barnaby, Edward and Giles, and four daughters, Elizabeth, Margery, Susanna and Jane.

Death

Edward made his will on 3 June 1601, asking to be buried in the chapel of Uley, and his daughter Jane was among those he remembered in it. He died before 5 November 1602, when the will was proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury^W. Isabel survived him and later married Rice Davis of Tickenham, in Somerset.

Long after his death, the gravestone that Jane shared with her husband, John Deighton, in the south aisle of St Nicholas church in Gloucester named her “daughter to Edward Basset, of Uley, Esq.”

Notes

Sources

Edward’s parents, marriage, children and will are from Douglas Richardson, Plantagenet Ancestry, 2nd edition (2011), vol. 1, pp. 176 and 634–635, and from the same author’s Magna Carta Ancestry, p. 264; the gravestone’s words are printed in Magna Carta Ancestry, p. 265. Richardson cites articles in The American Genealogist (vols. 9 and 10, 1932–1934), John Smyth’s Berkeley manuscripts and the heralds’ Visitation of Gloucestershire^W of 1623. He gives the will’s reference as P.C.C. 77 Montague.

Dates

Richardson gives no birth or death date for Edward. His birth about 1558 at Uley comes from an online family tree, which also gives his death at Uley on 5 November 1602. Richardson gives 5 November 1602 as the day the will was proved, so Edward died between 3 June 1601 and that day.

His wife’s name

Richardson calls her “Isabel (or Elizabeth)” Ligon in Plantagenet Ancestry and “Elizabeth (or Isabel)” in Magna Carta Ancestry; the 1623 Visitation of Gloucestershire names her Elizabeth, daughter of Henry Lygon. The daughters’ husbands, as Richardson gives them, were William Clayfield and Thomas Poyntz (Elizabeth), Samuel Shellom (Margery, also called Margaret) and Michael Dorney (Susanna).

The name

Richardson spells the family name Basset. The 1623 Visitation writes it Bassett and calls the place Yewley.