♂Edward Purefoy

Edward Purefoy was an English gentleman of Shalston, Buckinghamshire, in the first half of the sixteenth century. His daughter Mary married Thomas Thorne of Yardley Hastings, and through her Thomas Dudley^W, later governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W, was his great-grandson. He was the twelfth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through his daughter Mary Purefoy and her daughter Susanna Thorne.

Family

Edward was most likely a son of Nicholas Purefoy and his wife Alice Denton, who appears to have been a daughter of John Denton of Wightam and his wife Isabel Brome. He is said to have been born at Effield on 13 June 1494.

Marriage and children

Edward Purefoy married Anne Fettiplace, probably a daughter of Richard Fettiplace of East Shefford, Berkshire, and his wife Elizabeth Bessiles. The Purefoy pedigree recorded at the 1619 heraldic visitation^W of Leicestershire gives them eleven sons and a daughter: John, William, Thomas, Edward, Nicholas, Henry, a second Thomas, Charles, Francis, a second Henry, Richard and Mary. John was the son and heir, and Mary married Thomas Thorne, a gentleman of Yardley Hastings in Northamptonshire.

Edward is said to have died at Shalston on 1 June 1558. John held Shalston after him.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through his daughter Mary, her daughter Susanna Thorne, Susanna’s son Thomas Dudley (1576–1653) 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

His daughter Mary

No record names Edward as Mary’s father. The tie rests on the will of his son John Purefoy of Shalston, dated 4 May 1579 and proved 25 May 1579 in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, printed in abstract by Waters in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register 49 (1895), p. 507. The will remembers “My cousin Robert Thorne … Thomas Dudley … My nephew Edward Thorne”; Robert and Edward were sons of Thomas Thorne and Mary, so Mary is taken to be John’s sister. The 1619 Leicestershire visitation pedigree (Harleian Society, vol. 2, 1870, p. 33) lists Mary among Edward’s children as the wife of Thomas Thorne of Yardley.

Birth and death

The dates come from Waters’s note on John Purefoy’s will, which calls the testator “son and heir of Edward Purefoy of Shireford, Esq. (Leic.) who was born at Effield, June 13, 1494, and died at Shalston, June 1, 1558”. No record of his baptism or burial is known.

His parents

The 1619 Leicestershire pedigree sets Edward under “Nicholas Purifoy. = Alice Da. of Tho. Denton of Cauersfeild.” The Denton pedigree in the Oxford visitations (Harleian Society vol. 5, pp. 228-229) instead places Alice, as the wife of “Nicholas Purefoy of Shaldeston”, among the children of “John Denton of Wightam” and Isabel, a daughter of John Brome of Baddesley, with a brother Thomas Denton of Caversfield. The Thomas of the Purefoy pedigree is most likely that brother, written in his father’s place; the reported grant of Nicholas’s wardship and marriage to John Denton in 1491 fits the Oxford pedigree. A visitation pedigree was compiled from the family’s own account, a generation or more after the events.

The children

The same pedigree names the sons in the order John of Shalston, William of Hollingbourne in Kent, Thomas, Edward, Nicholas, Henry, Thomas, Charles (marked “sine p’le”, without issue), Francis, Henry and Richard. The repeated names Thomas and Henry may mean that an elder child of each name died young; the pedigree does not say. Dean Dudley’s History of the Dudley Family (1886) calls Richard the “third son of Edward Purefoy, of Shalston”, which does not agree with the pedigree’s order.