♀Elizabeth Berkeley

Elizabeth Berkeley was a daughter of Sir John Berkeley of Stoke Gifford, in Gloucestershire, England, and the wife of Henry Ligon of Upton St Leonards, a younger son of the Lygons of Madresfield who served Henry, Lord Berkeley^W. She was the thirteenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Isabel Lygon (1555–1615).

Family

Elizabeth was one of the three children of Sir John Berkeley of Stoke Gifford and his wife, Isabel Dennis, a daughter of Sir William Dennis of Dyrham, in Gloucestershire; she had a brother, Richard, and a sister, Mary. Her father died in 1545. Her mother then became the second wife of Arthur Porter^W of Newent and Alvington, a sheriff of Gloucestershire, who died on 31 May 1559. They had no children together.

Marriage

Elizabeth married Henry Ligon, the fourth son of Sir Richard Lygon of Madresfield, in Worcestershire, and his wife, Margery Greville. Henry made his home at Upton St Leonards, in Gloucestershire, and in 1560, and again in 1568, he was in the service of Henry, Lord Berkeley. The couple had two sons, Sir Arnold and Henry, and two daughters, Mary, who married Samuel Clinton, and Isabel. Douglas Richardson’s Plantagenet Ancestry, a study of colonial families descended from the medieval kings of England, traces the ancestry of both Henry and Elizabeth back to King Edward I.

Henry made his will on 30 July 1577, the day before he died, and their daughter Isabel was among those he remembered in it.

Notes

Sources

Elizabeth’s parents, her mother’s second marriage, her own marriage and her children are from Douglas Richardson, Plantagenet Ancestry, 2nd edition (2011), vol. 1, p. 634, and from the same author’s Magna Carta Ancestry, p. 264. 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 Worcestershire (1569). The Gloucestershire Berkeley pedigree, as Richardson quotes it, gives “Elizabeth [Berkeley] ux. Hen. Lison [sic] of Upton St. Leonards”, and the Worcestershire Lygon pedigree says that Henry “m. Eliz. da. to S’ John Berckly K.”

Dates

Richardson gives no date for Elizabeth’s birth, marriage or death, and does not say whether she outlived her husband. Her father, John Berkeley, was born about 1510; the Gloucestershire visitation gives his death as 1545, and the Visitation of Somerset as 1546.