♀Elizabeth Sandys

Elizabeth Sandys is said to have been a daughter of William Sandys^W, Lord Sandys of the Vyne in Hampshire, and the wife of Sir Humphrey Forster of Aldermaston, a Berkshire knight. She was the twelfth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Margaret Forster.

Her father was one of the leading men at the court of King Henry VIII. Summoned to Parliament as a baron from 1529, he served as the king’s Chamberlain of the Household from 1530 to 1535, went with Cardinal Wolsey to Paris, and signed the letter that urged the Pope to grant Henry his divorce. His wife, and probably Elizabeth’s mother, was Margery Bray, the only daughter and heir of John Bray.

Elizabeth married Humphrey Forster, the eldest son and heir of Sir George Forster of Aldermaston. The couple had a son, William, his father’s heir, and three daughters, Elizabeth, Margaret and Anne. Margaret became the wife of Anthony Elmes of Bolney, in the parish of Harpsden near Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire. Sir Humphrey died in 1556, leaving William as his sole executor.

Notes

Her parentage and marriage

The 1566 heralds’ visitation^W of Berkshire, as printed by W. C. Metcalfe in 1885, records that Sir Humphrey Forster of Aldermaston “mar. Elizabeth, da. to Sir William Sandes, Kt, Lord Sandes of the Vyne”, and by her had William, Elizabeth, Margaret (“second da.”) and Anne. Robert Battle and Henry B. Hoff’s study of the Elmes family in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register (2022) gives the same marriage, from the heralds’ visitations.

Her mother

The Complete Peerage gives Lord Sandys’s wife as Margery, “only da. and h. of John Bray (Senior)”, and names no other wife. Neither it nor the visitation names Elizabeth’s mother, but two other entries in the Complete Peerage, on Lord Sandys’s daughter Alice, call Alice’s mother “Margaret, da. and h. of John Bray”.