♀Isabel de Meynell

Isabel de Meynell (died 25 April 1393) was a Derbyshire knight’s daughter who married three knights in turn, and through her the estates of the Basset lords of Drayton passed to the Shirleys: the last Lord Basset of Drayton left his lands to her son Hugh Shirley. She was the eighteenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through her son Hugh Shirley (died 1403).

Parents

Isabel was the daughter of Sir Hugh de Meynell of Langley Meynell in Derbyshire and his second wife, Alice de Audley, a daughter of Nicholas de Audley, 1st Lord Audley. Alice had been married before, to Ralph Basset of Drayton, the heir of Lord Basset, who died before his father in about 1335. Their son Ralph succeeded his grandfather as the last Lord Basset of Drayton^W, so Isabel was most likely his half-sister through their mother. Older pedigrees took her for a Basset, and a herald’s pedigree of 1583 called her the last Lord’s illegitimate sister.

Marriages

Isabel married first Sir Thomas Shirley of Lower Ettington in Warwickshire. Their son was Hugh Shirley. Thomas died before 1362, and Isabel married twice more: Sir John de Wodhull, who died in 1367, and, by a licence dated 2 May 1369, Sir Gerard Braybrooke^W.

With Gerard she had a son, Ralph, and a daughter, Nichole. In 1376 Gerard and Isabel gave up all their right in the Wiltshire manors of Tyderle, Great Durnford and Little Durnford to Nicholas de Wodhull for £100.

The Basset lands

In 1389–90 Isabel’s half-brother, Ralph, the last Lord Basset of Drayton, settled his lands on her son Hugh, and through them the Shirleys came into large estates in Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire and Warwickshire. It was a bequest, not an inheritance: the inquests held after Lord Basset’s death in 1390 named the Earl of Stafford and Alice Chaworth as his heirs. The Shirleys kept the lands all the same, many of them until 1827.

Isabel died on 25 April 1393 and was buried at Colmworth in Bedfordshire.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through her son Hugh Shirley, Hugh’s son Ralph Shirley and Ralph’s daughter Beatrix Shirley (died 1483), and from her through the Bromes, Dentons, Purefoys and Thornes to Thomas Dudley^W (1576–1653), later governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and his 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

Her parentage

Douglas Richardson’s Plantagenet Ancestry, p. 378 (Braybrooke), calls her “ISABEL DE MEYNELL, widow successively of Thomas de Shirley, Knt. (died 1362) … and John de Wodhull, Knt. (died 1367), and daughter of Hugh de Meynell, Knt., of Langley Meynell (in Kirk Langley), Derbyshire, by his 2nd wife, Alice, daughter of Nicholas de Audley, Knt., 1st Lord Audley”. On p. 149 (Audley) the same Alice is “married (1) RALPH BASSET, of Drayton, Staffordshire … (2) HUGH DE MEYNELL”, and p. 402 carries the line on from Isabel and Thomas de Shirley to their son Hugh. The Complete Peerage (2nd ed., vol. 2, 1912, pp. 3–4) makes the last Lord Basset the son and heir of Ralph Basset by Alice, daughter of Nicholas Audley, the elder Ralph dying in his father’s lifetime about 1335. It already suspected the answer Richardson gives: Isabel “appears to have been sister of the last Lord Basset—possibly of the half blood”, and since Alice “m., secondly, Hugh de Meinill, she might, not improbably, have been (merely) a uterine sister by that alliance.” This page follows Richardson.

The older accounts differ. William Dugdale’s Antiquities of Warwickshire (1656), p. 466, names Thomas’s wife “Isabella filia Rad. Domini Basset”, and Burke’s Peerage and Baronetage (1869), under Ferrers, makes her a granddaughter of Ralph, Lord Basset of Drayton. The Complete Peerage quotes Francis Townshend, Windsor Herald, who held her illegitimacy “indisputable” on the strength of a pedigree drawn in 1583 by the herald Robert Glover for Sir George Shirley, “in which she is called natural sister of the last Baron, and the coat assigned to her is debruised by a baton”.

The Basset will and the inquests

The Complete Peerage (vol. 2, pp. 3–4) gives the last Lord Basset’s death on 10 May 1390 and his will dated 16 January 1389/90. The inquests found his heirs to be Thomas, Earl of Stafford, and Alice, wife of William Chaworth, but “it is certain that the last Lord devised all his estates to his nephew (“mon neveu”), Hugh Shirley, and the heirs male of his body”, and that the Shirleys inherited “considerable estates in the counties of Nottingham, Leicester, and Warwick … many of which remained in the Shirley family till the death of Earl Ferrers in 1827.”

Marriages, children and death

The third marriage, the licence of 2 May 1369, the two Braybrooke children, the 1376 release of the Wiltshire manors and her death and burial all come from Richardson, Plantagenet Ancestry, p. 378: “His wife, Isabel, died 25 April 1393, and was buried at Colmworth, Bedfordshire.” Richardson gives Thomas’s death as 1362; Dugdale has him dead before the thirty-sixth year of Edward III, which began in January 1362.