♀Isabel Dennis

Isabel Dennis was a daughter of Sir William Dennis of Dyrham, in Gloucestershire, England, who married in turn two Gloucestershire gentlemen: Sir John Berkeley of Stoke Gifford and, after his death, Arthur Porter of Newent, a sheriff of the county. She was the fourteenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Elizabeth Berkeley.

Family

Isabel was one of the thirteen children, six sons and seven daughters, of Sir William Dennis^W of Dyrham and his first wife, Anne Berkeley, a daughter of Sir Maurice Berkeley. Her father, a sheriff of Gloucestershire, died in 1533. Douglas Richardson’s Plantagenet Ancestry, a study of colonial families descended from the medieval kings of England, traces her father’s line back to King Edward III, and her mother’s to King Edward I.

Marriages

Isabel married John Berkeley, the son and heir of Richard Berkeley of Stoke Gifford; John was knighted. John and Isabel had three children: a son, Richard^W, who was later knighted, and two daughters, Mary, who married first Nicholas Walshe and then Sir William Herbert, and Elizabeth, who married Henry Ligon of Upton St Leonards.

Sir John died in 1545. Isabel then became the second wife of Arthur Porter^W of Newent and Alvington, a sheriff of Gloucestershire and a knight of the shire^W for the county, who died on 31 May 1559. They had no children together. In the Porter family’s pedigree she kept the style she had held as a knight’s widow: “Issabell Laydy Barkley d. of Sir Wm. Dennys Knight”.

Notes

Sources

Isabel’s parents, both her marriages and her children are from Douglas Richardson, Plantagenet Ancestry, 2nd edition (2011), vol. 1, pp. 634 and 637–638, and from the same author’s Magna Carta Ancestry (2005), pp. 264 and 273. Richardson cites John Smyth’s Berkeley manuscripts and the heralds’ visitations^W of Gloucestershire (1623, 1569 and 1582–83, printed together in 1885), whose Dennis pedigree, as he quotes it, names her as “Isabel [Dennis] wife of John Barkley” and then of Arthur Porter. The Porter pedigree in the same visitations names Arthur Porter’s first wife as Alice, a daughter of John Arnold.

Dates

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