♀Joan Basset

Joan Basset was an English heiress of the early fifteenth century, the daughter and heir of Thomas Basset of Brailsford in Derbyshire and the first wife of Sir Ralph Shirley of Lower Ettington in Warwickshire. She was the sixteenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through her daughter Beatrix Shirley (died 1483). Through Beatrix she was an ancestor of Thomas Dudley^W, later governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W.

Family

Joan’s father, Thomas Basset, was a younger son of Sir John Basset of Cheadle in Staffordshire by his second wife, Joan Brailsford, and it was his mother’s inheritance that came to him. Joan’s mother was Margaret, daughter of William Mering.

Marriage

Ralph married Joan Basset, daughter and heir of Thomas Basset of Brailsford in Derbyshire. Her husband was the son of Sir Hugh Shirley, killed at the Battle of Shrewsbury^W in 1403, and he is said to have fought under Henry V at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. They had a son, Ralph, who was living at Wiston in 1449, and a daughter, Beatrix, probably Joan’s child, who married John Brome of Baddesley Clinton. Ralph later took a second wife, Alice, daughter of Sir John Cokayne of Ashbourne, and the records do not give the date of Joan’s death.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through her daughter Beatrix Shirley, Beatrix’s daughter Isabel Brome, Isabel’s daughter Alice Denton, Alice’s son Edward Purefoy, Edward’s daughter Mary Purefoy, Mary’s 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

Her name and her parents

William Dugdale’s Antiquities of Warwickshire (1656), p. 466, calls her in Latin “Jocosa fil. & haeres Thomae Basset de Brailesford ar.”, the first wife of Sir Ralph Shirley; English pedigrees call her Joan. Douglas Richardson, Plantagenet Ancestry (2nd ed., 2011), p. 402, and a table in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register, vol. 150 (1996), p. 324, give the marriage, and the table shows Ralph and Joan as the parents of Ralph Shirley “of Wiston in 1449” and of Beatrix, wife of John Brome. The Brome pedigrees name Beatrix’s father only; as Ralph married twice, her mother is given here as Joan on the strength of that table.

F. N. Craig, in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register, vol. 142 (1988), p. 243, names Joan’s mother as Margaret, daughter of William Mering, and makes Thomas Basset the younger son of Sir John Basset of Cheadle by his second wife Joan, daughter and heir of Sir Henry Brailsford. The Shirley pedigree in the heralds’ visitations of Sussex (Harleian Society vol. 53, 1905, pp. 5–6) agrees, calling Thomas “heire to his mother”.