♂John Berkeley

John Berkeley (about 1510 – 1545) was a knight of Stoke Gifford, in Gloucestershire, England, whose father died when he was about three years old, leaving him heir to the family’s lands. He was the fourteenth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Elizabeth Berkeley.

Early life

John was the son and heir of Richard Berkeley of Stoke Gifford and his wife, Elizabeth Coningsby, a daughter of Sir Humphrey Coningsby, a justice of the King’s Bench^W. His father died in 1513 and was buried in the College of Westbury, in Gloucestershire. His mother married again; her second husband was Sir John Fitz James^W, Chief Justice of the King’s Bench.

Marriage and family

John married Isabel Dennis, a daughter of Sir William Dennis^W of Dyrham, in Gloucestershire, and his first wife, Anne Berkeley. 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. Douglas Richardson’s Plantagenet Ancestry, a study of colonial families descended from the medieval kings of England, traces John’s own line back to King John, through the king’s illegitimate son Richard Fitz Roy.

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.

Notes

Sources

John’s birth, parents, marriage, children and death, and his widow’s second marriage, are from Douglas Richardson, Plantagenet Ancestry, 2nd edition (2011), vol. 1, pp. 630–634, and from the same author’s Magna Carta Ancestry (2005), 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 Somerset (1531, 1573 and 1591). The Gloucestershire Berkeley pedigree, as Richardson quotes it, gives “Sir John Barkley of Stoke Knt. ob. 1545. = Issabell d. of Sir William Dennis Knt.”

Dates

Richardson puts John’s birth at about 1510 because he was aged three in 1513. The Gloucestershire visitation gives his death as 1545, and the Visitation of Somerset as 1546; Plantagenet Ancestry follows 1545 and Magna Carta Ancestry 1546. The two books likewise differ on his father’s death, 1513 in Plantagenet Ancestry and 1514 in Magna Carta Ancestry and the Somerset visitation.

The son’s name

Magna Carta Ancestry (2005) calls John’s son Robert; the later Plantagenet Ancestry (2011) calls him Richard, and the Berkeley chart in the Complete Peerage, 2nd edition, vol. 2 (1912), p. 234, likewise names Sir Richard as John’s son and heir, who died in 1604.