♂John Bray

John Bray is said to have been the elder brother of Sir Reginald Bray^W, the statesman and favorite of King Henry VII, and the father of an only daughter, Margery, who became the wife of William Sandys^W, the first Lord Sandys of the Vyne. He was the fourteenth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Margery Bray.

Sir Reginald is said to have had two brothers both named John. This John was the elder, known as John Bray senior; the younger John was the father of Edmund Bray, later Lord Bray. Sir Reginald married but had no children, and when he died on 5 August 1503, Margery, as John’s only daughter, was his niece and heir. Her cousin Edmund claimed the property as the heir in the male line, and in the end it was divided between them.

Notes

The sources

The printed accounts of his brother and his son-in-law are the only sources for John Bray. They give no dates for him and do not name his wife. The Complete Peerage (1st edition, vol. 7, 1896, p. 56) gives Lord Sandys’s wife as “Margery, only da. and h. of John Bray (Senior), niece and heir of Sir Reginald Bray, K.G.”, and adds in a footnote that “the property she inherited from her uncle was claimed by her cousin, Lord Braye, the heir male, son of a junior brother and was eventually divided between them.”

The Dictionary of National Biography (vol. 6, 1886, p. 238) says that Sir Reginald “had no issue, and his elder brother John having only one daughter, married to Sir William Sandes, afterwards Lord Sandes of the Vine, he left the bulk of his fortune to Edmund, eldest son of his younger brother John (for he had two brothers of that name).” The two accounts agree on the family; they differ on how the estate was shared, and this account follows the Complete Peerage’s fuller statement that it was divided.

His parents

The same article makes Sir Reginald “the second son of Sir Richard Bray, one of the privy council to Henry VI, by his wife Joan Troughton”, of Eaton Bray in Bedfordshire. The article does not say whether Joan Troughton was John’s mother as well.

His daughter’s name

Two other entries in the Complete Peerage (1st edition, vol. 4, p. 278; 2nd edition, vol. 6), giving the parentage of Lord Sandys’s daughter Alice, call her mother “Margaret, da. and h. of John Bray”.