♂John Cheney

John Cheney was an English knight of Shurland, on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent, and the grandfather of one of the leading men at the court of King Henry VIII. He was the fifteenth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Elizabeth Cheney.

Family

As the peerage histories tell it, his daughter Elizabeth married Sir William Sandys of Andover in Hampshire, who died in 1497. Their son William^W was his father’s heir and rose to be a Knight of the Garter, Lord Sandys of the Vyne and Chamberlain of the Household to King Henry VIII. When John Cheney himself was born and when he died are not known.

A modern genealogy places his family close to the royal house. His wife was probably Eleanor Shottesbrook, a great-aunt of King Henry VII. Eleanor’s mother, Edith Stourton, had been married before, to Sir John Beauchamp, and their daughter Margaret Beauchamp was the grandmother of the king, through his mother Lady Margaret Beaufort^W.

Notes

His name and his place

The Complete Peerage names him through his daughter, “Elizabeth, da. of Sir John Cheney, of Shurland”, in its account of his grandson Lord Sandys (first edition, vol. 7, 1896, p. 55) and in its accounts of Lord Darcy, the second husband of his granddaughter Edith Sandys (first edition, vol. 3, p. 20; second edition, vol. 4, p. 72). Douglas Richardson’s Magna Carta Ancestry (2005, p. 503) calls him “John Cheyney, Knt.” and his daughter Margaret. In these entries neither book gives his dates or names his parents.

His wife

No source names Elizabeth’s mother outright. Richardson writes of Elizabeth’s daughter Edith that “Edith was near kinswoman of King Henry VII, King of England, she being the granddaughter of his great-aunt, Eleanor Shottesbrook”, and in another entry (p. 714) gives Eleanor, the only daughter of Sir Robert Shottesbrook by Edith Stourton, as the wife of John Cheyne, Knt. Edith’s father was a Sandys, so Eleanor must have been her mother’s mother, and so the wife of Elizabeth’s father. Richardson lists Edith Stourton’s children by her first husband, Sir John Beauchamp, as John and Margaret; that Margaret Beauchamp was the mother of Lady Margaret Beaufort is well-established history. The Complete Peerage (first edition, vol. 2, p. 238; second edition, vol. 3, p. 191) calls Eleanor a daughter and coheir of Sir John Shottisbrooke, not of Sir Robert.

Which John Cheney

The Complete Peerage gives an account of Sir John Cheyne of Shurland, who fought for Henry Tudor at Bosworth, was summoned to Parliament as Lord Cheyne^W, and died without issue on 30 May 1499. Its first edition (vol. 2, p. 238) makes him the son and heir of John Cheyne of Shurland by Eleanor Shottisbrooke; its second edition (vol. 3, p. 191) makes him a younger son instead, and says that his father John and his mother Eleanor had both died before November 1487. None of these entries calls Elizabeth a sister of Lord Cheyne, and none says which John Cheney of Shurland was her father.