♀Margaret Hoo

Margaret Hoo was an English gentlewoman whose three daughters by Thomas St. Clair (1401–1435) divided his estates, and whose descendants half a century later became heirs to her own Hoo family. She was the sixteenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through her daughter Edith Saint Clair (born about 1423).

Family and marriage

Margaret is said to have been the only daughter of Sir William Hoo, a knight who died on 22 November 1410 at the age of seventy-five, by his first wife, Alice St. Omer, through whom he held the manor of Mulbarton in Norfolk.

Her husband had inherited the St. Clair lands as a boy of seventeen. Thomas is said to have married Margaret Hoo without the king’s licence while he was still under age and a ward of Henry V, and in 1424 Henry VI pardoned him for a fine of £200. A royal ward’s marriage was the king’s to grant or sell, so a ward who married without leave owed the Crown for it. They had three daughters, Elizabeth, Alianore and Edith. Thomas is said to have died overseas on 2 August 1435, and his three daughters became his coheirs.

The Hoo inheritance

Half a century later Margaret’s descendants became heirs to her own family as well. When her nephew Thomas Hoo, the son of her brother Sir Thomas Hoo, died without children on 8 October 1486, the Bedfordshire jury reportedly named as his coheirs her daughter Elizabeth, her daughter Alianore’s son William Gage, and Miles Harcourt, Edith’s grandson.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through her daughter Edith, Edith’s daughter Alice Harcourt (died 1526), Alice’s daughter Elizabeth Bessiles, Elizabeth’s daughter Anne Fettiplace, Anne’s daughter Mary Purefoy, Mary’s daughter Susanna Thorne, Susanna’s son Thomas Dudley^W (1576–1653), later governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, 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

Sources for her life

Her parents are given in F. N. Craig, “Maternal Ancestry of Governor Thomas Dudley: Hoo, St. Omer, Malmains, St. Leger, Fitzwarin and Andevill Lines”, New England Historical and Genealogical Register 140 (1986), p. 219, which calls Edith the “daughter of Thomas St. Clair by his wife Margaret Hoo”. Craig’s companion article on the St. Clair line (vol. 139, 1985, p. 283) gives the marriage without licence and the pardon of 1424, citing the Calendar of Patent Rolls. W. D. Cooper’s “Notices of the Family of Hoo”, Sussex Archaeological Collections 8 (1856), p. 108, names Sir William’s children by Alice as Thomas, John, possibly a William, “and one daughter, Margaret, who married the wealthy Thomas St. Clere”, and gives his age and date of death. The 1486 coheirs are from Cooper’s abstract of the Bedfordshire inquisition after her nephew’s death, where she is “Margaret St. Clere, sister of Thomas Hoo, Knt.” Cooper added that “This Margaret is not noticed in any of the printed pedigrees of Hoo, nor are her children.”

Her mother

Cooper and Craig both make her a daughter of Sir William’s first wife, Alice St. Omer. Some online genealogies place her instead under his second wife, Eleanor Wingfield, without giving a source.

Miles Harcourt

Cooper’s abstract calls Miles Harcourt the son of Edith; the inquisition after the death of Edith’s husband in 1486 makes Miles the son of their son Christopher, and so Edith’s grandson.