♀Margaret Loveyne

Margaret Loveyne (died 10 May 1408) was an English heiress, the daughter and heir of Sir Nicholas de Lovaine, who was married first to Sir Richard Chamberlain and then to Philip Saint Clair, and whose lands were divided at her death between her sons by both husbands. She was the seventeenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through her son Thomas St. Clair (1401–1435).

Early life

Margaret was the daughter of Sir Nicholas de Lovaine, a knight, and his wife, Margaret de Vere, a daughter of John de Vere, Earl of Oxford^W. Her father made his will on 20 September 1375, with bequests to his wife, to his son Nicholas and “to Margaret, my daughter”, and he died four days later, on 24 September. Her brother Nicholas, then five years old, was his heir, but the boy evidently did not live to inherit: by 1396–97 Margaret was described as her father’s “daughter and heir”.

Marriages

Her first husband was Sir Richard Chamberlain, and their son, Richard, was born in the early 1390s. As a widow she married Philip Saint Clair, a knight, in or before 1398. They were already husband and wife in 1396–97, when the Crown enquired into their wish to grant away the reversion of houses in the London parish of All Hallows the Great, which her widowed mother held for life.

On 4 April 1397 the St. Clair manors in Sussex, among them Brambletye and Lavertye at East Grinstead, Tarring and Brighton, were made over to Philip and Margaret together, with Chalgrove in Oxfordshire and Ashby Magna in Leicestershire. Their elder son, John, was born on 1 November 1397, and their younger son, Thomas, at East Grinstead on 28 October 1401.

Death and inheritance

Margaret died on 10 May 1408 and Philip six days later, on 16 May, leaving two young sons: John, then ten, was the heir, and Thomas was six. Her own inheritance then passed to her sons by both marriages. The inquisition post mortem^W taken in London on 25 October 1408 found that her heir there was “Richard son of Richard Chaumberleyn”, aged fifteen, while the Kent inquisition, taken at Penshurst on 21 November 1409, named John and Thomas as her “heirs in gavelkind”^W. Years later, in 1425, Richard Chamberlain and his half-brother Thomas St. Clair are said to have been sued together by Thomas de Pulteney over the manors of Penshurst, her father’s seat, and Yevesfeld in Kent.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through her son Thomas, Thomas’s daughter Edith Saint Clair (born about 1423), 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 parentage rests on an inquisition of 20 Richard II (The National Archives, C 143/427/18), which names “Philip Seyntclere, knight, and Margaret his wife, daughter and heir of Nicholas Loveigne, knight” and the London houses “now held for life by Margaret, late wife of the said Nicholas”. Her father’s will is abstracted in N. H. Nicolas, Testamenta Vetusta, vol. 1, pp. 98–99, and his inquisition (Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem, vol. 14, no. 172) gives his death on the Monday before Michaelmas 1375 and his son Nicholas as “aged 5 years and more”. Her mother is called “filia comitis Oxonie”, daughter of the Earl of Oxford, in the register of the Grey Friars of London (C. L. Kingsford, The Grey Friars of London, 1915), and the will names “Sir Aubrey de Vere, brother to my said wife”. Douglas Richardson’s Plantagenet Ancestry (2nd ed., 2011), pp. 220–221 and 501, gives the same parents, both of her husbands, her son Richard Chamberlain and the lawsuit of 1425.

Her three inquisitions are in the Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem, vol. 19, Henry IV: Philip’s Surrey inquisition (no. 458), her London inquisition (no. 488) and her Kent inquisition (no. 656). The marriage in or before 1398, when Philip and Margaret had livery of the manors of Margaret and her first husband (Calendar of Close Rolls), is from F. N. Craig, “Maternal Ancestry of Governor Thomas Dudley: St. Clair and Audley Lines”, New England Historical and Genealogical Register 139 (1985), p. 283. The Sussex manors were made over to them by a deed of 4 April 1397 in the Sussex Archaeological Society’s collection (SAS/G1/1).

Her death date

The three juries gave three dates. Philip’s Surrey inquisition says “Margaret died on 10 May, Philip on 16 May last”; her Kent inquisition says she died on 7 May 1408; her London inquisition gives 26 June. The Kent jury also found that Philip held her lands “by the law of England and took the profits until he died”, so she died before him and 26 June cannot stand; 10 May is taken here.

Her son Richard Chamberlain

Her London inquisition gives Richard as “aged 15 years and more” in October 1408. Richardson gives his birth as about 1391–92 (“aged 16 in 1408, 22 in 1413”) and his death in 1439.

Her name

The name is written Loveyne, Loveigne, Lovaine and Lovayne in the sources.