♀Margery Bray

Margery Bray was the only daughter and heir of John Bray, an heiress to the estates of her uncle Sir Reginald Bray^W, chief minister to King Henry VII, and the wife of William Sandys^W, Lord Sandys of the Vyne, who served Henry VIII as Chamberlain of the Household. She was the thirteenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Elizabeth Sandys.

The Bray inheritance

Margery’s father, John Bray, was the elder of two brothers of that name. Their brother Sir Reginald married but had no children, and when he died on 5 August 1503, Margery was, according to the Complete Peerage, his niece and heir. The property she inherited from her uncle was claimed by her cousin Edmund Bray, the heir male, later Lord Bray, and was in the end divided between them. Edmund was the son of the younger John.

Marriage

Margery became the wife of William Sandys of the Vyne, in the parish of Sherborne St John in Hampshire, a soldier who rose at the court of Henry VIII to be a Knight of the Garter, Lord Sandys de Vyne and Chamberlain of the Household. Lord Sandys had three sons and four daughters; among them were Thomas, his heir, and Elizabeth, who married Sir Humphrey Forster of Aldermaston in Berkshire. Her husband made his will on 8 December 1540 and died, by the Complete Peerage’s reckoning, in 1542.

The family

Thomas Sandys, the eldest son, succeeded his father as the second Lord Sandys de Vyne and was summoned to Parliament from 1543 to 1558. He married Elizabeth Manners, a daughter of George Manners, Lord Ros. He died about 1560 and was buried in the chapel of the Holy Ghost at Basingstoke, and his widow Elizabeth was granted the administration of his estate, as “of Mottisfont, Hants”.

Notes

Her parentage and inheritance

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 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 agree on the family and differ on how the estate was shared; this page follows the Complete Peerage. Sir Reginald’s date of death is the Dictionary’s.

Her 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”. The entry for Lord Sandys himself calls her Margery.

Her children

Neither the Complete Peerage’s entry for Lord Sandys nor the Dictionary names the mother of his children. The Complete Peerage names no other wife for him, and its entries on Alice name Margery as her mother, so she was probably Elizabeth’s mother too. The count of three sons and four daughters comes from its note that the names of “his 4 daughters and their marriages and his 2 younger sons” are given in Banks’s baronage.