♀Maud Grey

Maud Grey (died 29 January 1394) was an English gentlewoman who was married first to John Botetourt and then to Sir Thomas Harcourt of Stanton Harcourt in Oxfordshire. She was the seventeenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through her son Thomas Harcourt (1377–1420).

Family and first marriage

She was most likely a daughter of John de Grey, 1st Baron Grey of Rotherfield^W, a Knight of the Garter, by his second wife, Avice, a co-heiress of John, Lord Marmion. According to a catalogue of the Harcourt family pictures, she and her two brothers took the name and arms of their mother’s family, Marmion, rather than their father’s.

She was first married, probably in 1358 or 1359, to John Botetourt, the son of John, Lord Botetourt, of Weoley. They had a son, John, and a daughter, Joyce. Her husband died overseas on 21 September 1369, in his father’s lifetime, and left her a widow with two young children.

Stanton Harcourt

Thomas Harcourt and Maud Grey were most likely married by 1373. Thomas had come into Stanton Harcourt and the Leicestershire manor of Bosworth on his mother’s death in 1369. Their son and heir, Thomas, was born by 1377.

Maud died on 29 January 1394 and is said to have been buried at Stanton Harcourt. Her portrait, taken from her monument there, was later among the Harcourt family pictures at Nuneham. Her husband outlived her by twenty-three years and died on 12 April 1417.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through her son Thomas Harcourt (1377–1420) and, much further down, through Thomas Dudley^W (1576–1653), later governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and Thomas’s son Samuel Dudley (1608–1683). From Samuel one line comes down 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

Parentage

Douglas Richardson’s Plantagenet Ancestry (p. 345) makes her the daughter of John de Grey, K.G., 1st Lord Grey of Rotherfield, by his second wife, Avice Marmion. J. C. Wedgwood’s “Harcourt of Ellenhall” (Collections for a History of Staffordshire, 1914, p. 197) gives the same parents, calling her father the 2nd Lord Grey and her mother “daughter and co-heiress of John, Lord Marmion”. The pedigree in The Harcourt Papers, vol. 1 (1880), names her father as “Robert, Lord Grey of Rotherfield”. No record naming her parents survives; the parentage rests on these compiled works.

The Marmion name

The Harcourt Papers’ list of the family pictures at Nuneham describes her portrait as that of “Maud, daughter of John, Lord Grey of Rotherfield, by his second wife, Avice, daughter and co-heir of John, Lord Marmion, (which Maud, with her two brothers, assumed the name and arms of their mother,) wife of Sir Thomas Harcourt”, adding: “The picture is from her monument at Stanton Harcourt.” The same entry makes her husband the son of “Sir Richard and Johanna”, which the inquests after his mother’s death in 1369 contradict: Sir Richard was his elder brother.

Her first marriage

Richardson (p. 345) has her marry John Botetourt “shortly after 28 Nov 1358”, gives his death overseas on 21 September 1369, and names their children John, born about 1362, who died without children before 1386, and Joyce, who married Hugh Burnell. Wedgwood (p. 197) writes that she “had previously married in 1359 John, son of John, Lord Botetourt, of Weoley, who had died v.p. in 1369”. Richardson dates her second marriage “before Michaelmas term 1373 (date of lawsuit)”; Wedgwood gives 1370.

Death and burial

The Buckinghamshire inquest taken on 20 February in the seventeenth year of Richard II states: “The said Maud died on 29 January last” (Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem, vol. 17, no. 367), which places her death in 1394. Wedgwood writes that she “was buried at Stanton Harcourt in 1391”, and the Harcourt Papers’ pedigree gives “Obiit 30 Jan., 1391 : bur. at Stanton Harcourt”; the picture list in the same volume says she “Died the seventeenth year of Richard II”, which ran from June 1393 to June 1394 and agrees with the inquest. The burial place rests on the Harcourt histories.