♂Maurice Berkeley

Maurice Berkeley^W (about 1435 – September 1506) was an English knight and a younger son of James, Lord Berkeley^W; his elder brother cut him out of the family inheritance, and he spent the last years of his life winning it back. He was the sixteenth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Anne Berkeley.

Early life and marriage

Maurice was the second son of his father’s third marriage, to Isabel Mowbray. He served King Edward IV as a Knight of the Body, one of the knights who attended the king in person, and a seal of his from 1464 shows a long-haired mermaid holding up a round looking-glass in one hand and a bunch of flowers in the other.

In 1465, in his thirtieth year, he married Isabel Meade, the daughter and heiress of Philip Meade^W, a Bristol merchant who was three times mayor of the city. Isabel is said to have been a widow already, with three children from her first marriage who all died young. It has been suggested that the match offended Maurice’s elder brother, William; John Smyth, the Berkeleys’ steward and historian, wrote that William “had little cause to complain of the obscure parentage of the Lady Isable which he vainly called base.” In 1474 Philip Meade and his son and heir, Richard, conveyed to Maurice and Isabel a tenement in Thornbury, in Gloucestershire, called Marshallis place, with its close and garden. The couple had three sons, Maurice, Thomas and James, and one daughter, Anne.

Disinherited

William^W had no surviving children. He settled Berkeley Castle and the greater part of his lands on King Henry VII and the king’s heirs male, and in return he was allowed to sell off other lands and was made Marquess of Berkeley in 1489, so that Maurice was totally disinherited. Between 1486 and 1492 Maurice and Isabel, described as “daughter and heiress of Philip Mede,” sued Nicholas Pitts, vicar of Ratclyff (Redcliffe) in Bristol, and Thomas Cokkis in Chancery^W over the manor of Tickenham, in Somerset, and houses and lands in Wraxall, Bedminster and Bristol.

When William died in the sanctuary at Westminster on 14 February 1491/2, Maurice, then fifty-six, was his heir all the same. Within seven years he recovered more than fifty manors and other lands that his brother had disposed of illegally, and an old account of the family says that for this he “may bee called Maurice the Lawier.” More land came to the couple through Isabel, who inherited lands at Thornbury and at Wraxall, Ashton and elsewhere in Somerset from her brother Richard in 1495. In 1498 Maurice was one of the heirs of a distant cousin, Thomas Greville, also called Cokesey, and from him he had the manors of Tetbury, in Gloucestershire, and Manningford Bruce, in Wiltshire. He was never summoned to Parliament, but he is counted Lord Berkeley by right.

Death

Maurice died in September 1506, aged about seventy, and was buried at Austin Friars^W, in London. Isabel outlived him by at least eight years; she died at Coventry, in Warwickshire, after 29 May 1514, and was buried with him.

The family

Their son Maurice, born in 1467, was made a Knight of the Bath^W at the coronation of King Henry VIII on 23 June 1509, served as sheriff of Gloucestershire and as lieutenant of Calais, and is said to have been summoned to Parliament as Lord Berkeley in 1523; he died at Calais on 12 September that year without legitimate children. His younger brother, Thomas^W, born in 1472, was knighted by the Earl of Surrey on the field of the Battle of Flodden^W on 9 September 1513. Thomas was Maurice’s heir in 1523 and was summoned to Parliament from 1529.

Notes

Sources

Maurice’s parentage, birth, marriage, children, the conveyance of 1474, the Chancery suit, his inheritance of 1492 and recovery of the family lands, the Greville inheritance of 1498, his death and burial are from Douglas Richardson, Plantagenet Ancestry, 2nd edition (2011), vol. 1, pp. 259–260, which also describes his seal of 1464 and lists his son Thomas’s knighthood at Flodden. The Complete Peerage, 2nd edition, vol. 2 (1912), p. 135, gives the same account and adds that he had been Knight of the Body to Edward IV, that he married “in his 30th year (1465),” that Isabel was then “a widow with 3 children who all d. young,” the remark about Isabel’s parentage (which it takes from Smyth’s history of the Berkeleys, and which it introduces by saying that “it has been conjectured” the match offended his brother), the phrase “Maurice the Lawier,” and the career of his son Maurice. The 1st edition, vol. 1 (1887), pp. 331–332, describes William’s settlement of his lands on the king and his death in the sanctuary at Westminster. Richardson cites Smyth’s Berkeley manuscripts and the 1623 visitation of Shropshire, whose Berkeley pedigree gives “Maurice lord Berkley died 22 H. 7. = Isabell da. & heir to Phillip Meade of Bristow.”

Dates

Richardson gives Maurice’s birth as about 1435, from his age of fifty-six in 1492. The Complete Peerage says he died in September 1506 aged seventy, and that Isabel died “at the same age of 70.” Neither gives a day for his death.

Isabel’s brother

Richardson names the brother from whom Isabel inherited in 1495 as Richard Meade of Bristol, the same Richard who joined his father in the conveyance of 1474. The Complete Peerage calls him Thomas Mead.