♂Nicholas de Audley

Nicholas de Audley (11 November 1292 – 28 November 1316) was an English baron, lord of Heleigh in Staffordshire, a younger son who inherited the Audley lands on his brother’s death and, at twenty, married Joan Martin, the widowed Countess of Lincoln. He was the twentieth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through his daughter Alice de Audley (born 1313).

Early life and inheritance

Nicholas was the younger son of Nicholas de Audley, lord of Heleigh, and probably of Katherine Giffard. His father died in 1299, and the inquest into his lands found the elder son, Thomas, aged ten, to be his heir. Thomas died in 1307, still under age, and the inquest held after his death named Nicholas, “brother of the said Thomas”, as his next heir.

Parts of the inheritance were held in dower^W, the share of a dead lord’s lands that his widow kept for life. In 1313 Nicholas went to law against two women who held such shares: Lucy, the wife of William de Ryther, for waste and destruction in the houses and woods she held in Endon and Cold Norton, and his brother’s widow, Eve, by then the wife of Thomas de Ufford, for waste in the woods, lands and iron mines she held at Audley, Endon and Chesterton. In March 1314 he proved his age and took possession of his brother’s lands, with their castle at Heleigh^W.

Lord Audley

From January 1313 Nicholas was summoned to Parliament by writ^W, by which he is held to have become the first Lord Audley^W. His seal of 1314 shows him in armour on a galloping horse, his shield, surcoat and the horse’s trappings all bearing the fretted arms of Audley. He served in Scotland in 1316.

Marriage and family

Nicholas de Audley married Joan Martin, the widow of Henry de Lacy, Earl of Lincoln^W, by June 1313. The Complete Peerage records that he married her without the king’s licence, which the widow of a tenant of the Crown was bound to obtain before she married again. They had two children: a son, James, born at Kneesall in Nottinghamshire in January 1314, and a daughter, Alice.

Nicholas died on 28 November 1316, three years after the marriage, and their son James, still a small child, was his heir. Joan outlived him by six years.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through his daughter Alice de Audley, her daughter Isabel de Meynell (died 1393), Isabel’s son Hugh Shirley (died 1403), his son Ralph Shirley and Ralph’s daughter Beatrix Shirley (died 1483), and from her through the Bromes, Dentons, Purefoys and Thornes to Thomas Dudley^W (1576–1653), later governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and his 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

Birth date

Douglas Richardson’s Plantagenet Ancestry (2nd ed., 2011), p. 148 (Audley 7), gives his birth as 11 November 1292, and so does The Complete Peerage (2nd ed., vol. 5, 1926, under Giffard). The earlier volume 1 of the same work (1910, p. 339) gives 11 November 1289 and has him die “aged 27”. The inquest of 1308 after his brother Thomas’s death (Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem, vol. 5, no. 62) gave his age as 18 at the feast of St Martin, and another jury there as 17, which would put his birth about 1289–1290. That he proved his age only in March 1314, as volume 1 itself records, fits the later date of 1292 better.

Parents

The inquest on his father, Nicholas de Audley, taken in 1299 (Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem, vol. 3, no. 536), names the heir as “Thomas his son, aged 10”; the 1308 inquest on Thomas names this Nicholas as Thomas’s brother and heir. Neither names their mother. Katherine Giffard rests on Richardson, pp. 147–148 (Audley 6), who has her as the elder Nicholas’s widow, sued with his executors in 1303, and later a nun at Ledbury.

Marriage, children and death

Richardson, pp. 148–149, has the marriage “shortly before 6 June 1313”, the lawsuits of 1313, the summons to Parliament from 8 January 1312/3, the seal of 1314 (after Birch’s catalogue of seals in the British Museum), the service in Scotland in 1316, and his death on 28 November 1316; Joan Martin he calls the widow of Henry de Lacy, Earl of Lincoln. The Complete Peerage (2nd ed., vol. 1, p. 339) puts the marriage in 1312, made without licence, has him prove his age on 27 March 1313/4, and dates his death shortly before 9 December 1316. Richardson and The Complete Peerage (vol. 5) give James’s birth at Kneesall as 7 January 1313/4; volume 1 gives 8 January 1312/3. The inquests after Joan’s death in 1322 (James “aged 9”) and after her brother’s in 1326 (James aged 14 “on the morrow of the Circumcision last”) fit the earlier year better.