♂Sir Nicholas de Lovaine

Nicholas de Lovaine^W (died 24 September 1375) was an English knight and landholder whose seat was Penshurst in Kent, and whose second wife, Margaret de Vere, was a daughter of the Earl of Oxford. He made his will on 20 September 1375 and died four days later, leaving a five-year-old son as his heir. He was the eighteenth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through his daughter Margaret Loveyne (died 1408).

Career and first marriage

Nicholas is said to have risen in the king’s service as a king’s yeoman and Constable of Pevensey Castle^W, and in 1364 to have gone as ambassador to the Pope. He was probably married first between 1349 and 1355, to Margaret de Bereford, the widow of Sir John de Pulteney^W, a London draper who had four times been Mayor of London. Through her he came to hold several of Pulteney’s manors, Penshurst and Ospringe in Kent and Cheveley and Ditton Camois in Cambridgeshire among them, and in 1363 his stepson William de Pulteney settled several on the couple for life. They had a son, Guy. Nicholas also bought land on his own account: the manors of Stanton St John and Great Barton in Oxfordshire and Lagham in Surrey in 1351, then Hedgecourt and the reversion of Burstow, also in Surrey, in 1365 and 1366.

Marriage to Margaret de Vere

Before March 1370 Nicholas married Margaret de Vere, a daughter of John de Vere, Earl of Oxford^W, and the widow of Henry de Beaumont, Lord Beaumont, who had died in the summer of 1369. They had a son, Nicholas, born about 1370, and a daughter, Margaret Loveyne. His wife’s Beaumont sons were part of Nicholas’s arrangements too: his will remembered John, Lord Beaumont, and his manor of Stanton St John was to pass after him to “Henry, Richard and Thomas, sons of Sir Henry de Beawmond”.

Death

Nicholas made his will on 20 September 1375. He left bequests to his wife, to his son Nicholas and to his daughter Margaret, named his wife’s brother, Sir Aubrey de Vere, and asked to be buried at Penshurst or else in the Abbey of St Mary Graces^W near the Tower of London. He died four days later, on 24 September, “Monday before Michaelmas”, and the will was proved on 25 November.

The inquisition post mortem^W taken in Oxfordshire in December 1375 found that “Nicholas his son, aged 5 years and more, is his heir”. The boy evidently did not live to inherit: by 1396–97 his sister Margaret was described as “daughter and heir of Nicholas Loveigne, knight”, and his widow still held for life houses of his in the London parish of All Hallows the Great.

Lines of descent

Both lines come down from his daughter Margaret Loveyne through her son Thomas St. Clair (1401–1435) to Thomas Dudley^W (1576–1653), later governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and his son Samuel Dudley (1608–1683). One continues through Samuel’s son Stephen Dudley (1654–1735) to Nathaniel Dudley (1763–1844), 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 his life

His death and heir come from his inquisition post mortem (Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem, vol. 14, no. 172; The National Archives, C 135/250/4), on a writ of 12 October 1375: “He died on Monday before Michaelmas last. Nicholas his son, aged 5 years and more, is his heir.” Michaelmas (29 September) fell on a Saturday in 1375, so the Monday before was 24 September. The same inquisition gives the remainder of Stanton St John to Henry, Richard and Thomas de Beaumont.

His will of 20 September 1375 is abstracted in N. H. Nicolas, Testamenta Vetusta, vol. 1 (1826), pp. 98–99, from a Harleian manuscript: “to Margaret, my wife; to Nicholas, my son …; to Margaret, my daughter; to John Lord Beaumont …; to Sir Aubrey de Vere, brother to my said wife”. A later bequest in the same copy “to Maud, my wife” is footnoted there as a copyist’s error.

His offices, the embassy of 1364, his first marriage, his son Guy, the 1363 settlement, his purchases of land, the date of his second marriage, his burial request and the probate of 25 November 1375 are from Douglas Richardson, Plantagenet Ancestry (2nd ed., 2011), pp. 220–221, which also gives his birth as about 1325. His daughter’s description as “daughter and heir” is from an inquisition of 1396–97 (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”.

His parentage

His parents are not known. Some online trees make him a son of Thomas de Loveyn and Joan Basing, but no record ties him to them, and Thomas’s own inquisition names only a son, John.

His name

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