♀Stonley

Stonley married Robert Brome, a lawyer of Warwick in the reign of Richard II, and through her son was an ancestor of the Bromes who later held the manor of Baddesley Clinton in Warwickshire. She was the seventeenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through her son John Brome. Through that son she was an ancestor of Thomas Dudley^W, later governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W.

Life

Robert Brome is said to have married the daughter and heiress of William Stonley. Her husband was a lawyer, from a family said to have been tanners in Warwick for several generations, and according to the antiquary William Dugdale^W he served as steward of the courts of Thomas de Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, for the earl’s lands in the county. He appears in the records in 1396–97, the twentieth year of Richard II’s reign. Their son, John Brome, was a burgess of Warwick and sat for the town in the Parliament of 1406–07. The records do not give the dates of her birth or death.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through her son John Brome, John’s son John Brome (died 1468), that John’s daughter Isabel Brome, her daughter Alice Denton, Alice’s son Edward Purefoy, Edward’s daughter Mary Purefoy, Mary’s daughter Susanna Thorne, Susanna’s son Thomas Dudley (1576–1653) and Thomas’s 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

Her name and parentage

Her given name is not recorded. James William Hawes, Edmond Hawes of Yarmouth, Massachusetts (1914), p. 76, says only that Robert Brome “married the daughter and heiress of William Stonley”, and the Warwickshire heraldic visitation^W of 1619 (Harleian Society vol. 12, p. 97) names her father as “Wm. Stonley” and no more. The account of her husband’s family and career comes from Dugdale’s Antiquities of Warwickshire (1656), which Hawes quotes.

Some online family trees call her Matilda Stanley, born about 1360, a daughter of William Stanley of Storeton in Cheshire and Alice Massey. No source supports this; it turns the name Stonley into Stanley.