♂Thomas Thorne

Thomas Thorne (buried 9 November 1588) was a gentleman of Yardley Hastings, Northamptonshire, whose family name the parish register wrote as Dorne. He was the grandfather of Thomas Dudley^W, later deputy governor and governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W, whom his will remembered as one of “the Children of Susan Dudley, my Daughter, widow”. He was the eleventh great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through his daughter Susanna Thorne and her son Thomas Dudley (1576–1653).

Family at Yardley Hastings

Thomas married Mary Purefoy, a daughter of the Purefoy family of Shalston in Buckinghamshire; the Purefoy pedigree recorded at the 1619 heraldic visitation^W of Leicestershire notes “Mary mar. to Tho. Thorne of Yardley in Com. Northamp.” Their children were baptized at Yardley Hastings over eleven years: Anna, “filia Thome Dorne”, on 1 November 1550, Katherine in 1551, Arthur in 1552, William in 1558, Susanna in March 1559/60, Robert in 1560 and Isabel in 1561. A son Edward has no baptism in the register, which has none for the years 1553 to 1557.

Will and death

Thomas made his will on 29 October 1588 as “Thomas Dorne of Yardley Hastings, Gent.” He left his “loving wife” Mary £10 out of the manor of Syresham and named his sons Edward and Arthur as executors. The will suggests that his son Robert was away from home: “If my sonne Robert Dorne should come home … he shall be obedient unto his Mother”. The records do not explain where Robert had gone.

His daughter Susanna had married Roger Dudley and was by then a widow. Thomas left £10 to her children, among them her son Thomas, then twelve years old. He was buried at Yardley Hastings on 9 November 1588, entered in the register as “Thomas Dorne gent”, and his will was proved on 9 May 1589.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through his daughter Susanna, her son Thomas Dudley 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

The will

The will is known from printed abstracts. Mary Kingsbury Talcott, in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register 66 (1912), pp. 340–341, prints it as dated 29 October 1588 and proved 9 May 1589 (Northampton Registry of Wills, Book 5, pp. 328–330). Helen Koues’s Historical Pamphlet No. 1 (1903) calls it the will of “Thomas Thorne, or Dorne, of Yardley Hastings, proved in May, 1589, and dated the same year”; the burial of 9 November 1588 shows that the will must be of 1588, as Talcott gives it. A will of “Thomas Thorne alias Dorne, Gentleman of Passenham, Northamptonshire”, catalogued under 5 December 1588 among the wills of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, may be a second probate of his estate or belong to a namesake.

Thorne or Dorne

The Yardley Hastings register writes the name Dorne in every entry for the family except Isabel’s baptism in 1561, which reads “Izabell Thorne”. Only Anna’s baptism names a parent; the other children are tied to Thomas by the place, the surname and the will, which names Robert, Edward, Arthur and Susan.

Susanna, “youngest daughter”

Koues calls Susanna Thomas’s youngest daughter, yet Isabel was baptized in June 1561, after her. Either the description is loose or Isabel was not his daughter.

Mary as the mother

The will names his wife Mary but no record names the mother of the children. That Mary Purefoy was their mother rests on the will of her brother John Purefoy of Shalston (1579), which calls Edward Thorne “my nephew”; see her own page.

His ancestry

Brandon Fradd, “Ancestry of Thomas Thorne, Grandfather of Thomas Dudley”, The Genealogist 19 (2005), pp. 112–128, traces four generations of the Thorne family above him.