♂William Dennis

William Dennis^W (about 1470 – 22 June 1533) was an English knight of Dyrham, Olveston and Iscote, in Gloucestershire, who served as sheriff of the county in 1519–20 and had fourteen children by his two wives. He was the fifteenth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Isabel Dennis.

Family and inheritance

William was the son and heir of Sir Walter Dennis of Olveston and his second wife, Agnes Danvers. Office in the county ran in the family: his father had twice been sheriff of Gloucestershire, and his grandfather and great-grandfather had held the office before him. Sir Walter died on 1 September 1505 and was buried at Olveston, and William, then about thirty-five, was his heir. Knighted in his turn, he followed his forebears as sheriff of Gloucestershire in 1519–20.

Douglas Richardson’s Plantagenet Ancestry, a study of colonial families descended from the medieval kings of England, traces William’s line back to King Edward III through John of Gaunt^W and Cardinal Henry Beaufort^W, whose illegitimate daughter Joan was William’s great-grandmother. Richardson thinks it virtually certain that Joan was born before 1397, when her father took holy orders.

Marriages and death

William married Anne Berkeley, the only daughter of Sir Maurice Berkeley^W and his wife, Isabel Meade. In the Dennis family’s pedigree the heralds entered Anne as “Lady Anne d. of Morris Lord Barkley brother to Wm. Marquis Barkley”. The couple had thirteen children, six sons and seven daughters. According to the family pedigrees, their daughter Isabel married first Sir John Berkeley of Stoke Gifford and, after his death in 1545, Arthur Porter of Newent.

William was also married to Edith Twinihoe, by whom he had one more daughter, also named Anne. Sir William died on 22 June 1533.

The family

Two of the couple’s six sons, Walter^W and Maurice^W, were knighted. Their daughter Mary became a nun at Lacock Abbey^W, in Wiltshire.

Notes

Sources

William’s parents, his office, both marriages, his children and his death are from Douglas Richardson, Plantagenet Ancestry, 2nd edition (2011), vol. 1, pp. 636–638, and from the same author’s Magna Carta Ancestry (2005), pp. 272–273. Richardson cites John Smyth’s Berkeley manuscripts, the printed list of sheriffs, a Dennis pedigree of about 1530 at the College of Arms, and the heralds’ visitations^W of Gloucestershire (1623, 1569 and 1582–83, printed together in 1885), whose Dennis pedigree, as he quotes it, gives “Sir Wm. Dennys K.” two wives, first “Lady Anne d. of Morris Lord Barkley brother to Wm. Marquis Barkley” and second “Edith d. of… Twinihoe”. Richardson spells the place Dirham.

His two marriages

Richardson makes Anne Berkeley William’s first wife and Edith Twinihoe his second, as does the Dennis pedigree as he quotes it, and he records Anne as still living in the Easter term of 1523. Wikipedia’s article on Sir William puts the marriages the other way round. It cites a settlement of 1481, recorded after his father’s death, that names Edith as William’s wife; it dates his marriage to Anne to about 1508; and it quotes the inquisition taken after William’s own death, under which land was settled in 1532 on William and his wife Anne. Its article on their son Maurice likewise calls Anne his father’s second wife.

Dates

Richardson puts William’s birth at about 1470 because he was aged 35 in 1505, the year his father died, and gives his death as 22 June 1533. Plantagenet Ancestry has him sheriff of Gloucestershire in 1519–20 and Magna Carta Ancestry in 1519; Wikipedia’s article gives 1518 and 1526.

The cardinal’s daughter

Richardson names Joan Beaufort’s mother, “allegedly”, as Alice Arundel. Older accounts say that Joan was born before her father took holy orders, and Richardson judges it “virtually certain” that she was born before 7 April 1397, when he took deacon’s orders. To date her birth he counts back from her two great-grandsons whose ages are known, William, born about 1470, and Sir Edward Stradling, born about 1476, and arrives at about 1390. Joan married Sir Edward Stradling of St Donat’s, in Glamorgan, and their daughter married William’s grandfather, Maurice Dennis.