♂William Hoo

William Hoo (about 1335 – 22 November 1410) was an English knight who served Edward III, Richard II and Henry IV for some forty years: as a soldier at Calais, as keeper of the castle of Oye in the English Pale of Calais^W, and as an envoy to Burgundy and France. He was the seventeenth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through his daughter Margaret Hoo.

Early life and marriage

William was born about 1335, and is said to have been the second son, but the eldest to survive, of Sir Thomas Hoo and Isabel St. Leger, an heiress whose lands lay in Sussex, Northamptonshire and Hertfordshire.

William married Alice St. Omer, the daughter of Thomas St. Omer of Mulbarton in Norfolk, before 25 May 1366. On that day her father’s lands at Mulbarton were divided between Alice and her half-sister Elizabeth, who was still a minor in the king’s wardship^W, and William and Alice received a third of the manor, including “the whole area and all the houses within the moat”.

In 1367 Sir William named the parish priest of Mulbarton, a right that came with the manor, and he rebuilt the church and its tower, filling the windows with portraits of himself, of Alice and of her family. The Norfolk historian Francis Blomefield^W recorded in 1769 that one of the north windows had until lately shown Alice’s father kneeling in armour, her mother kneeling behind him and Alice behind them both, with Sir William and Alice kneeling opposite.

In the king’s service

By May 1370 William was in the king’s service at Calais, where he was allowed £40 for his wages. In 1387, according to a history of the family published in 1856, he helped Michael de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk^W, escape to Calais disguised as a “Flemish poulterer”, with his beard shaved. De la Pole, Richard II’s former chancellor, was fleeing the king’s opponents, the Lords Appellant^W, who had him condemned in his absence the next year.

That same year William was made keeper of the castle of Oye, a fortress in the marches of Picardy, near Calais. On 1 October 1387, about to set out for Jerusalem and expecting to be away for up to two years, he had the king’s licence to leave a deputy in charge. He was reappointed year after year; the indenture of 16 November 1392 gave him a garrison of ten men-at-arms and thirty archers, and a salary of £10 a quarter.

Henry IV did not renew the post when he took the throne in 1399, and in May 1402 the Privy Council noted that the king should be spoken to on Sir William’s behalf “touching the restitution of the castle of Oye”. The new king still used him as a diplomat. In March 1405 he was one of the English ambassadors to the Duchess of Burgundy over the affairs of the Low Countries and a trade treaty with Flanders. In 1406 and 1407, while serving in the garrison of Calais, he helped negotiate with John the Fearless^W, Duke of Burgundy, for a truce and for the regulation of trade and fishing, and with France for the free passage of the sea.

Later life and death

The children of William and Alice are said to have been Thomas, who succeeded his father; John, who died without children; and Margaret, who married Thomas St. Clair. Alice died before her husband, and both were buried in the chancel of Mulbarton church. William married again, to Eleanor, the daughter of Sir John Wingfield; they were married by 1401–2, and she bore him another son, Thomas, and outlived him.

He was named to one more embassy in 1410, but was held up in England, and on 12 May another man was appointed in his place. He died on 22 November 1410, at the age of about seventy-five.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through his daughter Margaret, Margaret’s daughter Edith Saint Clair (born about 1423), Edith’s daughter Alice Harcourt (died 1526), Alice’s daughter Elizabeth Bessiles, Elizabeth’s daughter Anne Fettiplace, Anne’s daughter Mary Purefoy, Mary’s daughter Susanna Thorne, Susanna’s son Thomas Dudley^W (1576–1653), later governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, 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

Sources for his life

His death on 22 November 1410, “at the ripe age of seventy-five years”, his burial in the chancel at Mulbarton, the church he rebuilt, and the windows are from W. D. Cooper, “Notices of the Family of Hoo”, Sussex Archaeological Collections 8 (1856), pp. 104–131, at pp. 106–109; Cooper takes the windows from Blomefield’s History of Norfolk, vol. 3, p. 51. F. N. Craig, “Maternal Ancestry of Governor Thomas Dudley: Hoo, St. Omer, Malmains, St. Leger, Fitzwarin and Andevill Lines”, New England Historical and Genealogical Register 140 (1986), p. 219, also gives his death in 1410. His birth year is worked back from his age at death.

His career is from Cooper, who cites the Issue Roll of Bishop Brantingham for the Calais wages of 1370, Rymer’s Foedera for the Jerusalem licence, the embassies and the 1410 replacement, and Nicolas’s Proceedings of the Privy Council for the 1402 note. The escape of Michael de la Pole rests on a chronicle, the Vita Ricardi II, as Cooper cites it. The catalogue of the National Archives lists a record of his custody of the castle of Oye in 1395–96 (E 101/69/1/290) and a record of 1401–2 naming “William Hoo and Eleanor his wife” (E 199/11/9).

The division of 25 May 1366 is in the Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem, vol. 12, no. 79, which names “William de Hoo and Alice, his wife, one of the daughters and heirs of the said Thomas”; the place is written Mulkeberton there.

Parentage and children

The Complete Peerage (2nd ed., vol. 6, pp. 561–566, under Hoo) calls him the “2nd but eldest surviving” son of Thomas Hoo and Isabel St. Leger; Cooper (p. 106) names only two sons, John Hoo of Knebworth, who died without children, and William. Cooper (p. 108) gives his children by Alice as Thomas, John (living in 1428, died without children), “possibly a William”, and Margaret, who married “the wealthy Thomas St. Clere”; the licence of 1387 names “his son William” as one who might serve as his deputy at Oye. Craig (p. 219) also makes Margaret the daughter of William and Alice. Some online family trees place Margaret and John among the children of the second wife, Eleanor Wingfield; Cooper and Craig do not, and the family tree follows them.