Rose Knevett in the Beresford pedigrees

In this post I am going to look at Rose Knevett or Knyvett, the mother of Tristram Beresford, my 11xgreat grandfather who was agent for The Honourable The Irish Society in the Plantation of Ulster in the early 17th Century.

We are in no doubt that Tristram’s parents were named Michael and Rose. The 1619 Visitation of Kent explicitly shows that Tristram of Londonderry was the 3rd son of Michael Beresford of Squerryes in Westerham, Kent and his wife Rose, daughter of John Kneute de … . There are several errors and omissions in the various Beresford pedigrees which I’ll come to later, but this seems clear enough. The same family also appears in the 1574 Visitation living at Otford (near Sevenoaks) with Rose’s maiden name being spelt Kneuitt. (The letter v is consistently transcribed as u.)

Many online trees have decided that this John Knevitt must be the son who died in the lifetime of his mother Jane Bourchier Knyvett, 3rd Baroness Berners de jure, of Ashwellthorpe in Norfolk. It’s a tempting proposition – that John has many fascinating ancestors. (Jane Bourchier descended from Edward III and was cousin to two wives of Henry VIII by her grandmother’s second marriage. I wrote about them all in my post on West Horsley Place.) The dates fit – that John was born about 1518 and Rose about 1540. And that John had a sister called Rose (wife of Oliver Reymes) named in his mother’s will.

But unfortunately there is a fly in the ointment. There were Knevetts in Kent at this period. The Blackwood pedigrees of the Beresfords in Ireland state that John Knevitt was ‘of County Kent’. I found a reference to two Knevett brothers of West Kent taking part in the Battle of Hartley 1554. (The Beresfords owned 30 acres of land at Hartley.) One online source even gives a marriage date of 3 May 1564 at Sevenoaks for Michael Beresford and Rose Knevitt. It claims it’s taken from familysearch.org but I have been unable to find that record.

Three examples of Knyvett arms at Ashwellthorpe

The final proof that Rose was not from Norfolk comes in the footnotes of the 1619 Visitation. It gives her family’s arms as Gules, three plates charged with a cinquefoil sable. This clearly has no similarity at all with the Knyvett arms that are found throughout the church in Ashwellthorpe.

You can see Rose’s arms in the tomb of her daughter Bennet in the church of St Nicholas at Ash near Canterbury. Bennet married Sir Thomas Harflete or Septvans and on their tomb they each have escutcheons above them representing their parents’ marriages. Bennet has the Beresford arms impaling Gules, six plates argent charged with a cinquefoil (or a fleur-de-lys?) sable.

The same arms can be seen on the tomb of their daughter in nearby Wingham church. (Picture to follow.)

So it would seem that anybody interested in the ancestry of Rose Knevett would have to do some work on the Kent line of Knevetts.

Errors in the Beresford pedigrees

I mentioned earlier that there are problems with the Beresford pedigrees.

1. The 1619 pedigree wrongly attributes the children of George Beresford, Michael’s eldest son, to Richard, the second son. George’s 1613 will mentions all these children. (Notice how rich he was! He gave £400 to each of his daughters and that’s at least £75000 in today’s money.) Even in the unlikely event that George and Richard had nine children with identical names, we know it was George’s son Michael who inherited Squerryes because his mother Elizabeth Petley is named in his IPM of 1628.
2. It also omits Michael’s second and third wives. His third wife, Dorothy, is mentioned in his will and they had a son William and two daughters, Mary and Jane. (Notice how stingy he was! £500 to Mary & Jane, but only £4 to the poor of Westerham.) Dorothy was born Dorothy Cromer or Crowmer and had several children by her first marriage to William Seyliard. One of them, Elizabeth Seyliard, married her stepbrother Cornelius Beresford and they were ancestors of the Presidents Bush of the USA.
3. The Beresford arms seem to change between the two Visitations. There are two sets of arms associated with Beresford – the one with the 3 fleur-de-lys and the one with the bear. I think what happened is that Michael descended from a younger son who adopted his own arms, but the senior branch died out, so the cadet branch was able to use both.
4. Thomas, the 4th son of Michael and Rose, is omitted from the earlier Visitation. This could be explained by Thomas being the 4th surviving son, born after 1574. But I think this is the same family in the 1569 Visitation of Nottinghamshire (Michael’s father was Steward of Nottingham):

In this pedigree Nicholas has the same parents as Michael of Westerham and seven children whose names match those of Michael’s eldest seven children (although George is 14 years too old). Surely Nich is a misprint for Mich? And Rose is now the daughter of John Fitzwilliam of Knevett, a place which does not exist. Does this mean John’s father was William Knevett? Perhaps the one that fought at Hartley in 1554?

Even if Nicholas is a brother of Michael, this pedigree introduces more inconsistencies. George Beresford, the Steward of Nottingham, has the same wife as in the Visitations of Kent but different parents. Personally I believe that Michael, who signed the 1574 Visitation, knew the name of his own grandfather. I think that the John marked as a brother to the Steward of Nottingham was actually his father. Wouldn’t it be great if the original scrolls were made available digitally rather than these inaccurate 19th Century transcriptions?

We need the extra generation between Michael and Thomas in the above tree. Thomas Beresford of Derbyshire died in 1473, 135 years before Michael which sounds too distant to be a great-grandfather. The Blackwood pedigrees, which follow the Visitation of Nottingham, give a date of 1505 for the marriage of John Beresford and Miss Fitzherbert. This sounds right for Michael’s grandfather, not his uncle.

The tomb of Thomas Beresford and his wife Agnes Hassall in Fenny Bentley church is a strange monument. They lie in eerie stone shrouds, like ossified courgettes. Their 21 children, depicted in the same way, perform a macabre dance round the sides.

 

Ashwellthorpe

While performing in Norwich for a week in Autumn 2019, I took the opportunity of visiting the pretty church of All Saints, Ashwellthorpe, 10 miles outside the city centre. It’s only small, but its monuments trace a history of hundreds of years before and after the late 14th century when it was built.

North of the chancel is the splendid alabaster tomb of Sir Edmund Thorp (d 1418) and his wife Joan Northwood (d 1415). They are possible 19xgreat grandparents of mine, and probably of everybody else too. There are only so many ancestors to go round when you get that far back. Sir Edmund’s distinguished career under Richard II, Henry IV and Henry V is given in his History of Parliament entry.

1, Thorp and Bainard quartered. 2, Northwood, erm. a cross ingrailed gul. on the first quarter, arg. a fess between two bars gul. 3, Clifton. 4, Barry, arg. a chevron between three bears heads cooped sab. muzzled or

Originally this side had 1, or, a lion rampant gul. armed and langued az. 2, arg. two bars and a canton gul. 3, Kerdeston, gul. a saltier ingrailed arg. 4, Calthorp, but the first two have been replaced by the arms of the king and of St George that were previously placed on the west of the tomb.

The tomb is in excellent condition. Lady Joan’s head is supported by angels and three charming dogs support her feet and those of Sir Edmund. There are more photos here. The tomb has eight escutcheons representing their ancestors.

The Thorps had been in possession of the manor for over a hundred years by that point (as described in British History Online) but Sir Edmund and Lady Joan had two daughters. One daughter, Joan Clifton, had no issue and so the manor was inherited by the other daughter Isabel who had married Philip Tilney. (See Tilney in the Visitation of Norfolk.)

Their eldest son Frederick Tilney had only one daughter, Elizabeth, who brought the manor to her husband Sir Humphrey Bourchier. (I talked about his death in the Wars of the Roses in my post on West Horsley Place in Surrey.) Elizabeth went on to marry a second time to the Earl of Surrey and was the grandmother of two of Henry VIII’s wives and ancestor of the Dukes of Norfolk, but Ashwellthorpe passed onto her son by her first marriage to Humphrey, Sir John Bourchier, 2nd Baron Berners, and then to John’s daughter Jane Bourchier, who married Edmund Knyvett, Henry VIII’s Sergeant Porter. Edmund was a younger son of Edmund Knyvett (d 1503) of Buckenham Castle in Norfolk and Eleanor Tyrell. (Their eldest son, Thomas Knyvett (d 1512) had married a daughter of Elizabeth Tilney.) See below for a pedigree down to William Knyvett, the father of Edmund senior.

The Berners barony is so ancient that it was created by writ. This means that unlike more recent peerages which have official grants of remainder which specify that they can only pass to heirs male of the original recipient, this title can pass through female heiresses. In theory, Jane Bourchier Knyvett was the 3rd Baroness Berners, although she never claimed the title. She outlived her heir, John Knyvett, so it was her grandson Thomas who claimed the title, but never had it confirmed before his death in 1618.

Jane and several of her Knyvett descendants are buried under the floor of the little chapel to the north of Sir Edmund’s tomb.

Memorial to Jane Bourchier Knyvett with missing escutcheon

Jane Knyvet restyth here, the only heyr by Ryght, Of the Lord Berners that Syr John Bourchier hight, Twenty Years and three, a Widdows Lyffe she lede, Always keeping Howse, where Rych and Poor were fedd, Gentyll, just, quyet, void of Debate and Stryff, Ever doyng Good; Lo ! thus she led her Lyffe, Even unto the Grave, where Erth on Erth doth lye, Gn whose Soul God grant of his aboundant Mercy The 17 of February A^o Dni. MDLII

The succession at Ashwellthorpe is illustrated by a series of coats of arms on the octagonal font near the entrance to the church – representing Thorp (not pictured), Tilney/Thorp, Bourchier/Tilney, Knyvett/Bourchier, and more Knyvett marriages to Harcourt, Parry, Bacon (and another not shown).

The coats of arms of Thorp, Bourchier and Knyvet can be seen again in the stained glass of the little chapel to the north of Sir Edmund’s tomb, along with the arms of the Wilson family who eventually became Barons Berners in 1832, the barony having been in abeyance for most of the preceding 140 years. The Wilsons were succeeded by the Tyrwhitt-Wilsons, the last of whom, the 14th Lord Berners (1883-1950), was a famous socialite, composer and novelist. He was gay and had no heir. Once again the ancient title passed through the female line, first to a Williams, and now the current holder is a Kirkham. She is the 16th holder of the title, which is not very many for a peerage that is now 565 years old.

The Berners barony is represented by another stained glass window in the east wall of the chapel, showing quarters of Wilson, Knyvett, Bourchier, Royal arms (the first Baron descended from Edward III), Berners (no tinctures) and Wilson again.

Last, but not least, the chapel also houses a full-size replica of the beautiful Ashwellthorpe Triptych, an altarpiece commissioned around 1519 to celebrate the marriage of Christopher Knyvett to his Flemish bride, Catherine.

The central panel depicts the Seven Sorrows of Mary, while the side panels show the bride and groom kneeling in front of their name saints. Christopher’s escutcheon and clothing show Knyvett quartered by the same Clifton arms seen on Edmund Thorp’s tomb. When Edmund’s son-in-law John Clifton of Buckenham died without an heir, his inheritance was claimed by his sister’s son, John Knyvett. The Knyvetts had owned Buckenham ever since.

 

Visitation of Yorkshire, 1563

The informative panel in the chapel says that ‘Christopher Knyvett of Ashwellthorpe’ disappears from the records (and probably died) around 1520 and the altarpiece was inherited by his brother Edmund and handed down through the family until it was sold in 1908 by the Wilsons who held the Berners title at that time. I would question that description ‘of Ashwellthorpe’ though, because Ashwellthorpe only came into the Knyvett family with Edmund’s marriage to Jane Bourchier.

Considering the Knyvetts were such a distinguished family, it is surprising that neither the original Buckenham branch or the cadet branch at Ashwellthorpe appear in any of the Visitations of Norfolk. Perhaps they had so much land in so many counties that they were always out when the Heralds called. The only useful Knyvett tree I have found is the one in the Knevet tree in the 1563 Visitation of Yorkshire, shown above, and that one stops in the mid-15th Century.

So it’s difficult to make a complete tree and it remains an open question whether John Knyvett, who died in the lifetime of his mother Jane Bourchier, had a daughter called Rose who married Michael Beresford of Kent and was the mother of Tristram Beresford, my 11x great grandfather who went to Ireland to line his pockets as agent for the Livery Companies in the Plantation of Ulster. So that’s what I’m going to look at in my next post.