Appleton/Tyrell: A Tangle - soc.genealogy.medieval

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Message from discussion Appleton/Tyrell: A Tangle
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From: Brad Verity <royaldesc...@hotmail.com>
Newsgroups: soc.genealogy.medieval
Subject: Re: Appleton/Tyrell: A Tangle
Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2012 22:56:02 -0700 (PDT)
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On Apr 24, 4:28=A0pm, John <jhiggins...@yahoo.com> wrote:

> To be clear on this, Brown's book on the Tyrells presents a chart on
> page 112 which he labels as a "suggested pedigree". =A0And his tentative
> placement (indicated by dotted lines) of Joyce the supposed wife of
> Thomas Appleton makes her a granddaughter, not daughter of the Sir
> Roger Tyrell who had two wives, Christian and Elizabeth. =A0He makes
> this placement primarily based on the fact the wife of the younger Sir
> Roger was named Joyce and hence the basis for the name of the daughter
> Joyce.

I'm grateful to both you & Doug Smith, John, for checking this Brown
book on the Tyrells, which I don't have.  It sounds as if Brown was
having the same difficulty placing Thomas Appleton's wife in the
Tyrell family.  His solution turns out even more impossible
chronologically, but he didn't have the access to the Appleton wills
that we now do.  To re-iterate: Alice (as we now know her name was,
not 'Joyce'), the wife of Thomas Appleton, was a mother of seven by
1483/4.  We can assume that all seven children were under-age when
their father made his will, for he arranges that a bequest to his
eldest son Roger be given to him when he turns age 21.  So Roger
Appleton (d. 1529) was born at some point after 1462/3.  Let's
estimate that the childbearing of Thomas & Alice Appleton began
between 1465-1470.  If Alice was about age 20 when she began bearing
children, then her birthdate would be about 1445-1450.  We could
probably extend it to 1455 & still be safe.  If she was a Tyrell, we
then need to look at potential parents for her that were having their
children in the 1440s/1450s.  This removes Sir Robert Tyrell of
Wivenhoe (d. c.1507) & Christian Hartishorn (d. 1506) as her parents,
as they were not married until at least the 1480s.  I've seen an
estimated birthdate of 1476 for Christian's son (by her first
husband), Henry Mackwillam of Stambourne Hall.

To our knowledge, Sir Robert Tyrell of Wivenhoe had no wife prior to
Christian, so that removes him as father to Alice, wife of Thomas
Appleton.   The Appleton pedigree of 1612 (as it's been published in
the Harleian series) does NOT say that the wife of Thomas Appleton was
a daughter of Sir Robert Tyrell & Christian Hartishorn.  It says she
was a daughter of Sir Robert Tyrell, Master of the Horse to Henry
VIII.  Now, it is probably not correct on that point: for Alice's
father to have been Master of the Horse to Henry VIII when he was
King, he would have to have survived until at least 1509, 25 years
after the death of his son-in-law Thomas Appleton.  Not impossible,
but not likely either.  Perhaps Alice's father was Master of the Horse
to a monarch previous to Henry VIII?  Maybe Henry VII, or Henry VI?

It is also noteworthy that in the Tyrell pedigree from the 1558
Visitation, there is no mention of a marriage of any of their
daughters to an Appleton.

> He also identifies the probable source of the identification of Joyce,
> daughter of Sir Robert Tyrell (unclear which one), as being Morant's
> Essex. =A0But he does not give a specific citation in Morant for this,
> saying only that Morant mentions this in the context of the passage of
> the manor of South Benfleet from the Coogeshalls to the Tyrells and
> then to the Appletons. =A0It should be noted that Brown is very critical
> of Morant's treatment of the Tyrell genealogy (calling it "nonsense"
> at at least one point), so Morant should perhaps be used with care
> here.

It's great to dig back the layers and discover the root of the error.
Morant wrote in 1768, and may have used the 1612 Appleton Visitation
pedigree as a reference (though it wasn't published until 1878).
Someone back in 1612 (whether it was an Appleton descendant, or the
herald taking the Visitation we can't now know), stated three facts
about the wife of Thomas Appleton:

1) That her first name was Joyce (which we know now is incorrect - it
was 'Alice').
2) That she was the daughter of Sir Robert Tyrell
3) That her father Sir Robert was Master of the Horse to King Henry
VIII (which we know now from chronology is highly unlikely, if not
impossible).

Subsequently, someone else (one of the heralds, Morant, Brown,
Richardson, maybe each and all of them) went looking for a Joyce,
daughter of Robert in the Tyrell pedigrees, found a Joyce daughter of
Sir Robert Tyrell & Christian Hartishorn in the 1558 Tyrell Visitation
pedigree, ignored the fact that the pedigree did not assign any
husband to this Joyce, and assumed that she was the wife of Thomas
Appleton.

We now know that's not the case because 1) The chronology makes it
impossible; 2) The daughter of Sir Robert Tyrell & Christian
Hartishorn was actually named 'Margery' not Joyce; and 3) The wife of
Thomas Appleton was actually named 'Alice' not Joyce.

> It should also be noted, as Doug Smith notes above, that Brown's
> "suggested pedigree" differs from the visitation pedigree in saying
> that the maiden name of [the elder] Sir Robert Tyrell's first wife
> Christian/Christine was Mackwilliam, not Hartshorn, and that it was
> his 2nd wife Elizabeth (not the first) who married Edward
> Mackwilliam. =A0Brown discusses the differing sources on this point and
> makes what he terms a "plausible" case for this.

The evidence of the stained glass portrait of her in Stambourne Church
proves that Christian, wife of Edward Mackwilliam was a Hartishorn.
And the evidence of Sir Robert Tyrell's will of 1507 proves that he
survived his wife Christian, and so had to be her second husband.  I
don't know what logic Brown uses in his argument, but it is pretty
straightforward that it was Sir Robert's first wife Christian who was
the wife of Edward Mackwilliam of Stambourne Hall.  As Edward's son
Henry Mackwilliam was in possession of Stambourne Hall in 1506, Edward
was dead by that date.  He died then before Sir Robert Tyrell and
cannot have married Tyrell's widow Elizabeth.

> Wedgwood's bio of Roger Appleton the MP (d. 1491) gives him only a
> single wife: =A0Elizabeth, dau. of Henry Frowick and widow of John
> Martin [sic}. =A0As DR has noted above, for chronological reasons this
> Roger cannot be the father of Thomas Appleton (d. 1485). =A0And
> similarly he cannot be the grandfather of Roger Appleton (b. ca. 1462)
> who married Anne Sulliard.

Thanks for checking this, John.  I didn't have the death date of 1491
for the M.P. Roger Appleton.  Of course he couldn't be the same Roger
Appleton who fathered Thomas and Agnes.  Both of their parents were
deceased when Thomas made his will in 1483/4.  He also states that his
father was buried in Holy Trinity Church, Dartford.

Cheers,                                     ------Brad
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