Mary (Witham) Bolles 1st Btss (abt. 1579 - 1662)

Born about 30 Jun 1579 in Ledsham, Yorkshire, England

Ancestors

Wife of Thomas Bolles Esq — married 1611 in Nottinghamshire, England

Descendants

Died 5 May 1662 at about age 82 in Heath Old Hall, Heath, Wakefield, Yorkshire, England

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Biography

Dame Mary Witham was a member of the aristocracy in England.

Known to history as Dame Mary Bolles, Btss, she was the only woman ever to be created a baronet (ess) in her own right, and probably remains so.

Mary Witham was the daughter of William Witham of Ledston Hall (in the West Riding of Yorkshire; still extant)^[1] and his wife Eleanor, daughter of John Neale, of Daventry, Northamptonshire (see Visitation of Northamptonshire, 1618–19). She was baptized in the parish of Ledsham on 30 June 1579 ^[2]; she was the ninth child, but at least five had died in infancy.

First marriage

She was married twice. Firstly she married Thomas Jopson (sometimes shown as Jobson). His father Robert Jopson had, in 1585, purchased the manor and a great deal of the land within the manor and township of Cudworth in the West Riding of Yorkshire. The Lordship of the Manor and the estate was inherited by Thomas Jopson on the death of his father.^[3] She is remembered in the will of Thomas Jopson and in the will of her stepson, who became a senior magistrate in Nottinghamshire during the Interregnum. ^{[4] [5] [6]}

The only surviving son of Thomas and Mary was another Thomas Jopson, who inherited the Cudworth estate, but predeceased his mother. This Thomas had children from his first marriage, the eldest of which was William, who succeeded to the estate as a minor (and eventually to the baronetcy, see below). Mary, his grandmother as guardian, became de facto Lord of the Manor during her grandson's minority.

During this period her other siblings, other than her eldest brother Henry, had died. Henry inherited the Heath Hall estate from his father (d. 1593), who had previously bought it after selling the manor of Ledston and built what became Heath Old Hall. ^[7] On Henry's death, Mary succeeded to the family estates, including Heath Hall, and so became rich in her own right, independently of any husband.^[8]

Second marriage

Her second marriage was to Thomas Bolles, of Osberton in Worksop, Nottinghamshire,^[9] (licence 1611^[10]). She became the step-mother of Thomas Bolles's children, as well as guardian to her own grandson. Thomas Bolles entered his pedigree at the Visitation of Notts., 1614^[11] and died 19 Mar 1634/5, when his funeral cert. was ‘testified by the Lady Mary Bolles, Baronnettes, late wife and executrix’.^[12]

They had issue two daughters:

1. Anne (b. 1614), married at Worksop, Sir William Dalston, 1st Bt. (cr. 1641), MP, who inherited the Heath Hall estate.
2. Mary (b. 1618), married at Worksop, 8 Jan 1640, Thomas Legh, of Adlington.

Baronetess

She was styled Dame Mary Bolles of Osberton, having been created by Charles I, 19 December 1635, uniquely a Baronetess of Nova Scotia, with remainder ‘to her heirs male and assignees'; this is ‘the only case of a Baronetcy having been conferred on a female, or even enjoyed suo jure by one. The rank of the widow of a Baronet has occasionally been conferred.'^[13][14]

Baronetcies had been created in the 14th century, but were revived by Charles's father James VI/I in 1611 as a means of raising funds for the Royal coffers. A baronetcy is the only British hereditary honour that is not a peerage.

There is a number of Scottish baronetcies that can pass, or have passed, through the female line.^[15] Lord Lyon Learney has stated: 'For some inexplicable reason it appears that from the inception of the 1911 Roll of Baronets the impression was formed that where the person who would have succeeded to such a Baronetcy with destination to heirs-of-line or of entail, carrying through heirs-female, was a woman, then the female herself could not succeed.'^[16]

Death and legacy

Dame Mary died at Old Hall in Heath, 5 May 1662, when she was succeeded in the Baronetcy by her grandson, Sir William Jopson^[17] (d.s.p.m., c. 1673), only surviving son of Thomas Jopson, her only son by her first husband. Sir William also inherited Heath Hall together with her personal estates.

Her interment did not take place until six weeks after her decease, she having assigned £120, a very much larger sum then than now, for keeping open house for all comers during that time. Her will, only signed the day before her death, besides containing a number of charitable bequests, legacies to relatives and friends, and £200 for the erection of her tomb, further provides for the funeral festivities as follows:

“I give all my fat beeves and fat sheep to be disposed of at the discretion of my executors, whom I charge to perform it nobly, and really to bestow this, my gift in good provision; two hogsheads of wine or more, as they shall see cause, and that several hogsheads of beer be taken care for (there being no convenience to brew). And, my bedding being plundered from me, I desire that the chambers may be well furnished with beds, borrowed for the time, for the entertaining of such as shall be thought fit lodgers."

Besides these arrangements, Lady Bolles left £700 to be expended in mourning, and £400 for funeral expenses, and charged her executors most earnestly to see her will exactly performed, adding that if any person interested in it obstructed them in any degree, he or she should forfeit all claim to any benefit from it.^[18]

Her marble altar-tomb in All Saints', Ledsham, bears her effigy wrapped in a shroud, with the following inscription:

Here under lyeth interred the body of the Right Worshipful Dame Mary Bolles, of Heath Hall in the County of York, Baronetess, one of the daughters of William Witham of the worshipful and ancient family of the Withams, of Leadstone Hall in the county aforesaid, Esq., who married to her first husband Thomas Jobson of Cudworth in the said county, Esq., by whom she had issue, Thomas Jobson, Esq., and Elizabeth, who married Thomas Sherrebrooke of Oxon in the county of Nottingham, Esq. The said Dame Mary Bolles had to her second husband Thomas Bolles of Asbarstone in the county of Nottingham, Esq., by whom she had issue Anne, who married the right worshipful Sir William Dalston, of Dalston in the county of Northumberland, Knight and Baronet; and Mary, who married Thomas Legh of Adlington in the county of Chester, Esq. The said Dame Mary Bolles, being above eighty years of age, departed this mortal life at Heath Hall aforesaid, the 5 day of May, in the year of our Lord 1662.^[19]

There is a tradition that after her death, Mary Bolles ‘haunted her house at Heath and parts adjacent till such time as she was conjured into a certain deep place in the river Calder, near that town (i.e. Wakefield), called from thence Lady Bolles’s Pit’.^[20] Brooke states that she purchased her title.^[21]

Charities

Dame Mary was regarded as something of an eccentric, but she endowed various public projects, including a charity school at Warmfield^[22] and a water tower. She built the water tower at Heath Hall; its uses are uncertain, but may have included ensuring a potable water supply to the village and hall, a gazebo and viewing tower, and also it is 'thought to power a nearby ironworks'.^[23] The Dame Mary Bolles water tower still stands.^[24]

The parish of Royston and particularly the township of Cudworth (which is within the parish of Royston) benefited by a charitable grant that was still being managed until it was merged with others in the 1990s.

Dame Mary was born in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and survived through those of James I/VI, Charles I, the Commonwealth period (the Interregnum) and the Restoration.

Sources

• Standish, John. Transactions of the Thoroton Society (Cooke & Vowles, 1901) Vol. 5, Supplement Page 14
• Marshall, George William. The Visitations of the County of Nottingham in the Years 1569 and 1614 (London, 1871) Page 95

• Ancestry Family Trees Publication: Online publication - Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com. Original data: Family Tree files submitted by Ancestry members. https://www.ancestry.com/family-tree/tree/26867133/family

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolles_baronets

• Sir Crispin Agnew of Lochnaw, Bt, QC, 'Dame Mary Bolles Baronetess and female baronetesses', The Baronets’ Newsletter, Summer 2020, 10-11.

1. ↑ See Stirnet, Witham 1 for this family, citing Burke's Commoners, vol. 2; Visitation of Yorks., 1584/5
2. ↑ Ledsham parish records
3. ↑ Pedigree of Jobson of Cudworth, Co. York http://www.nottshistory.org.uk/articles/tts/tts1901/jobsonpedigree.pdf
4. ↑ will of Thomas Jopson dated 1653 held at the National Archive in Kew
5. ↑ Court Baron record for the manor of Cudworth dated 1643
6. ↑ Report to Parliament by the Charity Commissioners 27 January 1827
7. ↑ The Time of Our Lives in Heath: a portrait of a Yorkshire village at the Millennium
8. ↑ https://www.wizdom.ai/publication/10.1093/NQ/S5-XI.273.237I/title/bolles_pedigree
9. ↑ see Maddison's Lincolnshire Pedigrees (1906, under Bolle of Haugh)
10. ↑ G.E. Cockayne, Baronetage, II, 414
11. ↑ The Visitations of the County of Nottingham in the Years 1569 and 1614
12. ↑ G.E. Cockayne, Baronetage, II, 414
13. ↑ G.E. Cockayne, Baronetage, II, 414
14. ↑ https://www.gutenberg.org/files/42038/42038-h/42038-h.htm
15. ↑ Sir Crispin Agnew of Lochnaw Bt, 'The Baronets of Nova Scotia', Journal of the Heraldry Society of Scotland, 1979, No. 1, pp. 35- 43
16. ↑ Dame Maureen Dunbar of Hempriggs, Baronetess, 1966, SLT (Lyon Ct), 2, 6
17. ↑ G.E. Cockayne, Baronetage, II, 415
18. ↑ John Ingram, The Haunted Homes and Family Traditions of Great Britain, 1897
19. ↑ Journal of British Archaeological Assn, vol. 20, 261 https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=liZNAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA261&dq=%22dame+mary+bolles%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiPr9jEmdnqAhWMFMAKHS42D90Q6AEwAXoECAEQAg#v=onepage&q=%22dame%20mary%20bolles%22&f=false
20. ↑ J.C. Brooke, Somerset Herald, 1778–94, vol. 1, 408, Coll. of Arms
21. ↑ J.C. Brooke, Somerset Herald, 1778–94, vol. 1, 408, Coll. of Arms
22. ↑ Archbishop Drummond's Visitation Returns 1764, vol. 2, Yorkshire S-Y, Borthwick, 1997, p. 100
23. ↑ https://britishlistedbuildings.co.uk/101200499-dame-mary-bolles-water-tower-including-water-wheel-housing-and-overflow-channel-warmfield-cum-heath#.XxQqdh17new
24. ↑ British Water Tower Appreciation Society, Dame Mary Bolles Water Tower: http://bwtas.blogspot.com/2008/07/dame-mary- bolles-tower.html