Mary de Stanley

  General Notes:

Mary Stanley's mother was Lady Margaret, daughter of Michael de le Pole, a younger son of the Earl of Suffolk. Lady Mary de Stanley married Sir John de Hardy, Lord Mayor of London. Mary's ancestry included lords, ladies, the Dukes of Earl and of Westmorland, princes, barons, and seven kings of Scotland (from the years 942 to 1214). See notes on her son, Micheal de Hardy.

One of these sovereigns was King Duncan I MacCrinin, murdered by Macbeth on 14 August 1040. Other of Lady Mary's ancestors were John de Lacie, Magna Carta Baron, and William Malet, twenty-fourth in descent from Clovis, Sheriff of Somerset and Dorset, and also a Magna Carta Baron. Yet another of her family was Henry de Bohun, Earl of Hereford and Magna Carta Baron, fifth in line of descent from King Malcolm III of Scotland, and who died on pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1220.

Lady Mary was also lineally descended from Humphrey de Bohun VIII, Earl of Hereford and of Essex, Constable of England, born 1276 and slain 1332, and who married Isabel Plantagenet, daughter of King Edward I of England and Eleanor of Castile. through their parentage on the distaff side, the Hardys could thus trace their lineage to King Edward. Through her descent from Lady Joan, daughter of John of Gaunt (son of King Edward III), they were likewise doubly lineal descendants of that monarch. Sir John de Hardy, Lord Mayor of London, by his marriage alliance to the de Stanleys, thus gave the future Hardys of this union claim to royal blood, no matter how distant and diluted, for seven Scottish sovereigns and the two King Edwards were no mean ancestral boasts...


*Source: Our Farthers' Fields, James Everett Kibler, University of South Carolina Press [1998], pp.7-9

Mary married John De Hardy, son of John De Hardy and Living. (John De Hardy was born in 1510 in Wetwang, East Riding, Yorkshire, Eng and died in 1545 in London, England.)