DUPORT
The Duports originated from Caen in Normandy, and settled in England during the reign of Henry IV (1367-1413). I have not been able to trace my family line back any further than James Duport, of Shepshed, Leicestershire, who married Emma, daughter and co-heiress of William Montagu early in the 16th century.
Their son Thomas Duport studied law at The Temple, London, becoming a noted lawyer and Member of Parliament. Through kinship with the influential Grey family he became steward of the estates and property of his kinsman Henry Grey, Marquess of Dorset, later Duke of Suffolk, a position Thomas kept until the Duke’s execution in 1554 following the aborted reign of Lady Jane Grey, the Duke’s daughter, the ‘nine-days queen’.
Thomas married Cornelia Norton, by whom he had numerous children. The couple seem to have maintained a close family tie with the Greys through Lady Mary Grey, Queen Jane’s younger sister. Their daughter Katherine Duport served Lady Mary during the final years of her life; and in 1578 Thomas Duport was appointed co-executor of Lady Mary’s Will, in which his wife, described as “my very good cosen” was bequeathed a standing cup of silver and gilt with a cover. The Will likewise names Thomas himself as “my trustie and welbeloved cowsen”, which indicates the degree of their kinship.
Even so, this connection to the Greys doesn’t seem to have harmed Thomas’s career during the subsequent reign of Queen Mary Tudor. Although he had no actual ties with the county of Cornwall he was returned as Sitting Member for Truro in the second Parliament of Mary’s reign, and appointed as receiver of the Duke of Suffolk’s forfeited lands in the west of England. In later years he came to rely for his livelihood on his extensive local practice as a lawyer in Leicestershire, investing his profits in land and properties.
Thomas Duport died at Shepshed on 5th September 1592 and was buried there in the parish church of St Botolph’s. The fine wall monument erected to his memory inside the church shows him and his wife with their three surviving sons and four surviving daughters.
Duport family memorial in St Botolph’s church, Shepshed
My line of descent from this family continues through Thomas’s son Henry Duport, born around 1544, a lawyer like his father. Henry matriculated from Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1564 and spent thirteen years at the Inner Temple in London before transferring his practice to Derby, where he became Member of Parliament in 1597, and Recorder in 1603. His wife was Anne, daughter of Thomas Highgate, military commander of the personal troops of the 1st Earl of Pembroke. In his later years Henry Duport returned to Leicestershire, living well into his nineties and finally dying on 16th November 1640, having lived through the reigns of six monarchs.
An inquisition post mortem, taken at Leicester in August 1641, shows that he had outlived his children, and had no male heir, the heirs being three adult grandchildren. One of these was Henry Seagrave, elder son of Henry Duport’s daughter Cornelia. In 1604 Cornelia had married a Leicestershire gentleman, Ralph Seagrave of Scalford, and had four surviving children before dying in 1620. I am descended from their son, John Seagrave.
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One of Henry Duport’s brothers, Dr John Duport, became Master of Jesus College, Cambridge, and was four times elected vice-chancellor of the University, as well as serving for a time as Precentor of St Paul’s Cathedral, London. There follows an article I originally wrote about Dr Duport for Medbourne parish magazine:
DR JOHN DUPORT
Rector of Medbourne, Leicestershire
John Duport, rector of Medbourne, died in this parish some time after Christmas in the closing days of the year 1617. He had enjoyed a notable career, the highlight of which was being appointed Director of the Second Cambridge Company, a group of learned scholars employed by James I in translating parts of the Apocrypha for the King’s new bible, which we know as the King James Version.
Dr Duport came from an illustrious family. His father, lawyer Thomas Duport of Shepshed, Leicestershire, rose to become trustee or attorney of Henry Grey, Duke of Suffolk, father of Lady Jane Grey, the nine-days queen. And he was executor of the Will of Jane’s sister, Lady Mary Grey, in whose personal household Thomas’s daughter Katherine had served.
In one of his sermons, his son John later tells us his father so disliked inactivity that “he would rather unloop his old doublet and sew it up again” than be found idle.
John was born at Shepshed around 1550. He was educated at Jesus College, Cambridge, where he became a Fellow in 1574 and Master in 1590, and was four times elected Vice-Chancellor of the university. Other ecclesiastical offices included Precentor of St Paul’s Cathedral 1575, and Prebendary of Ely in 1609. He was regarded as a moderate Puritan. He married Rachel, daughter of Richard Cox, Bishop of Ely (who had ordained him), and one of their sons, James Duport, was to become Dean of Peterborough, and Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge.
In the course of his Church career Dr John Duport received the benefices of a number of parishes (such frequent change of parish for a clergyman of the Anglican Church was a sign of growing prosperity: they were always changes from a poorer benefice to a better one and were considered as “preferments”).
However, the one which concerns us here is his appointment as rector of Medbourne with Holt in October 1601. Unfortunately there are no surviving details of his incumbency, although several of his seven surviving children were baptised at St Giles’s during the 1590s, suggesting an association with the parish predating that appointment.
His wife Rachel was buried here in July 1618, some six months or so after his own death; and though we know that he had made a Will in October 1617 and died that Christmastime, there is no actual record of John Duport’s burial in the Medbourne parish register, so it may be that he was interred elsewhere – possibly at Cambridge, given his close association with Jesus College there.
My own line of descent from the Duports is through his niece Cornelia (c1583-1620), who married Ralph Seagrave at Shepshed in 1604. Through them was descended Elizabeth Seagrave, whose daughter Elizabeth Dalby married Joseph Bestell in 1733. It is through the Duports that I can trace my ancestry directly back to King Edward I via the Earls of Salisbury (see final section of my website).