REGISTERS OF THE ISLE OF WIGHT: NEWPORT AND COWES TRANSCRIBED AND EDITED BY CANON R. E. SCANTLEBURY
JAMES WINDSOR HENEAGE and ELIZABETH HENEAGE Mrs. Elizabeth Heneage, widow of James Windsor Heneage, built the churches at Newport and Cowes ( I.W.). A former Rector of Cowes, the Rev. Richard George Davis, spent many laborious years of research tracing the history of Mrs. Heneage. Several MS. volumes in the Cowes Archives record the fruits of his work, and he embodied his findings in an article in The Lamp (Vol . LIII , No. 295, no date, but, from internal evidence , 1897 ) . For years running into centuries there had lived at Brenchley, in Kent , a family of the name of Browne. The family by marriage had allied itself with the family of Iden, descendants of Alexander Iden, who, in the thirty -fifth year of the reign of Henry VI, captured the rebel Jack Cade. In 1626 John Browne was attached to the service of King James , and was the founder of His Majesty's Ordnance . " In the latter half of the seventeenth century the then John Browne, of Brenchley , left the home of his ancestors and with his wife Mary settled at Gatcombe , in the Isle of Wight. A son, John , was born to them, who, in 1733, married Elizabeth Urry, a member of a branch of an old island family* who had about one hundred years before established themselves at Sheat in the parish of Gatcombe . . . . John and Elizabeth Browne had only one child, a daughter, to whom at her baptism was given the name of Elizabeth. Elizabeth Browne was born in December , 1734, and baptised in the church at Gatcombe on January 5th, 1735. Nothing is known of the early years of her childhood, nor of how her parents, living in the very centre of the Isle ofWight, received the gift of faith. They both became Catholics when their daughter was very young. Her parents sent her to the Convent School at Hammersmith in 1749. In a MS . list (now at St. Scholastica's Abbey, Teignmouth) of boarders at this school is the entry in 1749 : " Elizabeth Browne ( Isle of Wight ) Heneage," and in a second, later, list ( 1669-1768) containing the entries of her daughters in 1768: M. Heneage & E. Heneage, " the same entry occurs again: 1749. She was therefore " Elizabeth Browne (Isle of Wight ) Heneage She left sent to school at the age of fourteen. Father Davis says , Urrys or Urries . . . . were among the most ancient The Urreys * families of the Isle of Wight. Their arms were : Gules a chevron between three falcons argent (Rev. E. Boucher James , Letters Archeological and Historical
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Relating to the Isle of Wight, i, 391; London, 1896) R.E.S. In this list, written probably about 1763 by Frances Gentil, then Superior, the name of the husband is given, as above , for girls who had married (Rev. H. J. Coleridge , S.J.: St. Mary's Convent , York, pp . 139-41 ; London, 1887) .
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