Regarding your questions in Reply #44:
First, I would say that Mary was possibly the oldest daughter but we can't definitively say so based on the evidence we have so far.
I agree. She could simply be the favourite daughter, or maybe she loved those properties dearly even though she was but a small child making her father want her to have them, or some other reason that has been lost between the testator writing his will in 1530 and us nearly 500 years later.
Chronology-wise it makes absolutely no sense for Mary to be eldest and Anne to be the second daughter. If Anne was born after 1518, as we have now established that she was, she
must have been born after Elizabeth.
I have seen Katherine referred to as the second daughter in a usually reliable source and Anne as the third daughter in another seemingly reliable source. Katherine
could have been born right after Elizabeth, that would have worked chronology-wise, but then the numbering of the girls would not make sense unless Mary was actually the youngest ...
Like I wrote previously, I have been inclined to dismiss the numbering of the girls as 'Elizabeth, Katherine, Anne', as I had been operating on the assumption that Anne was the eldest as she married first, in 1528. Now that it seems as though she was indeed the youngest, (or at least youngest out of the of the three of them, Elizabeth, Katherine and Anne), I have been forced to rethink that. Those two others could be refering to some reliable source that I have yet to find. But the numbering does not work if Mary were the eldest. Unless she died so young that she 'didn't count'. I have experienced this once before. Another Elizabeth, in the 1700's, I think. She clearly had two elder sisters, I found their christening records, but she was always referred to as the eldest daughter in documents, including her father's will. She also had younger sisters, but the two girls born first died very young.
Secondly, I agree with your conclusions regarding Anne and the Willoughby marriage.
Yes. It has never made sense to me, that if Anne and Henry Willoughby were already cohabiting in 1528, why their children only started being born over 12 years later in the 1540's. These things do happen of course, it just never seemed that likely. Especially for a family that had the habit of marrying their daughters off ridiculously young, if you ask me.
Alas, in the event, they did not.
(Katherine's daughter Jane was married off between 13 and 15, her daughter Mary at 15, Anne's daughter Margaret Willoughby was married of in 1559 at the age of 15 and Elizabeth's daughter Margaret Audley must have been between 12 and 13 when she was married to Lord Henry Dudley, younger brother of Lord Robert Dudley and Lord Guildford Dudley, as they were already married when the failed attempt to put Jane Grey on the throne occurred. She was not only Lady Jane Grey's first cousin through her mother and Jane's father, but also her sister-in law.
She would later marry as his second wife the widower of her cousin Mary.
They would both marry this chap:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Howard,_4th_Duke_of_Norfolk#/media/File:ThomasHoward4HerzogvonNorfolk.jpgOf the above, Jane would have no surviving children, and Mary and Margaret Audley, the Duchesses of Norfolk, would both die in childbirth.
At some point, you would have thought that it would have pegged for these people that these super-early marriages with a baby every year weren't necessarily the wisest. *sigh* The matter was of course exacerbated by the higher classes' practice of hiring wet nurses. One important reason for wet nurses was for the mother to conceive again quickly. Breastfeeding works as a natural birth control, which was known at time. The working classes took full advantage of this, naturally, due to the expense and work of another child so soon after the last one, without realising it giving the mother's body time to heal after birth (it is said to take a year for the body to be fully restituted), resulting in a stronger mother and baby. The higher classes took the opposite course of action, inadvertantly resulting in the opposite ...
Of course, many siblings, also today, are born within a year of each other, and people have babies young, these things happen, and fortunately everything usually turns out fine
But year after year after year ... And so many of them. And so planned. And with the, to put it mildly, severely lacking prenatal care and childbirth care of the time ... )
