Gurney Genealogy Library Updated 7 April 2026 by Allen Gurney WIP / Draft

Anthony Gurney (c. 1499 – 4 January 1555/6)

Ancestor fact sheet for G17 in the direct Gurney line. Boy lord of West Barsham; second cousin of Anne Boleyn through his Heydon mother; brought Great Ellingham and the Mortimer of Attleborough lands into the family by marrying Margaret Lovell. Foreman of the Norfolk grand jury that indicted the Earl of Surrey in 1547. Updated April 2026.

Born
c. 1499 (Pease genealogy: 1491). Norfolk. Eldest son of William Gurney V (G18) and Anne Heydon, daughter of Sir Henry Heydon of Baconsthorpe Castle. Inherited as a child after his father's death (before 1508) — Anthony was a "boy lord" of approximately nine when his grandfather William Gurney IV (G19) died in January 1508. 1
Died
4 January 1555 Old Style (= January 1556 modern reckoning). The precise day is recorded by Francis Blomefield in his parish entry for West Barsham: "Anthony Gournay, Esq. ... died January 4, 1555, leaving Henry, his grandson and heir, aged twenty-one years." 2
Occupation / Status
Lord of West Barsham (held by one knight's fee of the manor of Castleacre, "lord in 1514" per Blomefield), Great Ellingham, Harpley, Hingham-Gurneys, Hardingham, Wattlefield, and (after 1525) the Lovell Mortimer-of-Attleborough estates that came in through his wife. Leading Norfolk gentleman. Foreman of the Norfolk grand jury that indicted Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, on 7 January 1546/7 (the indictment that led to Surrey's execution two weeks later). 3
Buried
Probably West Barsham (the family seat). No surviving monument is recorded in any source consulted. 4
Marriage
Margaret Lovell — daughter and coheir of Sir Robert Lovell, by Ela Conyers his wife. Sir Robert was, in Blomefield's words, "cousin and coheir of Sir Thomas Lovell, privy counsellor to King Henry VII and Henry VIII and Knight of the Garter" — Sir Thomas Lovell KG (c. 1449–1524) being one of the most powerful men in early Tudor England. The marriage brought into the Gurney family the manor of Great Ellingham (after the 1525 death without issue of Henry Spelman the elder of Mickle Elyngham), Berryhall in Ellingham, and a substantial slice of the medieval Mortimer of Attleborough holdings. Per the Pease genealogy, the marriage took place in 1519. Margaret died c. 1536. 5

Highlights

  • A boy lord, with a Howard godmother circle. Anthony inherited the principal Norfolk Gurney estates as a child (probably around age nine, c. 1508). His mother Anne Heydon brought into the family the Heydon-Boleyn-Howard cousinage of late-medieval Norfolk: her father Sir Henry Heydon of Baconsthorpe was a major figure in Edward IV's and Henry VII's Norfolk administration, and her sister Bridget had married Sir William Paston. Anthony was therefore a second cousin of the future Queen Anne Boleyn through his Heydon mother — a kinship that would still be remembered in the 1540s when his own grandson Henry's godmother was a Lady Catherine Howard. 6
  • Brought Great Ellingham and the Mortimer of Attleborough lands into the family. Around 1519 Anthony married Margaret Lovell, daughter and coheir of Sir Robert Lovell by Ela Conyers — a Conyers who was sister to the Anne Conyers who would become mother of the famous antiquary Sir Henry Spelman of Congham. Sir Robert Lovell was, per Blomefield, "cousin and coheir of Sir Thomas Lovell, privy counsellor to King Henry VII and Henry VIII and Knight of the Garter." When Henry Spelman the elder of "Mickle Elyngham" died without issue in 1525, the manor of Great Ellingham — held of the heirs of Lord Bardolph — descended to Anthony in right of his wife. This is independently recorded by Blomefield in his Great Ellingham parish entry. The Great Ellingham acquisition was the most significant addition to the family estates since the Wauncy marriage of Edmund Gurney (G23) two centuries earlier. 7
  • "Gurney's Place" in Norwich — town house in St Julian's parish. Daniel Gurney records a Gurney town house in the parish of St Julian, Norwich, known as "Gurney's Place," held during Anthony's lifetime. The Gurneys had been holders of urban property in Norwich since the medieval period (Pockthorpe and the eastern suburbs); a town house in St Julian's, the parish associated with the Lady Julian of Norwich anchoress cell, would have been a notably central location. 8
  • Foreman of the Norfolk grand jury that indicted the Earl of Surrey, January 1546/7. On 7 January 1546/7 Anthony Gurney sat as foreman of the Norfolk grand jury that returned a true bill against Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey — the poet, son of the Duke of Norfolk, and one of the great courtier-noblemen of Henry VIII's reign — for treason. Surrey was tried at the Guildhall on 13 January, condemned, and beheaded on Tower Hill on 19 January 1547. Henry VIII himself died nine days later. The indictment is documented in the State Papers and is one of the few moments when a Norfolk Gurney appears at a national level of political action. The political weight of Anthony's position — a relatively minor Norfolk gentleman foreman of a jury that destroyed England's premier earl, with the king dying within days — is hard to overstate. 9
  • Hosted in the Lestrange of Hunstanton household accounts. Anthony appears in the famous Hunstanton household and privy purse accounts (kept by the Lestranges of Hunstanton, 1519–1578) — published by Daniel Gurney in Archaeologia vol. 25 (1832). The accounts identify "Anthony Gurney, Esq. of West Barsham and Great Ellingham" among the Lestranges' regular Norfolk visitors and dinner companions. The Lestranges were major north-Norfolk gentry; their accounts are one of the most detailed surviving records of early-Tudor East Anglian gentry sociability. 10
  • Died 4 January 1555/6, leaving his grandson Henry as heir. Anthony's eldest son Francis Gurney (G16) had died vita patris some months or years earlier. When Anthony died — Blomefield gives the precise day, 4 January 1555 Old Style — the inheritance passed to his grandson Henry Gurney (G15), a child of about seven. Blomefield's "aged twenty-one years" almost certainly refers not to Henry's actual age at the moment of inheritance but to the age at which Henry would later take formal livery of the estate after his minority. The death within months of Mary I's restoration of Catholicism made Anthony almost the last Gurney patriarch to die in a Catholic England. 11

Children

Name Dates Notes
Francis Gurney c. 1521 – before 4 January 1555/6 G16 in the direct line. Eldest son and heir-apparent. Married Helen Holdich of Ranworth in 1543. Died vita patris before his father, leaving Henry G15 as Anthony's grandson and heir. 12
Ela Gurney fl. mid-16th century Daughter listed in Pease/Pennyghael genealogy. Named for her mother's mother Ela Conyers. 13
Further child(ren) fl. mid-16th century Pease/Pennyghael genealogy mentions a third child whose name is not given in the source consulted. 13

Narrative

Anthony Gurney is the figure who bridges the medieval Norfolk Gurneys — the Wauncys and Calthorps and Heydons of the Wars of the Roses — with the Tudor and Elizabethan Gurneys whose lives we can trace in considerable personal detail through his grandson Henry’s commonplace book. He is the second cousin of Anne Boleyn, the foreman of the jury that destroyed the Earl of Surrey, the husband of a Lovell heiress who brought Great Ellingham into the family, and — almost incidentally — the man whose precise death date (4 January 1555/6) Francis Blomefield troubled to record in his West Barsham parish entry two and a half centuries later.

He was born around 1499 — Pease/Pennyghael’s “1491” is probably too early, since his father William Gurney V (G18) is reckoned to have died before 1508 and his mother Anne Heydon was probably married no earlier than the late 1480s. He inherited as a child. His father William V had died vita patris, and when his grandfather William Gurney IV (G19) — the Norfolk escheator and council member to the Duke of Norfolk — died in January 1508, Anthony succeeded directly as a “boy lord” of around nine. Wardship arrangements for the substantial Norfolk Gurney estates during his minority would have been managed by his uncles or maternal Heydon kin.

Through his Heydon mother, Anthony was tied into the most significant Norfolk gentry network of the late 15th and early 16th century. His Heydon grandfather Sir Henry Heydon of Baconsthorpe was a Privy Councillor to Henry VII; his Heydon great-grandmother had been Anne Boleyn the elder of Blickling, making Anthony a second cousin of Queen Anne Boleyn through her father Sir Thomas Boleyn’s Heydon kin. His Heydon aunts had married into the Pastons of Caister, the Cobhams (with onward marriage to Sir Thomas Wyatt), and the Lestranges of Hunstanton — the latter a connection that explains why two generations later Anthony’s grandson Henry’s son Francis Gurney (G14) would become the financial agent to the Lestranges from 1612 to 1636.

Francis Blomefield’s History of Norfolk records Anthony as lord of West Barsham in 1514 — the earliest independent dating we have for him. Around 1519, per the Pease genealogy, he married Margaret Lovell, daughter of Sir Robert Lovell by Ela Conyers. The marriage was significant in two ways. Margaret’s father Sir Robert was a “cousin and coheir,” in Blomefield’s phrase, of Sir Thomas Lovell KG (c. 1449–1524) — Speaker of the House of Commons in 1485, Treasurer of the Household to Henry VII and Henry VIII, Knight of the Garter, one of the most powerful men in early Tudor England. The Lovell family had also been Mortimers of Attleborough through earlier marriages, and held substantial lands in central and southern Norfolk. Margaret’s mother Ela Conyers was sister to the Anne Conyers who would become mother of the famous antiquary Sir Henry Spelman of Congham — meaning Anthony’s children were close cousins of the man who, a generation later, would virtually invent English legal antiquarianism.

The most concrete result of the Lovell marriage was the acquisition of Great Ellingham. Per Blomefield’s parish entry for Great Ellingham (vol. i, pp. 482–490), the manor had been held by Henry Spelman the elder of “Mickle Elyngham,” who died without issue in 1525. On Spelman’s death the manor passed to Anthony in right of his wife, “one of the daughters and coheirs of Sir Robert Lovell, by Ela Conyers his wife.” Great Ellingham — held of the heirs of Lord Bardolph — would become the principal residence of Anthony’s grandson Henry G15 a generation later, and the parish church (St James the Apostle) would hold his epitaph verse.

Anthony’s known landholdings as Norfolk gentleman in the 1520s–1550s therefore included: West Barsham (the principal seat, held by one knight’s fee of Castleacre per Blomefield); Great Ellingham (after 1525); Hingham-Gurneys (held of the heirs of Henry Lord Morley); Harpley; Hardingham; Wattlefield; and “Gurney’s Place” — a town house in St Julian’s parish, Norwich. He also appears in the published household and privy purse accounts of the Lestranges of Hunstanton (1519–1578) as a regular Norfolk visitor and dinner companion of the Lestrange family.

His most striking single recorded act is dated 7 January 1546/7. On that date Anthony Gurney sat as foreman of the Norfolk grand jury that returned a true bill against Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey — the poet, son of the Duke of Norfolk, and one of the great courtier-noblemen of Henry VIII’s reign — for treason. Surrey was tried at the Guildhall on 13 January, condemned, and beheaded on Tower Hill on 19 January 1547. Henry VIII himself died nine days later, on 28 January. The political weight of Anthony’s position — a relatively minor Norfolk gentleman foreman of a jury that destroyed England’s premier earl, in the king’s last weeks of life — is hard to overstate.

Anthony’s eldest son Francis (G16) died vita patris some time before December 1556. Anthony himself died on 4 January 1555 Old Style — i.e., January 1556 in modern reckoning — and Francis Blomefield records the inheritance directly in his West Barsham parish entry: “Anthony Gournay, Esq. was lord in 1514 … and died January 4, 1555, leaving Henry, his grandson and heir, aged twenty-one years.” Henry G15 was actually about seven at the moment of inheritance; the “twenty-one” almost certainly refers to the age at which Henry would later take livery of the estate after his long minority.

Anthony’s death came two months into Mary I’s restoration of Catholicism. He was almost the last Gurney patriarch to die in a Catholic England — within three years his grandson Henry would be growing up under the religious settlement of Elizabeth.

Citations

  1. Daniel Gurney, The Record of the House of Gournay (London: privately printed for the author by John Bowyer Nichols and Son, 1848), pedigree p. 287, "Anthony Gurnay, Esq." Born 1491 per the Pease/Pennyghael Gurney genealogy (Charles E. G. Pease, 2016), but the c. 1499 dating is more consistent with his being a "boy lord" of approximately nine in 1508. Parents and Heydon descent: Daniel Gurney, Record, pedigree p. 287; Supplement to the Record of the House of Gournay (King's Lynn: Thew & Son, 1858), pp. 870 ff. ↩
  2. Francis Blomefield, An Essay Towards a Topographical History of the County of Norfolk, vol. vii (London: William Miller, 1807), "Gallow and Brothercross Hundreds: West-Barsham," pp. 42–47: "Anthony Gournay, Esq. was lord in 1514; he married Margaret, one of the daughters and coheirs of Sir Robert Lovell, cousin and coheir of Sir Thomas Lovell, privy counsellor to King Henry VII and Henry VIII and Knight of the Garter; and died January 4, 1555, leaving Henry, his grandson and heir, aged twenty-one years." Available via British History Online. The "January 4, 1555" date is Old Style; modern reckoning January 1556. Daniel Gurney, Record (1848), pedigree p. 287, gives only "1556" without a precise day. The Pease/Pennyghael Gurney genealogy gives "1556." Blomefield is the most precise of the three. ↩
  3. "Lord in 1514" from Blomefield, History of Norfolk, vol. vii (1807), pp. 42–47. Tenure of West Barsham by one knight's fee of Castleacre is recorded by Blomefield in his entry for the same Henry G15 generation later. The Earl of Surrey grand jury indictment is from the State Papers and is reported in Daniel Gurney, Supplement (1858), pp. 870 ff., citing the foreman as "Anthony Gourney, Esq." Independent corroboration of the indictment exists in modern Surrey biographies — see for example W. A. Sessions, Henry Howard, the Poet Earl of Surrey: A Life (Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 380–408. ↩
  4. Daniel Gurney, Record (1848), pedigree p. 287. No surviving monument is recorded in Pevsner's Norfolk volumes or in any other consulted source. ↩
  5. Marriage and Lovell descent independently confirmed by two sources: Francis Blomefield, History of Norfolk, vol. vii (1807), pp. 42–47 (West Barsham), and vol. i (1805), "Hundred of Shropham: Great Elingham," pp. 482–490: "this manor went to Anthony Gourney, Esq. of North Barsham, in right of Margaret his wife, one of the daughters and coheirs of Sir Robert Lovell, by Ela Conyers his wife, who was sister to Anne Coniers, mother of [the antiquary] Sir Henry Spelman" of Congham. Both volumes available via British History Online. Marriage date 1519 from the Pease/Pennyghael Gurney genealogy. Sir Thomas Lovell KG (c. 1449–1524), Knight of the Garter and Privy Councillor to Henry VII and Henry VIII, has his own entry in the modern Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. ↩
  6. Heydon kinship: Daniel Gurney, Record (1848), p. 282, and Supplement (1858), pp. 868 ff. Independent corroboration in Wikipedia, "Sir Henry Heydon," and the long-form WikiTree page for Sir Henry Heydon of Baconsthorpe Castle. The Heydon-Boleyn second-cousin connection is well-established in the 16th-century Norfolk Boleyn literature; see e.g. Eric Ives, The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), genealogical chart appendix. ↩
  7. Francis Blomefield, History of Norfolk, vol. i (1805), "Hundred of Shropham: Great Elingham," pp. 482–490: full descent from Henry Spelman the elder of Mickle Elyngham (d. 1525 without issue) to Anthony Gourney through Margaret Lovell. Available via British History Online. The Spelman of Mickle Elyngham connection had not been highlighted in Daniel Gurney's account. ↩
  8. Daniel Gurney, Supplement (1858), pp. 870 ff., on "Gurney's Place" in St Julian's parish, Norwich. Norwich Gurney urban property has a long pedigree: see also Francis Blomefield, History of Norfolk, vol. iv (1806) (the Norwich volume), passim, on the Pockthorpe ward and the medieval Gurney holdings in the eastern suburbs of Norwich. ↩
  9. The 1546/7 grand jury foreman role: Daniel Gurney, Supplement (1858), pp. 870 ff., citing the State Papers. Modern context: W. A. Sessions, Henry Howard, the Poet Earl of Surrey: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), chapters on Surrey's December 1546 arrest, January 1547 trial, and 19 January 1547 execution. The Norfolk Gurney foreman role places Anthony at the centre of one of the great state trials of the late Henrician period. ↩
  10. Daniel Gurney, "Extracts from the Household and Privy Purse Accounts of the Lestranges of Hunstanton, from A.D. 1519 to A.D. 1578," Archaeologia vol. 25 (1832), pp. 411–569. Page 528 note i identifies "Anthony Gurney, Esq. of West Barsham and Great Ellingham. He married Margaret, daughter and coheir of Sir Robert Lovel, Knt. one of the representatives of the Lords Mortimer, of Attle-borough." Available on Cambridge Core (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/archaeologia/article/abs/xxii-extracts-from-the-household-and-privy-purse-accounts-of-the-lestranges-of-hunstanton-from-ad-1519-to-ad-1578-...). ↩
  11. Blomefield, History of Norfolk, vol. vii (1807), pp. 42–47: "died January 4, 1555, leaving Henry, his grandson and heir, aged twenty-one years." Daniel Gurney, Supplement (1858), pp. 870 ff., on the wardship of Henry G15 during his minority. The "twenty-one" reading: see the G15 fact sheet for the discussion of Henry's actual age in 1555/6 versus the age at livery. ↩
  12. See the G16 Francis Gurney fact sheet for the full citation chain. Primary source for Francis as Anthony's son and predecessor: Francis Blomefield, History of Norfolk, vol. vii (1807), pp. 42–47. ↩
  13. Pease/Pennyghael Gurney genealogy (Charles E. G. Pease, 2016), naming three children: Francis, Ela, and one further child not named in the source consulted. ↩