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THE ARMS OF SIR WILLIAM CLARKE
The dominant memorial in Hitcham Church is that to Sir William Clarke (1550-1625). His coat of arms, as represented on the tomb, is shown at the top of the page and below as figure 2. His mother Elizabeth Ramsey was descended from the distinguished Danvers, Baldwin, Beauchamps and Neyrnut framilies. His father from the lesser Ferrers and Hextall families.
An interpretation of the families represented on these arms is as follows.
TOP L to R : CLARKE - RAMSEY - BEAUCHAMP - NEYRNUT
BOTTOM L to R : DANVERS - HAMPDEN - BALDWIN - DORMER
There are a number of problems here.
Firstly, on the slab for Ramsey-Danvers hidden under the raised floor of the church the design used is as shown above as DANVERS A, a design used by the Danvers family in Leicestershire. ‘On a bend three martlets’. However, if we look at the bottom left-hand corner of Sir William Clarke's arms we find a design that matches the BROUGHTON OF ESSEX family where we might expect to find the DANVERS arms. It is thought that this might be a mistaken representation of the DANVERS B design, used by the Danvers family of Oxfordshire. It is likely that the older DANVERS A is the correct design and that the later artist not only attempted DANVERS B but actually produced BROUGHTON instead!
Secondly, the BALDWIN element in Elizabeth Ramsey’s arms looks like an extremely unlikely trio of paired asparagus shoots - in fact it represents Sir John Baldwin (1469-1545) Lord Chief Justice whose arms were 'argent six oak leaves in pairs two in chief and one in base vert stalks sable theit peaks downwards' [source : coadb.com/youtube.com] - i.e. these are meant to be oak leaves!
The RAMSEY element is coloured gold and black whereas the normal colouration for RAMSEY is silver and black.
Finally the DORMER element is normally 'ten billets of gold on a blue background', but this has been rendered as a checker of 8 blue and 8 yellow squares with ermine above and below. This element is actually an accuaret rendition of the prestigeous ARDEN of WARWICK arms but the connection to the Clarke-Ramseys is very unlikely.
The Clarke monument in Hitcham bears close comparison with the better-known Mompesson monument in Salisbury Cathedral. Both were built within a few years of each other around 1627, and plausibly by the same craftsman. Both are brightly painted, though the Salisbury one was repainted in the 1960s and appears much better quality perhaps as a consequence. The Mompesson monument includes the arms of Mompesson's wife Katherine Pagington - and importantly these have two elements in common with Sir William Clarke's.
Katherine Pagington (1556-1622)'s arms are shown here as FIG 1. Katherine was born in Aylesbury. Her parents were Sir Thomas Pagington and Dorothy Kitson. Her grandparents were Robert Pagington and Agnes Catherine Baldwin and Thomas Kitson and Margaret Donnington. She married (1) John Danvers (2) Jasper Moore and (3) Sir Richard Mompesson. Her arms appear to incorporate PAGINGTON- (Sir John) BALDWIN - DORMER - and a BEAUCHAMP variant.
Sir William Clarke (1550-1625)'s arms are shown here as FIG 2. He too was born in Buckinghamshire. His parents were Nicholas Clarke and Elizabeth Ramsey. His grandparents were Sir James Clarke and Elizabeth Ferrers and Thomas Ramsey and Parnell Baldwin.
Now Parnell Baldwin and Agnes Catherine Baldwin were sisters, both daughters of Sir John William Baldwin Lord Chief Justice and Agnes Dormer (1482-1565) . So Sir William Clarke and Katherine Pagington shared great-grandparents, and would certainly have known each other though unlikely to have been friends and there are clearly family ties as shown by the two identical elements in the coats of arms.
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