The last descendant.
Mrs. Hall’s only child, Elizabeth, was the last surviving descendant of the poet. In April 1626 she married her first husband, Thomas Nash of Stratford (b. 1593), who studied at Lincoln’s Inn, was a man of property, and, dying childless at New Place on April 4, 1647, was buried in Stratford Church next day. At Billesley, a village four miles from Stratford, on June 5, 1649, Mrs. Nash married, as a second husband, a widower, John Bernard or Barnard of Abington, Northamptonshire, who was knighted by Charles II in 1661. About the same date she seems to have abandoned New Place for her husband’s residence at Abington. Dying without issue, she was buried there on February 17, 1669-70. Her husband survived her four years, and was buried beside her. [282] On her mother’s death in 1649 Lady Barnard inherited under the poet’s will the land near Stratford, New Place, the house at Blackfriars, and (on the death of the poet’s sister, Joan Hart, in 1646) the houses in Henley Street, while her father, Dr. Hall, left her in 1635 a house at Acton with a meadow. She sold the Blackfriars house, and apparently the Stratford land, before 1667. By her will, dated January
1669-70, and proved in the following March, she left small bequests to the daughters of Thomas Hathaway, of the family of her grandmother, the poet’s wife. The houses in Henley Street passed to her cousin, Thomas Hart, the grandson of the poet’s sister Joan, and they remained in the possession of Thomas’s direct descendants till 1806 (the male line expired on the death of John Hart in 1800). By her will Lady Barnard also ordered New Place to be sold, and it was purchased on May 18, 1675, by Sir Edward Walker, through whose daughter Barbara, wife of Sir John Clopton, it reverted to the Clopton family. Sir John rebuilt it in 1702. On the death of his son Hugh in 1752, it was bought by the Rev. Francis Gastrell (d. 1768), who demolished the new building in 1759. [283]