Jane Barker - Barker Family

Barker Family

Jane Barker was born in May 1652, in the village of Blatherwick, Northamptonshire in England. She was the only daughter, and the second of three surviving children, of Thomas and Anne Barker. Thomas Barker was one of the Secretaries of the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal of England.

Jane’s mother belonged to a Cornish gentry family–the Connocks — which produced a number of army officers who provided traceable evidences of Catholicism in the family. A major, William Connock, quit his Dutch service in order to follow James II — the last Catholic monarch to reign over the Kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and who was forced into exile in France after the Glorious Revolution in 1688.

Accordingly, the Catholicism circulating around the Connock family had a major influence on Jane, who also followed James II into exile at St-Germain from 1689 to 1704. In 1662, the Barker family moved to a manor house in Wilsthorp, Lincolnshire, where Thomas Barker held a lease to some 80 acres (320,000 m2) of farm. Jane lived here from 1662 to 1717, with intervals in London and St. Germain.

Like other families of the gentry class, the Barkers dedicated their limited resources to the education of the eldest son and heir, Edward, who received a B.A. in 1672 and an M.A. in 1675 at St. John's College, Oxford. However, Edward’s premature death in 1675 made Jane an heiress to her parents’ property. Upon her father’s death in 1681, Jane inherited the Wilsthorpe manor house and the property in Northamptonshire, while her younger brother, Henry, was left a sum of only ten pounds.