• Rt Hon Amber Rudd MP, Home Secretary

Carrying on the political theme, Ms Rudd's ancestry was only pointed out to me recently by a reporter from The Mail on Sunday. Ms Rudd has the almost obligatory descent (for senior Conservative ministers, that is) from King Charles II. Hers is through the Barrett-Lennard baronets and the Lords Dacre. Her mother is the great-grandaughter of a highly respected Law Lord, Lord Fitzgerald of Kilmarnock. Both her mother's grandfather and father were eminent barristers. Ms Rudd also descends through the St Aubyn and Barrett-Lennard families from Rt Hon Sir William Morice MP, who was Secretary of State for the North between 1660 and 1668.

Perhaps at this stage (and as can be seen there is still a lot of work to be done on Ms Rudd's parternal ancestry), the most interesting part of Ms Rudd's ancestry is through her maternal grandmother, Christina Evangeline Bradhurst. Born in 1894, she was the daughter of Augustus Maunsell Bradhurst, an American emigr� who lived the life of the English country gentleman to the full, marrying the granddaughter of a baronet and marrying only child into the upper rank of British society. Augustus was born in the United States in 1868, and descended in the male line from a well known New England family who are placed amongst the earliest colonists. One of Augustus's distinguished ancestors was Hon Thomas Pell, of Pelham Manor, Westchester County, New York. He married Anna, the daughter of Wampage, Sachem or Chief of the Siwanoy Indians, by Susanna Hutchinson (1633 - 1713). Susanna had been captured in a raid on the Rhode Island colony by the Siwanoys, where her father, William Hutchinson, was Governor. It is said that when her family tried to rescue her, she refused to leave and insisted on staying with Wampage!

SOURCE REFERENCE A FABULOUS WEBSITE: http://www.cracroftspeerage.co.uk/online/content/seizequartiers.htm