Notes and Queries/Series 7/Volume 5/Number 112/A Cobbler’s Pedigree
A Cobbler’s Pedigree.—The following is going the round of the daily papers:—
“A cobbler died recently at Smeeth, in Kent, who differed from the majority of cobblers in one respect. He had a pedigree, and was, as the local paper observes, a ‘man of blood.’ His name was William Kingsmill, and for upwards of a hundred years he and his ancestors carried on the same business; but his family was a very old one in Kent. The deceased, in fact, it is stated on good authority, was a lineal descendant of John Kingsmill, who, in the fourteenth century, was one of the judges of Common Pleas, and who married Joan, daughter of Sir John Gifford. Sir George Kingsmill, a later ancestor, was another judge of Common Pleas, who lived his life in Tudor times, and took for a wife a Lady Hastings. A grandson of this judge, and a progenitor of the defunct cobbler, was Sir Richard Kingsmill, surveyor of the Court of Warde in the year 1600. To him succeeded a son named Sir William, and the son of the latter, named Sir Henry, his successor being another Sir William, who married Anne, a daughter of Sir A. Hazlewood. The eldest daughter of this couple married Heneage, Earl of Winchilsea, and a later descendant of the family was Admiral Kingsmill, who sat in Parliament, and was commander-in-chief of the king’s ships on the coast of Ireland. He was created Admiral of the White and a baronet, and was succeeded by Sir Robert Kingsmill, whose son became colonel and captain commandant of the Battleaxe Guards. So the recently deceased cobbler had good Kingsmill blood in his veins.”
It would be interesting could the defunct cobbler’s descent be authenticated. The Kingsmills were as much identified with Hampshire as with Kent. According to the usually received pedigrees of the family—which are very meagre—Admiral Kingsmill and his ancestors, the knights above named, were descended not from Sir Richard Kingsmill, Surveyor of the Court of Wards, but from the latter’s elder brother, Sir William Kingsmill, of Sidmonton, Hants. W. D. Pink.