Nancy Bates was born in 1777 at Milbourne Hall near Newcastle-upon-Tyne, in Northumberland County, the north-eastern most county of England, on the Scottish border. The Bates family owned this large estate for many generations. Ralph Bates, a baronet, was descended from several of the local noble families including the Chaytor and Tempest families. His wife Anne Ellison was the daughter of Henry Ellison, also a baronet; another baronet was Anne’s brother-in-law, Sir Cuthbert Shafto, who is mentioned in Brant Bonner’s letter about the Milbourne estate (see below). Several of these individuals served as High Sheriff of Northumberland at various times, including Ralph Bates (in 1762), his son and Nancy’s brother, Ralph Bates (1812), Annie Ellison’s father Henry Ellison (1734), and Sir Cuthbert Shafto (1795).
Nancy’s father Ralph died in 1783 when she was just 6 years old. In the late 1790s, Nancy fell in love with a commoner, Robert Turnbull, a tailor from Lilliesleaf, Scotland. Robert served in the British Army as part of the Dumfries Militia in the first decade of the 1800s, during the Napoleonic Wars. In those times, most members of the landed gentry married others of the same class, so as to maintain their lofty economic status. Nancy’s mother disapproved of her betrothal to the tailor Robert, and disowned her. Robert and Nancy moved Lilliesleaf. Possibly to hide her marriage, or perhaps to emphasize her noble roots, Nancy gave her name to the civil authorities in Scotland as “Nancy Milburn”, using the name of her family estate rather than her last name “Bates”.
Nancy and Robert Turnbull’s son, Robert Turnbull Jr., was born in Lilliesleaf, Scotland on 28 Nov 1808. As a child, Robert Jr traveled to Milbourne Hall to try to establish contact with his grandmother, but he was turned away, a story told in A Proud Scot Declines a Sovereign and a Meal.
One of R.J. Bonner’s sons, Brant, recorded a conversation with his father about the Bates and Turnbull families, reproduced below. When Robert Jr. traveled to visit his grandmother, his grandfather Ralph Bates was deceased (in 1783), thus the visit was to Lady Melbourne only. Sir Cuthbert Shafto (not “Shafton”) referenced in the document was the High Sheriff of Northumberland in 1795. He was in fact an in-law: Ralph Bates’s grandmother Ann Bates was widowed and married second John Shafto (1641-1709), Cuthbert’s great-grandfather. Sir Cuthbert Shafto was thus a step-cousin of Nancy Bates.
Nancy Bates is a “gateway ancestor” to many medieval and ancient historical figures including William the Conqueror, 300 years of early English kings, Charlemagne, and Clovis I. The lineage to these ancients is detailed in the biography of Nancy’s father, Sir Ralph Bates, and in Details of the Royal Bonner Lines of England & France.
