Lawrence Washington (1602-1655)
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Lawrence Washington (1602–1655) was the great-great-grandfather of George Washington.
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[edit] At Oxford
Washington was a Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford. His degree there was awarded in 1623. He resigned from his Fellowship in 1633. According to the college records he left in debt, "owing 17s 10d personally and £9 5s 9d on behalf of a pupil". College Fellows at Oxford at the time were held liable for their students' debts. The college accounting books read: "Mr Washington to be sued", but no lawsuit ever was filed.
The college recounts the following story of the debt: "In 1924 a party of Canadian and American lawyers were shown the account of these debts during a visit to the College, and they suggested that they should pay the personal debt of 17s 10d, subject to no interest being charged. A pound note was produced amidst much laughter. Unfortunately this light hearted gesture was not appreciated by some of George Washington's more seriously minded supporters. A letter to the Daily Express and an article in the New York Herald both denied that any debt had ever existed."[1]
A portrait of Lawrence Washington at Oxford is attempted in Willard Sterne Randall: "George Washington: A Life", Owl Books 1998. (Chapter One: A Prompt and Literal Obedience)
Lawrence's stay at Oxford coincided with the rectorate (1619-1645) of Giles Widdowes at St Martin's. Widdowes was chaplain to Katherine Villiers, Duchess of Buckingham of whom Lawrence became the in-law. (ref.below)
[edit] Sulgrave Manor
Washington's great-grandfather, also named Lawrence, a succesful wooltrader (see also:Enclosure) and Mayor of Northampton (several times:1532, 1545), had bought Sulgrave Manor in Northamptonshire, not far from Banbury in Oxfordshire, from King Henry VIII in 1539. His son Robert inherited Sulgrave Manor in 1584.
On the road from Sulgrave (4 miles southwest) to Banbury lay the parish of Middleton Cheney (All Saints) of which the Principal and Fellows of Brasenose College, Oxford, were the patrons. Magdalen College School was another important Oxford dependency close to Sulgrave, 4 miles due south at Brackley (of Magna Carta fame). The school was one of the principal landowners in Helmdon, within 2 miles southeast of Sulgrave. Helmdon may be noted for its appealing church, one of the very few in England to conserve the medieval image of a master mason (Wills Campiun, [2]) in stained glass.
In Lawrence's youth the surroundings of Sulgrave were still saturated with the legend of St Rumbold of Buckingham [3] which looks almost purposely designed to appeal to children. St. Rumbold's remains had been kept at Brackley. St.Rumbolds shrine and centre of pilgrimage prior to the Reformation was 5 miles to the east of Brackley, at Buckingham.
During the Civil War Banbury ( Cropredy ) and its surrounding area ( Northampton, with nearby Althorp ) came under the royalist military responsibility of Spencer Compton, who in his capacity of Master of the Robes had known Lawrence's brother as a Page to Charles I, Prince of Wales in Madrid (1623).
In 1914 Sulgrave manor became the property of "the Peoples of Great Britain and the United States of America in celebration of the Hundred Years Peace between the two nations". In 1924 the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America endowed the Manor House and continues to help support it. [4]
[edit] Later life/Purleigh
Washington became rector of the village of Purleigh, in Essex, from 1632 until 1643. He lost his position during the Civil War when Essex where his living was situated came under the government of the Long Parliament. He died in poverty after he had been ejected from Purleigh and relocated to the rectorate of Little Braxted, at present an eastern outskirt of Witham (1643) . He is buried in the nearby town of Maldon, [5]
A look at the Ordnance Survey Map shows Purleigh, south of Maldon, at the head of the Blackwater Estuary - an important East Anglia trade center in medieval (wool) and early modern times (books from the Dutch free presses).
Who exactly lived at Purleigh Hall during Lawrence's rectory is at present undocumented but it appears that he had some exiting neighbours.
Two miles west of the Old Purleigh Rectory was Woodham Mortimer Hall the home of the famous Chamberlen physicians. More close by, one mile south, lay Cold Norton Hall of Thomas Sutton the founder of Charterhouse School, after his death the Hall remained an asset to the School Governors. Matthew Wren, Bishop of Ely (1638), Christopher Wren's uncle, was a Charterhouse Governor and may well have used the summerhouse on his yourneys from London to Ely.
An ancient footpath, St Peter's Way, led eastward through Purleigh to nearby St Peter-on-the-Wall, build by St Cedd in the 7th century. Four miles up the path one came to Stokehall Manor in Althorne where the Earls of Oxford, Robert and Aubrey de Vere in Lawrence's days, were Lord of the Manor. The family home of De Vere lay some distance in the north: Hedingham Castle. (The orphan John Smith, captain, founder and governor of Virginia -1607- was the ward of Peregrine Bertie, the husband of Edward de Vere's sister)
A mile further along the path lay Mayland whose rector was the father of John Gauden, bishop of Worcester. Before becoming a bishop John Gauden, was rural dean of Bocking (from 1641 onward) within ten miles north of Little Braxted/Witham where Lawrence became rector in 1643.
His most influential neighbours however had their summerhouse at Edwins Hall, Woodham Ferrers, a mere 2 miles southwest of Purleigh. They were the heirs of Archbishop Edwin Sandys. It is not inconceiveable that George Sandys and Lawrence Washington actually met there.
[edit] Later life/Little Braxted
By moving to Little Braxted, some 12 miles southwest of Manningtree , Lawrence moved that much closer into the eye of the storm. Manningtree was the hometown of the infamous Matthew Hopkins whose spree of witchfinding (1644-1647) coincided with Lawrence's new rectorate.
In his celebrated "Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" (1841,1852) Charles Mackay has illustrated how vulnarable the ostracized royalists were to the witchcraze. The 75 year old royalist rector of Framlingham became one of over 200 victims of Hopkins.
There was also courageous reaction to the fanaticism: the Rev. Mr. Gaul of Houghton in Huntingdonshire wrote a pamphlet accusing Hopkins of being a common nuisance. Hopkins was not the only one to disagree. In 1646 Puritan soldiers sacked and burned the church of Little Gidding in Huntingdonshire, the symbolic center of Nicholas Ferrar's Anglican prayer community.
By 1648 the County of Essex had risen against Oliver Cromwell, the rebellion ending with the siege of Colchester, 10 miles distant from Little Braxted.
[edit] American Connection
Although a small village Purleigh had already its history of emigration to America during Lawrence's rectorate: a John Faunce had left Purleigh for Plymouth in 1623. ( John Harris of Creeksea Place Manor, 7 miles southeast of Purleigh, left for Virginia around 1621, in the wake of Capt. Thomas Harris of "Crixe, Co.Essex"-1611. )
By then Sir Samuel Argall had become Deputy Governor of Virginia (between 1617-1619). When his widowed mother had remarried Lawrence Washington, the brother of Robert, of Sulgrave, and grandfather of Lawrence, of Purleigh, Sir Samuel became the first Washington with firm footing in America.
Washington family lore has it that Sir Samuel, then Captain Samuel Argall, was one of the colonials who captured Pocahontas in 1613.
[edit] Notoriety
During Lawrence's lifetime the Washington name had gained some notoriety in England in the person of Colonel Henry Washington, a loyal Cavalier, who was instrumental in the taking of Bristol (1643) at the side of Rupert of the Rhine and was among the last loyalists to hold out for Charles I at Worcester.
- " The furious tenacity of Henry Washington was to give Worcester its proud title of civitas fidelis - the first of the cities that declared for the crown and the last which held out in defence thereof "
- (ref: C.V.Wedgwood 1973 The King's War 1641-1647, index s.v. Washington).
Colonel Henry (1615-1663) was Lawrence's nephew by his elder brother Sir William Washington's marriage to Anne Villiers, half sister of George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham. [6] ( a family connection with the Villiers already existed in Robert of Sulgrave's marriage to descendent Elizabeth Lyte in 1565 )
Lawrence's younger brother Thomas ( born:1604 ) died in Madrid in 1623 while acting as a Page to Charles I, Prince of Wales during the negotiations over the marriage of the Infanta Maria led by Buckingham.
Lawrence's niece, Henry's sister, Elizabeth Washington married another brilliant Cavalier, William Legge who rose to be a Colonel in Prince Rupert's army and as a close personal friend and confident to the Prince shared his triumphs and Royal Disfavours. (Governor of Oxford in 1645).(ref. op.cit. Wedgwood 1973).
Their son was George Legge, 1st Baron Dartmouth.[7]
Two of Lawrences sisters married grandsons of Archbishop Edwin Sandys: Margaret (born 1605) married sir Myles(?) Sandys, Alice (born 1610) married Robert Sandys. So they became nieces to George and Edwin Sandys of Virginian fame.
Thus when Lawrence's son John settled in Virginia, to found the American lineage of George Washington, as the son of a "bankrupt minor cleric" he did so as a well connected and honourable gentleman.
[edit] Belvoir
When Washington's in-law George Villiers married Katherine Manners, daughter of the 6th Earl of Rutland, the family name became associated with the famous Belvoir Castle.
Buckingham and Katherine's son George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham married Mary Fairfax the daughter of the no less famous Thomas Fairfax, Lord Fairfax.
"Belvoir" was to be the name of the Fairfax Virginian estate neighbouring Mount Vernon.
[edit] Rules of Civility...
In a supreme "Biographical Companion" of George Washington ( Frank E. Grizzard, Jr. 2002 ) the reader's attention is drawn to a compilation of Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation among George's handwritten documents.
- " The origin of these maxims found in Washington's school exercises and long identified with him because they were so fully exemplified in his life, has been traced all the way back to Reformation Europe. Washington's version of the rules apparently was based on a seventeenth-century English-language edition of the rules that had been translated from an even earlier French version by Francis Hawkins of London. "
- (Frank E. Grizzard, Jr in op.cit. pg 361)
1642, the date related to the Rules ... places the origin of the educational collection of maxims firmly within the cultural sphere of his great-great-grandfather.
It's not hard to imagine that their importance for young George could have been enhanced with a family reminiscence of the quite glorious days of Reverend Lawrence Washington.
[edit] Ale-House
The same "Biographical Companion" details the portrait of Lawrence Washington with the contemporary phrasing of the charge laid against him and that led to his removal from Purleigh:
- common frequenter of ale-houses, not only himself sitting daily tippling there, but also encouraging others in that beastly vice
- in op.cit pg.5, s.v. Ancestry
This of course is the Puritan point of view. For others it may come as a relief to find that Lawrence was socially well integrated, to the point even of engaging in debate in public places.
The importance of ale-houses in the development of political factions in the particularly critical phase in the history of parliamentary democracy is well documented by the great students of the seventeenth century. (see: Veronica Wedgwood, Christopher Hill )
Lawrence Washington's illustrious Oxford contemporary John Earle (M.A.1624, Fellow of Merton, proctor of the University in 1631, Bishop of Worcester,Bishop of Salisbury) in his Microcosmography (Oxford, 1628-1633) had written of the tavern:
- To give you the total reckoning of it; it is the busy man's recreation, the idle man's business, the melancholy man's sanctuary, the stranger's welcome, the inns-of-court man's entertainment, the scholar's kindness, and the citizen's courtesy. It is the study of sparkling wits, and a cup of Canarie-wine their book, whence we leave them.
Students at loss over the state of the art of great literature in Lawrence's day might profitably compare: Joseph Hall, Virgidemiarum 1597; Thomas Overbury, Characters 1614; Nicholas Breton, Characters upon Essays, Moral and Divine 1615, The Good and the Bad 1616.
[edit] Intellectual World
The present summary no longer justifies the less than splendid isolation that has parked the illustrious ancestor among the drunk and the destitute.
Let us kindle our imagination with the following:
- The first library in British North America which belonged to any public institution was the gift of an Englishman. This was the library attached to the college projected at Henrico, Virginia, but was given up after the Indian massacre of 1623. To this institution was left, by the will of Mr Thomas Burgrave, late minister in Virginia, a library valued at 100 marks. An unknown giver in England sent over for this library, in 1620, St Augustine's " De Civitate Dei", "Master Perkins his works, and an exact map of America" and in 1621 added to his gift "a small Bible with a cover richly wrought, a great church Bible, the Booke of Common Prayer, and other Bookes." (...)That this was the first public library in the British colonies is a moral certainty.
- in: Steiner, Bernard C. " Rev.Thomas Bray and his American libraries" American Historical Review 2 (October 1896):59-75 [8]
Apart from giving an inkling of what Lawrence Washington was obliged to know in his Brasenose Fellowship tutorials the paragraph admirably summarizes the great intellectual themes present -still side by side- during the decades preceding the Civil War.
St Augustine was immensly influential in the 17th century: Thomas More, and the way Utopia was reflected in The New Atlantis. It must be noticed that the most important editions of Sir Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam appeared during Lawrence's Fellowship.( The "Essays"-1625-dedicated to George Villiers ). William Perkins, the great "social" preacher of "Treatise of the Vocations, or Callings of men" will be remembered for inspiring the very American :" Early to bed early to rise...". The Book of Common Prayer was to be prohibited under Parliament...
The exact map of America brings us to the crux of the story. In the old Bishop's Bible the understanding of Ophir in Psalm XLV.9 had been annotated: "Ophir is thought to be the Island in the West coast, of late found by Christopher Columbo: from where at this day is brought most fine gold". (Stephen Neill: "Anglicanism",A Pelican Book 1958) This may have accounted for some of the push by the elder generation of merchants to have their sons look for the approriate education at the great universities.The University of Oxford shone with its recent Bodleian that was systematically being stocked with a flood of new books: one can not picture reluctant readers of Richard Hackluyt.
If an additional remark were needed it could be made upon the style of language the library example introduces. It is the clear and accessible language that was to be immortalized by a whole school of Metaphysical poets. A famous one, Francis Quarles we encounter being introduced to residents of Boston in 1638 (!). [9]
Francis Quarles [10] settled in Essex, east of London on the road to Maldon and Colchester, but it may be stretching to far to have him meet Lawrence Washington. We are more cautious to link Lawrence to George Sandys, whose taste for poetry is reflected in the translations of Ovid he fashioned while sojourning in Virginia in the 1620's.
Lawrence Washington's aquaintance with George Sandys, the loyalties of his family members, his tenure of Fellowship at Oxford, could also have easely brought him in line with the practical intelligence relative to foreign affairs in the modern context (Virginia, see:Nicholas Ferrar) as developed since Walsingham by Sir Henry Wotton, with whom George's brother Edwin had worked in Venice (see:Paolo Sarpi). C.V.Wedgwood touches on the husband of Lawrence's niece Elizabeth, William Legge's work in secret intelligence for Charles I.(in: The King's Peace, 1973 index s.v.Legge) This William Legge was the great-grandfather of William Legge, 2nd Earl of Dartmouth The background we are hereby discovering may have served for some great tutoring of his son John, the founder of the Washington line in America.
E.J.Holmyard in Alchemy ( A Pelican Book, 1957 ) informs us that Kenelm Digby was invited to, and favourably received at the Court of Prince Charles in Madrid in 1623 where he treated a superficial wound of James Howell with the famous Powder of Sympathy (weapon-salve) of which he had acquired the recepy in Florence (1622). Lawrence's brother Thomas died in Madrid during that embassy. Digby returned to London in the company of Charles and Buckingham. Weapon-salve became a key issue in the debate over witchcraft (see: Allan G. Debus The English Paracelcians, The Watts History of Science Library 1966 - index s.v. weapon-salve)
[edit] Washington family sketch
- Lawrence Washington was the great-great-great-great-great-grandfather of George Washington: he bought Sulgrave Manor.
- Lawrence Washington (1602–1655) was the great-great-grandfather of George Washington.
- John Washington (1630–1677) was the great-grandfather of George Washington, and was responsible for the family's emigration to America.
- Lawrence Washington (1659–1698) was the grandfather of George Washington.
- Augustine Washington (1695–1743) was the father of George Washington.
- Lawrence Washington (1718–1752) was George Washington's half-brother and mentor.
- George Washington (1732–1799), was the first president of the United States.
[edit] References
- Frank E. Grizzard, Jr. George Washington, A Biographical Compendium Santa Barbara California, ABC-CLIO, 2002
- C.V. Wedgwood The King's Peace 1637-1641 London and Glasgow, Collins Fontana, 1973
- C.V. Wedgwood The King's War 1641-1647 London and Glasgow, Collins Fontana, 1973
- Christopher Hill The Century of Revolution 1603-1714 London and New York, Routledge Classics, 2006
- Wallace Notestein The English People on the Eve of Colonization 1603-1630 New York, Harper&Brothers, 1954 in: The New American Nation Series (Steele Commager and Morris ed.)
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