Mary Ball Washington Page 5

  This same area, near the village of Epping, may be the ancestral land of the Ball family. Joseph Ball, the older half brother of Mary Ball Washington, the son of Joseph her father, lived in Stratford, in Greater London, in the mid-1700s, expanding the connection to the area.

  ABOUT TWO YEARS BEFORE THE MOTHER OF THE FATHER OF HIS COUNTRY was born, a different Founding Father opened his eyes for the first time in Boston, in the colony at Massachusetts Bay. His name was Benjamin, born to Josiah and Abiah Franklin. Decades later would see Benjamin and a decades-younger George Washington working side by side, along with others of all ages, in support of an entirely different new world than that which they or anyone had been born into.

  THE BALLS, RIGHT FOR THEIR ETYMOLOGICAL ORIGINS, WERE BOLD. Whether it was John Ball the preacher; or the Balls who may have come from Normandy; or Colonel William Ball, the first in Virginia, all took a plunge for the betterment of their family and family name. It was in character for the Balls to flee war-torn England after the defeat of the royalists to seek a new life in Virginia. It took less bravery to stay than to flee, lest William Ball find himself beneath the blade of an executioner, just like King Charles.

  The motto of the family coat, “Caelumque Tueri,” was taken from the last two words of this poem by the ancient Roman poet Ovid:

  Pronaque cum spectant animalia caetera terram

  Os homini sublime dedit caelumque tueri.57

  “Whereas other animals observe to the earth, he gave the face of man sublimity and to look to the sky.”

  “To look to the sky”—their motto resonated not just for the Balls, but eventually for all Americans. The Balls looked to the horizon toward the New World and to Virginia—and set their course to become more than even they would have imagined.

  STUDIES OF THE WASHINGTON NAME RANGE FROM THE FANTASTICAL TO the mundane. This was a dialectic in the nineteenth century as historians wished to study the founder of our nation. The United States has no king, so make George descended from royalty, wrote some. The United States has no nobility, so emphasize his ancestors’ noble titles, wrote others. The United States has no official religion, so emphasize his saintly ancestry, reflected a third group. Simultaneously, American citizens wanted humble origins reflecting the American dream . . . contradicting the desire to place George in the pantheon of nobility of the Enlightenment.

  Much like that of the Balls, the Washington lineage was riddled with sons named after their fathers, or brothers named after uncles. What the Balls had with their cross-generational Williams and Jameses, the Washington men had with Lawrences and Johns. George Washington’s grandfather was Lawrence Washington; Lawrence’s father, the first of the Washingtons to settle in the Americas, was John; John’s father was Lawrence, a reverend of Purleigh, Essex; the Reverend Lawrence’s father was Lawrence, who had a father named Robert, whose brother was Lawrence; Robert’s father, the builder of Sulgrave Manor in central England, was Lawrence. And Washington’s older stepbrother was Lawrence.

  Some historians, studying the paternal ancestry of one of the greater Founding Fathers, desired to connect his bloodline to literal divinity.

  Albert Welles, in his 1879 book, believed George Washington could be traced to the Norse god Odin, or at least his pseudo-mythic and -historical equivalent, giving it the less than subtle title The Pedigree and History of the Washington Family: Derived from Odin, the Founder of Scandinavia. B.C. 70, Involving a Period of Eighteen Centuries, and Including Fifty-Five Generations, Down to General George Washington, First President of the United States. Welles was no conspiracy theorist or crackpot historian; he was the president of the American College for Genealogical Registry and Heraldry.

  Welles, in the preface, cited an anonymous source from London who had “been engaged for thirty years in gathering evidence” on this. This source believed that without his research “that great man’s lineage would not have been revealed.”58 The book analyzed generation after generation of Washington ancestry, and concluded that he was the ancestor of Odin, who around 70 B.C. was the founder of Scandinavia and “the son of Fridulf, supreme ruler of the Scythians, in Asaland, or Asaheim, Turkestan, between the Euxine and Caspian Seas, in Asia. He reigned at Asgard, whence he removed in the year B.C. 70, and became the first King of Scandinavia. He died in the year B.C. 50.”59 Ultimately, the author traced Denmark royalty from father to son to the American rebel.

  There’s cult of personality, and then there’s this. The United States did not have a rich genealogical history by 1879 (in fact, it had just undergone a civil war that threatened its foundation’s very existence), and presumably many, Welles included, wished to fill that void. There were no mythic figures or kings or queens or empires of the century-old nation on the other side of the Atlantic, so why not find ways to create one?

  MID- TO LATE 1500S ENGLAND WAS A GOLDEN AGE FOR THE ISLAND. THE Washingtons’ Sulgrave Manor was central not only geographically but also culturally. Not far from the Washingtons was William Shakespeare. According to Ethel Armes, there was an additional connection to American history here. “The ancestors of Benjamin Franklin dwelt for centuries in Ecton, a village about twenty miles from Sulgrave. . . . Four American presidents trace their ancestry to this locality.” This includes Washington, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, and the ancestors of Warren G. Harding. It is possible (“more than likely,” says Armes, “and how pleasant to fancy it true!”) that these ancestors, as well as Shakespeare, met often.60

  Outside stood a garden, called the Orchard, in which some think Lawrence, possibly planting over the monastery’s previous gardens, took inspiration from contemporary stylists, such as Andrew Borde’s tome, which stated, “It is a commodious and pleasant thing in a mansyon to have an orcharde of sundrye fruytes.”61 It was a mansion worthy of his name and ancestry.

  TODAY, THE SULGRAVE WEBSITE BEARS THE COAT OF ARMS OF THE WASHINGTON clan, which not by coincidence is the same coat as that on the District of Columbia’s flag. The Manor is open to the public during certain hours of the day.

  Upon the dedication and opening of the Manor in 1914, the New York Times ran a full-page story with pictures. “A charming piece of old architecture,” it read, “gray with the rains, frost, and sunshine of 300 years.”

  At the end, the article prophetically stated, “In dedicating the Manor as a memorial to the peaceful relations existing between the two great English-speaking nations during a century, the British Committee has created a permanent memorial of permanent interest.”62

  LAWRENCE WASHINGTON, THE BUILDER OF SULGRAVE MANOR AND AN IMPORTANT man in his own right, died in February of 1584, at over the age of eighty. The anti-Catholic and tumultuous times of King Henry VIII and the short bloody years of Queen Mary were long over, and Queen Elizabeth I was fewer than thirty years into a forty-five-year reign.

  It was the Elizabethan Age.

  THE NEXT SEVERAL GENERATIONS OF WASHINGTONS CONTINUED SIMILARLY; they neither started revolutions nor built exuberant manors, nor did they supposedly hide kings and queens from persecution.

  Lawrence Washington, the grandson of the Sulgrave builder, was born there around 1568. He had married a Butler, Margaret, whose family descended from the medieval Plantagenet dynasty. As a descendant of King Edward I of England, who reigned in the early fourteenth century, this would place all of her children, and children’s children, ad infinitum, as royal blood, George included. Triply so, as Margaret and thus her children and descendants could claim both the king of France and the king of Spain as ancestors, the latter of whom, King Ferdinand III of Castile, the father of Edward’s wife, was canonized by the Catholic Church, thus making George “an inheritor of the Saints in light,” as “in his veins flowed the blood of the Servants of God,” as he was deemed by the monthly Catholic World in 1916.63

  Lawrence Washington, husband of Margaret, died in 1616, after having at least four children.

  It was this next generation that brought American interest.

  Born around
1602 in Sulgrave Manor, Lawrence, the great-great-grandfather of George, became a lector at the University of Oxford, and later a reverend and rector of Purleigh in Essex; he married and had children. He was a father to a pair of brothers, Lawrence and John, who years later would sail to the colonies.

  That’s when England changed.

  The English Civil War in the mid-1600s brought not only a political change to the kingdom but also a religious change. Puritanism became almost an official religion of the country; Christmas was banned in 1647 and a strict if not prohibitionist mentality on alcohol spread throughout. Woodrow Wilson, future president, in his biography of George, wrote that Reverend Lawrence “had been cast out of his living at Purleigh in 1643 by order of Parliament, upon the false charge that he was a public tippler, oft drunk.”64 Another source repeats this, that he was “allegedly ousted by the Puritans for drunkenness.”65

  The English Parliament, taking on its Puritan tenor, described him as one of the 2,800 Anglican clergymen who were “scandalous, malignant priests,” saying that Lawrence was “a common frequenter of ale-houses, not only himself sitting daily tippling there but also encouraging others in that beastly vice. [He] hath often been drunk.”66

  The truth was, however, that he was simply a royalist, from a royalist family. Yet his career and livelihood were destroyed.

  He died only a few years later, in 1652.67

  What was here in England for royalists and ancient Englishmen like the Washingtons? Certainly any pension would have been spread too thin among a widow and her children. Competing political and religious faith were all but banned in a Puritan do-or-die society. Where did one go?

  West.

  WHILE WILLIAM BALL WAS SAILING TO THE NEW WORLD, SO TOO WERE THE sons of Reverend Lawrence, including the eldest John, born in 1632, and Lawrence, born in 1635. The same decade that the Balls were fleeing England, the Washingtons were also arriving in Virginia.

  They arrived around 1657 or 1658. Two years later, in 1660, in England, the monarchy was restored with the ascension of King Charles II.

  But by then, England was behind the Washington and Ball families.

  Moving to the New World was not a simple task nor one that should have been taken lightly. That was true for the Balls, and that was true for the Washingtons: when they “came to people the New World . . . a coat-of-arms had slight bearing beside the qualities of personal force and distinction.”68 It was a new beginning in the colonies.

  John Washington, brother of Lawrence, son of Reverend Lawrence, great-great-grandson of Lawrence of Sulgrave Manor, and great-grandfather of George Washington, arrived and settled at Bridges Creek in Westmoreland County, Virginia. “What was poverty in England,” wrote Henry Cabot Lodge in the late nineteenth century, “was something much more agreeable in the New World of America.”69

  THE PLANTATION AT BRIDGES CREEK LATER EXPANDED INTO NEARBY POPES Creek, where an estate, later known as Wakefield, would become the birthplace of George Washington himself. The estates on both Popes and Bridges Creek were typical Colonial houses, two stories with a number of rooms and chambers.70 John met and married Anne Pope, daughter of Nathaniel Pope (whom the creek was named after, and a major founder of the Colony of Maryland71), and they had their first child, Lawrence (grandfather of George).

  The numbers of his acreage soon started to add up, making a man rich from tobacco even richer. His father-in-law gave 700 acres to the newlywed couple in Mattox Creek, and John purchased, in the spring of 1659, up to an additional thousand acres (700 of which went to his brother Lawrence when he emigrated), and in 1664 he purchased 1,700 acres of land, where the future Wakefield was to be built. Through the years, he purchased several hundred more acres in the county, eventually tallying up to a total of ten thousand.72 His brother Lawrence, soon after his arrival, settled farther south along the Rappahannock River.73

  JOHN WASHINGTON WAS ELECTED AS A MEMBER OF THE VIRGINIA HOUSE of Burgesses and raised to the rank of colonel in the militia. In 1664, the parish he attended was renamed Washington Parish in his honor, and he was enlisted among other commissioners in March of 1675 or 1676 “to use Indians in the warre and require and receive hostages from them, alsoe to provide one hundred yards of tradeing cloath to each respective ffort, that it be ready to reward the service of Indians.”74 In this war the Native Americans gave him the nickname “Conotocaurious,” meaning “devourer of villages,” and he often assisted Marylanders in attacks on and defense from Native Americans, at one point killing six chiefs.75

  BUT THERE WAS ANOTHER WAR ITCHING TO BE FOUGHT.

  Nathaniel Bacon, a prominent Virginian settler, rose in 1676 against the governor, William Berkeley. Bacon was disillusioned by Virginia’s lack of interest in the constant Indian attacks on the frontiers, which were increasing, and the counterattacks by the colonists. He raised his own militia without first consulting the governor. Berkeley declared him a rebel, and Bacon, in retaliation, marched into and burned down Jamestown.

  John Washington joined one of the two sides. He could have joined Berkeley, alongside William Ball himself. “The Fates that move the pieces on the chess-board of life ordained that two prophetic names should appear together to suppress the first rebellion against the English government,” wrote Sara Pryor in her typical poetic prose.76

  On the other hand, different sources, including Joseph Sawyer in his 1927 biography of George Washington, clearly stated that John “joined Nathaniel Bacon—often called ‘the young Cromwell’—in hurling defiance at loot-saturated Governor Berkeley of hated memory.”77

  This could foreshadow the Washington descendant’s penchant for revolutionary fervor.

  COLONEL JOHN WASHINGTON, THE GREAT-GRANDFATHER OF GEORGE, DIED in 1677 at around the age of forty-five, having amassed, in the end, 8,500 acres of land and having made an undeniable mark on Virginia’s history.

  His eldest son, Lawrence, to become the grandfather of George, received 1,850 acres.78 Total acreage was worth approximately $70,000.79

  John Washington’s will stated, “I give unto my sonn Lawrence washington my halfe & share of five thousand acres of Land in Stafford County which is betwixt Coll Nicolas spencer & myselfe which we [are engaged].”80 That five-thousand-acre land was called Little Hunting Creek Plantation, the site of what would later become known as Mount Vernon.

  LAWRENCE, GRANDFATHER OF GEORGE AND ELDEST SON OF COLONEL JOHN, was born around 1659 in Virginia, becoming the first of the Washington clan to be born in the colonies, possibly at Bridges Creek.

  Lawrence served until his death in 1698 as a Virginian justice of the peace and traveled to England at least once in the spring of 1686 for unknown reasons. In 1695 he served as high sheriff of Westmoreland County. He had several slaves, as indicated by court records.81

  Around the age of twenty-seven, John married Mildred, the daughter of Colonel Augustine Warner, of another prominent family. They had three children: John, Augustine, and Mildred. The oldest, John, was eight years old when his father died. Mildred, his daughter, was an infant. Augustine, the future father of George Washington, was only four years old when he became fatherless.

  To his daughter, the older John gave Little Hunting Creek Plantation, of 2,500 acres; to John, his eldest, he gave his current residence of Popes Creek; and to Augustine he gave 1,100 acres. In accordance with his will, if his children were to be underage when he died, that they would “continue under the care & Tuition of their Mother till they come of age or day of marriage, and she to have the profits of their estates, toward the bringing of them up and keeping them at school.”82

  FROM ENGLAND TO VIRGINIA, FROM RICH TO POOR TO RICH, THE WASHINGTONS endured war, oppression, and bounty. It would not end.

  WITHIN A FEW SHORT DECADES FROM THE DEATH OF HIS OWN FATHER, AUGUSTINE Washington married Mary Ball, of an equally rich and equally early Virginian family.

  Chapter 3

  The Rose of Epping Forest

  EARLY LIFE OF MARY BALL

  1708‒17
30

  “I am now learning pretty fast. . . .”

  Belle of the Northern Neck,” “Rose of Epping Forest,” “Toast of the Gallants of her Day”: these were some of the sobriquets passed down in biographies and hagiographies of Mary Ball. All were romantic, and all were probably simple hearsay and nicknames coined decades after her death. But whether these nicknames were created during, after, or far after her long life in Virginia, they all gave a sense of beauty, attractiveness, and purity of the young Mary, adding a mythical aura.

  The early life and childhood of Mary Ball is shrouded in mystery and a simple lack of facts. Like the genealogy of her ancestors, and like the genealogy of her future husband’s ancestors, all that happened was simply not recorded. And what was recorded did not necessarily happen. By 1850, only a couple of generations after Mary’s passing, Margaret Conkling, one historian in the mid-nineteenth century, noted that no record of her childhood was preserved; in successive years, some authors, including famed historian Benson Lossing, saw fit to either romanticize or simply assume rumors and tales and forged documents as facts.

  MARY WAS BORN AROUND 1707 OR 1708 TO JOSEPH AND MARY JOHNSON BALL, the only child of their marriage. Genealogist Horace Hayden argued that “she was born as late as August 25, 1708, New Style,” on account of her age at death eighty-two years later.1 Another source, author Nancy Turner from the early twentieth century, speculated early November 1707, on an autumn day.2 And yet a third source decades later stated she was “apparently” born during the winter of either 1708 or 1709.3