All Cloudless Glory I-II [antikvár]

ONE THE ANGLO-AMERICAN WASHINGTONS 7657-/752 T r I 1 HE ENGLISH WASHINGTONS, an ancient gentry family and dutiful subjects of their Tudor and Stuart monarchs, gained rewards suitable to their stations. In 1539 Lawrence Washington, a former mayor of Northampton, purchased from the Crown for a modest sum a priory at Sulgrave, where he built a house. Two generations later, another Lawrence Washington of Sulgrave produced seven sons to serve their sovereigns. One died in Spain while page to the Prince of Wales. Two were knighted, one becoming the father of Colonel Sir Henry Washington, hero of the armies of Charles I. Sir William, Henry's father, married an aunt of the duchess of Richmond. From this it appears that it was another kinsman, George Washington, who was recorded under Charles I as "waiting on the Duke of Richmond to be sworn of the Privy Chamber to the King." The Reverend Lawrence Washington, the only cleric among these seven sons, was to suffer in mind, body, and estate for his loyalty to church and Crown. An Oxford graduate, he became in 1633 the "modest, sober" rector of All Saints Church in Purleigh, Essex. When civil war broke out in 1642, he supported the sovereign and denounced the "Traytors" of the parliamentary army. Shortly after the second Lord Fairfax broke the cavaliers' siege of Hull, Parliament ejected the "Malignant Royalist," as it called Lawrence, from his parish. Parliament added the common Puritan charge