Part #2: A Town Fit For A King
From - "Yankee Fred: The Story of the first Prince of North America", by Professor Ranulph Thorpe, Oxford University Press, 1979:
The Royal Colony of Virginia had a rich and long history by colonial standards, and despite the long and often treacherous sea voyage from England, had remained surprisingly closely affected by home affairs since its inception (as a Company) in 1607. When Prince Frederick finally arrived there in 1728, having been delayed by just one of those voyages as well as a series of futile attempts to change his father's mind before being forced to depart, he found the colony a mass of contradictions. On the one hand, the Virginians were proud of their land's status as the "Old Dominion", the land where the faithful Royalist supporters of the Stuarts had fled during Cromwell's tyranny, and this had been recognised by Charles II upon the Restoration. On the other, Virginia's equally proud tradition of limited self-rule, through the House of Burgesses, owed a lot to Cromwell's dispatching of more independent-minded governors during his brief rule.
It was the latter, based in the new capital of Williamsburg, that was the greatest surprise to Frederick. His father, as is well known, cared little for England and less for her colonies, and had left their governance to his ministers. What would his reaction have been, the Prince must have thought, had he known that England's "perfidious parliament" had spawned another, across thousands of miles of ocean? Perhaps the thought of his father's expression cheered the Prince. Certainly, he seemed to recover fairly quickly from his initial gloom at being exiled.
Williamsburg was the first city in Britain's North American colonies, having received a royal charter in 1722. A far more pleasant place than the older, mosquito-infested Jamestown, the House of Burgesses had decamped there with some relief several years before. The House was subordinated to the Governor's Council, an upper house loosely analogous to the British House of Lords, and ultimately the Governor himself. The powers of the Governor over the House had been increased by James I and Charles I, but then decreased again by Cromwell's envoys. As was then common in the North American colonies, the appointed Governor (then George Hamilton, the First Earl of Orkney) never visited his constituents, any more than the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster was actually expected to be a Lancastrian anymore. The British political establishment saw no contradiction in this. Therefore, the real power lay in the hands of the Royal Lieutenant Governor, then known simply as William Gooch.
Gooch had taken over from his predecessor, Robert "King" Carter, only a year before, but was already making a name for himself with his energetic policies of promoting trade and encouraging westward settlement. Like his absentee superior Orkney, Gooch was a veteran of the First War of Supremacy[1], but he would eventually go on to fight in the Second[2]. People were already beginning to call him a worthy successor to the now retired Alexander Spotswood, unlike those that had gone between them.
Williamsburg would have been the obvious place for the exiled Prince to hold his court. After all, it was the home of the House of Burgesses and the capital of the Colony, and it was over these people - together with all the others in the Colonies - that Frederick was supposed to exercise his highly theoretical powers as the first Lord Deputy of the Colonies. It is surprising, therefore, that he instead elected to purchase an estate in the much newer town of Fredericksburg with the pension funds that his father had grudgingly allowed him.
To say Fredericksburg was new is an understatement. It had, in fact, only just been founded when the Prince groggily stepped off the deck of HMS Dartmouth at Williamsburg harbour (to be met by a puzzled crowd of local dignitaries). As noted above, travel between Britain and the Colonies was fraught with difficulties at the best of times and could take months, with the result that the stories of Frederick's disgrace had reached Virginia only in confused an incomplete forms. This was not helped by the fact that even the best-informed travellers from England had set off at a time when it still seemed as though King George might change his mind. Reports of the exile were dismissed as wild exaggerations. A possible future King of Great Britain and King of Ireland, here in Virginia? Surely not!
So it was that the new town on the Rappahannock River, though founded months after George's coronation and Frederick's disgrace, was still named for him as its fathers confidently believed he was still the Prince of Wales. It has borne that name ever since, for better or for worse. Frederick built himself a modest house with his pension on the new land. Of course, his choice of such accommodations may well have been influenced by his father's stinginess and the fact that Frederick needed permanent lodgings as soon as possible, and it is true that the house was much extended and grandified in later years. Nonetheless it endeared him, perhaps by accident, to the locals. The Virginians had grumbled for years about the overly extragavant Governor's House in Williamsburg, and Spotswood's own home in Germanna was nicknamed the 'Enchanted Castle'. They took great delight in discovering that a potential heir to the throne was living in humbler circumstances, making the self-righteous Governors seem stuffy by comparison. Frederick's house would eventually be nicknamed 'Little St. James', an epithet given by his supporters, who believed that he would one day reside in the real St. James' Palace in London as King of Great Britain and King of Ireland.
Frederick had other advantages. Though he had left Hanover at the age of seven, and did not identify with the German homeland as his father and grandfather did, German was nonetheless his birth tongue and he remained fluent in it. This was remarked upon by the colonists in general, who jokingly referred to him as the 'Third Wave of Germanna' - a reference to the fact that, not far from Fredericksburg, two groups of German religious refugees from the Rhineland and Palatinate had been allowed to settle in 1714 and 1717. The Germans were tolerated by the Virginians providing that they did not leave the boundaries of Spotsylvania County, named after Spotswood who had masterminded their settlement. But most English-speaking Virginians had little to do with their neighbours to the north, often seeing them merely as a useful barrier between them and the still-persistent Indian raids. Everyone remembered the massacre at the frontier town of Henricus many years before.
Frederick changed all that. He was one of the few notables in Virginia who spoke both English and German fluently, and though the Germanna settlers were mostly poor peasants (even by Virginian standards), he had quietly resolved to do anything he had to, to gain a shot at regaining his rightful place. So it was that it was Frederick, and a growing circle of admirers that included many of Virginia's notables, that began to break down the barriers between the Germanna and the English.
And he had no shortage of admirers. Many towns are named for royals, but few can boast that said royals actually live there. Little St. James was always busy with visitors, and Frederick's servants (mostly hired Germanna, eager to escape their often wretched agrarian Spotsylvanian existence) were called upon to produce many parties and banquets of state. For that was what they truly were. Frederick was holding court, more like a king of old, and it is in this only, perhaps, that Hanoverian taints of absolutist thinking crept in. Nonetheless, the Prince was perfectly aware that his position was tenuous and he could not afford to assume too many of his royal prerogatives. More by luck than judgement, he had begun to win the hearts of the people of Virginia, both common and noble. It opened a tiny window of hope that he could build a power base strong enough that he would one day to return to England in his rightful position as Prince of Wales, and then King.
Frederick's supporters thought that there was a better than even chance of him achieving this aim - if Prince William died without issue, then the succession would automatically revert to Frederick, for George II had no other male heirs and was not expected to produce any. So it was that ingratiating oneself with a man who was currently living humbly and wanting of favours, but might one day be one of the most powerful and wealthy men in the world, seemed like a very attractive proposition.
Before Frederick's exile, a number of North American colonials had been knighted and given titles by the Kings, but most of them immediately decamped to England in order to exercise their new influence in the Court of St. James. The Colonies lacked a native aristocracy, save perhaps Virginia with its old Company holdovers and its Planters. Just as Orkney never visited Virginia, most Governors treated their occupation as merely another title to go alongside their knighthoods and marquessates and earldoms. Once more, Frederick changed that.
London was still the place where a North American title-holder could exert the most influence and gather the most wealth, but many realised that they could gain favour with Frederick for future rewards with far less effort than they could gain favour with George for present ones. It was almost like a financial investment, literally in some cases. Frederick was soon involved with Gooch, and with the members of the House of Burgesses - including the by now venerable James Blair, the clergyman who had founded Williamsburg's William and Mary College, the second oldest university in the Americas. Frederick pledged, perhaps glibly at the time, to patronise the College if he ever became King. It was considered a wonder that the Prince could get on both with Blair and with the retired Spotswood (through his work with the Germanna), as in the prime of their careers they had been bitter political enemies.
Of course, Frederick did not lead a charmed life. He came close to losing everything he had built up more than once. Perhaps his greatest problem was also his greatest advantage: the fact that all but the titled Virginians were unaccustomed to meeting royalty. After he had made a few moves that were popular with the commoners, they began to see him as a paragon of kingly virtue, an image that came very close to being shattered in 1732, when he had at last began to feel that he was making a strong position for himself.
As well as mutual paternal dislike, Frederick inherited another of the Hanoverians' infamous habits - womanising. He was not such a terrible offender as his father, but nonetheless enjoyed a mistress or two. The problem was that the Virginian commoners, unlike their English contemporaries, had never experienced such royal depredations and, to put it mildly, did not recognise his Droit De Seigneur.
Things came to a head with a scandal in 1732 when Frederick was allegedly caught in bed with one Mildred Gregory by none other than Gooch himself, after the Governor had unwisely dashed into Little St. James' with an urgent political matter on which he thought Frederick's patronage would be of help. Here Frederick's at first accidental and then carefully cultivated informal style worked against him: his servants did not think to announce Gooch.
The Governor himself was persuaded to keep the matter secret - after all, Frederick's ruination would also destroy all the investments of favour made by Gooch and his fellow politicians - but it nonetheless leaked out. "They who have ears, let them hear," the Prince is thought to have ruefully quoted (in German). Mostly the story was dismissed as an attempt to blacken the Prince's name by those who retained a strong allegiance to George and thus Prince William. Only a few knew the truth of it. Unfortunately for Frederick, one of those few who found out was Augustine Washington, Mildred's sister. At the age of thirty-five, ten years older than Frederick, she had already outlived two husbands and had three daughters from her second marriage. As Gooch is reported to have remarked, "God only knows what he saw in her." Certainly, Frederick at first intended her to be merely another mistress. Augustine had other ideas.
The Washingtons were not rich, nor were they poor. Augustine owned a plantation at Popes Creek and was looking to expand. Royal patronage, even by the disgraced prince, would be useful, and he was persuaded by his new second wife Mary to cool down from his initial anger. Blackmail would be a more useful tool than simple revenge. However, he was still determined to see his little sister right, for Mildred had quietly informed him that she was pregnant.
With misgivings, Frederick agreed to meet the Washingtons at Little St. James' and was informed of Augustine's demands. The son of Lawrence Washington, a former burgess and sheriff, his family had come to Virginia after having their lands confiscated by Oliver Cromwell and failing to have them returned by the restored King Charles II. A great injustice, did the Prince not agree? The Prince did. Something that should surely be rectified, or at least compensated, if a more...reasonable Person should occupy the throne of England? Why, naturally.
It was the second part of Augustine's demands that appalled Frederick. It would be wrong to call the Washingtons simple, but they were stubborn colonial folk with a strong sense of Anglican morality. Frederick would have to do something about Mildred's pregnancy. Compensate her, leave her to raise an illegitimate royal son as so many Englishwomen had on his funds? No. Frederick was relieved, for despite his invieglement with the Virginian notables, his own funds remained limited. This relief did not last. No, he would not compensate Mildred. He would marry her.
Nothing the Prince could do could make Augustine budge. As well as fulfilling his sense of the correct restribution, he knew that this would be the ultimate way of forcing Frederick not to go back on any promises if he became King. Kings couldn't divorce, not without a host of scandals. Frederick protested that Mildred was an inappropriate wife, a widow with children from a previous marriage. That would not have been a problem if she had been titled, of course. Frederick had expected to be married off to a German princess, as George was already planning to do to Prince William. Well, Augustine pointed out, if he kept his promises, Mildred - and the rest of the family - would be titled.
Frederick was forced to bow to his logic, knowing that the Washingtons had connections and could easily ensure that the truth of the scandal got to prominent ears. That would finish him, unless he wanted to flee and try to start again somewhere else. He rejected that. After all, he had expected a loveless marriage anyway, and did it truly matter if it was to a common colonist rather than a German princess? All that mattered was that he would one day wear the crown, and who cared who sat beside him?
It is thus rather surprising that Frederick apparently did grow to possess some feelings for Mildred as the years went on, and in March 1733 she bore him a son, Prince George Augustine of Cornwall (called George FitzFrederick, in the illegitimate style, by the Williamite detractors who did not recognise the marriage). Nothing could have been calculated to make Frederick decide his marriage was, on balance, a good thing. It is thought that his choice of George for the name may even have been a deliberate swipe at his father's condemnation. On the other hand, some historians have argued that it has a rather different derivation. For, a month before the young prince's birth, Augustine Washington too had chosen to bestow the name upon his newborn son...
[1] The War of the Spanish Succession - CGN.
[2] The War of Jenkin's Ear/Austrian Succession.
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Thande
(shock and suprise)