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While America feels a just pride in having given birth to George Washington, it is something for England to know that his ancestors lived for generations upon her soil. His great-grandfather emigrated about 1657, having previously lived in Northamptonshire. The Washingtons were a Northern family, who lived some time in Durham, and also in Lancashire, whence they came to Northamptonshire. The uncle of the first Lawrence Washington was Sir Thomas Kitson, one of the great merchants, who, in the reigns of Henry VII. and VIII., developed the wool-trade of the country, which depended mainly on the growth of wool, and the creation of sheep-farms in the midland counties. That he might superintend his uncle’s transactions with the sheep proprietors, Lawrence Washington settled in Northamptonshire, leaving his own profession of a barrister. He soon became Mayor of Northampton, and at the dissolution of the monasteries, being identified with the cause of civil and religious liberty, he gained a grant of some monastic land, including Sulgrave. In the parish of Brington is situated Althorp, the seat of the Spencers: the Lady Spencer of that day was herself a Kitson, daughter of Washington’s uncle, and the Spencers were great promoters of the sheep-farming movement. Thus, then, there was a very plain connexion between the Washingtons and the Spencers.

For three generations the Washingtons remained at Sulgrave, taking rank among the nobility and gentry of the county. Then their fortunes failed: they were obliged to part with Sulgrave, and retired to Brington, under, as it were, the wing of the Spencer family. From this depression the Washingtons recovered by a singular marriage. The eldest son of the family had married the half-sister of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, which at this time was not an alliance above the pretensions of the Washingtons: they rose into great prosperity. The emigrant, above all others of the family, continued to be on intimate terms with the Spencers, down to the very eve of the Civil War; he was knighted by James I. in 1623, and in the Civil War took the side of the king. The emigrant who left England in 1657, we leave to be traced by historians on the other side of the Atlantic.

“George Washington, without the genius of Julius Cæsar or Napoleon Bonaparte, has a far purer fame, as his ambition was of a higher and a holier nature. Instead of seeking to raise his own name, or seize supreme power, he devoted his whole talents, military and civil, to the establishment of the independence and the perpetuity of the liberties of his own country. In modern history no man has done such great things without the soil of selfishness or the stain of a grovelling ambition. Cæsar, Cromwell, Napoleon, attained a higher elevation, but the love of dominion was the spur that drove them on. John Hampden, William Russell, Algernon Sidney, may have had motives as pure, and an ambition as sustained, but they fell. To George Washington alone, in modern times, has it been given to accomplish a wonderful revolution, and yet to remain to all future times the theme of a people’s gratitude, and an example of virtuous and beneficent power.”—Earl Russell’s Life and Times of Charles James Fox.