Sulgrave Manor offers history perspective - and not just on Washington`s birthday

  • Published
  • By Staff Sgt. Brian Stives
  • 501st Combat Support Wing Public Affairs
SULGRAVE, United Kingdom --  If Sulgrave Manor were in the United States, there would be numerous roadside signs competing with the rural views of the English Midlands on the way north from Oxford or west from Cambridge. But the rural location is no obstacle for tourists using their sat navs or Americans from RAF Croughton and RAF Alconbury. They marked George Washington`s birthday as they do every year - at a special service in the church where some of the first president`s forebears are buried.

"We love having the Americans over," said Shrimp Christy in her gentle Northamptonshire accent. Christy is the churchwarden for the parish church of St. James the Less. A small, cheerful woman, she teamed with evident pleasure that the military visitors stayed for afternoon tea in the village at the conclusion of the annual service.

This year, Ch. (Maj.) Peter Fischer, 501st Combat Support Wing chaplain, was invited to offer the sermon and everyone was invited to a free tour of Sulgrave Manor, the ancestral home of George Washington.

"It is important for us to learn history," said Ch. (Maj.) Earnest Beeman, 423rd Air Base Group chaplain and organizer of the service in Sulgrave. "That is why I offered to set this up this year and last year."

"It was a tremendous honor to be able to speak at the ancestral church of the father of our nation, especially on Presidents' Day weekend," said Fischer.

Sulgrave is a 20-minute drive from Banbury and less than an hour by car from Oxford and Stratford-upon-Avon--both magnets to Americans visiting England. It`s also within easy reach for visitors touring the picturesque Cotswold villages or taking in Warwick, site of the United Kingdom`s finest medieval castle.

The village of Sulgrave makes few obvious concessions to its link with George Washington. Don`t expect Washington souvenirs at the village store just around the corner from the manor house. It`s unlikely to stock the kind of frozen pizzas you want, the drinks are not chilled and if you prefer sugar-free, forget it. But in return for such minor inconveniences, Sulgrave offers England`s stock-in-trade: a perspective on history and the sense that the past and present are merely different pages of the same book.

The parish church, for example, can trace its vicars back to 1222. It boasts the pew where the Washington family worshiped on Sundays; the tomb of Lawrence Washington, who built the manor; and a window bearing four stained- glass versions of the family coat of arms.

The same heraldic design of red and white mullets and bars can be seen in the window of the Great Hall at the manor house. In everyday language, mullets and bars are stars and stripes, leading to the inevitable assumption that the coat of arms inspired the American flag.

"`I think the remarkable thing to know," said Sue McNally, Sulgrave Manor guide, "is that the Washingtons used these (emblems) from the year 1346--literally hundreds of years before the flag, long before America was even known about on this side of the world."

McNally told the 501st Combat Support Wing visitors to Sulgrave Manor that the Washington line can be traced back to 1183, the year William de Hertburn of County Durham in the north of England purchased the estate of Wessington.

By 1400, the male line lost possession of Wessington, and while one person of that name was later elected prior of Durham`s Benedictine convent, several variants on the name began showing up in other parts of England. The name went through a number of changes and the U.S. capital might have been Weschington, D.C., or even Wasshington had the family name not matured to its final form.

Seven generations and 200 years before the birth in Virginia of the illustrious George, Lawrence Washington moved south to Sulgrave in the heart of England.

He flourished as a wool merchant, and in 1539 after Henry VIII broke from Rome and abolished the monasteries, Washington snapped up the 140-acre manor of Sulgrave for 324 pounds, 14 shillings and ten pence. He had 11 children and built a fine house for them to live in. The house, now on display to visitors, incorporates one surviving wing from the original manor house.

Flanking the house is a formal rose garden, fine lawns lined by yew hedges and walls constructed of local limestone. A pair of flag staffs fly the British and American flags, topiaries flank the main door and beyond the main house there`s an orchard. In the sunlight, it looks like a spot to settle in, not to leave.

"`It`s all very well to look at the house and look at the beautiful gardens and ask, 'Why did John Washington go to Virginia?'" said McNally, who has been answering that question and others like it during her tours.

"John's father was in trouble under Cromwell because he was a Royalist," she explained, referring to the civil war that ended with the Puritans beheading King Charles I and installing Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector of England.

"'He was a church minister, he spoke from his pulpit on behalf of his king and country and the spies were out. John never owned this house anyway. His father had lost his possessions and his good name."

All very true. The Puritans, in fact, justified throwing the clergyman out of his parish by calling him "a common frequenter of ale houses and often drunk." The family loyalty to the king despite his fatal tiff with Parliament is well-illustrated by Sir Henry Washington, who served under Prince Rupert at the storming of Bristol and in 1646 led the three-month defense of Worcester. It`s ironic considering the traditional family history that the most famous Washington of all later cost the king the American colonies.

George Washington`s great-grandfather, John, got to Virginia in 1657 as mate of the ketch Sea Horses of London; he extended his stay because the ship sank as it turned for home; an advantageous marriage and the rapid acquisition of land persuaded him to settle.

The Washington tenure of Sulgrave Manor, therefore, lasted about a century and the house underwent considerable structural change under subsequent owners. After opening as a museum in 1921, it was furnished during a 20-year period with items selected for their quality and authenticity.

There are, however, some touches commemorating the revolutionary leader: a velvet coat, his saddle bags, his oak liquor chest, a lock of hair. The most valuable item in the collection is the portrait of George Washington by the American painter Gilbert Stuart, which hangs over the fireplace in the oak-beamed Great Hall, a room that survives from the original house.

"Touring Sulgrave Manor really makes you realize how young the United States actually is," said Fischer. "For us, a building that is a few hundred years old is historic; here in the U.K., many of their churches and buildings were built before Columbus even sailed to the New World."