The Sulgrave Washingtons Once Again

Abstract

On reading the article, The Washingtons of Sulgrave, in the October 1937 issue of The William and Mary Quarterly, anyone, not well acquainted with what has already been published about the Washington family and Sulgrave Manor, would naturally suppose that Mr. S. H. L. Washington, has recently made some startling discoveries unknown to the accredited American and English workers in that field of research. It is certainly unfortunate that that writer should have omitted to explain that many of the facts were first published in the late Mr. Edward Lee McClain's contribution to American and some English history in 1932 at the time of the celebrations connected with the bicentenary of President George Washington's birth, entitled The Washington Ancestry and Records of the McClain, Johnson and Forty other Colonial American Families, compiled by Mr. C. A. Hoppin, of New York, a distinguished and reliable genealogical expert. This work bears the imprint, Copyright1932 Edward Lee McClain. All Rights Reserved. Now Mr. S. H. L. Washington's first claim is the correction of the hitherto accepted mistakes about the early life of Lawrence Washington (the founder of the Sulgrave branch) and he suggests that Sir William Parr (and not Sir Thomas Kytson) influenced Lawrence Washington to remove from Warton in Lancashire and become a wool merchant in Northampton, England. By 1932 the errors about the early career of Lawrence Washington had all been exposed. I was the first to prove that Lawrence Washington as late as 1529 was still in Warton, Lancashire. The Rev. H. Isham Longden has shown in his History of the Washington Family that Lawrence Washington is of record March 24th 1530 at Northampton, receiving property and married to Elizabeth widow of William Gough, a rich mercer, who had been bailiff of Northampton in 1514 and had made his will August 24th 1528. The Rev. H. I. Longden, Mr. C. A. Hoppin and I all knew that the marriage of Catherine Kytson in 1545 had nothing to do with Lawrence Washington's arrival at Northampton in 1529 or 1530, and nowhere do we state that it influenced him. At the Public Record Office in London, more than thirty years ago, I examined some pleadings and depositions of the time of Henry VIII relating to the ownership of a farmhold in Warton, Lancashire. Margaret Washington (nee Kytson), widow, and her son Lawrence were accused of wrongfully occupying in 1529 the Warton farmhold after the death of Robert Washington in 1528.