John Washington

John Washington (1633 – 1677) was an English merchant, planter, politician and military officer. Born in Tring, Hertfordshire, he subsequently emigrated to the English colony of Virginia, where he became a planter. In addition to serving in the Virginia militia and owning several plantations operated using a combination of indentured and later enslaved labour, Washington also served for many years in the House of Burgesses, representing Westmoreland County. He was the first member of the Washington family who hailed originally from Northeast England to live in North America as well as the paternal great-grandfather of George Washington, the first president of the United States. Early life and family John Washington was born to rector Lawrence Washington and the former Amphillis Twigden, about 1633 (when his father resigned his fellowship at Oxford that required him to remain unmarried), likely at his maternal grandparents' home in Tring, Hertfordshire. However, as an adult, John Washington gave his age in a Virginia deposition as 45, which would put his birth two years earlier. Before his marriage Lawrence had been a don at the University of Oxford. He had been born at Sulgrave Manor near Banbury in Oxfordshire. When John was eight, his father enrolled him in Charterhouse School in London to begin preparing for an academic career, but the boy never attended the school. In 1633 the senior Washington had left Oxford to become the rector of All Saints Parish in Purleigh, Essex. During the English Civil War, in 1643 Parliamentary Puritans stripped the royalist Rev. Washington of that clerical position, alleging misconduct that was disputed. Rev. Lawrence Washington then became vicar of an impoverished parish in Little Braxted, Essex, where he died in January 1652. His widow returned to her parents' family home in Tring, Hertfordshire, and in 1655 John became administrator of his widowed mother's estate. John Washington was apprenticed with a London merchant through the help of his Sandys relatives. He gained a valuable education in colonial trade, as England had colonies in the Caribbean and North America. He served as Master's Mate on board a tobacco ship when he first came to Virginia.