38 \ THE WASHINGTONS’

Cave, near Hullin Yorkshire. And this explains
why we are usually told that the great Washing-
ton’s ancestors came from the north of England.
So they did—just at last. But their true home
for more than a hundred years had been the noble
county of Northampton. Lawrence Washington
was born and died in the county, his children
were born there too, and Sir John the emigrant
married a Northamptonshire lady, Dame Mary
Curtis, of Islip, and her tomb is in Islip Church
to this day. So that the midlands may justly
claim the honor of having sent forth a son of their
soil, to help in the making of the great American
people.

A few years ago circumstances took me to Bring-
ton Rectory; and day after day I wandered across
to the grand old. church and sat for several hours
at a time, sketching the beautiful tombs of the
many noble Spencers who since-1599 have been
buried there.

(Before that date they were buried at Worm-
leighton, their great house in Warwickshire.)

There lies Sir Robert, whose friendship in-
duced Lawrence Washington to settle at Bring-
‘ton, and there, too, lies William his son, Baron

Spencer of Wormleighton, John Washington’s

friend.

There too is the heart of his son and suc-
cessor the gallant Henry Spencer, who was
made Earl of Sunderland by King Charles on the
blood-stained battlefield of Edgehill, within sight
of his house of Wormleighton, and who fell at
Newbury by Falkland’s side. And there is his
uncle, Edward Spencer, the Puritan — Cromwell’s
friend; whose influence with the Protector saved
Brington Church and those splendid tombs from
destruction at the hands of the Roundhead sol-
diers. How often have I blessed Edward Spen-
cer’s memory when I looked at those exquisite
monuments all fresh and whole, with their grand
recumbent figures, and their carved and painted
and gilded canopies— and thought of the broken
fingers, the mutilated noses, the disfigured armour
and inscriptions in too many of our English
churches.

But unique and magnificent though the monu-
ments be in the Spencer Chapel, what riveted my
attention was a great slab of stone in the pave-
ment of the aisle. It is cracked right across the
middle, but is otherwise uninjured, It bears a

ENGLISH HOME.

coat of arms, on one half of which are two stripes
with three: stars above them; on the other half
three chalices; and beneath runs an inscription
setting forth that

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This was the father of the emigrant Sir John,
and those three stars, those two stripes, that were
carried over the ocean to the new home in Vir-
ginia, must have had some connection I think, with
a certain flag that floats very proudly —as it has
reason to do — on thousands of ships that sail that
very ocean —on thousands of flagstaffs through-
out the length and breadth of the American con-
tinent. There are several other Washington tombs
at Brington all with their stars and stripes in
some form or other. But I think you will agree.
with me that Lawrence, the last English ances-