RALEIGH – The more time I devote to studying the early history of North Carolina and Virginia, the more I am convinced that understanding the history of England is critical to understanding the history of its American colonies.

In particular, the 17th century conflict between the Stuart kings – James I, Charles I, Charles II, and James II – and their various foes, foreign and domestic, explain much of the settlement patterns and early politics of colonial America.

For starters, Puritans hostile to King Charles I made up the first big wave of English immigration to America during the 1630s and early 1640s. They mostly settled in New England.

Then the onset of the English Civil War between Charles I and Parliamentary forces – whom their foes derisively called “Roundheads,” because of how short some wore their hair – interrupted the flow of Puritans and, from the 1640s into the 1660s, replaced it with an even-larger flow of Charles loyalists to Virginia. These were the Cavaliers.

Today, please allow me to tell you the story of a few of these Cavaliers: the Gorsuch and Lovelace families.

A Minister Finds Lovelace

At the turn of the 17th century, Daniel Gorsuch was a prosperous merchant in London. He saw to it that his son, John Gorsuch, received a good education. John probably attended the prestigious St. Paul’s School, then continued his studies at Cambridge in 1617. Although Daniel Gorsuch may have wanted his son to go into business, John Gorsuch had different ideas. He received his master’s degree in 1624 and entered the ministry of the Church of England.

In his youth, John Gorsuch had made a young friend, Richard Lovelace. Richard was the son of Sir William Lovelace, a member of the original Virginia Company and an experienced soldier. Through Richard, John Gorsuch met another child of Sir William Lovelace, his daughter Anne Lovelace. In 1628, John and Anne were married.

John obtained his church posting in a way we might find surprising today. During the 1600s, private landholders often built and maintained local Anglican churches, particularly in the rural areas of England. The parish churches would be in the care of a rector, a priest, who collected the church tithes (really local property taxes). The rector used them to support himself and the operations of the church, and sometimes to pay a return to the private investor.

In the late 1620s, Daniel Gorsuch began investing in real estate in Hertfordshire, located between London and Cambridge. One of the properties he bought was St. Mary’s Church in the Herfordshire town of Walkern. Daniel Gorsuch spent no small amount of money refurbishing the church. So it probably was no coincidence that the new Rev. John Gorsuch became rector of St. Mary’s in 1632.

A Bad Tumble in a Hayloft

Rev. John Gorsuch was a diligent and studious priest – he obtained his doctorate at Cambridge in 1636 – and a stubborn defender of the traditional practices of the Anglican Church.

Around Christmas of 1636, when a Puritan couple sought to receive communion at St. Mary’s without following the standard procedure of approaching the altar rails, Rev. Gorsuch denied them. After a second instance of the same denial, the couple complained to an Anglican bishop with Puritan leanings, who overruled Rev. Gorsuch. But then the bishop was arrested by King Charles I and imprisoned. John Gorsuch, already a Loyalist, had even more reason to support the Stuart monarchy against its Puritan critics.

Unfortunately for Rev. Gorsuch, those Puritan critics were growing increasingly vocal and powerful. As the English Civil War began in 1642, a pro-Puritan vicar named Simon Smeath lodged charges against Rev. John Gorsuch. Smeath accused Gorsuch of public drunkenness, gambling, malfeasance, insubordination, and trying to recruit soldiers for King Charles’s army. Gorsuch angrily defended himself against the smears, reportedly calling his critics “fools, bastards, and cuckolds” during his trial.

Smeath, who had powerful friends in Parliament, may well have wanted to seize control of the Walkern church that John Gorsuch’s father had so expensively refurbished. Smeath got his wish. Parliament ejected Gorsuch from the parish. But Smeath may not have fully understood that the Gorsuch family still owned the church property and would thus continue to receive a share of its tithes.

In 1647, it seems that Simon Smeath convinced a Colonel Fairclough of Weston do something about John Gorsuch “causing a nuisance” in the parish. Fairclough’s men went to Gorsuch’s home. John apparently tried to hide in the hayloft, but they found him there and smothered him to death.

Anne Lovelace Gorsuch was now a widow with many children, no stable means of support, and a questionable reputation with the Puritan authorities. Her political problem wasn’t just the suspicious death of her Royalist husband. It was also the Royalist activities of her famous Lovelace brothers.

The Words of Richard Lovelace

Her oldest brother, Richard Lovelace, had been a popular figure during his days at Oxford University in the 1630s. One Oxford contemporary wrote that Richard was “the most amiable and beautiful person that ever eye beheld; a person also of innate modesty, virtue, and courtly deportment, which made him then, but especially after, when he retired to the great city, much admired and adored by the female sex.”

By every indication, Richard Lovelace returned that female admiration as often as possible. He also nurtured his literary interests. He wrote poems and plays, including a comedy, The Scholars. Later, he wrote a tragic play entitled The Soldiers, based on his own military experiences.

As a self-styled “Cavalier poet,” Richard Lovelace shared the Royalist politics of his friends and family. In 1639, he decided to join the regiment of another young Royalist, George Goring, and rose to the rank of captain during service in the Bishops Wars of 1639-40, when King Charles sought to impose Anglican orthodoxy on the Presbyterians of Scotland. The wars succeeded only in riling up Scottish opposition to the king. This led the Scots to ally with Parliament against King Charles in the early phase of the English Civil War.

In 1641 and 1642, Captain Richard Lovelace participated in several acts of civil and not-so-civil disobedience against Parliament. He was arrested. His subsequent imprisonment prevented Richard from fighting in the early battles of the English Civil War.

It’s unclear whether that represented a loss to the military cause of King Charles. But it clearly produced a gain for English literature. While in prison, Richard Lovelace wrote a number of accomplished poems, the most famous of which was entitled “To Althea, From Prison.” You may not remember having to read this poem in English lit class, but perhaps you remember this line from it:

Stone walls do not a prison make / Nor iron bars a cage.

Over his career, Richard wrote some 200 poems, including another often-assigned work entitled “To Lucasta, Going to the Warres.” Its most famous line was this:

I could not love thee, dear, so much / Loved I not honour more.

After his release from prison, Richard Lovelace left for the Continent, where he fought King Charles’s enemies in France and the Low Countries. The next time Richard Lovelace surfaced in English politics, it was in 1648. Again he protested the Parliamentarians. Again he was imprisoned. By the time he was released in 1649, King Charles had been beheaded. When Richard Lovelace died in 1657, his political cause seemed lost.

The Deeds of Francis Lovelace

If Anne Lovelace Gorsuch’s brother Richard became famous for words, her other Cavalier brothers – particularly Francis Lovelace – became famous for deeds.

The second son of Sir William Lovelace, Francis appears to have more doggedly pursued his father’s military vocation. During the English Civil War, Francis fought in Royalist units in England and Wales, rising to the rank of colonel. In 1645, he was governor of Carmarthen Castle in Wales when Parliamentary forces attacked the stronghold. After a costly siege – during which his brother William Lovelace was killed – Francis was eventually forced to abandon the position. (His brother Richard Lovelace commemorated William’s death poetically in his first published book, Lucasta.)

After this setback, Francis and his brother Dudley Lovelace, also a Cavalier officer, joined Richard Lovelace on the Continent to fight King Charles’s foreign enemies. But after their brother-in-law John Gorsuch was murdered in a hayloft in 1647, Richard was imprisoned in 1648, King Charles was beheaded in 1649, and his son Charles II fled to Ireland, it seemed like an opportune time for the Lovelaces remaining in England to exit stage left.

In 1650 Francis Lovelace obtained permission to immigrate to America. His widowed sister Anne Gorsuch and several of her children accompanied him. Despite Francis’s best efforts, Virginia didn’t remain an outpost of Royalists for long. In 1651, a Roundhead squadron appeared in Chesapeake Bay and forced the capitulation of Gov. William Berkeley and other pro-Stuart officials.

In 1652, Francis Lovelace left Virginia to inform Charles II that the colony had yielded to Oliver Cromwell’s government. He spent the next six years with the exiled Stuart monarch on the Continent. In 1658, with his brother Richard Lovelace having recently died, Francis returned to England to speak for the Royalist cause. On August 5, 1659, he was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London. When the Restoration brought Charles II to the throne in 1660, Francis was freed.

Francis Lovelace and his remaining brothers Dudley and Thomas served the new king in London for several years. Francis was particularly close to the king’s brother James, the Duke of York. When a war broke out between the English and Dutch in 1664, and English forces captured the city of New Amsterdam, the Duke of York turned to Francis for advice, given his early experience among the American colonists. By 1667, the Duke had appointed Francis Lovelace governor of the new English colony of New York.

If He Could Make It There…

Gov. Lovelace quickly sailed to New York and began his duties. Recognizing the economic value of the port, and the importance of trade revenues for maintaining its defense, Francis established New York City’s first mercantile exchange and improved its roads, ferries, and port facilities. He also promoted peace with local Indians and comity within the colony. Francis even extended official toleration to Quakers, which was not common in England or its colonies at the time.

Francis’s remaining brothers accompanied him to his new post. Thomas Lovelace served as one of New York City’s first aldermen and later purchased an estate on Staten Island. In 1672, he became captain of the infantry company defending the island. As for Dudley Lovelace, he became one of the commanders of Fort James, built to defend the city in case the Dutch tried to recapture it.

That’s exactly what the Dutch did in 1673.

As it happened, Gov. Francis Lovelace was in Hartford, Connecticut at the time, meeting with its governor John Winthrop Jr. about one of Lovelace’s most successful projects: a post road from New York City to Boston. It’s unlikely that the Dutch invasion would have turned out any differently had the governor been in New York City, however. The English had too few troops to defend their new colony. Both Dudley and Thomas Lovelace were captured and imprisoned. After the war ended, Dudley returned to England while Thomas remained in America and eventually served as sheriff of Richmond County, New York.

There was no happy ending for Francis Lovelace. Blamed by English authorities for the loss of New York, and deprived of his colonial property by the Dutch, Francis headed home to Europe to restore his finances and defend his reputation. Unfortunately, in 1674 he was captured by the Turks while sailing the Mediterranean. Taken to Algiers, he was deprived of all his remaining funds and then ransomed for additional money.

Once Francis made it to England, James the Duke of York accused him of an inadequate defense of New York. In January 1675 Francis Lovelace, long a stalwart defender of the Stuart cause, was imprisoned by King Charles II in the Tower of London – the same place the Puritans had once imprisoned him for supporting Charles II. While in prison, Francis became ill. He died a few months later.

So there you have it. Richard, Francis, and the other Lovelace brothers had paid a heavy price for their politics. So had their sister Anne Lovelace and her husband John Gorsuch, who were my 10th great-grandparents. But perhaps to the Lovelaces and Gorsuches, fighting for a cause they held dear had been worth it. As Richard Lovelace put it in “To Althea, From Prison”:

If I have freedom in my love, And in my soul am free,
Angels alone that soar above, Enjoy such liberty.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.