Washington’s Flemish ancestry passed unbroken through the Counts of Flanders to Mathilda of Bruges, who was apparently dragged by her red hair by William the Conqueror to their wedding ceremony. Despite the rough handling, the marriage was successful. William went on to subdue Anglo-Saxon England – in large part thanks to a contingent of Flemish knights who fought at the Battle of Hastings – and for several centuries his progeny sat on Britain’s throne.

George Washington’s royal ancestral line continued for several hundred years after the Conqueror’s subjugation of the British Isles. Edward I (“Longshanks”) was Washington’s last royal antecedent. From that time, Washington’s family tree slipped in the social register until stabilising sometime in the late 15th century, just about the time of the English Reformation.

Early on in their time in England, the Wessingtons (as the Washington clan was first known) made their livelihood by raising sheep and trading wool. After several generations, the family changed their Saxon name to Washington, and by the early 1500s the Washingtons were comfortably settled in southeast England, in the town of Maldon.

In the 1560s, Thomas Washington, one of George Washington’s ancestors, relocated to Antwerp, where he became head of the largest company of English cloth and wool traders, the Merchant Adventurers (which went on to finance the Pilgrim’s settlement at Plymouth). Later, in 1564, a row between the ruler of Flanders and Queen Elizabeth forced them to move just across the Scheldt to Middleburg in Zeeland.

Thomas Washington eventually moved to England and died in Colchester, a town whose business was closely tied to the Flemish weavers and the wool industries. Later generations of the Washington family remained sturdily woven into the fabric of East Anglia’s commercial life. They were also linked to the Flemish Protestant textile workers whose settlement was to have such a large impact on New England.

George Washington’s great-grandfather, John Washington, was the first of his surname to make his home and fortune in the New World. In 1656, John Washington left the smuggling coves of Malden in East Anglia – a hotbed of Flemish immigration and religious dissent – as a “mariner” on a trading ship for America. He settled in Virginia, gave up the sea and eventually became a wealthy planter.

America’s first president was, of course, a complete product of his time. This means that in his youth he considered himself a colonial subject of the British Crown and, of course, a member of the planter aristocracy. Still, when he was not engaged in politics or the plantation, the young, red-haired George Washington had one passion. He played cricket, which, like golf, has long been considered a quintessential British pastime. Recent research, however, has shown that cricket was actually an import carried by the Flemish weavers who settled in England in the late 16th century. (See the story in Flanders Today, 11 March, 2009).

A number of Washington’s friends and advisers also had Flemish heritage, including his close friend and lawyer, John Mercer, a descendant of a Flemish cloth merchant family from Kent.

At the end of all of this, it is unfortunate that there is no hint that George Washington was even dimly aware of his Flemish ancestry. Certainly those around him never remarked or commented about his ancestral ties, and his diary recorded no genealogical passion. This may reflect the traditional Flemish desire to blend in.

In the end, it may well be that this act of assimilation is what marks out George Washington, the father of the American people, as a son of Flanders.

The occasional feature “Letter from America” traces the Flemish roots of famous Americans

http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/washington