Ferdinando Gorges

• 1. Introduction

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  Ferdinando Gorges earned the title "Father of English Colonization in North America" without ever setting foot there. That paradox sits at the heart of his story. A soldier knighted at the siege of Rouen, a conspirator who escaped the gallows by turning on his own allies, and an imperial visionary whose grandson ultimately sold off everything he built for twelve hundred and fifty pounds: Gorges spent decades trying to shape a continent he would never see.

  How does a man become the architect of English America from the other side of the Atlantic? What drove him to pour money and political capital into a distant coastline he only knew through the words of captive strangers? And what happened to the province he worked so hard to establish once he was gone? Those questions will guide us through the life of one of England's most consequential and least remembered figures.

• 2. A Family Built on Borrowed Names

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  The Gorges family arrived in England with the Norman Conquest, and the name itself was inherited rather than earned by blood. The last male of the ancient Anglo-Norman Gorges line was dying childless, so he bequeathed his estates, including the Somerset manor of Wraxall, to a nephew named Theobald Russell, on the single condition that Theobald adopt the Gorges name and arms. Ferdinando was a descendant of that Theobald Russell "Gorges."

  The male line of the original family had extinguished itself in 1331 with the death of Ralph de Gorges, 2nd Baron Gorges, of Knighton on the Isle of Wight. By Ferdinando's time, the family's identity rested on a legal arrangement struck generations earlier. The Gorges had held their Somerset estates since the reign of King Edward II, and the family counted royal service stretching back even further: Sir John Russell of Kingston Russell, Dorset, an early ancestor in the male line, had served as a household knight to King John and as steward to the young King Henry III.

  Ferdinando's mother Cecily Lygon brought her own strands of aristocratic connection. Her ancestors could trace a link to King Richard II, and she was the daughter of William Lygon of Madresfield in Worcestershire. Among the descendants of that branch would eventually be counted the Earls Beauchamp. Ferdinando was named not after his father but after his mother's brother, Ferdinando Lygon, which suggests something about where the family's deeper loyalties and affections ran.

• 3. Born Into Uncertainty

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  Even the year of Ferdinando's birth is uncertain. He was probably born somewhere between 1565 and 1568, most likely in Clerkenwell, in Middlesex, where the family kept their London house, though the family manor at Wraxall in Somerset is also possible. His father Edward Gorges died at the age of 31, and the circumstances pointed his first biographer, Baxter, toward the conclusion that Ferdinando arrived around the time of that death on the 29th of August 1568.

  But Edward Gorges, sensing his end was near, had drawn up a will on the 10th of August 1568, proved just over a month later on the 17th of September. In that document he left Ferdinando a 23-ounce gold watch and the manor of Birdcombe at Wraxall, to be held for a term of 24 years. An earlier writer examining those bequests concluded that Ferdinando had to have been born somewhat earlier, somewhere between 1565 and 1567, since the nature of the gifts implied a child already alive for some time.

  Ferdinando's only sibling was his older brother Edward, baptised at Wraxall on the 5th of September 1564, who later entered Hart Hall at Oxford in 1582. After their father's death, Cecily married again, to John Vivian of Brydges, and Ferdinando grew up at Nailsea Court at Kenn, near Wraxall. Whatever schooling he received left little trace in the documentary record.

• 4. Soldier and Survivor

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  No documents record what Gorges did before 1587, but by that year he is already referred to as a captain, meaning he had taken up arms well before then, possibly in his mid-teens. It was not uncommon in England at the time. The outbreak of the Anglo-Spanish War in 1585 likely drew him into active service soon after.

  In 1587, he was listed among the "several eminent chieftains" commanding 800 soldiers sent from Flushing by Sir William Russell to relieve the Siege of Sluis, which the Spanish Governor General of the Netherlands had laid. Gorges fought under Lord Willoughby, and he developed close ties with that family. Somewhere in the campaign or its aftermath, he was captured; by September 1588 his name appeared on a list of English prisoners at Lisle, with friends in England petitioning for his release through a prisoner exchange.

  By 1589 he was free and wounded again, this time at the siege of Paris. He married Ann Bell that same year, at St. Margaret's, Westminster. He was knighted at the siege of Rouen in 1591, and for his services he was appointed Governor of the Fort at Plymouth, a post he would hold for many years. Plymouth was one of England's most strategically vital ports, and governing its fort placed Gorges at the junction of commerce, naval power, and colonial ambition.

  The Spanish Armada of 1597 brought another test. Gorges was able to raise the alarm that enabled the country's defence, though autumn storms ultimately scattered the Spanish fleet before it could do serious damage.

• 5. Essex's Rebellion and Its Aftermath

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  In 1601, Gorges became entangled in the Essex Conspiracy, the armed uprising led by Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, against Queen Elizabeth I. His involvement could easily have ended his life. The rebellion failed, and several of its leaders were executed.

  Gorges escaped that fate by testifying against Essex and the other main conspirators. The decision preserved his career, his freedom, and ultimately his ability to pursue the colonial ambitions that would define his legacy. It was a pragmatic choice with a high personal cost in reputation, but Gorges emerged intact while Essex did not.

  His distant family connections had already primed him for the world beyond England's shores. Two of his distant relatives by blood or marriage were Humphrey Gilbert and Walter Raleigh, both figures central to early English efforts in the Western Hemisphere. When peace with Spain came in 1604 and English attention turned back toward colonization, Gorges was positioned, both politically and by temperament, to be among its leading advocates.

• 6. Three Strangers From the Coast

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  Gorges's interest in North America was said to have been sparked by a meeting with three captive American Indians whom Captain George Weymouth had brought back and presented to him. The men eventually learned English and described their homeland, and their accounts fired something in Gorges that would occupy the rest of his life.

  Gorges later claimed that one of those three captives was Tisquantum, the man history knows as Squanto, of the Patuxet people. Historians have disputed that claim. But whether or not Squanto was among them, the encounter changed the direction of Gorges's ambitions entirely.

  In 1607, as a shareholder in the Plymouth Company, he helped fund the Popham Colony, planted at what is now Phippsburg in Maine. The colony failed. Gorges did not give up. He remained closely associated with Bristol's renewal of colonization interest that followed the end of the Anglo-Spanish War, and he continued to work through the Plymouth Company's successor body, the Plymouth Council for New England, pressing for a permanent English foothold on the northeastern coast of America.

• 7. The Province of Maine

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  On the 10th of August 1622, in the reign of King James I, a charter dated that day created the Province of Maine. Gorges received the land patent jointly with John Mason, granted by the Plymouth Council for New England, with original boundaries running between the Merrimack and Kennebec rivers. The charter's own language named the territory: "Ye Province of Maine."

  In 1629, Gorges and Mason divided their joint holdings. Mason took the southern portion below the Piscataqua River, which became the Province of New Hampshire. Gorges kept Maine, and he and his nephew established the province's first court system. His son Robert served briefly as Governor-General of New England from 1623 to 1624, though American colonists viewed him with suspicion, skeptical of what they saw as Gorges's almost feudal vision of settlement and governance. Robert ultimately returned to England.

  A 1639 charter from King Charles I reconfirmed and expanded Gorges's authority over the province. The new charter's language was emphatic: the territory "shall forever hereafter, be called and named the PROVINCE OR COUNTIE OF MAINE, and not by any other name or names whatsoever."

  Throughout the 1630s, Gorges also tried to undermine the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In 1632 he formally challenged the legitimacy of its royal charter and forwarded complaints from disaffected colonists to the Privy Council of Charles I. None of it worked. His efforts to revive the old Plymouth Company and challenge Massachusetts's standing came to nothing. Captain Christopher Levett, an early English explorer of the New England coast and Gorges's agent as well as a member of the Plymouth Council, had attempted to plant his own colony in Maine, but that effort failed too; Levett died aboard ship on his return to England after meeting with Governor John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630.

• 8. Death and the Undoing of an Empire

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  Sir Ferdinando Gorges died on the 24th of May 1647, at his wife's home in Long Ashton, then known as Ashton-Phillips. He was buried in the Smyth crypt at All Saints' Church in Long Ashton, without any markings on his grave, the circumstances of the time making that restraint necessary.

  His eldest son John inherited the Province of Maine. But the family's grip on that distant territory proved impossible to sustain. In May 1677, Ferdinando's grandson, also named Ferdinando Gorges, sold all remaining family rights to Maine to the state of Massachusetts for the sum of twelve hundred and fifty pounds. The sale ended the Gorges family's presence in the New World entirely.

  Maine would not achieve separate statehood until 1820, more than 170 years after Gorges was buried without a marker in Somerset. The man who had never crossed the Atlantic had set in motion a legal and political structure whose consequences outlasted his family's ownership by nearly two centuries.