Early Life in England and Arrival in Virginia Colony
Nicholas Spencer was born to an aristocratic English family long seated at Cople, Bedfordshire, England. The family was related to the Spencer family of Northamptonshire, with whom they shared a coat of arms. In 1531 the Spencers bought the manor of Rowlands at Cople, which they owned for several centuries. Nicholas Spencer Sr., father of the Virginia emigrant, and his wife, the former Mary Gostwick, second daughter of Sir Edward Gostwick had several sons, of these William inherited the family estates but died childless after making his heir his nephew, also William, son of his next-brother Nicholas who had moved to Virginia. Another brother, Robert Spencer later removed from Surry County, Virginia, to Talbot County, Maryland, where his descendants long lived at Spencer Hall, the family plantation.
Nicholas Spencer moved from London to Westmoreland County, Virginia, in the 1650s, where he served as agent for his cousin John Colepeper, 1st Baron Colepeper. Colepeper had inherited his father's share of ownership in the Virginia Company in 1617, and was subsequently knighted and afterwards raised to the peerage. He became the one-seventh proprietor of the Northern Neck of Virginia under the charter of 1649. Colepeper never lived in the colonies, and his son Thomas Culpeper, 2nd Baron Culpeper of Thoresway, who lived at Leeds Castle, did not arrive in Virginia until 1680. In the meantime Nicholas Spencer had come to Virginia to help oversee his cousin John's investment.
Read more about this topic: Nicholas Spencer
Famous quotes containing the words early, life, england, arrival, virginia and/or colony:
“I realized how for all of us who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies the war was a defining experience. You went or you didn’t, but the fact of it and the decisions it forced us to make marked us for the rest of our lives, just as the depression and World War II had marked my parents.”
—Linda Grant (b. 1949)
“You are told a lot about your education, but some beautiful, sacred memory, preserved since childhood, is perhaps the best education of all. If a man carries many such memories into life with him, he is saved for the rest of his days. And even if only one good memory is left in our hearts, it may also be the instrument of our salvation one day.”
—Feodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881)
“Forced from home, and all its pleasures,
Afric’s coast I left forlorn;
To increase a stranger’s treasures,
O’er the raging billows borne.
Men from England bought and sold me,
Paid my price in paltry gold;
But, though theirs they have enroll’d me,
Minds are never to be sold.”
—William Cowper (1731–1800)
“For the poet the credo or doctrine is not the point of arrival but is, on the contrary, the point of departure for the metaphysical journey.”
—Joseph Brodsky (b. 1940)
“While I am in favor of the Government promptly enforcing the laws for the present, defending the forts and collecting the revenue, I am not in favor of a war policy with a view to the conquest of any of the slave States; except such as are needed to give us a good boundary. If Maryland attempts to go off, suppress her in order to save the Potomac and the District of Columbia. Cut a piece off of western Virginia and keep Missouri and all the Territories.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
““Tall tales” were told of the sociability of the Texans, one even going so far as to picture a member of the Austin colony forcing a stranger at the point of a gun to visit him.”
—Administration in the State of Texa, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)