In 1539 the former mayor of the town of Northampton, England, a prosperous wool merchant named Lawrence Washington (the great-great-great-greatgreat-grandfather of George Washington) settled north of Oxford in the hill country known as the Cotswolds. There he built a handsome stone cottage for himself and his large family which he called Sulgrave Manor.

In 1539 the former mayor of the town of Northampton, England, a prosperous wool merchant named Lawrence Washington (the great-great-great-greatgreat-grandfather of George Washington) settled north of Oxford in the hill country known as the Cotswolds. There he built a handsome stone cottage for himself and his large family which he called Sulgrave Manor. Part of a monastic estate confiscated by King Henry VIII when he broke with the Church of Rome five years earlier, it was situated in pleasant farm country where ancient lanes wandered for miles between wild rose hedges (which sometimes concealed highwaymen), and certain lonely barrows were reputed to be gathering places for local witches. This was a region where Nonconformist sects gained an early foothold, and the Puritanic tendencies of the natives were proverbial.

The two panels of heraldic stained glass which adorn the front and back covers of this issue were originally at Sulgrave Manor. This spring they were sold by their owner, British author Sacheverell Sitwell, to the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York, where they are now on permanent display. Of seven related panels, these are the only ones which have come to George Washington’s native country.

Both panels shown here were probably made in 1588, the year Queen Elizabeth’s Navy and the storms which Spaniards called “Protestant winds” destroyed the great Armada. The panels commemorate two marriages in the Washington family, one of them bearing the coat of arms of John Washington and Margaret Kytson, and the other, the arms of Margaret Butler and a second Lawrence Washington, the grandson of the builder of Sulgrave Manor.

The Washington coat of arms has a pattern of red and white bars and three five-pointed stars—or, in more heraldic language, “Argent, Two Bars Gules, in Chief Three Mullets of the Second.” Some historians have made the perhaps romantic assertion that these Washington arms were the original inspiration for the national flag of the United States which the Continental Congress adopted on June 14, 1777.

Apparently the Washington family fortune diminished in the years after the panels were made, for in 1610 Sulgrave Manor had to be sold. Almost fifty years later the first Washington arrived in the New World. In 1657—the last year of Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan dictatorship in England—George Washington’s greatgrandfather John sailed to Virginia as first mate and part owner of a trading ketch. When his ship was wrecked on a Rappahannock River shoal, John Washington elected to remain in America. The prospect of plentiful tobacco land was inviting; and, too, he must have been happy to settle beyond the stern reach of a Puritan-dominated England. For John Washington