Every person in this book lived and breathed. There are no fictitious characters.
Some are famous, even legendary, figures about whom many books have been written. The names of others can be found only on courthouse records, on marriage registers, or on deeds.
They share the fact that all have common ancestry, that all can trace their heritage, or that of their wife or husband, to the royal families who ruled Europe for centuries.
They also share the fact that all belong to the families who are ancestors of tens of millions of Americans. There will be those who ask, is it possible that the settlers of America in the early 1600s were not only acquainted but related? Can it be possible the majority of settlers in the early 1600s were families of grandsons and great nephews of the relations of wives of Henry VIII?
Not only possible, but true. The proof is in this book. Each character is a descendant of one or more characters from previous chapters, beginning with the Godiva of legend, a very warm and loving and exceedingly wealthy and religious woman whose famous ride is a monument both to her courage and to a love story for the ages.
Nation of Kings attempts mighty deeds; its success or failure rests entirely upon its readers. Mainly, it attempts to reveal to Americans a "secret" which individual dedicated genealogist-historians have tried in vain to share for centuries.
The information is a "secret" only because Americans for four centuries have looked on the landing at Jamestown in 1607 as such a complet break with the past that all history prior to that momentous day in May stopped cold when settlers planted the British flag on Virginia soil. In our collective minds, those settlers lost all human attributes and became individual stereotypes from that day forward. They ceased being sons and cousins and real men who missed their wives and sweethearts and daughters and became instead a group composed of several members of the Ruling Class presiding over the anonymous poor, uneducated, Farmer, Debtor and Prisoner who choose a hard life in a new world rather than the misery of their prior life in England.
Thus we stopped searching when we found a "Smith" or "Barlow" who had stood -- illiterate but revered because of his status as First Settler. Over the centuries, we accepted this text-book conclusion about our ancestors. They stepped full grown on the shores of a new continent, brave because they came with strangers, to be worshipped because there were only a few dozen names whose descendants could claim such lofty antecedents.
Actually, nothing could be further from the truth. Once one accepts the premise that mankind's basic needs, drives and motivations have changed little over the centuries, it is easy to see that a new land would have been divided in 1607 much the same as today. Those in power divide the spoils. Reseach reveals this was true. The only difference was in the size of the pie. Twentieth century man had noting to divide that continent wide and ocean deep. The man in power was King James. The people who surrounded him were those who in the half-centur prior to his accession had surrounded Queen Elizabeth I and had kept in touch with James, knowing his day on the throne was sure to come. Elizabeth was a daughter of Henry VIII. All ruling families, after 500 years of intermarriage, were related to some degree. Those she picked as confidants all had cousinly links to her childhood -- even her nurse had been a cousin. Her nurses' family descendants would be named as the world's greatest explorers.
America's first settler came complete with family, with family skeletons and family pride. He also came with a lot of company, with cousins and brothers and nephews whose names were not the same. The new political pie was divided among those close enough to the king to get a share. When they fulfilled the obligation of their charters from the king that their grants had to be peopled and developed, they looked first to ancestral villages and countryside for cousins from families they knew and trusted, and to trade guilds they ran for talented and skilled workmen. Only later in the 1600s, when demand for workers outstripped availability did they turn to the poor, hungry and imprisoned. America in its founding years was a place in which the younger sons of noble families could make their fortunes. With the approaching execution of King Charles, America in the 1640s became a place where the nobility close to the king could live in safety. As Scotland fought time and time again to free herself from England's rule, America became the place of exile for the clan chieftans lucky enough to live through the bloodbaths which resulted.
Contributing to the current day belief that there are few "First Settler" descendants in America is the fact that by the third -- and certainly the fourth -- generation born on American soil, intermarriage between descendants of the large families of all of the above with ambitious young Irish, Scots, French, Dutch and German settlers had blurred the lines of descent into tens thousands of different surnames.
In the centuries that followed, steady migration into wilderness dimmed even the memories of those first days in a new land. Meld that with the fact that an American of the twenty-first century could have had 16,384 direct ancestors at the time this nation was settled.
Fewer than 200 lived at Jamestown in its earliest days.
Americans have been on a genealogy-kick since Alex Haley's Roots. Most, however, search mainly for an ancestor bearing the surname of their father or mother.Families passed their heritage down through family Bibles, scraps of paper in trunks and story-telling on the front porch after the work day was done.
If this book, the result of a quarter of a century of research by an investigative reporter, is intended to prove anything, it is that the front porch stories were founded not in myth but in reality, that America is not a nation of only serving wenches and felons, but a Nation of Kings.
Continue to Chapter 1
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