James Edward Oglethorpe: A Life in the Enlightenment

By THOMAS WILSON and Teri Norris

James Oglethorpe was a significant figure in the eighteenth century and this biography is a chapter-by-chapter account of his life as a son of a secretive Jacobite family, a soldier who fought under two towering figures who were on Napoleon's list of the greatest generals, a reform-oriented political figure, the founder of Georgia, a philanthrop

• Language: English
• Publisher: Twyyst Books
• Release date: Oct 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9781087964676

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Thomas Wilson

James Edward Oglethorpe: A Life in the Enlightenment

First published by Twyyst Books 2023

Copyright © 2023 by Thomas Wilson

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Contents

Prologue

Preface

1. Born to a New Era

2. Member of Parliament

3. Political Theorist

4. Humanist and Philanthropist

5. City Planner and Founder of Georgia

6. Military Officer

7. Patron of the Arts

8. Abolitionist

9. A Life in the Enlightenment

Image Gallery

Appendix A. Timeline with People and Events Influencing Oglethorpe’s Life

Appendix B. The Library of James Edward Oglethorpe

Attributions and Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Prologue

The private coach came to a slow, quiet stop in the late-night darkness near a gate at the edge of Godalming village. Four men stepped out, none speaking. The coach circled around, heading back from where it came, leaving them on the roadside. A man in a cape produced a small lantern, lit it, and approached the gate. Another man produced a key, and in the dim glow of the lantern’s light slipped it into a lock, turned the key slowly until it clicked, then carefully pushed open the gate.

The four men slipped through, closed the gate, and re-secured the lock. The man with the key took the lantern and motioned the others to follow him along a path through a wooded area. In a matter of minutes, they found themselves in a clearing where they could see the dim outline of a small cottage.

The man who led with the lantern reached through his jacket into his waistcoat and produced another key. He again motioned the others to follow. The two men with hats and cloaks produced weapons, one a pistol, the other a musket. The fourth man signaled for the man with the lantern and key and the armed men to approach the cottage. As the man with the key approached the door the other two circled the small building. When they were back in front, the door was unlocked and opened. The armed men stepped forward, took the lantern, and entered. A short time later they signaled for the others to come in.

The man who had unlocked the door strode through the small room, entered a pantry, and released a secret door between rows of empty shelves. Once again, the armed men stepped forward and entered first. Inside, there was a short landing and a flight of stairs leading to a crudely finished basement. The armed men went down, weapons at ready, and determined it was safe before one went back upstairs to motion the others to come down.

The man with the key walked over to a roughly hewn door hinged to heavy timbers amid the basement’s rock walls. He used the same key that opened the gate to open the lock on the door. This time, he entered first, striking a match and lighting a lantern fixed to the tunnel wall inside. One all four were in the tunnel, the man with the key closed and latched the door and doused the lantern on the wall. Bent slightly, he then led the others through the low, narrow tunnel. Two rats scurried forward into the darkness. The tunnel was constructed of rock and timbers much like the basement, but even more crudely. The dirt floor was wet in places, but not muddy. There was a mildly pleasant odor of damp earth.

The tunnel was long, perhaps five-hundred yards, and it took more than ten minutes to reach the end. Once there, they encountered a steep flight of stairs leading up to the floor of a house. The man with the pistol, which was now in its holster, was the first up the stairs. A heavy iron knocker dangled from a trap door between joists. He grabbed it and knocked five times.

Sir Theophilus and Lady Eleanor Oglethorpe were up late, sitting in the parlor of their Westbrook estate, when they heard a familiar knock in the center hall. Their eyes locked for a split second, then they rose in unison, left the room, and quickly repositioned themselves at either end of the hall carpet. Eleanor reached down and pulled back the carpet revealing a trap door. Theophilus bent over, grabbed an iron ring, and pulled the door open.

A caped musketeer belted for both a sword and a pistol adroitly climbed from below. He looked around, acquired a nod from both Oglethorpe’s, and motioned to others below that it was safe to come up. The second man to come up was similarly dressed but had a musket strapped to his shoulder. The first musketeer ordered the second in French to examine the hall and adjoining rooms. The third man wore nondescript attire but was immediately recognizable as James Stuart, the deposed king of England and Scotland, still claiming his title as James II, King of England, Ireland, and Scotland (where he was known as James VII), who reigned from exile in France. The fourth and last to come through the trap door was a familiar face: it was Paul, who had served with them before the revolution as senior a member of James’ royal household.

Theophilus lowered the trap door and Eleanor replaced the carpet. They motioned James and Paul into the parlor, as the musketeers gathered the travelers’ satchels and then took defensive positions in the hall. Once the men were seated, Eleanor went to the kitchen to direct a single maid who had remained on duty to prepare tea and bring a cart of bread, meat, and cheese that had been stocked by the chef.

As Theophilus poured Madeira wine for James and Paul, he asked about their journey from Paris. They had hoped to travel clandestinely for the most part, but to pose, when necessary, as English wine merchants accompanied by French guards. They landed near Hastings under cover of darkness, took the coastal road to Brighton, then turned inland for the remainder of the journey to Godalming. Westbrook, with its trap door and tunnel leading to town, was an ideal secret meeting place to council with allies and chart a course for restoring the Stuart monarchy.

Eleanor, who was always in the thick of the plotting, was anxious to get back to the parlor, but she couldn’t resist a stop in the nursery to see three-month-old James Edward. As she briefly looked at him in his cradle, she imagined his future role in expanding a restored Stuart empire, one that would bring a unified glory to England, her native Ireland, and Scotland. With a smile on her face, she returned to the parlor.

She entered the room in time to hear that James’ small party would rendezvous with a French ship off Brighton a fortnight after leaving them there. Accounting for travel time, which meant she and Theophilus would be their hosts for the next nine or ten days. They had prepared for the king’s visit by arranging a series of clandestine meetings with his allies, who had become known as Jacobites after the Latin name, Jacobus, for James. In the days that followed, it would likely be determined whether James would be restored to the throne through an action of Parliament or a counter-revolution.

Parliament had made William and Mary joint Monarchs over seven years earlier in 1689. After Mary’s death in 1684, Jacobites hoped that weakening support for William would present an opportunity to restore James to the throne without bloodshed. The meetings set to take place at Westbrook would take stock of that prospect and set a plan in motion.

James’ strongest base of support was in Scotland, but many Tory leaders and influential clergymen in England were sympathizers. They embraced the principle of the divine right of kings established by James’ grandfather, James I. They tended to favor the model of government found throughout Europe in which a strong Catholic monarch exercised divinely inspired, paternalistic leadership without the divisive influence of legislative authority that gripped England.

In the days that followed the trap door opened many times as enthusiastic loyalists came and went, offering a range of assessments of the political landscape. In the end, it was decided that there was insufficient strength among Tory Jacobites to commandeer the government and usher James back to the throne. That day would come, they believed, but only with the support of the powerful French army striking simultaneously with armies raised in Scotland and Ireland.

James returned to France, where he presented this assessment to his friend, Louis XIV, known as Louis the Great, or the Sun King. But the time was not ripe. He died five years later, and it was left to his son, James Francis Edward Stuart, pretender to the crown as James III, to mount revolutions with French support in 1715 and 1745. Both failed, but Jacobitism lived on through the Old Pretender and his son, who became known as Bonnie Prince Charlie.

Theophilus and Eleanor remained in England, largely because Theophilus would not convert to Catholicism. Four of their daughters, however, would settle in France, marry into nobility, and work for the Jacobite cause. James Edward Oglethorpe, on the other hand, would remain in England and learn to thrive in the world of a parliamentary government. He became part of the political establishment during the reigns of Queen Anne and during that of the subsequent Hanover kings, George I, George II, and George III. He learned to preserve elements of his past, steeped in the traditions of the House of Stuart, while at the same time embracing a new era, one that valued human rights, reason, and science—the Age of Enlightenment.

The preceding vignette is a plausible scenario illustrating life at Westbrook during James Edward Oglethorpe’s early years. The Stuart restoration failed, despite the best attempts of Jacobites like the Oglethorpes and their French enablers. But the intrigues persisted, and for half a century or more Oglethorpes were central characters in every plot. The secret and multifaceted lives of James Oglethorpe’s parents and siblings taught him the necessity of living a public life and a secretive life. The latter aspect of his life has made it impossible for his many biographers to know precisely and accurately portray where he stood on many of the controversial issues of the time. This biography triangulates his motivations from his speeches, his written record, the content of his library, letters of associates, and what the people who knew him well had to say about him.

The life of James Edward Oglethorpe (December 22, 1696-July 1, 1785) is a portrait of the Enlightenment. Chronologically, his life spanned nearly ninety of the 100 years between the Glorious Revolution and the French Revolution, the events that framed the Age of Enlightenment. Philosophically, he was immersed in the defining ideals of the age—human rights, republican governance, artistic and literary expression, philosophical inquiry, and scientific advancement. Most notably, he was not only intellectually engaged in that spectrum of ideals but often directly and intensely engaged in reinventing society in accordance with those ideals. Oglethorpe’s pursuit of Enlightenment principles took him across Europe twice and deep into the American frontier. His last decades were spent in London in a more settled life among the city’s intelligentsia. He met and synthesized the perspectives of kings, statesmen, brilliant generals, revolutionaries, and leading intellectuals in formulating his own worldview. His peripatetic nature was described in the words of Alexander Pope, driv’n by strong Benevolence of soul he ventured from pole to pole. It was an assessment made early in his adventurous life, but one that rang true later in life as well.¹

In his later years, James Oglethorpe recounted his life and beliefs to a circle of friends that included many of the most influential people of the time. The group, which included Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Oliver Goldsmith, Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, Horace Walpole, Elizabeth Montague, Edward Gibbon, Granville Sharpe, Edmund Burke, and Hannah More relished his stories and found inspiration in his values. As illustrious writers, artists, politicians, and humanists this circle of friends turned the page from eighteenth-century philosophy to nineteenth-century humanism. The upheaval over the principle that Oglethorpe held most dear, that all men are created equal, would guide the subsequent struggle to end slavery and to create a more just society.

It can be argued that Oglethorpe, as much as any other individual, both influenced the course of the Enlightenment and ushered its tenets forward into a new age. That thesis was advanced by this author in an earlier book, The Oglethorpe Plan, which documents the system of agrarian equality planned for Georgia and the debate it stirred over an actual application of the most fundamental of many new principles arising from the Enlightenment. The effort here widens the focus to examine his life more broadly, thereby characterizing the man as a product of the age and the age as a product of those like Oglethorpe who vigorously lived through it.

Oglethorpe was a raconteur of the first order, and his stories were so interesting that Samuel Johnson wanted to write his biography. After Johnson’s death, James Boswell took on the task. Although the biography was never finished, Boswell’s notes are held in Yale’s Beinecke Library and references to Oglethorpe can be found in his Life of Johnson. Oglethorpe’s relationship with the literati of the age spanned a period of fifty years, and his attempts to remediate injustice inspired their idealism and instilled in them a sense of intellectual momentum in a reformist age.

This biography of Oglethorpe is written topically rather than chronologically to reveal his influence as an actor playing multiple roles in an age of many advancements. Biographers have written about Oglethorpe’s life and historians have documented his role in founding the Georgia colony. The approach taken here places him in multiple currents of ideas and paradigm shifts flowing through the Enlightenment. To the extent that this approach is successful, the reader will take away a sense of Oglethorpe as one who invigorated the Enlightenment with provocative ideas and bold actions. He was not one who at the beginning of the age inspired a new humanistic and scientific paradigm, like Locke and Newton. Nor was he one of the closers who delivered the American and French revolutions, like Hume and Rousseau. However, the reader will see that in being driven by duty and a higher purpose he created a bridge from ideas of the early Enlightenment to actions of the later Enlightenment.²

¹ Alexander Pope, Imitations of Horace.

² Among the biographies, Ettinger’s James Edward Oglethorpe: Imperial Idealist (first printing 1936) stands out as the most comprehensive and well-documented. Ettinger saw Oglethorpe in the perspective of the age and was drawn to him for that reason. However, his biography was more concerned with documenting his life than characterizing it in historical context or depicting the ordinary people who were at the heart of Oglethorpe’s concern for reform.

Preface

James Edward Oglethorpe has had many biographers. The historian, Phinizy Spalding (1930-1994), described as the nation’s leading Oglethorpe scholar, reviewed the efforts of those biographers in 1972 and lamented the quality of their work.

Generally speaking, the books purporting to be lives of Oglethorpe are a sorry lot. These works demonstrate shocking lack of style, a deplorable lack of talent on the part of their authors, and a paucity of research. Several of the biographies epitomize all these faults and are, therefore, completely worthless. The rest possess one or more of these weaknesses to greater or lesser degrees.

Spalding concluded that even Amos Ettinger’s well-researched biography, considered by some to be definitive, has serious faults. To make that point he cites Ettinger’s sloppy geography, placing Mobile on the Mississippi River, Frederica near St. Augustine, and St. Simons Island in Spanish territory.³

At the completion of this latest biography, it is clear that none of the previous works have given sufficient attention to Oglethorpe’s prescience on the deeper structure of social pathologies. He diagnosed the social ills of his time, many of which are fundamentally similar to those of today; and then he proceeded to formulate sophisticated solutions for those deep-rooted problems. He applied the newly acquired scientific knowledge and methods of the early Enlightenment, coupled with a comprehensive political philosophy also new to the age, in devising the strategies necessary to achieve his reform goals. He viewed his time as a period of renewal, much as the turbulence of 2020 is seen by many as the beginning of a new period of social reckoning.

This biography approaches Oglethorpe as a figure in the Enlightenment acting with deep conviction to improve the lives of those who were oppressed by structural prejudices, corruption, and authoritarianism. The multifaceted goal pursued herein is to bring Oglethorpe to life as a product of the Enlightenment who confronted social ills that resonate with those we confront today as a society. This view of Oglethorpe is new. No less an authority than Phinizy Spalding saw him quite differently. He is a seventeenth-century man, Spalding wrote, one who would have been more at home in Puritan England—or America…. He found himself caught in the confusing and modern eighteenth century. He wrestled with it as best he could, but at the end of his life he was an anachronism. This book challenges that view. Yes, he may have been an anachronism in his 80s (who isn’t?), he played out his life in the Enlightenment at times feigning seventeenth-century attitudes, but always acting on eighteenth-century ideals.⁴

None of this is to say that Oglethorpe’s philanthropy and humanism have gone unnoticed. His most comprehensive and authoritative biographer, Amos Aschbach Ettinger (1901-1969), titled his work, James Edward Oglethorpe: Imperial Idealist. Ettinger’s work, published in 1936, thoroughly documented Oglethorpe’s many reform initiatives, driven by the idealism emphasized in the title. As an instructor in history at Yale University and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society of London, Ettinger’s professional milieu was principally concerned with great figures, macroeconomics, literary trends, and other top-down influences on society. Missing in the approaches of that day was attention to the actual plight of the people meant to benefit from reform, even though that concern was ever-present in Oglethorpe’s mind.

Other biographers have either tracked Oglethorpe from one project to another in a chronological run through his life or focused on his central achievement, the founding of Georgia. An annotated list of biographies can be found at the beginning of the Bibliography.

The present work, rather than taking a strictly chronological approach, examines a multifaceted man by examining each facet of his character at length and then assessing the totality of his life’s work. As it does so, the challenges of ordinary people, then and now, are recognized in the narrative. The ultimate aim, succinctly stated, is to make Oglethorpe’s life purpose relevant to readers who are seeking insights not only in the past but in today’s age of reckoning as well.

³ Spalding, Phinizy. James Edward Oglethorpe: A Biographical Survey. The Georgia Historical Quarterly. Vol. 56, No. 3 (Fall, 1972), pp. 332-348 (17 pages). Published By: Georgia Historical Society. For background on Spalding, see New Georgia Encyclopedia. For a more recent list of bibliographic works on Oglethorpe, see Julie Anne Sweet, Sailors’ Advocate, 1, n.1.

⁴ Spalding, Biographical Survey, 345.

1

Born to a New Era

James Edward Oglethorpe was a man of duty, ability, purpose, and compassion. He inherited a sense of duty from his family, which had a long-standing tradition of serving king, country, and community. However, duty alone was insufficient to effect significant historical changes. Oglethorpe also had a strong sense of obligation, which he consciously modified as he grew older to meet the demands of a changing world. The third crucial trait that enabled him to transform the world around him was discipline, which began as an early stoic predilection acquired from his parents and matured into a conscious Stoic philosophy.

Later in life, Oglethorpe developed a fourth character trait: compassion. As he encountered new influences outside of his family and in a rapidly changing world, he became increasingly aware of the need to question basic assumptions about society and seek ways to improve the condition of humanity.

Oglethorpe became a complex and fascinating figure, a man of action as well as a man of ideas. He was a soldier, a politician, a philanthropist, and a visionary. But above all, he was driven by compassion toward others and a deep-seated desire to make the world a better place.

Tradition of Duty

James Edward, the youngest of seven surviving children of Sir Theophilus and Lady Eleanor Oglethorpe, was born on December 22, 1696. It was a difficult time for the couple. Seven years earlier they were indispensable advisors of King James II; now their king was in exile in France, their children split between Paris and London, and their loyalty torn into two parts–a pretense to serve the British crown and clandestine service to the deposed king.⁵

Theophilus Oglethorpe (1650-1702), descended from a family with a tradition of loyalty and service to the crown and the nation, a tradition rooted in the principle that duty comes with privilege. This aspect of family tradition, more than any other, would remain with James Oglethorpe throughout his life. The sense of duty in Oglethorpe family history dated back to feudal times when an early ancestor, Ligulfe, Thane of Oglethorpe, supported traditional Anglo-Saxon rule against the invasion of William the Conqueror in 1066. The family was soon after documented as Yorkshire landowners by the 1086 Domesday (or Doomsday) Book, the first comprehensive record of property ownership in Britain. By the Fourteenth Century, the Oglethorpe family was well-established in Yorkshire, and their integrity and loyalty were well-known. In 1308, John de Oglethorpe of Bramham provided men from his estate to serve in the army of Edward II. Over the next several centuries the family became increasingly influential in the Yorkshire region, providing vital support to the king, Parliament, and the Church. Owen Oglethorpe, a bishop of the Catholic Church, crowned Queen Elizabeth, a Protestant, when other Bishops refused to conduct the ceremony.⁶

The Oglethorpes would become intimately associated with the House of Stuart during their reign over England, Scotland, and Ireland during the seventeenth century. The reign of the House of Stuart in Great Britain began with James I in 1603, following the death of Queen Elizabeth, the last monarch of the House of Tudor. The only child of Mary, Queen of Scots, James had been prepared by advisors in Elizabeth’s ministry to succeed her. During his reign, he authorized a new translation of the Christian Bible (the King James Version) and expounded a new doctrine of divine right, which asserted that a monarch derives authority from God and not from the people. The balance of governmental powers so finely tuned under Queen Elizabeth began to shift toward the monarchy under James.

James I was succeeded in 1625 by his son, Charles I, who placed increased emphasis on his father’s doctrine of divine right and sought to vest near-absolute power in the monarchy. Charles’ relationship with Parliament deteriorated irreversibly when he eased restrictions on Catholics, thereby threatening the authority of the Church of England. His rule became progressively more tyrannical, leading to the English Civil War that began in 1642. The fighting formally ended in 1648 when Charles was captured, brought to trial, and sentenced to death.

After the revolution, Britain was ruled by a republican Council of State. Oliver Cromwell, who led Parliamentary forces dedicated to Puritan religious tenets, became head of state. Within a few years, the republican government, named the Commonwealth of England, was transformed into a dictatorial regime over which Cromwell ruled as Lord Protector. Parliament ended the republican experiment in 1659 and restored the monarchy in 1660 under Charles’ son, ruling as Charles II, an event known in British history as the Restoration.

James Oglethorpe’s grandfather, Sutton Oglethorpe, who commanded loyalist forces, was imprisoned, heavily fined, and the family’s considerable land holdings were confiscated by the Commonwealth government of Oliver Cromwell. The family’s fortunes dramatically improved after the Restoration.⁷

Eleanor Wall (or Du-Vall) Oglethorpe (1662-1732) descended from a family with a similar sense of duty and tradition of service. She was, however, born in Tipperary, Ireland, and raised Catholic. It was under James II, the first Catholic monarch since Bloody Mary’s reign ended in 1558, that she was conferred the title Lady Oglethorpe in 1685. Eleanor’s father, Richard Wall, loyally defended Charles I against Cromwell, as Theophilus’s father had done, and he too lost his estate as a result. Eleanor traced her family ancestry to Richard Seigneur de Val Dery, an associate of William the Conqueror; and she claimed kinship to nobility, including the House of Argyll, a prominent Scottish clan that remained loyal to the House of Stuart.⁸

The social hierarchy defended by both families was cherished as one that had evolved over centuries to preserve basic human rights. It was a tradition built on a millennium of rights and representative government codified law since the Charter of Liberties (1100) and the Magna Carta (1215). The failure of Cromwell’s Commonwealth government proved that disastrous consequences would flow from overturning that tradition, intensifying the dedication of families like the Oglethorpes and the Walls to the status quo, and their strong sense of duty to king and country sprang from that belief.

In this gothic tradition it was the duty of the nobility and gentry not only to protect the king’s authority and their own rights and privileges but to represent the interests of the greater mass of people who worked the land for them and practiced the trades upon which the nation’s economy rested. The latter stratum of society, that which was least powerful and suffered the greatest under corrupt leaders, was that to which James Oglethorpe would dedicate his considerable energies. The new age required new champions like Oglethorpe, as it produced another great upheaval, one resulting not from seventeenth-century revolution, but from eighteenth-century mercantilism and urbanization.⁹

Sense of Obligation

Oglethorpe possessed a sense of obligation that transcended mere duty. He believed, as was common among the gentry and nobility, that social position and the benefits conferred with it, such as education, conveyed an obligation to serve those less fortunate. There was a sense of reciprocity present among the more enlightened, an expectation that each stratum of social class performed its duty to the benefit of all other strata. Reciprocity, however, was not the fully formed humanitarianism that Oglethorpe would acquire while in his twenties.

Theophilus and Eleanor entered the service of Charles II out of family duty and acquired a deep sense of obligation as they rose through the hierarchy of royal service. With the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 under Charles II, the family’s fortunes were again on the rise. Lands confiscated from Sutton Oglethorpe during the Commonwealth period were returned. New land was acquired from the king by James Oglethorpe’s father, Theophilus, then a young army captain, as a reward for defeating Scottish rebels in 1679. Subsequent services to the king led to additional rewards and promotions. His marriage to Eleanor Wall, then an employee of the royal household, would transform the family relationship with the crown into one of direct and immediate service.¹⁰

Theophilus was quartered on the Thames River next to the royal palace when he met Eleanor. She was employed as a maid to Louise de Querailles, the Duchess of Portsmouth, and the king’s mistress. She was promoted to Head Laundress and Sempstriss in 1680, and the couple was married later that year. The first of nine children arrived the following year. Of the nine children, three boys and four girls would survive infancy to make their mark on the world.¹¹

In 1683, Eleanor and Theophilus were implicated in an assassination attempt on Charles, an event that became known as the Rye House Plot. The king determined that they were not among the plotters and maintained a close association with the Oglethorpe couple. Theophilus was promoted to lieutenant colonel, and Eleanor expanded her influence within the royal household. The couple remained valued employees to the end of his reign. Their dedication had earned his blessing for their marriage, wealth from his largesse, and political capital through his trust.

Eleanor and Theophilus stood near Charles’ bedside as he lay dying in February 1685, more than a decade before James Oglethorpe was to be born. That they were among the few with him at the end was confirmation of their value and loyalty to the House of Stuart. Charles’s last decision in life was to call for a Catholic priest. He wished to die in the faith he secretly professed rather than in the Anglican faith to which Parliament expected him to adhere. The priest arrived to administer the last rites, but Charles died before they were completed, leaving a cloud of uncertainty over his disposition at the moment of death.¹²

Charles had suppressed his Catholic sympathies and his inclination toward a strong monarchy during much of his reign, thereby maintaining the support of Parliament. Tensions arose, however, when he removed restrictions on Catholics. Relations deteriorated further when it appeared that his brother, James Edward Stuart, the Duke of York, a Catholic, would succeed him to the throne. To prevent that from happening, Parliament debated an Exclusion Bill that would prohibit succession on the basis of religion. The Exclusion Bill failed to pass, and when Charles died, his brother, James Edward Stuart, acquired the throne as James II.

Charles’ attempt at deathbed conversion was a license for James to take his faith openly to the throne. It would not be a choice that Parliament or the nation’s nobility, dominated by Protestants, could support. Over the next eleven weeks, before he was crowned James II of England, Ireland, and James the VII of Scotland, the new king would form a group of trusted advisors, most of whom were drawn from his brother’s circle. The Oglethorpes retained their status in the hierarchy of the royal household, remaining duty-bound to the House of Stuart and invisible to the nobility, but deeply engaged in the machinations of royal affairs.

On the day of Charles’ death, Sir Theophilus was elected to represent Morpeth, Northumberland in Parliament, near where he had made a name for himself in defeating Scottish Covenanter rebels. James, when he was Duke of York, encouraged Theophilus to seek office. Theophilus’ sons, Lewis, Theophilus Junior, and James Edward were each in turn later elected to Parliament, establishing a legislative tradition to rival a parallel military tradition that would continue for a period of nearly seventy years.

The coronation of James II was held on April 23, 1685, completing an orderly transition to the throne despite James’ Catholic faith. Smooth succession offered a good reason to hope that the new monarch would become an effective leader under whom their fortunes would continue to rise. James’s right to the throne was soon challenged, however, by his Protestant nephew, the Duke of Monmouth, Charles’ son by mistress Lucy Walters. Monmouth had been exiled to Holland for his role in the Rye House Plot but returned to England’s southern shore in June with a small force and proclaimed himself James II. The ensuing armed struggle, known as the Monmouth Rebellion, is described in Chapter 6. The Oglethorpes were friends of Monmouth, but they remained loyal to James. Theophilus led forces that put down the insurgency, and he was subsequently knighted. Monmouth was executed in a harsh action that shocked many including the Oglethorpes, but it served as a warning to Protestant leaders in Parliament that the king was firmly in power.¹³

The year 1685 proved remarkable for the young Oglethorpe couple. They rose through the ranks of Stuart power and became highly influential during the first year of James’ reign. They were rewarded with quarters in St. James Palace, the official residence of the Sovereign (remaining so to the present day even after the actual residence moved to Buckingham Palace during the reign of Queen Victoria). Eleanor was granted the title of Lady Oglethorpe while Sir Theophilus’s advice on security was more important than ever. Their influence was so highly valued by the King that he rewarded them with land in London, attached to the palace compound, on which they were to build a house. Previous land grants had made them wealthy, and they were already