Tracking the "General Robert Lewis" Myth

The myth grew and bloated to such grotesque proportions that eventually the mythical "General Robert Lewis" was credited with building Warner Hall for his bride "Elizabeth Warner", instead of the property being in the Warner family and coming into Lewis possession with the marriage of Elizabeth "Isabella" Warner to JOHN Lewis III ("Councillor John" Lewis, third generation Virginia resident.

I still haven't found out who proposed the link back to "Sir Edward Lewis of the Van", but whoever came up with *that* was apparently unaware (or did not care) that there were two consecutive men of that name, father and son, and that the father, while in the right age bracket, did not marry any "Lady Anne Sackville Beauchamp" (he married Dame Blanche Morgan) and had no son Robert, while the son, who *did* marry the lady in question and *did* have a son Robert, didn't marry her until about October 1622 and had four sons - of which Robert was probably the fourth and youngest - between 1623 and 1630.

If Gustave Anjou had anything to do with it - as he might have, since "Lewis" was one of the "Anjou Lineages" - "did not care" is probably the right answer.

There is no surviving record of any General Robert Lewis in any of the Colonies during the 17th century.

There is also no surviving record of any General Robert Lewis in the English Army during the same period.

The rank *was* used in Colonial militia, but so rarely that we have the names of only five men who were granted it - and none of them was a Lewis, let alone a Robert Lewis.

Regarding the second Sir Edward Lewis of the Van, we have evidence for three of his four sons. Edward, the eldest, inherited the family estates and so forth (but apparently died without heirs), while William (second son) and Richard (third son) went into politics and each served in Parliament after the Restoration. There are no further records of fourth(?) son Robert, but his birth dates, approximate as they are (c. 1628-1630) indicate that he can't have been any of the known Robert Lewises who emigrated to the American Colonies prior to 1650.

William, William's son Edward (who also served in Parliament following his uncle Richard), Richard, and Richard's son Thomas each had their turn holding what remained of the family patrimony (uncle Richard is said to have frittered much of it away). After Thomas the title "of the Van" went into abeyance.

http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1660-1690/member/le...
http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1660-1690/member/le...
http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1690-1715/member/le...
http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1660-1690/member/le...
http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1690-1715/member/le...
https://biography.wales/article/s-LEWI-VAN-1548

Captain Henry Howell Lewis was blathering well before then, and may be the source of the smash-merge between Robert Lewis of Salem, MA and various Virginia Lewises - that is, if he didn't get it from someone who had previously jumped to the wrong conclusions.

You'll notice the immigration date has been shoved up five years, from 1635 to 1630. It is assumed - though how safe a assumption it is I know not - that all four of Sir Edward II's sons were living at his death, but the oldest would have been about seven and the youngest maybe one or two years old.

Edward Simmons Lewis, incidentally, traces back to neither the Warner Hall Lewises nor Robert Lewis of Salem, MA, but to yet another Lewis immigrant, Edmund Lewis of Lynn, Massachusetts (originating in Suffolk, England. a long way indeed from Wales).

Dorset did not become a Duchy until 1720 (I'm surprised they did it then, with neighboring Devon already having *two* sets of Dukes).

Any descent from the nobility of Dorset *must* come through Anne Sackville-Beauchamp, and we've already been all over how wildly improbable that is.

The fictitious "General Robert Lewis" is here pigging up two generations each of Lewises and Warners. He squashes John Lewis I, John Lewis Jr,, Augustine Warner I and Augustine Warner II into one pseudo-person. (It was Augustine Warner I, and no Lewis, who first built a house on the land that became known as "Warner Hall".)

So at this point we have the "General Robert Lewis" mythology well established and elaborated by the end of the 19th century, and probably in circulation long before that.

The mythology effectively obscured the first two immigrant generations, with no clear facts ascertainable until John (III) "Councillor" Lewis, who married Elizabeth Warner and brought Warner Hall into the Lewis family. (The Warner family daughtered out with Elizabeth and her two sisters - there were three sons but they all died young and heirless.)

There were two Robert Lewises arriving in Virginia in 1635, one (age 23) on the Plain Joan and one (age 38) on the Transport.

The 38-year-old is thought to be Robert Lewis of York County.

The 23-year-old, if his age estimate is accurate, would have been born circa 1612, which isn't a great match for the mythical "General Robert Lewis".

The whole Gloucester County, VA tree is at present chop-sueyed from the mythology and who knows what random factoids. This lot had *nothing* to do with Warner Hall.

Hiring a genealogist in London was the first mistake. Should have hired a Welsh genealogist *in Wales*, because only the Welsh can make head or tail out of their complicated genealogies.

Second mistake was assuming there was *A* Lewis family, when there were and are actually *many, many* Lewis families.

That remark about the Welsh needs a smiley :-D

This blog page https://richardgwynallenblog.wordpress.com/2016/04/26/the-lewis-fam... has been updated, but various questions remain (for instance, was "John Lewis Ricketts" the same person as John (ap) Lewis?)

The Cabell Greer list suggests that John Lewis the immigrant, wherever in Monmouthshire he came from, may have arrived earlier and sent for his family in 1653 - there are seven John Lewises between 1635 and 1650 (though I think we can discount the Accomack one), but none arriving *in* 1653. And Edward, John Jr, Lidia, and William Lewis were all sponsored by "John Lewis, Gloucester". http://www.evmedia.com/virginia/

Captain Henry Howell Lewis, or one or more of the sources he consulted, made that mash-up in the first place, somewhere during the second half of the 19th century (or possibly earlier if it was a consulted source). Probably that was the only "Robert Lewis" he could find any record of immigrating within the desired time frame, and he did not know (or did not notice) that the destination was Masachusetts.

So the "General Robert Lewis" myth seems to have hit mass print with the publication of Bishop William Meade's "Old Chuches, Ministers, and Families of Virginia" in 1857. That puts it back quite a bit. On page 232 of Volume II he starts going on about the (Warner Hall) Lewis family and goes wrong from the get-go in a footnote that extends onto the following page.

Bishop Meade, it turns out, was not even a reliable source for information on his own immediate family, misnaming his father's first wife and muddling up the background of his own mother. (Source: The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 47, No. 4 (Oct., 1939), pp. 361-363 (3 pages), Published By: Virginia Historical Society - available JSTOR)

Anyway, Bishop Meade states that "General Robert Lewis" emigrated from Wales to Virginia "in the *latter* part of the seventeenth century" (emphasis added), where he had a "son Robert" who had "three sons - Fielding, John, and Charles".

But Fielding Lewis was a *fifth* generation descendant, and his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had all been named John. (So, it was eventually learned, had his great-great-grandfather, the immigrant funder of the family.) And Fielding was not the oldest son, but the second (the oldest was Warner Lewis, who went unmentioned in the footnote). The first Robert recorded in the family was a brother of Fielding Lewis' father, Colonel Robert Lewis of "Belvoir", himself the grandfather of Meriwether Lewis of "Lewis and Clark".

Where Bishop Meade got his information is a very good question, since it was certainly not from the horse's mouth - more like the other end.