Martha Washington by Patricia Brady Read Free Book Online

at his dutiful son’s defiance, Custis abused Daniel, Patsy, and her father up and down the town of Williamsburg in the most embarrassing way. As he thundered to friends, he had not spent a lifetime amassing a fortune to have it spent by any daughter of Jack Dandridge. Neither Patsy Dandridge’s pedigree nor her wealth matched the Custises’, and the old colonel meant to force his disobedient son to break off the engagement.

    A controlling temperament wasn’t the only reason for John Custis’s opposition to this marriage. His antagonism was also rooted in two generations of unhappy family life. His mother had died when he was a child, his father remarried, and he had spent his teens studying in London, far from family and friends. When he returned to Virginia, he set up a bachelor household. In his late twenties, he fell madly in love with a beautiful heiress, Frances Parke. In his infatuation, he penned passionate letters to “Fidelia,” following the prevalent style for classical pseudonyms. His sweetheart’s family life made his own look cozy.
    Both rich and rakish, her father, Daniel Parke, had married Jane Ludwell of Green Spring plantation when they were in their teens; within a few years, he left her and their two little daughters behind while he followed his military star abroad. Despite Jane’s pleas for him to return home or at least to send money, Daniel had revisited Virginia only once in fifteen years. That visit was far from a success, since he brought along a mistress masquerading as his cousin and a bastard son, whom he left behind with the long-suffering Jane. As governor of the island colony of Antigua, he was murdered by rioting local planters because of his policies, licentiousness, or both. Parke was very wealthy, but the complications caused by the recognition of an illegitimate daughter in his will would trouble his descendants for years to come.
    John Custis and his Fidelia married in 1705, but their chances of happiness were effectively nil. Both were astonishingly bad-tempered and determined to rule the roost. Soon their violent private and public altercations were the subject of common gossip throughout the colony. Pity the poor children brought up in such a terrible household: no doubt Daniel and his sister came in for their share of parental rage and verbal abuse.
    Stories about the Custises’ relationship are legion, the details perhaps apocryphal, but their unhappiness real. At one point, it is said that they refused to speak to each other for months (probably an improvement over their endless quarrels), sending messages through the butler. Or that while driving together in a gig and arguing furiously, John turned the team toward the shore of Chesapeake Bay and drove out into the water. Fanny demanded to know where he was going, and her angry husband replied, “To hell, Madam.” She is said to have responded, “Drive on, Sir.” They created their own little hell on earth.
    Ultimately, the turmoil reached such a pitch in 1714 that the warring Custises signed a legal contract, mutually agreeing not to call each other “vile names or give . . . any ill language.” Within months after signing this sad document, Fanny died of smallpox at the age of twenty-eight, leaving behind a five-year-old daughter and three-year-old son. Custis never remarried, devoting himself to raising rare plants in his Williamsburg garden and making his children miserable—all to avoid any more mistakes in the name of love.

    Increasingly frustrated by his son’s determination to marry Patsy, John Custis threatened Daniel with disinheritance in 1748. He swore that he would leave all his unentailed estate to Jack, his mixed-race child by “young Alice,” one of his slaves. This little boy, who was about ten years old and recently freed, was one of the very few people the irascible old man cared about. But to his father’s surprise, Daniel