Robert Spencer, Second Earl of Sunderland, ancestor of the Dukes of Marlborough, and of the Earls Spencer, was a famous statesman during the reigns of Charles II, and James II, and played an important part, as did other Spencers of that family, as members of The Virginia Company, in the early settlement of that part of the New World.
This fact doubtless induced Nicholas and Robert Spencer, descended in the seventh generation from Robert Spencer of South Mylls, Bedfordshire, Gent. A.D. 1475, great grandsons of Robert Spencer and his wife Rose Cokaine of Cokaine Hatley, Bedfordshire, and younger sons of Nicholas Spencer and his wife Mary Gostwick, daughter of Sir Edward Gostwick, Knt., of Cople, Bedfordshire, thirty miles from Althorp, and a branch of the Northamptonshire Spencers, to emigrate to Virginia. The late Earl Spencer, in a letter written by him in
1890, to a member of the Spencer family of Talbot County, Md., stated that two members of his house Nicholas and RobertSpencer, brothers, had emigrated to America in 1657, with John and Lawrence Washington, also it appears from Bedfordshire, all of the young men being about the same age. It may not be generally known that the slab covering Lawrence Washington who died in 1616, with little doubt the grandfather of the Virginia emigrants, is in the chancel of St. Mary•s Church, Brington, Northamptonshire, near the mortuary chapel.
