 1674 - 1744 (70 years)
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| Name |
William Evelyn Byrd |
| Title |
Jr. |
| Birth |
28 Mar 1674 |
| Gender |
Male |
| Death |
26 Aug 1744 |
| Person ID |
I60912 |
Bob Juch's Tree |
| Last Modified |
31 Dec 2022 |
| Father |
William Evelyn Byrd, b. 1652, London, Middlesex, England  d. 4 Dec 1704, Westover, Charles City, Virginia, USA (Age 52 years) |
| Relationship |
natural |
| Mother |
Mary Horsmandon, b. 1652, East Sutton, Kent, England d. 16 Nov 1699, London, Middlesex, England (Age 47 years) |
| Relationship |
natural |
| Family ID |
F21110 |
Group Sheet | Family Chart |
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| Notes |
- BYRD, WILLIAM (March 28, 1674-August 26, 1744), travel writer, was born at "Westover," on the James River, Va., the son of William Byrd, planter and president of the Council of State, and Mary (Horsmanden) Byrd. He was sent to school in England at an early age, then traveled in Holland and France, and read law at the Middle Temple. After being admitted to the bar he returned to Virginia in 1692, and was at once elected to the House of Burgesses. He was much in England, usually on business for the colony, and in 1698 was made agent, and in 1706 receiver-general, succeeding his father, who had died in 1704. In 1699 he took in on his estates 300 destitute Huguenot refugees, whose descendants still live in Virginia. From 1709 to his death he was a member of the Council, and in his last year its president. In 1728 he was one of the commissioners who established the dividing line between Virginia and North Carolina--the source of his best known and most entertaining writing. In 1733 he laid out the city of Richmond on land he owned, thus founding Richmond, and Petersburg as well.
Note: Yet in spite of his vast estates, his lordly style of living, and his fine library (of 3,500 volumes, in what was still more or less a wilderness frontier), Byrd was constantly in debt and never extricated himself from financial difficulties. As T. J. Wertenbaker says, he "typified the grace, the charm, the culture, and also the rather lax business methods of the Virginians of the eighteenth century." In 1706 he married Lucy Parke; she died in 1716, leaving two daughters, and he subsequently married Maria or Marion Taylor, by whom he had two sons.
Note: As a statesman, a planter, a man of affairs, and above all a great gentleman, Byrd of course never considered himself an author. His writing was a mere pleasant avocation, like his interest in science which made him a Fellow of the Royal Society, and a close friend of Charles Boyle, Lord Orrery. Indeed, until his privately preserved manuscripts were published nearly a century after his death, if he was known by the general public it was as a figure in early Virginia history, or as father of the lovely Evelyn Byrd whose (apocryphal) love story is part of the folklore of the South. Today he would probably be known, if at all, as one of the ancestors of Admiral Richard Byrd.
Note: Yet this "well-built, haughty man with an aquiline nose" was a born writer. Thackeray read and admired him, and he provided part of the inspiration for Henry Esmond and The Virginians. His style is delightful--fresh, vivid, full of humor, with a modern ring. His contemporaries lauded his "happy proficiency in polite and varied learning," but colonial America was full of learned men, especially in New England; what it lacked was minds lively, keen, and picturesque. William Byrd supplied that lack. A wit, a bibliophile, an art-lover, equally at home in court circles in London and in the midst of his fields of "that bewitching vegetable, tobacco," he is one of the most attractive figures of early American history, and his works, especially in the well-edited later edition, deserve to be read more widely.
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