She lived.
They were married eleven days after she landed, on the twenty-second of February 1714, in the Cooper Street church in Charleston, by the Reverend Gideon Johnston, the new commissary at Charleston. Christopher recorded the marriage that night in the front of the small leather-bound family Bible his father had given him before he sailed in 1710, in his own hand, in the careful French he reserved for the most important entries: Christophe de Graffenried, fils du Baron Christophe V de Bernberg, époux. Barbara Tempest née Needham, de Wymondley en Hertfordshire, épouse. Mariés en l’église du commissaire à Charleston, en Caroline du Sud, le vingt-deuxième jour de février, 1714. Beneath it, in a hand smaller than the formal entry, in English, in the hand of a man whose throat had been swollen with feeling for thirty-five days, he wrote: She came.
They had one son. He was born in Williamsburg, Virginia, in the early evening of the twenty-eighth of November 1722, eight and a half years after the wedding. They named him Anton Tscharner de Graffenried, for Christopher’s grandfather and his mother. He was baptized by Commissary Blair on the twelfth of December at a fair held in Williamsburg, with the Honorable Nathaniel Harrison standing as one of his godfathers. Christopher entered all of this in the family Bible as well, in the same plain hand, with the same plain blessings. God bless him.
They lived in Williamsburg from 1717 or 1718 onward, in a house at Lot 47 on the south side of Duke of Gloucester Street, two blocks east of the Governor’s Palace. The house still stands, restored in the twentieth century as part of the Colonial Williamsburg historical district, and is known to the present generation of visitors as the Pitt-Dixon House. Whether Barbara made friends in the small expatriate-English colony of early Williamsburg, whether she missed Wymondley, whether she ever wrote to her mother Lettice at Lockleys or to her cousin’s wife at the priory, the documents do not say. The next certain mention of her is her death, which is recorded only by inference — Christopher VI’s later movements indicate that she had died by 1742, and the family tradition places her death somewhere in Virginia in the late 1730s or early 1740s. Christopher VI himself died in 1742. Their son Anton lived to 1794.
From Anton the line ran through colonial Virginia and into the new United States. By the end of the eighteenth century the de Graffenried descendants — sometimes still spelled de Graffenried, sometimes de Graffenreidt, sometimes (under American simplifications) just Degraffenreid — were spread across Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky. By the middle of the nineteenth century they had reached the cotton south. By the end of it they had reached Alabama. The line came down to my grandmother through a series of marriages and migrations I have catalogued elsewhere, in a workbook that runs to many sheets and a master report that runs to fifty thousand words, in the body of research from which this book has been written.
And meanwhile, in Hertfordshire, the priory was quietly slipping out of the family.
Barbara’s cousin George Nedham — the cousin George who had inherited the priory from his father George Junior in 1700, the man whose roof Barbara had lived under across her later twenties, the man who was Lord of Wymondley Priory when she rode out the gatehouse in October 1713 — died in 1725, leaving three daughters and no son. The daughters were Dorothy, Susan, and Martha. Martha, the youngest, married Thomas Browne of Camfield Place, who held one of the senior offices in the College of Arms, and in 1733 — eight years after her father’s death, almost two hundred years after Henry VIII had granted the priory to James Nedham — the priory and the manor of Little Wymondley passed out of the Nedham family for good. The Browne family quartered the Nedham arms into their own shield, as Garter would have done, as a marital memorial. The Wymondley Nedham male line was extinct.
Almost two centuries after Henry VIII gave James Nedham the priory, the family that had received it and held it through every reign and revolution between let it go in the only way an English landed family ever lets go of anything — through the failure of sons. Barbara, three thousand miles away in Williamsburg, would have heard of this in a letter, or perhaps would never have heard of it at all. There are no surviving letters from England to her in the de Graffenried archives. She had been gone for twenty years by the time her cousin died, and almost thirty years by the time the priory was carried out of the family in Martha’s marriage settlement.
Wymondley Priory still stands. The chapel where the family was baptized for two hundred years is still there — it has been altered, of course, in the way old English buildings are always altered, but the building is recognizable. The cloister yard is recognizable. The east range where Barbara’s bedroom looked out across the cloister yard, where she kept her writing-desk at the east window for the better part of two decades, is recognizable. The road to Hitchin runs past the gatehouse just as it ran past the gatehouse in October 1713 when she rode out of it for the last time.
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I have not yet been to Wymondley. I plan to go.
I have arranged, when the planning is done, to walk through the chapel where she was baptized and to stand for a while in the cloister yard where she met him. I want to put my hand on the doorframe she would have put her hand on. I want to know what the air smells like in October in north Hertfordshire. I want to read the parish register at Great Wymondley with my own eyes, even though I have already read the transcript, even though I know what it says. I want to see the words Barbary Nedham in the hand of a 1685 parish clerk.
I want to bring my daughters with me when I go.
They are still in school for now, but they will not be in school forever, and one of these years they will be old enough to make the trip. I would like them to walk through the priory the way I walked into this project two and a half years ago — not knowing what they will find, only knowing that someone they came from is somewhere in those rooms. I would like them to put their own hands on the doorframe. I would like them to stand in the cloister yard at evening, the way Barbara stood with Christopher in April 1710, and feel, in the cold north Hertfordshire air, that they have arrived somewhere they have been before.
They have been there before. They have been there for three hundred and twelve years.
This book has been my attempt to bring them back.
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There is a sentence in a book published in New York in 1925 that I have been arguing with for almost two and a half years. The sentence says that on the twenty-second of February 1714, at Charleston, South Carolina, Christopher VI de Graffenried married Barbara Tempest (née Needham), daughter of the distinguished Sir Arthur Needham of Wymondsley, Hertfordshire, England.
The sentence is wrong about the father. There was no Sir Arthur. Her father was Maurice, a fourth son who never inherited land, who married Letisia Bowyer of the Hertfordshire-Bedfordshire Wingate cousinage, who died in November 1712 of a fever that came on after he returned from an extended stay at Lockleys, and who never lived to learn that his daughter had sailed.
But the sentence is right about the rest of it.
She was Barbara Tempest, née Needham. She was of Wymondsley, Hertfordshire, England — the parish clerk’s spelling, slightly off, of Wymondley. She was distinguished, in the deeper sense of the word: she was the eighth-generation daughter of a Hertfordshire gentry family that had held a converted Augustinian priory for almost two centuries, descended from Crown servants and Elizabethan courtiers and Civil War survivors, the great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter of James Nedham, Surveyor of the King’s Works to Henry VIII.
She was, in the only way the word actually matters, distinguished by what she did. She got on a ship.
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Volume II opens on a wedding.