News from Friends of the City Churches

After an abortive expedition of 100 men, sent by Sir Walter Raleigh in 1585, the first true colonists – some 117 men, women and children, mainly from London and the West Country – arrived at Roanoke Island (on the coast of what is now North Carolina) in July 1587, under Governor John White. The settlers included his pregnant 19-year-old daughter, Eleanor, the wife of his Assistant, Ananias Dare. Their daughter was born on August 18th and named, like the colony, in honour of the Virgin Queen. Whatever the earlier relations between Raleigh’s men and the native women, Virginia Dare is known to history as the first English child born in America.

White left the colony just nine days later, and never saw his family again. With the invasion of the Spanish Armada in 1588, it was not until August 18th, 1590 – little Virginia’s third birthday – that White returned to find the settlement abandoned. The fate of Roanoke has been the stuff of mystery and romance ever since, retold annually since 1937 in an open air play, The Lost Colony, inspiring the fantastic hoax of the ’Roanoke Stones’, and now feeding myriad Web sites with myth and history.

The first permanent English colony in America was eventually established in 1607, a little to the south at Jamestown – 13 years before the Pilgrim Fathers reached Plymouth Rock (a useful fact to remember, south of the Mason Dixon line, especially around Thanksgiving). A key player in its foundation and survival was John Smith, whose statue stands today in the delightful churchyard of St. Mary le Bow, and whose post-Fire monument marks the site of his burial in St. Sepulchre, where he and his patrons are celebrated in a splendid stained glass window by Francis Skeat.

Ananias Dare and Eleanor White were married at St. Bride’s, Fleet Street; although the church they knew was lost in the Great Fire of 1666, they are remembered in a modern portrait bust of their daughter, Virginia. John White, British North America’s first colonial Governor, was buried in St. Dunstan in the West. Although no monument survives there, the magnificent memorial of an investor in the Jacobean venture, Sir Hugh Hammersley, still stands in St. Andrew Undershaft, a rare survivor of fire and war, which attests to the wealth of the merchant adventurers who speculated both east and west to change the course of history.       Signe Hoffos

Most of these churches are open during the week at some time: we provide church watchers in St Sepulchre and St Dunstan in the West. We could do more with YOUR help.

Friends of the City Churches, St Magnus the Martyr, Lower Thames Street, London EC3R 6DN tel 020 7626 1555

e-mail      www.london-city-churches.org.uk