Among the chief diversions of Washington’s social life was the theater. During stays in Williamsburg, he attended everything from concerts to waxworks to puppet shows, though nothing matched his sheer delight in a good play. Many scholars have noted the abundant theatrical imagery in his writings, as when he advised a young relative that he was about to “enter upon the grand theater of life.”²⁴ The recurrence of such metaphors says something not only about Washington’s love of theater but about his awareness of the dramatic nature of his life and the eventful times through which he passed. He would play many roles in his lifetime, always with consummate flair. That he turned to theater imagery when aiming at a high rhetorical pitch suggests that he saw himself as the protagonist of a great epic, dazzling an audience that had its eyes peeled on his every action.

Two touring companies, the American Company and the Virginia Company, performed at the Williamsburg theater and usually timed their visits to coincide with meetings of the burgesses. They offered surprisingly rich and varied fare, running the spectrum from Shakespeare to Restoration comedy to Augustan drama to contemporary plays. During one busy week in June 1770, Washington attended the theater five nights out of seven. The unremitting emphasis on Joseph Addison’s Cato as being Washington’s favorite play—partly because it was performed at Valley Forge, partly because it fit the stereotype of Washington as the stoic Roman—has obscured his love of many other plays, especially ribald and sophisticated comedies. The play that he probably saw and savored the most was Richard Sheridan’s racy The School for Scandal. He also quoted Shakespeare frequently, and his letters are filled with passing references to Hamlet, Othello, The Merchant of Venice, and The Tempest. Not surprisingly, in wartime, he plucked timely quotes from the Roman and history plays, including Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Henry V.

From Washington’s correspondence with his London factors, what emerges clearly is that he didn’t relegate social duties to his wife, but took an active part in ordering food, drink, and furnishings for all occasions. He wanted Mount Vernon to conform to the highest standards of elegance, and he studied how other people entertained. A telling diary entry, dated a year after his marriage, shows how observant he was of other people’s parties and how scornful of anything that struck him as slovenly or vulgar:

Went to a ball at Alexandria, where music and dancing was the chief entertainment. However, in a convenient room detached for the purpose abounded great plenty of bread and butter, some biscuits with tea, and coffee which the drinkers of cou[l]d not distinguish from hot water sweetened. Be it remembered that pocket handkerchiefs served the purposes of tablecloths and napkins and that no apologies were made for either. I shall therefore distinguish this ball by the style . . . of the Bread and Butter Ball.²⁵

Washington’s diaries from the 1760s attest to a crowded social calendar and show how George and Martha Washington absorbed Sally Fairfax into their lives as a dear friend. Given her close proximity at Belvoir, it would have been difficult to keep her at arm’s length. Instead, Sally came and went freely at Mount Vernon, and her husband remained one of Washington’s favorite hunting partners. The Washingtons were likewise regular visitors at Belvoir. In January 1760 Sally came to visit Martha, who was then recuperating from the measles. Three years later George wrote to inquire about an illness that Sally had contracted and said Martha “was in hopes of seeing Mrs Fairfax this morning,” until she herself came down with a fever. ²⁶ Martha Washington could never have befriended Sally Fairfax in this manner unless she thought that the earlier romance with her husband had been an ephemeral, youthful infatuation that had now receded to a safe distance.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Providence

THE MOST SPLENDID STAGE on which George Washington paraded in his early years was the colonial capital at Williamsburg, now overseen by Lieutenant Governor Francis Fauquier—the “ablest man who had ever filled that office,” in Jefferson’s view—a charming man of eclectic interests who was a fellow of the Royal Society and had published papers on science and economics.¹ The town, which was characterized by “the manners and etiquette of a court in miniature,” according to Washington, stood forth as a glittering symbol of British royalty, a showplace of surface brilliance whose major social priorities were “precedence, dress, imitation.”² To jaded European eyes, Williamsburg might have appeared small and prosaic, but its handsome government buildings, formal gardens, and spacious streets with brick sidewalks surpassed anything seen in rural Virginia.

In October 1760 Martha asked her husband if she could join him for the upcoming session at the House of Burgesses, and they traveled there in the full regalia of rich tobacco planters—a coach and six, with uniformed slaves riding as coach-man and postilion. Once at the capital, Washington lodged on the most fashionable thoroughfare, Duke of Gloucester Street. For ten years he stayed in the hostelry of a diminutive widow, Christiana Campbell, “a little old woman about four feet high and equally thick, [with] a little turn[ed] up pug nose, [and] a mouth screw[e]d up to one side,” as one Scottish traveler sketched her.³

That October Washington arrived in Williamsburg amid much jubilation. In early September the French had surrendered to British forces at Montreal, bringing to a close the conquest of Canada and leading Fauquier to declare, somewhat prematurely, that “the war is gloriously brought to a happy end.”⁴ The festive tone proved transitory. On October 25, 1760, George II, the only king George Washington had ever known, died and gave way to a new monarch. On February 11 Fauquier announced the accession to the throne of George III, whose reign would be bedeviled by George Washington and an army of renegade soldiers. The tidings of a new king had immediate repercussions for Washington, since it meant that the old House of Burgesses would be dissolved and new elections held.

Four days later Washington learned of an unexpected challenge to his seat. Lieutenant Colonel Adam Stephen had fought with Washington at Fort Necessity and in the ill-fated Braddock expedition and wound up as second in command in the Virginia Regiment. More recently Washington and Stephen had sparred during an intense scramble for western lands. In 1754, to spur lagging recruitment, Governor Dinwiddie had promised bounty lands in the Ohio Country to war veterans, and Washington had formed a partnership with three veterans—Robert Stewart, George Mercer, and Nathaniel Gist—to accumulate such land. They competed with a rival partnership led by Adam Stephen, who in later years, in a conversation with Dr. Benjamin Rush, vilified Washington as a “weak man.”⁵ Washington, for his part, castigated his quondam friend Stephen as “designing” and unprincipled.⁶

On February 15, 1761, Captain Stewart relayed word to Washington from Winchester that Stephen was “incessantly employed” in campaigning for one of the two seats from Frederick County. For two years Washington and Thomas Bryan Martin had held those seats, but Martin had now decided to retire, prompting Washington’s former aide and new partner, George Mercer, to run in his stead. Adam Stephen evidently denigrated Washington as the handpicked candidate of the wealthy landowners, for Stewart told Washington that “the leaders of all the patrician families remain firm in their resolution of continuing for you,” while Stephen issued demagogic appeals for “the attention of the plebeians, whose unstable minds are agitated by every breath of novelty, whims, and nonsense.”⁷