[376:A] The same disaster has recently befallen this venerable institution, on the 8th of February, 1859. The library, comprising many rare and valuable works, shared the fate of the building. The walls are rising again on the same spot.
[377:A] Anderson's Hist. Col. Church, iii. 127.
[377:B] Ibid., iii. 183.
CHAPTER XLIX.
1710-1714.
Spotswood, Lieutenant-Governor—His Lineage and Early Career—Dissolves the Assembly—Assists North Carolina—Sends Cary and others Prisoners to England—Death of Queen Anne—Accession of George the First—German Settlement—Virginia's Economy—Church Establishment—Statistics.
In the year 1710 Colonel Alexander Spotswood was sent over as lieutenant-governor, under the Earl of Orkney. He was descended from the ancient Scottish family of Spottiswoode. The surname is local, and was assumed by the proprietors of the lands and Barony of Spottiswoode, in the Parish of Gordon, and County of Berwick, as soon as surnames became hereditary in Scotland. The immediate ancestor of the family was Robert de Spotswood, born during the reign of King Alexander the Third, who succeeded to the crown of Scotland in 1249. Colonel Alexander Spotswood was born in 1676, the year of Bacon's Rebellion, at Tangier, then an English colony, in Africa, his father, Robert Spotswood, being physician to the governor, the Earl of Middleton, and the garrison there. The grandfather of Alexander was Sir Robert Spotswood, Lord President of the College of Justice, and Secretary of Scotland in the time of Charles the First, and author of "The Practicks of the Laws of Scotland." He was the second son of John Spotswood, or Spottiswoode, Archbishop of St. Andrews, and author of "The History of the Church of Scotland." The mother of Colonel Alexander Spotswood was a widow, Catharine Elliott; his father died at Tangier in 1688, leaving this his only child.[378:A] Colonel Alexander Spotswood was bred in the army from his childhood, and uniting genius with energy, served with distinction under the Duke of Marlborough.
He was dangerously wounded in the breast by the first fire which the French made on the Confederates at the battle of Blenheim. He served during the heat of that sanguinary war as deputy quartermaster-general. In after-life, while governor of Virginia, he sometimes showed to his guests a four-pound ball that struck his coat. Blenheim Castle is represented in the background of a portrait of him, preserved at Chelsea, in the County of King William.
