The founding and early years of the Lionheart family | The Lionhearts of Charles County, Virginia originated with one Richard Lyon, a handsome English country gentleman who lived on the border of Nottinghamshire and South Yorkshire in the mid-17th century. The only one of his parents' children to survive to adulthood, Lyon managed his sickly and increasingly frail father's estate until the latter died and passed it on to him in 1637 - just in time to get mixed up in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms under Charles I's reign. Lyon fought in service to the King, becoming an officer in the Marquess of Newcastle's 'whitecoat' forces and seeing action from the war's earliest days to the devastating defeat at Marston Moor which broke the Royalists' northern army. In this time, the golden-haired and azure-eyed Lyon gained a reputation not dissimilar from that of other, better-known Cavalier officers: proud, extravagant, a drinker of fine wines and chaser of finer skirts, and bold to the point of foolhardiness.
Left for dead after the massacre of the Royalist infantry at Marston Moor, Lyon managed to escape the battlefield after dark, seek treatment with a friendly Royalist family's manor, and ride southward to join the King's own forces. Unfortunately for him, only a few months later he went on to fight at the Battle of Naseby, where the Royalists were shattered for good and Lyon himself barely evaded capture. Nevertheless, determined to resist to the last, he rejoined the ragtag remnants of Cavalier forces in the Midlands under the Baron Astley, only to once again taste the sting of defeat early next year at Stow-on-the-Wold. Going underground, with his estate ransacked by the triumphant Parliamentary forces, Lyon lived as a vagabond in the countryside, thieving and cutting throats to get by when he wasn't sheltering with Royalist supporters who'd managed to conceal their sympathies from the new authorities. He always found a way to join Royalist armies and rebellions, from Charles II's forces at Worcester to the uprisings of Penruddock and Booth, and ever the survivor he'd manage to slink back into the English countryside after each inevitable defeat.
Newcastle's Whitecoats, a young Richard Lyon among them, make their last stand at Marston Moor, 1644 | |
After the death of Lord Protector Cromwell finally provided an opening for the Restoration, Lyon's loyal service was recognized by Charles II (and just in time, because he had deflowered his then-host's daughter - a young woman less than half his age - and the man would've turned him over to the Puritans had the latter's power not fallen apart at exactly that time). The newly restored King granted him an estate on the north bank of the James River, Virginia to compensate for his own Nottinghamshire estate (now burnt to the ground and wiped off the map to the point where even Lyon himself couldn't find its ruins) and jokingly remarked that he had the 'heart of a lion' for his zealous loyalty to the House of Stuart and unwillingness to ever surrender to Parliament or the Protectorate, even long after it became apparent that the Royalists had been militarily defeated. Jest though it may have been, Lyon took the King's congratulations to heart and legally changed his surname to 'Lionheart' shortly after marrying this last girl he'd just deflowered and making landfall in Virginia.
Since then, Richard's descendants have continued to live on the plantation house he built some miles east of Charles City, the Virginian town named after the King this first Lionheart had served so faithfully, managing their tobacco plantation and growing number of slaves and indentured servants from their luxurious new halls. As a staunch believer in both the established Anglican Church and the monarchy, Richard fought as an officer of loyal militia on the side of Governor Berkeley and his administration during Bacon's Rebellion - his last, and finally victorious war - and profited from the confiscation & redistribution of rebels' estates afterward. Many of the Lionheart men followed in their ancestor's martial footsteps and fought in the various Anglo-French conflicts in North America as part of the Virginia colonial militia, from King William's War to the final French and Indian War, ironically on the side of the Orange and later Hanoverian monarchy that displaced the Stuarts to whom Richard had been faithful at all cost.
Richard Lionheart at the end of his first week in America, his long golden hair regrown, 1661 | |
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Arthur Lionheart, the man, the legend: Early years | Speaking of the French and Indian War...this is where Arthur Lionheart II enters the picture. The most senior of Richard Lyon/Lionheart's direct male descendants, a then-twelve-year-old Arthur found himself in charge of the Lionheart estate after his father Percival died of a bad flu in 1742. Growing into a tall and robust young man, Arthur went on to secure a commission in the Virginia militia like so many of his predecessors, organize the 1st Virginia Regiment as its Colonel and play a key role in sparking the Jumonville Affair, a 1754 skirmish in which he and his Mingo Indian allies annihilated a French patrol in what is now western Pennsylvania under unclear circumstances (though Lionheart maintains to this day that the French shot first). Incidentally, his involvement here caused him to miss the birth of his own firstborn. Resoundingly defeated in the Battle of Fort Necessity that followed, Lionheart also took part in the even more disastrous Braddock Expedition the next year, which culminated in his superior's death at the Battle of the Monongahela and gave him a newfound appreciation for the irregular warfare which had made mincemeat out of his & the British forces.
The stupefied Colonel Lionheart looks on from horseback as General Braddock dies at the Monongahela, 1755 | |
Frustrated by disputes over seniority with other colonial captains and their British commanders, Lionheart spent the two years following the Monongahela commanding the defense of Fort Cumberland, a humiliating post away from action on the front-lines in which he saw no fighting. In late 1757 he was finally able to talk his way back into front-line combat, joining the Forbes Expedition to seize Fort Duquesne. This carefully organized and planned expedition was vastly more successful than Braddock's, and Lionheart and his Virginians washed away the stain of their past defeats with French and French-allied Indian blood in the constant skirmishes around General Forbes' forward base at Fort Ligonier, culminating in the October 1758 Battle of Fort Ligonier in which he and the British drove off a desperate attack by the outnumbered and undersupplied French garrison of Fort Duquesne. Marching to the latter fortress soon after, the British and their colonial auxiliaries found that the French commander had already destroyed his indefensible fort and withdrawn. As French positions in the Ohio Valley fell apart following this defeat and others further to the north, the Forbes Expedition effectively marked the end of Lionheart's role in the French and Indian War.
The British assumption of France's North American colonies did not go unchallenged by the local Indians, however, and tensions were further exacerbated by the harsh policies of General Jeffrey Amherst, the new Governor of these lands and of Virginia. Hostilities erupted around the Great Lakes in 1763 with the Odawa chief Pontiac leading Indians in revolt against Amherst's tyranny, inflicting upon the British (who regularly underestimated them) a number of sharp defeats. Drawing from his experiences in the French and Indian War, Lionheart tried to advise the authorities to take a reconciliatory approach to the insurgents and a cautious one to attacking 'irreconcilable' Indians, but was too lowly on the British chain of command to even get anywhere near Amherst and his staff. He had more success in Lord Dunmore's War five years later, where despite privately cursing the settlers who butchered once-friendly Mingo chief Logan's family at the Yellow Creek Massacre, he secured command of the Virginia militia and led them to victory when Indians under the Shawnee war-chief Cornstalk ambushed them at Point Pleasant in October of 1774: there, in addition to resolutely directing his men as the Indians swarmed their defenses, Lionheart also heeded his second-in-command's advice to send a flanking force across a nearby creek, catching Cornstalk off guard and driving the Indians into full retreat.
Colonel Lionheart exhorts the Virginia militia, including son Lionel, to fight on at Point Pleasant, 1774 | |
It was while Lionheart and his men were still returning over the western Virginian mountains that, in April of 1775, the first shots of the American Revolutionary War rang out at Lexington and Concord. |
Arthur Lionheart, the man, the legend: The Revolution | Lord Dunmore's suspension of the Virginia legislature at the outbreak of revolution in Massachussetts, coupled with the history of belittlement and willful ignorance to which Lionheart had been subjected while still a militia captain in Britain's employ, made the choice of who now-45-year-old Arthur should support a fairly easy one. Rumors that Lord Dunmore had colluded with the Shawnee to try to get the Virginian militia massacred at Point Pleasant and beyond, thereby weakening the increasingly unruly colonials before they could rebel, sealed it for Lionheart. Making his way to the newly convened Continental Congress, Lionheart advanced his case for leadership of the Patriots' military efforts (with the victory at Point Pleasant serving as his newest reason as to why he should receive the role) and was duly appointed commander-in-chief of the Continental Army by the Congress on June 14, 1775, the same day that said Army was organized. Meanwhile Lionheart's then-21-year-old son, Lionel, had opted to stay in Virginia with the rest of his family, but joined the local Patriots and played a junior role in the skirmishes which drove Lord Dunmore out of the colony by the end of 1775.
Lionheart's ensuing military career was marked by his aggressive leadership style and insistence on fighting the British in the open 'like men' wherever he could. This initially served him well in the Boston Campaign, where though he listened to the advice of his chief artillery officer Lionel Harrison to fortify the Dorchester Heights overlooking the city and install heavy artillery (which Harrison and allied Vermonters had secured in a raid on Fort Ticonderoga) there, he nevertheless insisted on baiting the British into an open battle. Launching probing attacks on Boston's defenses which were then promptly turned back by the British even as Harrison's heavy artillery began to rain fire down on the British ships in harbor, Lionheart successfully tricked his opposite number, General William Howe, into ordering an assault on Dorchester Heights in March of 1776. While this was ongoing, he eagerly ordered the Continental Army to attack from nearby Cambridge. The British were caught wrong-footed, their assault on Dorchester Heights floundered against the defenses there - a veritable second Bunker Hill, only this time the Americans won more than a moral victory - and the appearance of Lionheart's main force on the city outskirts threw the defense into complete panic. The raw Patriot militia and green Continental Army recruits took significant casualties as they threw themselves at the British defenses, but in truth those defenses were manned only by the British rearguard while the rest of their army and a thousand Loyalist civilians were racing to the boats to evacuate and were overrun piece by piece - Howe included, though he should be credited for managing a successful evacuation at all under these circumstances. As his soldiers swarmed across Boston, Lionheart issued strict orders to refrain from pillage, enforced by the threat of public flogging and hanging.
The last British soldiers to hold out in Boston stand down before General Lionheart, 1776 | |
General Lionheart was lauded as a triumphant hero, and accordingly basked in the praise of the Patriots as the first man to lead Continental forces to a major victory over the British. It was in this time that his son Lionel also came up north to join him, and was appointed Captain of a company in the 1st Continental Light Dragoons. However, this much adulation made the general overconfident and turned his gallantry to foolhardiness. Five months later Howe returned from Nova Scotia, wiser and angrier than before, with a host of over 30,000 soldiers (including nearly 10,000 Hessians) at his back. Lionheart dared to openly confront him with 23,000 soldiers under his own command. The result was the New York Campaign, in which the Americans were repeatedly defeated from Brooklyn Heights to Kip's Bay to White Plains. To relieve his besieged twin forts near the mouth of the Hudson River, in November of 1776 the increasingly desperate Lionheart attempted a large counteroffensive along the lower banks of the Hudson, which failed miserably in the face of Howe's larger, higher-spirited and better-disciplined army. Thus chastened, Lionheart left downstate New York and New Jersey to the British. Bloodied, exhausted, and low on just about everything after having to abandon most of their supplies to outrun Howe's forces, Lionheart and the Continental Army would have been incredibly doomed at this point if it had not been for a turn where his trademark aggression actually proved useful: the Delaware River campaign.
Crossing the icy Delaware River on Christmas night after first receiving reinforcements, Lionheart launched an extremely risky attack on a major Hessian encampment at the New Jersey town of Trenton in the early hours of the morning after Christmas. As the Hessians were still drunk and a blizzard had descended upon them, the Americans were able to score a rousing victory in the face of common military sense and even killed the Hessian commander, Johann Rall, after a short but fierce engagement. Having taken the Hessians' cannons and supplies for themselves, the Americans now retreated back over the Delaware and rested until New Year's Day. Shortly after receiving their pay in camp, they fended off a British reprisal at Assunpink Creek and went on the attack once more, defeating another British force at Princeton and in so doing keeping New Jersey in American hands. These victories were not particularly decisive in the long run - the British still had vastly more men and materiel to throw at the Americans - but they were direly needed to boost flagging American morale after the catastrophic New York campaign, and of course saved Lionheart's own career from being cut short by Congress.
Arthur Lionheart crossing the Delaware, Christmas 1776 | |
1777 was very much a mixed year for the Continental Army. Lionheart prevented the British under Howe from linking up with a major invasion force trying to push through the north under John Burgoyne, but at great cost. In April, he moved out of his fortified positions in the Watchung Mountains to attack a British army that had moved to Somerset Countyhouse; Howe had sent this force out as a diversion, but Lionheart smashed it so quickly before falling back to his Middlebrook cantonments that any plans the former might have had about stealing a march past the mountains had to be abandoned. Instead Howe sailed from New York for the mouth of the Delaware, and before Lionheart got too comfortable he found he'd have to race the British to the American capital at Philadelphia. After months of maneuvering and skirmishing, the tired Americans were resoundingly defeated at Brandywine, and a reckless attack ordered by Lionheart on Germantown not long after also floundered. Philadelphia was lost by year's end and the Continentals marched to Valley Forge, where a quarter of the men died in the harsh winter conditions and Lionheart found his leadership abilities questioned by his subordinates and Congress. Enraged and stressed, Lionheart defended himself before Congress while his men recuperated and drilled under the watchful eye of new foreign advisers from Europe, and with the support of his political connections was able to avoid getting sacked this time.
The Americans entered 1778 in much higher spirits than they had left 1777 with. The Continental Army had been rebuilt and trained to fight at a higher standard, the French and Spanish were entering the war, and the theater of operations was shifting southward as the British gave up on trying to retake the Mid-Atlantic and New England. Furthermore, the British high command had grossly overestimated the extent & organization of Loyalist support in the South. While the senior Lionheart remained occupied with containment actions against British forces still in the northern colonies until 1781, he did dispatch more contingents of the Continental Army southward over the years, including the Light Dragoons commanded by his son Lionel in late 1779: he whose exploits in New Jersey had earned him the moniker 'Light Horse Leo', won him both a promotion to Lieutenant-Colonel and a rare gold medal from Congress, and who went on to play a supporting role in the Southern Campaign, primarily focused on capturing rural outposts and trading blows with the dreaded Banastre Tarleton's own horsemen (incidentally, this was how he found the time to visit his wife and sire a son). The battles and troubles of that campaign were many, but this part of the story must be left to the men who saw it from start to finish to tell.
The elder Lionheart finally marched south, buoyed by significant French reinforcements, in 1781. The British, now led by Lord Charles Cornwallis, put up a formidable resistance and fended off the advancing Franco-American forces time and again, but were gradually boxed into Yorktown - time and numbers were both in Lionheart's favor and he intended to use them to the fullest - and forced to yield after the defeat of Admiral Thomas Graves' relief fleet at French hands in the Battle of the Chesapeake. Cornwallis' surrender on October 19, 1781 effectively ended large-scale operations in the American Revolutionary War, and the Thirteen Colonies' independence was formally recognized by Britain two years later at the Treaty of Paris.
Cornwallis surrenders at Yorktown, 1781 | |
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Arthur Lionheart, the man, the legend: The Confederation Years | Following the defeat of the British, America was free - and now it had to start functioning as an independent nation, or rather at this time, nations. Under the Articles of Confederation which had been fully ratified by 1781, the American colonies-turned-states remained virtually independent debt-ridden little nations of their own, with the Continental Congress (now referred to as the Congress of the Confederation) existing as a nominal authority with little in the way of enforcing its decisions. The Army and Navy both had to be disbanded, to the great sorrow of Lionheart Senior. His last significant act as commander-in-chief was to defuse the Newburgh Conspiracy, a threatened mutiny which could have exploded into a full-blown military coup after Congress had initially refused to pay the Continental veterans' pensions, with an emotional appeal to heed Congressional supremacy - in a deep and cutting irony which grievously harmed the relationship between father and son, it was none other than Lionheart Junior who penned a letter to other Generals suggesting taking unspecified action against Congress, something which the younger Lionheart remained unapologetic about.
Unpaid and frustrated Continental troops on the verge of mutiny, 1783 | |
Between 1783 and '88, Arthur Lionheart retired to his plantation estate, peacefully presiding over the growth of tobacco, grains and vegetables along the banks of the James River. Lionel Lionheart, in another twist of irony, became a representative of Virginia to the very same Congress whose overthrow he once implied would be a positive development...and very rapidly became disgusted at the chamber's utter lack of power to collect any revenue at all and apparent pointlessness while the states it claimed to represent remained mired in debt, squabbled with one another, and were wracked with internal dissent.
Temporarily retired and oblivious to the dangers facing the United States, Arthur Lionheart goes out for a pleasant stroll with his grandchildren, 1787 | |
In 1787, following the outbreak of Shays' Rebellion, it was decided that a stronger central government was necessary for the survival of the American states. A convention was called for in Philadelphia, with the elder Lionheart being invited to preside over the proceedings. He could not have expected that Lionel would dare call for America to become a monarchy so soon after casting off one crown - and not even by inviting a foreign prince, as some others suggested, but by crowning him 'High King of America'. Once more the father embarrassed the son by loudly and strenuously rejecting any notion of being crowned a monarch, demonstrating the strength of his republican convictions and destroying the latter's hopes of becoming Prince of Virginia this time, and the Constitution ended up calling for an empowered but still elected executive branch rather than any sort of monarchy.
In the resulting election, Lionheart - despite his personal wishes to retire back into private life once more - was pressured by his friends among the Founding Fathers and above all his own son into running for office, ostensibly for the sake of stability and to give the young United States a unifying figure as its head. He proceeded to win the 1788-89 race, with X coming in second place and thus becoming his Vice-President.
And thus, we enter the present day - Anno Domini 1789 - with President Arthur Lionheart and his Vice-President having been freshly inaugurated... |
Structure of the Lionheart family, 1789 | Arthur Lionheart II, patriarch, age 59 (b. July 30, 1730)
Mary Lionheart (née Pawlett), matriarch and wife of Arthur, age 53 (b. September 16, 1736)
Lionel Lionheart, son of Arthur and Mary, age 35 (b. July 27, 1754)
Frances Lionheart (née Le Montier), age 34 (b. February 28, 1755)
Francine Lionheart, daughter of Lionel and Frances, age 14 (b. April 12, 1775)
Richard Lionheart IV, son of Lionel and Frances, age 9 (b. November 23, 1780)
Victor Lionheart, son of Lionel and Frances, age 5 (b. July 18, 1784)
Caroline Lionheart, daughter of Lionel and Frances, age 4 (b. October 15, 1785)
Henrietta Lionheart, daughter of Arthur and Mary, age 29 (b. November 18, 1760). Married to Joseph MacCotter of North Carolina. Any children they have will be recorded in the MacCotter annals.
Jacqueline Lionheart, daughter of Arthur and Mary, age 25 (b. May 14, 1764) |
Arthur Lionheart, President of the United States |
The elder Lionheart deep in thought as he pens a letter to his wife, 1779
Age: 59 (b. July 30, 1730)
Spouse: Mary, née Pawlett (b. September 16, 1736) |
Lionel Lionheart, Virginian Senator |
'Light-Horse Leo' in his prime ordering around men of the 1st Continental Light Dragoons, 1781
Age: 35 (b. July 27, 1754)
Spouse: Frances, née Le Montier (b. February 28, 1755) |
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