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In his diary, Washington records this significant item: "Dined at the house lately Colonel Roger Morris confiscated and the occupation of a common Farmer." Washington always attributed his defeat at the hands of Mary Philipse to being too precipitate and "not waiting until ye ladye was in ye mood."
And I should explain here that, as things were in America then, and with Mr. Faringfield and Margaret, neither of us was entirely ineligible to the hand of so rich and important a man's daughter; although the town would not have likened our chances to those of a De Lancey, a Livingstone, or a Philipse. I ought to have said before, that Philip was now of promising fortune.
But he spent a week in New York City in order to see his enchantress, Mary Philipse, and it is even whispered that he proposed to her and that she refused him. Two years afterwards she married Lieutenant-Colonel Roger Morris, and during the Revolution the Morris house was Washington's headquarters; the Morrises, who were Tories, having fled.
And this lady lives in history because she had the felicity of being proposed to by George Washington. George himself tells us of this in his Journal, and George, you will remember, could not tell a lie. George was twenty-five, he was on his way to Boston, and was entertained at the Philipse house, the Plaza not having then been built. Mary was twenty, pink and lissome.
Littlepage, you might almost as well have asked me, if I had ever heard of a Van Cortlandt, or a Philipse, or a Morris, or any other of the gentry hereabouts. Mr.
He was dined and wined and fêted in Philadelphia, and again in New York, where he fell in love at apparently short notice with the heiress Mary Philipse, the sister-in-law of his friend Beverly Robinson. Tearing himself away from these attractions he pushed on to Boston, then the most important city on the continent, and the head-quarters of Shirley, the commander-in-chief.
While thus engaged, he received a letter from a friend and confidant in New York, warning him to hasten back to that city before it was too late, as Captain Morris, who had been his fellow aide-de-camp under Braddock, was laying close siege to Miss Philipse. Sterner alarms, however, summoned him in another direction.
During the Revolutionary War, Roger Morris, of Putnam County, New York, made the mistake of siding with the Tories. A mob collected, and Morris and his family escaped, taking ship to England. Before leaving, Morris declared his intention of coming back as soon as "the insurrection was quelled." Roger Morris never came back. Roger Morris is known in history as the man who married Mary Philipse.
Two years afterwards Mary Philipse married Colonel Roger Morris, in the king's service, and cards were duly sent to Mount Vernon. But the whirligig of time equalizes all things, and, in Seventeen Hundred Seventy-six, General Washington, Commander of the Continental Army, occupied the mansion of Colonel Morris, the Colonel and his lady being fugitive Tories.
He spent the time at the house of a former Virginian, Beverly Robinson, who had married Susannah Philipse, daughter of Frederick Philipse, one of the rich men of Manhattan. In the household was a young woman, Mary Philipse, sister of the hostess. She was older than Washington, educated, and had seen much more of polite life than he.
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