Francis Lovelace

Who was Francis Lovelace?

Francis Lovelace was an English Royalist and the second Governor of New York colony.

He was born the third son of Sir William Lovelace and his wife Anne Barne of Lovelace Place, Bethersden and Woolwich, Kent. He was the younger brother of Richard Lovelace, the Cavalier poet. The Bethersden Lovelace lineage was founded in 1367 by John Lovelace, six generations before Francis, and has been confused over the years with the Hurley Lovelaces who were raised to the House of Lords.

The five Lovelace brothers supported Charles I in the English Civil War. Charles was a Colonel in the Royalist army and was governor of Carmarthen Castle in Wales from June 1644 until it was surrendered to Parliamentary troops in October 1645 after a fierce battle in which one brother was killed. He and another brother, Dudley, migrated to Europe and served with the French army later in the 1640s. The brothers later supported Charles II, and spent time in exile like him, in his fight to be restored to the throne.

Lovelace lived in Virginia where his sister, Anne Gorsuch, had migrated after marriage, from 1650 until after the colony was seized by the English Parliamentary commissioners in 1652 when the governor, Sir William Berkeley, dispatched him to France to inform Charles II. He returned to England in 1658, the year of Oliver Cromwell's death. In 1659 he secretly married Blanche Talbot, by whom he had two children, and same year was arrested and confined in the Tower of London until after the fall of the Parliamentary government and the restoration of Charles II in 1660.