Washington [113]
The renovation reflected the split in Washington’s life between his deep desire for privacy and his growing need to entertain people and assume a grand public role. On the south side of the house, he would add a downstairs library and an upstairs bedroom, sealed off from the rest of the house to fend off intruders. On the north side, he would add an imposing two-story room, later called the Banquet Hall, with a magnificent Palladian window—a space in which Washington could receive luminaries with a dignity befitting his station. The renovation also introduced the curved arcades that gracefully attach the mansion visually to the smaller buildings flanking it. Many of these changes would be completed while Washington was with the Continental Army, but while he remained, he oversaw the work with typically fastidious attention to detail. “I am very much engaged in raising one of the additions of my house, which I think (perhaps it is fancy) goes on better whilst I am present than in my absence from the workmen,” he wrote.34
Everything at the Mansion House Farm—the serpentine walks, the beautiful gardens, the undulating meadows—reflected Washington’s taste. It is noteworthy that, as tensions mounted with Great Britain, his conception of Mount Vernon grew more regal. In its British style, the house reflected his love of the country against which he was about to rebel, suggesting that his hostility to the mother country was a case of thwarted love. “Examples of English taste are everywhere at Mount Vernon,” write the historians Robert F. Dalzell, Jr., and Lee Baldwin Dalzell. “The taste in question also bears the indelible stamp of that most English of institutions—the aristocratic country house.”35
PATSY CUSTIS’S UNTIMELY DEATH meant that Martha Washington would now derive her emotional sustenance from the unpredictable Jacky Custis alone. Myles Cooper continued to ply Washington with favorable reports about his young charge, as had Jonathan Boucher before him. In September 1773 he informed Washington that Jacky’s “assiduity hath been equal to his rectitude of principle and it is hoped his improvements in learning have not been inferior to either.”36 By December Cooper couldn’t keep up these fake progress reports with a straight face and told Washington that he had yielded to Jacky’s wish to quit college and marry. As a military man, Washington knew when he faced a losing battle. Having Jacky’s “own inclination, the desire of his mother, and the acquiescence of almost all his relatives to encounter,” Washington told Cooper, “I did not care, as he is the last of the family, to push my opposition too far and therefore have submitted to a kind of necessity.” 37 One can again feel Washington’s painful frustration in bowing to Martha’s wishes when it came to her incorrigible son.
On February 3, 1774, Jacky Custis, nineteen, wed Nelly Calvert, sixteen, in Mount Airy, Maryland, the home of the Calvert clan. Only half a year had passed since Patsy’s death, and one wonders what Martha Washington thought about the timing of this rushed marriage. She didn’t think it proper to attend the wedding in mourning dress, so her husband carried a congratulatory letter from her to the newlyweds. Jacky had married into a prominent family, the Catholic proprietors of Maryland, who had issued a famous act of religious toleration in 1649. At the same time the family had its own salacious past to titillate Jacky’s imagination. His new father-in-law, Benedict Calvert, was the illegitimate offspring of Charles Calvert, the fifth Lord Baltimore, and lived in a huge mansion graced with Van Dyke portraits of his ancestors. Whatever Jacky’s flaws, Nelly Calvert seemed to be a universally popular young woman. Boucher said rhapsodically that she was “the most amiable young woman I have almost ever known