John Custis II

John Custis II (Sr.) (1629 – January 29, 1696) was a Colonial merchant and planter who aligned with governor William Berkeley during Bacon's Rebellion and began a political career in which he served in both houses of the Virginia General Assembly and became one of the founders of the Custis family, one of the First Families of Virginia.

Early and family life

The son of the former Johanna Wittingham and her Gloucestershire-born husband, Henry Custis, may have been born in Rotterdam in the Netherlands. His Royalist-leaning father Henry Custis fled there from England with his family during the English Civil War. Henry Custis owned a popular tavern in Rotterdam catering to fellow emigrants, and would trade with various merchants. By that date, his sister Ann had become the second wife of the widower Argall Yeardley, the son of George Yeardley (who became governor of the Virginia colony and died there in 1627). Ann's husband was not only a prominent planter on Virginia's Eastern Shore but had already served nearly a decade on the Virginia Governor's Council. Ann Custis probably sailed across the Atlantic Ocean with John Custis and their kinsman Henry Norwood, who left in a sloop from Argoll Yeardley's house for Jamestown.

After emigrating to the Virginia colony, Custis became a merchant and landowner. In 1650, Argall Yeardley issued him a certificate for 600 acres of land. In the 1650s, Custis also began holding important local offices, including as surveyor and appraiser of estates. Complicating matters, in 1674, King Charles had granted the right to collect quitrents from all of Virginia except the Northern Neck of Virginia to favorites Henry Bennett (Earl of Arlington) and Thomas Culpeper, so the Virginia General Assembly later that year petitioned the King asking him to reverse the grant, which seemed the equivalent of additional taxes upon already financially strapped colonists, but received an equivocal answer.

After fleeing Jamestown in late July 1676, during Bacon's Rebellion, Governor Berkeley took refuge at Arlington plantation, the grand house this John Custis had erected earlier that decade in what had become Northampton County, possibly because sandbars on Old Plantation Creek forced larger ships to anchor well out to sea and made landing enemy troops difficult (and thus made it defensible). Some time before July 5, 1677, after governor Berkeley had sailed to England and died, Lieutenant governor (and commissioner) Herbert Jeffrys appointed Custis to the Virginia Governor's Council, and he continued to sit as an additional member of the Accomack and Northampton County Courts. However, somehow his name was omitted from the list of Council members when Francis Howard was appointed governor in October 1683, so Custis petitioned the Crown for reinstatement in 1685.

Death and legacy John Custis prepared his last will in testament in 1691, and on April 15, 1692 resigned from the Virginia Governor's Council, citing extreme violent sicknesses and fits, as well as failing memory and hearing. Although thereafter relieved of civic responsibilities, Custis did not actually die until January 29, 1696, presumably at his Arlington mansion, and was buried near the manor house. By this time his son had already begun his Virginia political career, and would in 1700 begin more than a decade's service on the Virginia governor's council, and one of his two grandsons to become burgesses would also serve more than two decades. Archeological excavations have been performed at the former Arlington mansion site, and descendant George Washington Parke Custis who moved into what in John Custis' day was the Northern Neck Proprietary named a mansion there Arlington after this mansion.