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- REMARKS:
Parentage id conjectural.
- BIOGRAPHY
Son of Thomas Warner and Elizabeth Sotherton, Augustine Warner was born about 28 September 1611 in Hoveton or Norwich, Norfolk, England. About 13 May 1638 he married Mary Towneley. Not much is known about him, but he migrated to Virginia in 1650 when he was thirty-nine, first to York County and later to Gloucester County.
King Charles I had been executed in January 1649 and Oliver Cromwell was making war against 'gentlemen' like Augustine Warner. This may have been the reason why he decided to sail for Virginia, with his wife Mary, and their son Augustus, who was to be an ancestor of George Washington and Queen Elizabeth II, and his daughter Sarah, who married Lawrence Towneley and was to be an ancestor of General Robert E. Lee.
Anglo-Saxon Virginia had been born in starvation and crime, laced with courage, but by 1650 the rotten days were over: Augustine Warner prospered, and he built his small mansion, Warner Hall, on a prong of the Severn River. The tobacco that King James had described in 1606 as 'vile, base, and yet hatefull corruption', was growing nicely and making the colonists rich. The silk worms, first sent to Virginia in 1614, had grown to 'big Bignesse', and were also showing a profit.
Augustine Warner soon became a leader in the Colony; he was a Colonel of the Militia, a Justice, and then a Burgess in the General Assembly. Augustine Warner died 24 December 1674 at Warner Hall.
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