In Virginia in 1743, Lawrence Washington, the charming son of a middle-rank planter, married Anne Fairfax of the colony’s richest, most powerful family, and went on to make history after he died. He was exceedingly fond of his half-brother George, badly schooled and unhappy at home with his shrew of a mother. He took the boy with him into his new family, as if he were his own son.

It was at Belvoir, the Fairfax estate, that George learned to mix with the rich and the worldly, absorbed what they said about playwrights and power and copied their manners and speech. The Fairfaxes hired him to do his first job, which gave him the money to start buying property. This helped him to his high rank in the local militia, where he started the Seven Years’ War almost by accident, and emerged from it a soldier of note.