A Restoration Rake

Many 17th-century comedies feature a stock character known as a rake: an aristocrat who could be charming and courageous but was an irresponsible womanizer and gambler. Daniel Parke II was just such a character.

Born in 1664 or 1665, a few miles from Williamsburg at Queen’s Creek plantation, and educated in England, Parke returned to Virginia and was elected to the House of Burgesses and later appointed to the governor’s council. He feuded with the prominent Virginia clergyman James Blair, at one point dragging Blair’s wife out of a pew during a service in Bruton Parish Church. He married Jane Ludwell but scandalized his neighbors by making no secret of the fact that he had a mistress, with whom he had a son he named Julius Caesar. He deserted his wife and children and accumulated large debts to his sisters and mistress, among others, which he never paid.

“Parke had all the vices of a Restoration rake,” wrote his biographer Helen Hill Miller. “He was a cultivator of anyone who could forward his advance, nimbly shifting attachments in the light of changed circumstances and dominating those he could outweigh.”

“At the same time,” Miller wrote, “his life exhibited the chief virtue of the Restoration rake, personal courage.” He was shot in both legs during the War of the Spanish Succession but continued to fight. He participated in the battle of Blenheim in 1704, and after that key victory, the Duke of Marlborough, who commanded British and allied forces, chose Parke to deliver the news to Queen Anne. The queen rewarded him with a miniature portrait of herself that hangs from a red ribbon around Parke’s neck in this portrait.

“Kneller’s portrayal of Parke in military splendor, complete with symbols of victory, not only underscores his recent success at Blenheim but also preserves the subject’s fame in perpetuity as a heralded military hero,” said Laura Barry, the Foundation’s director of collections and deputy chief curator.

Parke wanted to become royal governor of Virginia but was instead named governor of the Leeward Islands. He again antagonized prominent colonials, partly because of affairs with their wives. During a 1710 riot, he was dragged from his governor’s residence and murdered.

Back in Virginia, Parke’s daughter Frances married John Custis IV, who ended up saddled with much of Parke’s debt. Their son, Daniel, had Parke as his middle name, as did Daniel’s children with his wife, the future Martha Washington.