The fourth Lord Dunmore was the eldest son of William, the third Lord Dunmore, by his wife the Honorable Catherine Nairn. In 1770, at the age of thirty-eight, he was appointed governor of the colony of New York, and subsequently of Virginia as well. From the beginning of his tenure, he proved deeply unpopular. Hindered by his Scottish ancestry that made him appear boorish to the Virginian gentry, he won few friends with his impatient and abrupt manner. He was also rather cowardly: faced with the onset of the mass unrest that was to culminate in the War of Independence, his response was to retreat from the Governor’s Palace to the safety of a naval vessel moored offshore. Deemed even less forgivable at the time was the fact that he was the only British commander ever to free slaves. Having utterly failed to establish his dominance, he went on to suffer a series of humiliating losses in battle that culminated in defeat on Gwynn’s Island, Virginia, on 8 July 1776. It is likely that construction started on the Dunmore Pineapple on his return from the New World the same year.