[2] Lee married his wife Anne or Anna[4] in a newly built brick church at Jamestown in late 1641 or early 1642, and outgoing Governor Francis Wyatt gave the bride away.
[5] Though generations of Lees did not know her original surname, she now appears to possibly have been a daughter of London publisher Francis Constable, baptized in 1622, and a ward of Sir John Thorowgood, a personal attendant upon King Charles I.
Lee began his career as a government official handling land records (among other duties), and would hold several important colony-wide as well as local offices, as discussed below.
Lee received the title to this 1,000 acre (4 km2) tract on 10 August 1642, supposedly through the headrights of thirty-eight immigrants unable to pay their own passage.
[citation needed] In any event, the Lee family's first home was likely a log cabin on leased land on the same side of the York river, at the head of Tindall's Creek near the Native American community of Capahosic Wicomico.
Lee moved his bride and infant son John away from the capital city (notoriously unhealthy due to stagnant waters nearby in summers), and they lived near the frontier of settlement.
Lee and his family escaped the 1644 raid, then settled at New Poquoson on the lower peninsula south of the York River, where it was safer from attack.
[12] In 1649 Lee was appointed a member of the King's Council (both a primitive executive branch of government and the precursor of the upper house of Virginia's legislature).
In 1650, Secretary of State Lee sailed to the Netherlands to report Virginia's loyal adherence to the exiled Charles II, and returned with a new (but worthless) commission from the late King's heir for Governor Berkeley.
[13] During the next two years (and Berkeley's forced retirement), Lee negotiated the Virginia colony's capitulation to the Commonwealth of England, and was satisfied with the terms that were laid out.
[10] He both employed and imported both English indentured servants (i.e. employees who paid for their passage to America with seven years of labor) and at least 90 African slaves (for which he claimed 4000 acres of headrights in 1660).
Lee later purchased another 2,600 acres (11 km2) at Machodoc Creek, which also seemed a possible port along the Potomac River where ships could traffic with England, and which became part of Westmoreland County.
Lee also acquired 4,000 acres (16 km2) farther up the Potomac, near and westward of where the city of Washington, D.C., would rise, in what became Westmoreland County (but after various subdivisions became part of modern Fairfax and Alexandria).
[18] During a trip to England in 1658 with his eldest son John, Lee acquired a residence at Stratford Langthorne, in the County of Essex, then a pleasant suburb of London.
In 1661 he moved his wife and children there, although the steward he had found to manage his Virginia property (and to whom he had promised to marry one of his daughters) had grown homesick and returned with them.
It is located about a mile from Stratford-at-Bow on the north side of the Thames in West Ham Parish, and later became the site of great wharves, docks, and the congestion of east London.
Lee died on 1 March 1664, in the Virginia colony, probably after an illness at his "Dividing Creek" plantation based on gaps in his service in the Northumberland County court.
His property at Stratford in England was to be sold, and the proceeds be used to discharge his debts, as well as pay for the education of his two eldest sons (John and Richard), and if any remained, to provide dowries for his daughters (Elizabeth and Anne).
She remarried, to Edmund Lister, also a Northumberland County colonist with extensive English ties, who would sue his stepson John Lee (also executor of his father's estate; the documents being lost) before his death on 24 September 1666.