At least that is sufficient to dispel the rather silly family tradition that George Coggill was an illegitimate son of King George III. There were always several things wrong with the tradition anyway. For one, George III never visited Leeds (or anywhere else in the north of England for that matter) and Leeds would have made a very peculiar place to have dispatched an inconveniently pregnant royal mistress in the late eighteenth century. For another there is no evidence whatever that the King ever had a mistress, pregnant or otherwise, for as far as is known, he exhibited a most unHanoverian fidelity to Queen Charlotte throughout his long life.
It is possible that the tradition was started in order to explain the fact that while the Torrey family Bible contains a good deal of information regarding the parents and siblings of Ann Atkinson, who died before it was purchased, it is silent on the ancestry and relations of George Coggill, who was alive when most of the information was inscribed in it and could, presumably, have provided the facts. This omittance, perhaps, suggested to the Victorian mind of a later generation that a dark secret lurked behind it, such as bastardy. And if an ancestor is to be thought a bastard, he might as well be a royal one.
Why any information regarding the family of George Coggill was omitted is entirely unknown and very curious, indeed, given his financial success and prominence in the New York business community. But doubtless it will remain unknown, barring some very lucky strike by a genealogist in the records of Yorkshire. He was married. Children were:
62 i.
George Coggill.
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