Sir Frederick Philipse Robinson, GCB was a soldier who fought for Britain during the American War of Independence. His father, Colonel Beverley Robinson, was a Virginian who moved to New York, marrying a wealthy heiress of the Philipse family with Dutch and Bohemian ancestry, Susanna Philipse. Frederick was born in the Hudson Highlands on the family estate in the Philipse Patent, today's Putnam County, New York, in September 1763.

Beverley Robinson, was a Virginia-born soldier who became a wealthy colonist of the Province of New York and is best known as a Loyalist during the American Revolutionary War. Robinson married Susanna Philipse, heiress to a significant share of the roughly 250 square miles (650 km2) Highland Patent on the lower Hudson River in the Province of New York.