To Begin the World Over Again

by Matthew Lockwood

  As the war in America intensified waves of loyalists and other refugees arrived in Britain fleeing the violence and chaos of the colonies. Among the floodtide of men, women, and children pouring into British ports, few had anything on their minds other than escape and survival. Some, however, dove into the tumultuous world of political advocacy and intrigue. Others sought to help the war effort in other small ways, printing propaganda, raising funds, and passing on information. Few among them, however, arrived on British shores with plans as radical as John Aitken. Aitken was a Scotsman by birth, born to a blacksmith in Edinburgh in 1752, the eighth of twelve children. Although he received a decent education at George Heriot’s Hospital, his apprenticeship to a painter—the source of his later nom de guerre—did not stick and when his indenture was up he cycled through a series of menial occupations before deciding that crime was perhaps the profession best suited to his restless personality. In his memoir-cum-confession, Aitken admitted to a litany of criminal acts committed in the course of his wanderings throughout Britain, ranging from the mundane (shoplifting and burglary) to the daring and the reprehensible (highway robbery and rape).12 While he remained at large, the would-be painter’s proclivity for crime did not go unnoticed, and, worried that the authorities were closing in, Aitken signed indentures in exchange for passage to America, arriving in Virginia in 1773.

  The long arm of the law was not the only thing that drove the young Scotsman to the New World, and in words that deftly capture his insouciant brand of restless romanticism, he later claimed to have been led to America by “curiosity,” “as an adventurer, to seek his fortune.”13 The wanderlust and inability to stick to a calling that led Aitken from Edinburgh to London to Jamestown did not let up on the western shores of the Atlantic, and he quickly skipped out on his indenture and roamed the colonial countryside from Virginia to North Carolina, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts. The newly arrived immigrant did not, perhaps unsurprisingly, pick up a profession in his ramblings, but as he traveled up and down the colonies he began to absorb the political teachings so prevalent in America in the 1770s. Aitken had always been a young man in search of something, a sense of purpose, a calling, a place in the world that would garner him notice and respect. Whatever he was looking for in his years of wandering, whatever drove him from his home in Scotland to the shores of the Chesapeake, he had found what he sought in the radical political message of the nascent independence movement.14

  For a restless young journeyman with few prospects, the atmosphere of revolutionary America must have been intoxicating, full of possibility, stirring rhetoric, and bold action. Aitken was quickly entranced by what he heard and what he read. Aitken was almost certainly exposed to the works of Thomas Paine and other polemicists of the day, but of all the political tracts published in the 1770s, Aitken chose as his unlikely call to arms Richard Price’s Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, the Principles of Government and the Justice and Policy of the War with America. Price, a Welsh Unitarian minister, was one of the most influential moral philosophers of the eighteenth century, admired by many on the political left and visited by a who’s who of illustrious Patriots, including Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and John Adams. His Observations were widely read in both Britain and America, where his forceful defense of American self-determination in response to British intransigence was well received by those with radical republican sympathies. Price did not in any way encourage violence, but his justification of rebellion as self-defense clearly appealed to the aimless Aitken and helped cement the political positions he had acquired in America.15

  Armed and inspired by the rhetoric of liberty and revolution, in March 1775 John Aitken joined the waves of refugees departing America for exile in Britain. But while he shared quarters, meals, and long, cramped hours with the refugees, the young Scotsman did not share their melancholy resignation at quitting the turbulent colonies for the metropole. Instead of feeling a mixture of defeat and relief, Aitken was alive with a heady and dangerous ambition, determined to strike a blow for American liberties, a blow that would cripple the British navy and bring him the notoriety he had long desired. As he later confessed, he had devised a plan to target British shipyards as soon as the troubles in America began, and he set out for England with the thought of burning down the ships of the Royal Navy “continually running in his mind,” and committed to viewing and inspecting the dockyards and shipping of Britain to see how they might best be attacked.16

  Aitken did not have to go far to begin his surveillance of British naval yards. Upon arriving in London in October 1775 he quickly enlisted in the 32nd regiment at Gravesend, which, with the newly recruited Scot in tow, marched off to Chatham the next day. Chatham was home to a royal dockyard stretching for more than a mile along the River Medway near the coast of Kent on the North Sea. A center of British shipbuilding since the sixteenth century, though superseded by Portsmouth and Plymouth in the eighteenth century, Chatham still remained a vital shipyard and a potent symbol of British naval power. It was also famous in English memories as the site of one of its greatest military humiliations, the burning of the English fleet by the Dutch admiral Michiel de Ruyter during the Second Anglo-Dutch War in 1667. This connection with previous military defeat and with the burning of ships may well have been the reason Aitken was originally drawn to Chatham upon his return from America.

  The army, however, was not the place for a restless would-be terrorist, and Aitken deserted a short time after arriving in Chatham. Perhaps he had completed his inspection of the vulnerabilities of the Chatham naval yard, or perhaps the security at Chatham was too robust, but whatever the reason, Aitken shifted his attention to another vital naval station, Portsmouth, on the south coast. By 1776, Portsmouth had replaced Chatham at the heart of British naval power and thus perhaps a more appropriate target for one seeking to strike a blow against the British war machine. As at Chatham, Aitken surveyed the docks and shipyards and their associated buildings, taking note of security measures and contemplating the best way to start fires undetected.

  Having completed his sketches of the various naval yards and plans for his incendiary attack, Aitken set out for France. He had planned to return to America, hoping to show his plans to the Continental Congress. In the end, however, the journey was too dangerous and too costly in a time of war, and thus Aitken turned his sights on the nearest representative of the fledgling American government, the congressional representative in Paris. After a harrowing journey in a small packet ship across the Channel, constantly in fear of discovery by the many soldiers and spies infesting the English coast, Aitken landed in France in mid-October 1776 and quickly made his way to the capital.

  In Paris, Aitken made a beeline for the home of Silas Deane, the newly minted American ambassador to France. France had already become interested in America and its conflict with Britain when the fighting broke out in Massachusetts in 1775. In the eighteenth century America had come to represent a natural paradise free from the vices that riddled the old world, a land of simplicity, honesty, and liberty, a Rousseau-ian paradise, and a potent antidote to the vapid artificiality of a decaying France. In a culture already suffused with shared ideals of liberty and freedom, the American struggle for independence from European despotism was greeted in France with interest and sympathy. Paris buzzed with talk of America, and American pamphlets like Thomas Paine’s Common Sense became bestsellers. The leading figures of the revolution became national heroes. Washington and Franklin in particular were enormously popular, model men, the flesh and blood personification of the ideals of the age: Washington, the stoic, modest citizen-soldier, a throwback to the virtues of the classical world, and Franklin the citizen philosopher, the embodiment of simple truths and homespun wisdom, the Enlightenment come to life. The cause and its heroes struck a chord in France, providing a stark contrast to the hedonism of the French court in a country increasingly disgusted by it.

  That such a vibrant new nat
ion should be locked in combat with France’s perennial nemesis only made the whole affair more appealing. For, above all, to the French the American fight for independence represented a long-wished-for opportunity to restore the wealth, power, and prestige lost during the Seven Years’ War. That war had seen Britain in the ascendant and France humbled and humiliated across the globe from North America to India. In its wake, the French empire lay nearly in ruins, with its East India Company barely able to make a profit, while British might and British trade expanded by leaps and bounds. For this national shame, France had to take vengeance, and Britain, “the modern Carthage” to France’s Rome, brought low. Looking back at his own motivations for joining the war, the Comte de Ségur remembered that “we were tired of the longueur of peace that had lasted tens [of] years, and each of us burned with a desire to repair the affronts of the last wars, to fight the English and to fly to repair the American cause.”17

  Preparations for a future war with Britain had begun almost before the guns had cooled in 1763. In the years after the war, France’s powerful foreign minister, the Duc de Choiseul, began to rebuild the French navy, sure that naval power was the key to success against the British going forward. In 1768 he went so far as to send the German mercenary captain, Baron de Kalb, to America to weigh the prospects of an eventual American rebellion. Within France, others, like the Comte de Vergennes, were convinced that the removal of the French threat to Britain’s American colonies after the Seven Years’ War would eventually sow the seeds of civil war, giving the colonies the security needed to strike “off their chains.” By 1776 Vergennes, now France’s increasingly influential foreign minister, was sure that the conflict in North America presented France with a golden opportunity. In 1775, he sent Julien Alexandre Achard de Bonvouloir to America as a secret agent, tasked with making contact with influential American rebels and assessing the prospects of a colonial victory. In Philadelphia de Bonvouloir conferred with the renowned Benjamin Franklin about the possibility of a Franco-American alliance against their common enemy. No formal agreement was reached, but with sources everywhere alerting him to the potential offered by the emerging conflict, Vergennes urged Louis XVI to intervene in North America, arguing that at last, “providence had marked out this moment for the humiliation of England.”18

  Not everyone was as convinced as Vergennes. The queen, Marie-Antoinette, was said to oppose intervention, as did conservatives more generally, fearing that aiding a republican rebellion against a legitimate monarch, even a British one, set a dangerous precedent. Others, like the former finance minister Turgot, warned with remarkable foresight that the costs of another imperial war would be too much to bear. “The first gunshot,” he predicted, “will drive the state to bankruptcy,” beggaring France without necessarily weakening Britain. In America too, the prospect of a French alliance seemed difficult to stomach. Catholic France had long been the bête noire of the firmly Protestant colonies, a source of conflict and anxiety throughout the eighteenth century. The colonies desperately needed outside aid if they were to defeat the most powerful empire on earth, but the idea still rankled many.19

  With such concerted opposition on both sides of the Atlantic, France moved slowly at first. From 1776, France, directed by the spiderlike Vergennes, negotiated a system of clandestine aid with Silas Deane, and later with his replacement Benjamin Franklin. America desperately needed supplies, arms, and expertise from France. This represented a considerable French investment in a cause with uncertain prospects for success, but Deane was able to offer one thing that the French greatly coveted: access to American markets previously closed to them by Britain’s Navigation Acts. If victorious, Deane suggested, a “great part of our commerce will naturally fall to the share of France.” Sure that replacing the British as the prime beneficiary of the ever-expanding American market would more than make up for the costs incurred by aiding the colonies, neatly negating Turgot’s grim prediction, in July 1776 Vergennes agreed to funnel much-needed money and supplies to the rebels through a company set up by the playwright Pierre Beaumarchais.20

  It was not just French guns, clothing, and money that secretly flowed across the Atlantic after 1776. The romantic fight for liberty had captured the imagination of many young men, and the prospects of glory, position, and reward led a host of Europeans to offer their services to the United States even as their own countries remained officially neutral. Led by the Comte de Broglie and the Bavarian soldier of fortune Johannes de Kalb, Silas Deane was soon swamped by French and German officers jockeying for positions in the American army. “Had I ten ships here,” Deane informed Congress, “I could fill them all with passengers for America.” So great did the press of officers become that Deane noted that he felt “nigh harassed to death” by offers to join the Continental Army. Overwhelmed by applications he might well have been, but Deane had enough foresight to see that European officers would provide badly needed expertise and legitimacy to the American war effort. And so he did not hesitate to grant lofty commissions to scores of French officers.21

  Silas Deane’s role in securing foreign mercenaries to fight in America was an open secret, so it is no surprise that Aitken, intent on becoming an American mercenary as well, would seek him out. Although Deane’s lodgings at the Hotel d’Antraigues were regularly swarming with foreign fortune-hunters seeking to gain a commission in the American army (in the course of his time in Paris Deane would recruit such luminaries as the Marquis de Lafayette, Thomas Conway, Casimir Pulaski, and Baron von Steuben to the American cause), Aitken eventually managed to secure two meetings with the American agent. At the first meeting Aitken, who Deane thought had the “sparkling and wild” eyes of a “zealot or a madman,” claimed that “though I may appear to your honor a very weak and insignificant creature, yet if you will give me another audience I will show you from the intelligence I can give you that I can strike a blow, ay, such a blow as will need no repetition.” He would give no firm details other than that he had visited all the “principal ports” of England. At the second meeting, Aitken laid out his plan to set fire to the naval yards and shipping at Portsmouth, Plymouth and Bristol. Although he had a detailed plan of attack, Deane was skeptical, sure that Aitken would be caught immediately. Ever bold, Aitken claimed he had devised an incendiary device, a sort of lighter that would allow him enough time to escape a naval yard before the blaze was noticed. In a move that finally clinched Deane’s support, Aitken even showed reluctant ambassador blueprints of the device, a device that was small enough to be easily concealed, but would, in the words of one historian, “smolder for hours before bursting into flames.” With Deane’s consent, a small sum of money and the promise of a future reward if successful, Aitken returned to England, determined to finally set his plan in motion.22

  Back in England in November 1776, Aitken chose his first target, the naval docks of Portsmouth. Aitken had devised a simple but ingenious plan. First, he had an apprentice brazier make several of the incendiary devices he had described to Deane in Paris—approaching a master brazier might have aroused suspicions as to the purpose of the device. Second, he placed the devices in a hemp-drying house and a rope-making house in the dockyard and lit a third fire in his lodging house. The lodging house fire was intended to serve as a diversion. Aitken hoped that lighting this fire first, while the devices in the hemp house and rope house were still smoldering, would draw the fire-fighting services away from the dockyard. If all worked as planned, by the time the fires in the dockyard were noticed, it would be too late to move the fire-fighting equipment quickly enough to battle the flames effectively. The plan worked to some degree (though the hemp and rope house fires failed to spread to the ships as he had hoped), and with the fires glowing in the distance, Aitken fled in haste to London, hurried on by the certain belief that the authorities were in hot pursuit.23

  Even in the buzzing hive of London with its throngs and multitudes, Aitken was sure he was only one step ahead of the law. He needed a place of refuge. In
Paris, Silas Deane had given the ambitious arsonist the name of an American contact in Westminster, and, hoping to receive the promised aid from a fellow Patriot, Aitken made a beeline for the house of Edward Bancroft. Little did he know, as few did, Edward Bancroft was in fact a double agent. Bancroft had been born in Massachusetts and raised in Connecticut, where he was educated by Silas Deane before embarking on a career as a plantation doctor in Dutch Guiana. While in South America, Bancroft’s moonlighting as a naturalist—he wrote an influential early account of the electric eel—brought him to the attention of Benjamin Franklin. Bancroft had relocated to London in 1769 and since 1776 had, at Franklin and Deane’s behest, agreed to act as a spy for the Americans. What Deane did not know was that Bancroft was in fact supplying information to the British authorities, relaying accounts of Deane’s activities in Paris and even helping to scupper American attempts to buy ships from Europe.24

  For Bancroft, the arrival at his door of an agent in service to America was a highly dangerous and vexing turn of events. He could not very well hide a wanted man in his own home without drawing the suspicions of his British contacts. Nor could he completely ignore a man sent by the American representative in Paris without potentially alerting his supposed allies to his double-dealing. At first, Bancroft refused to hide Aitken, but when the Scot cryptically replied that he “would soon see or hear, by the papers, of an extraordinary accident,” Bancroft agreed to meet him again the following day. The arsonist and the double agent met for a second time at a coffee-house where Aitken pledged to the American that “he would do all the prejudice he could to this kingdom.” Bancroft, who had turned to spying for the British because of his dislike of the independence movement, was not a sympathetic audience for the ravings of an unstable radical. He told Aitken that “he could not be of an opinion with him in that respect, for that he got his bread in that kingdom [Britain] and therefore would not be concerned with him.” Fearing that Bancroft would give him up, Aitken begged him not to inform the authorities. Although Aitken did not know it, Bancroft was playing both sides and was thus in no position to expose him and merely sent the Scotsman on his way.25