With little assistance forthcoming in the capital, and much left to burn, Aitken left London, making his way through High Wycombe, Oxford, and Abingdon, funding his journey by means of a series of burglaries, break-ins, and petty thefts, before turning south-west toward Plymouth and another of the great naval dockyards. In Plymouth—and later at Woolwich—Aitken made several attempts on the shipyards, but security was too tight and he never got further than the top of the wall surrounding the station. His lack of success, combined with fears that he would not go unnoticed for long, drove Aitken from Plymouth to yet another vital port, Bristol, on the River Avon near its entrance into the Irish Sea. After yet another series of abortive attempts, Aitken succeeded in setting a dockside warehouse on fire, once more employing his home-made incendiary device. Bristol was heavily involved in trade with America and, in an ironic twist, some of the damaged property belonged to an American merchant.
The nation was now on edge. Fires had been set deliberately in multiple cities and rumors of an American conspiracy were spreading rapidly with each new fire immediately seen as part of the plot, whatever its true cause. With the country panicked and no leads forthcoming, the Admiralty turned to the venerable Sir John Fielding, England’s foremost expert on criminal investigation and its most famous magistrate. He suggested a two-pronged strategy: the offer of a £1,000 reward for the anonymous incendiarist’s capture and the printing of descriptions of the suspect in consecutive issues of a wide range of newspapers, including Fielding’s Hue and Cry. For all its apparent simplicity, Fielding’s plan worked and Aitken was quickly apprehended in Hampshire by a man whose shop Aitken had attempted to rob and another local who recognized his image from the newspapers.26
In a letter to the Waterford Chronicle in Ireland, one witness dolefully described the execution of John Aitken at Portsmouth on March 10, 1777: “This morning John the Painter brought here from Winchester, attended by the under-sheriff, and hung near the dock gates on a gibbet sixty-five feet high, amidst an amazing concourse of people.” Before he reached the unusually tall gibbet—in fact the mizzenmast of a naval ship refitted for the purpose—and the waiting crowd of over 20,000 spectators, Aitken had been “conducted from the gaol in this town in a cart, through the Quat-gate to the common; after which they proceeded round the rope house where the fire happened, that he might himself be witness to the devastation he had occasioned.” Most reports mentioned that he was calm, resolute, and even humorous on his way to the gallows—just as Guy Fawkes, England’s great traitorous boogeyman, had been when facing execution after his attempt to blow up Parliament almost two hundred years earlier one paper suggested. As was customary, at the gallows he made a speech to the assembled crowd. Some reports had it that he admitted his guilt and the justness of his execution. Others suggested he was only sorry he had not been able to fulfill his plans—“I intended to give a stab in the side, but it has only been a slight scratch in the hand.” One account even reported that he had disavowed the American cause, “wishing success to his majesty’s arms, against a set of rascals and villainous rebels now in America.” Whatever he said to the crowd, he faced his execution with dignity. Immediately after his death, his body was moved to another gibbet set up on the beach at the entrance to Portsmouth harbor, a message to all who entered of the fate of arsonists and traitors.27
The reaction in Britain to this new and terrible form of warfare was a mixture of shock, apprehension, and vitriolic condemnation. For many, the actions of John the Painter were the logical culmination of American revolutionary principles. The conflict had begun with bloody rhetoric, violence, riot, and rebellion, and such grisly words and deeds had led ineluctably to the terrorism of Portsmouth and Bristol. Since Aitken had admitted to reading and taking inspiration from Richard Price’s Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, much spleen was vented in his direction. In a letter to the Public Advertiser one commentator castigated Price and others of his ilk for riling up the masses and stoking the fires of rebellion.
I must not desist from laying before you and the People who you would seduce to Rebellion one declaratory Instance of the nefarious Consequences of your Tenants; an Instance avowedly founded on your Principles, and which more than threatened the most deplorable of all Calamities, a general conflagration. John the Painter, by Nature a villain, and by Religion a Presbyterian, was perfectly prepared to receive your Doctrines of Liberty . . . These Doctrines falling on his Head, like sparks of Fire on Gunpowder, gave full Explosion to his Iniquities, and inflamed his soul to prove that he was truly your disciple. Conscious that he was able to act, convinced the Freedom consisted of the Power of self-determination and self-government, he resolved to be free, and stand or fall by your Principles, and forthwith set fire to Portsmouth and to Bristol.28
For the author, as for many in Britain and America who opposed or feared the revolution, the problem was not that Price or Paine or other writers specifically encouraged violence. The problem was that such writings encouraged people, especially the common people who they thought had little understanding of political philosophy, to believe that they had the power, the freedom, or the liberty to act as they wished, to take matters into their own hands for their own ends. Such political principles presaged danger, the opening of a Pandora’s box of mob rule and political chaos. Price may not have advocated arson, but by encouraging people to seize their liberties and freedoms and by advocating self-government, he might as well have put the torch in Aitken’s hands. Such rhetoric was bound to set the mob ablaze.
While some castigated the American rebels and their British supporters, others found distinctly familiar sources of fear, pointing the finger at France. It was known that Aitken had traveled to France to receive his instructions, and several newspapers published details of his French passport, which had also been presented as evidence at his trial. Though the passport was perfectly normal, the insinuation was made by several papers that while France was officially neutral, secret aid was being given to the American cause by supporting and encouraging men such as John the Painter. Fears of French involvement in the war had been present from the earliest days, and such fears would only increase as the years progressed.29
Whether the ultimate source of anxiety lay in America, France, or Britain, all agreed that the actions of John the Painter set a worrying precedent. Newspapers all over Britain and Ireland nervously reported Aitken’s boast that had he evaded capture, “the consequence must have been fatal to the kingdom.” If any were foolish enough to breathe a sigh of relief at the arsonist’s capture, however, they were quickly disabused of their feelings of security by Aitken’s advice that the authorities should be “particularly cautious who was admitted into any of the Docks, as he had reason to think other attempts would be made.” In reality, Aitken had no reason other than his own fevered imagination to believe other attacks were imminent, but his words of warning certainly had an effect on the mindset of Britons thereafter. As long as the radical, incendiary principles of the American rebels and British provocateurs like Richard Price and Thomas Paine were allowed to circulate, they argued, other arsonists would surely follow. “But what avails it,” one vocal critic cried:
that one Villain has been executed, when the Man [Price] and his principles, by which the Villain was seduced and justified, are still in full Powers to spread their Corruptions through the world? Will not the same motives instigate other Johns and other villains to perpetrate the like detestable acts of Conflagration? . . . One savage beast is put to death, but the parental origin from which he sprung is still surviving to engender others equally destructive.
In British eyes, John the Painter was perhaps the first of many radical terrorists still to come.30
Despite the different historical context, the clothes, the language, and the characters, the career of John Aitken has all the hallmarks of a modern terrorist. As a youth he was restless and purposeless, having difficulty finding a place or a profession in his local world. This restivenes
s in turn led to an escalating criminal career, moving from petty crime to serious felonies. Like many twenty-first-century terrorists who travel abroad and return home radicalized, Aitken was radicalized overseas, latching on to a radical rhetoric in the excitement and chaos of a civil war. He then returned home bent on proving his commitment to his new cause by attacking some of the most visible symbols of British power, the navy. Although he believed his actions to be sanctioned and directed by leaders of his movement, like modern terrorists Aitken largely acted on his own initiative with little central direction or even approval from the leaders of the movement of which he felt part. Finally, although he acted in the name of a specific cause, Aitken’s actions were also, in large measure, an attempt by a purposeless young man to gain the notice and respect of the world that had long ignored him.31
While Aitken’s attacks on the dockyards of Portsmouth and Bristol had a negligible practical effect on the British war effort, they did have a psychological impact familiar in cases of modern terrorism. Fears of similar attacks were rampant in the wake of Aitken’s capture. The outrage and shock was palpable, as was the fear that once such an act was publicly known, imitators would not be far behind. “Firing of Dock-yards is such a Crime so uncommonly atrocious and so much of a public Calamity and which every Power in Europe may be object of,” one newspaper cried, “if once the Success of it be tried” the perpetrators should be treated as “offenders against the Law of Honour and the Law of Nations.” By 1777 steps were being taken to prevent what seemed like the inevitable future attempts at deliberate arson in the name of rebellion. Edmund Burke, no enemy of the American cause, proposed a bill in Parliament to “secure the nation’s ports, docks, dockyards and shipping from fire” and to institute more severe punishment upon those who might “attempt to set the same on fire.” Though the war would continue much the same as before, the home front would never be the same again. Terrorism had made its first mark on British soil.32
At the same time that Aitken was burning his way through Britain’s dockyards, British authorities began to crack down on sedition throughout the empire. In 1776 Ebenezer Platt, a 24-year-old Patriot from Georgia, was arrested at Savannah and charged with diverting a shipment of arms and ammunition intended for pro-British forces to the Continental Army. Charged with treason, Platt was transferred to Jamaica for trial only to be acquitted. Instead of releasing Platt after his acquittal, the authorities sent him to England still in chains. In England supporters of Platt—who would come to include such luminaries as Benjamin West, Benjamin Franklin, and William Jones—managed to secure a writ of habeas corpus, legally requiring the government to either try Platt or release him.
Platt presented a dilemma for the British authorities. Under normal circumstances, no one could be tried in Britain for an offense committed in another dominion, nor could anyone be tried a second time on charges of which he had already been acquitted. But these were not normal circumstances. In the context of the American War, setting Platt free would set a dangerous precedent. If the government released Platt and admitted that he could not be held indefinitely without trial, they could not continue to hold the hundreds of captured American sailors imprisoned in British hulks. Rather than hold these sailors as prisoners of war, which would tacitly confirm the colonies’ claims of independence, the American captives were held as criminals—traitors and pirates—who thus should have been eligible for habeas corpus. So instead of either trying or freeing Platt, in February of 1777, Lord North introduced a bill to suspend habeas corpus. Suspending habeas corpus would allow the American prisoners to be held indefinitely without trial while not admitting their status as prisoners in a war between independent sovereign powers.33
In its original context, the 1777 suspension act was targeted at suspected traitors and rebels in North America or on the high seas rather than those in Britain, but even this narrow suspension of habeas corpus raised the hackles of Britons already alarmed by growing ministerial power. The opposition Whig leader Charles James Fox, eloquent to a fault, charged that the act “strides not only to destroy the liberty of America, but this country likewise.” John Wilkes feared the suspension would “arm the ministers with an unconstitutional power,” while Granville Sharp, reformer, evangelical, and future abolitionist, thought the act proof of “the haughty omnipotence of Parliament, the Pope of England!” As ever, the cries of the reformers went unheeded, but they were right to worry. The 1776 Habeas Corpus Act ushered in a number of consequential innovations. Habeas corpus had been suspended before in times of acute crisis, but only for a limited period (usually no more than five months) specifically stipulated in the legislation. After 1777, suspensions could be and were extended indefinitely. Indeed, as the American crisis deepened and new threats appeared closer to home, the suspension of habeas corpus, “the Great Writ of Liberty,” would be renewed again and again until 1783. Platt’s case had been a rallying point for opposition to the government and its heavy-handed trampling of British liberties. But the reformers’ ultimate failure to prevent the suspension of habeas corpus was a sign that the mood in Britain was shifting away from the radicals and toward a more conservative outlook that welcomed authoritarian measures in the name of national defense and public safety.34
In the years after Aitken’s execution and Platt’s sedition, troubling disturbances continued to rock Britain, pushing more and more moderates toward the support of authoritarian measures. In 1779, further riots broke out in London after the acquittal of Admiral Keppel at a court-martial for treason. An opposition Whig and opponent of the war with America, Keppel was a vocal critic of Britain’s naval deficiencies and only agreed to undertake active service in the navy with the entrance of France into the war in 1778. He quickly saw action at the Battle of Ushant off the coast of France in 1778. The battle was inconclusive but perceived to be a British failure by many, leading to back-biting, recrimination, and accusations of treason between Keppel and his second-in-command Sir Hugh Palliser. Keppel believed that as he was an opponent of the current government, Lord Sandwich, the first Lord of the Admiralty, and Palliser, a member of the Admiralty Board, wished to see him fail and were actively conspiring to undermine his command. When Keppel was brought before a court-martial and accused of treason, many in London viewed the affair as a politically motivated prosecution designed to attack a member of the opposition. The trial thus became a patriotic cause célèbre, and Keppel’s eventual acquittal was greeted with riots targeting Lord Sandwich and members of the government.
When the news of the acquittal broke on February 11, 1779, Palliser fled Portsmouth at five in the morning to take refuge in the Admiralty. In London, windows were illuminated in a time-honored show of support, guns were fired, and firecrackers set off. A house in Pall Mall formerly belonging to Palliser was looted and its windows smashed, as were the windows of Lord Mulgrave, Captain Hood, Lord Germaine, and Lord Lilburne. A panicked Lord Sandwich was forced to escape through his garden, “exceedingly terrified,” with his mistress. On February 20, a reluctant Admiral Keppel was granted the freedom of the City of London, his carriage pulled through the streets to a dinner in his honor at a London tavern. Windows were once more illuminated in Keppel’s honor and those who failed to show their support had their windows smashed, including members of the opposition such as Charles James Fox. Three rioters were arrested, but so great were the fears of further disorder that none were actually convicted.35
Scotland was beset by turmoil and tumult as well. Many in Scotland had opposed the war with America based on commercial interests, especially the great tobacco merchants of Glasgow who relied on American supplies of the commodity. By the 1760s, Scotland had a stranglehold on the American tobacco trade, controlling as much as 98 per cent of American exports and importing as many as 47 million pounds per annum, one-third of total Scottish imports. With such deep commercial ties, Scotland and America were closely bound, and these ties only increased with significant Scottish immigration to America in the e
ighteenth century. With these immigrants came the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment, the ideas of David Hume, Adam Smith, Lord Kames, and William Robertson. The work of these Scottish thinkers was transmitted by influential Scottish immigrants such as John Witherspoon, President of the College of New Jersey, and William Smith of the College of Philadelphia, and in turn provided much of the intellectual framework for the colonies’ fight for independence.36
In September 1778, a Scottish regiment mutinied in Edinburgh after rumors spread that they were to be sent to the developing theater of war in India. The riots saw “400 banditti keep 50,000 people in awe and alarm” and convinced many that it was impossible to conduct a war on so many fronts and keep the home front safe and secure. But the real trouble came in 1779 when major riots broke out in Edinburgh and Glasgow in response to an attempt to push the Catholic Relief Act upon the Scots. In January, opposition to the extension of the Relief Act began to gather steam among Scottish Presbyterians, with the Scottish Kirk coming out publicly against the bill at the end of the month. Instigated by the Church, mobs rose in Glasgow and Edinburgh. In Edinburgh, rioters destroyed two Catholic “mass-houses” and accosted two Catholic lords. The university was also attacked, as the historian and principal of the university, Dr. Robertson, was regarded as one of the most vocal proponents of Catholic Relief. The riot was only quelled when the bill was withdrawn and Lord Weymouth, one of Scotland’s secretaries of state, agreed to pen a letter to the Scottish clergy promising that the administration had no plans to relax restrictions against Catholics in Scotland. Pushed through in an attempt to appease Irish Catholics and secure Catholic troops, after France’s entry into the war in 1778, Catholic Relief became an object of fear for many in Britain.37
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