5. Justin du Rivage, Revolution against Empire: Taxes, Politics, and the Origins of American Independence (New Haven, 2017); Nick Bunker, Empire on the Edge: How Britain came to Fight in America (New York, 2014); P.J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America 1750–1783 (Oxford, 2007); R.R. Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolutions (Princeton, 1964); Lester Langley, The Americas in the Age of Revolution: 1750–1850 (New Haven, 1996); Jonathan Israel, Expanding the Blaze: How the American Revolution Ignited the World (Princeton, 2017); Janet Polasky, Revolution without Borders: The Call to Liberty in the Atlantic World (New Haven, 2015).
6. C.A. Bayly and Maya Jasanoff each illuminated some of the important consequences of the American War for the British Empire. Bayly has suggested that the post-war period saw a shift toward a more closely controlled, centrally governed empire, while Jasanoff has suggested that the experience of the loyalist diaspora after the war demonstrates the legacy of a “Spirit of 1783,” which encouraged expansion, liberal humanitarianism, and growth of a hierarchical centralization within the British Empire. Both accounts are surely correct, though neither considers the full scope of the British imperial world, nor how exactly this reorientation of the empire functioned in practice. C.A. Bayly, Imperial Meridians: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (London, 1989); Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York, 2011).
1 THE REVOLUTION COMES TO BRITAIN
1. Ignatius Sancho, The Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, An African (London, 1784), 269–70.
2. Ignatius Sancho, Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, An African (Cambridge, 2013), vol. 2, 174; Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker, London Lives: Poverty, Crime, and the Making of the Modern City (Cambridge, 2016), 349; Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (London, 2006), 336.
3. Sancho, Letters, vol. 2, 176–7; Hitchcock and Shoemaker, London Lives, 340, 349; Frances Burney, The Diary and Letters of Madame D’Arblay (London, 1843), vol. 1, 400–8.
4. Old Bailey Sessions Papers (OBSP), t17840915-146; Hitchcock and Shoemaker, London Lives, 353–5.
5. Richard Platt, Smuggling in the British Isles: A History (Stroud, 2011), 129–31.
6. Frank McLynn, Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth-century England (Oxford, 1991), 178–9.
7. Ibid., 172–92.
8. Platt, Smuggling, 48–9.
9. McLynn, Crime and Punishment, 179.
10. Ibid., 194.
11. Platt, Smuggling, 54–5.
12. McLynn, Crime and Punishment, 172.
13. Ibid., 184–95.
14. Ibid., 179, 195.
15. J.M. Beattie, Policing and Punishment in London, 1660–1750: Urban Crime and the Limits of Terror (Oxford, 2001), 424–32; Hitchcock and Shoemaker, London Lives, 363.
16. Douglas Hay, “War, Dearth and Theft in the Eighteenth Century: The Records of the English Court,” Past and Present 95 (May 1982): 125–42.
17. OBSP, t17830604-56.
18. OBSP, t17821204-7.
19. J.M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England, 1660–1800 (Princeton, 1986).
20. Douglas Hay, “Property, Authority and the Criminal Law,” in Douglas Hay et al., Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-century England (London, 1975).
21. Roger Ekirch, Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718–1775 (New York, 1987); Hitchcock and Shoemaker, London Lives, 322–3.
22. Maryland Gazette, November 2, 1775.
23. Ibid., April 10, 17, 24, 1751.
24. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D (London, 1823), vol. 3, 316; Benjamin Franklin as quoted in Emma Christopher, A Merciless Place: The Lost Story of Britain’s Convict Disaster in Africa (Oxford, 2011), 33; Paul Ford, ed., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul Ford (New York, 1894), vol. 4, 158–9.
25. The Parliamentary Register, or the History of the Proceedings and Debates of the House of Commons, vol. IV (London, 1776), 106.
26. Maryland Gazette, July 13, 1775.
27. Emily Jones Salmon, “Convict Labor during the Colonial Period,” Encyclopedia Virginia (Virginia Humanities and Library of Virginia, 2011, online).
28. Charles Davenant, An Essay on the probable Methods of making a People Gainers in the Balance of Trade (London, 1699), 50.
29. Hitchcock and Shoemaker, London Lives, 355.
30. Adam J. Hirsch, The Rise of the Penitentiary Prisons and Punishment in Early America (New Haven, 1992), 14–18.
31. Cesare Beccaria, Of Crimes and Punishments (London, 1778).
32. John Howard, The State of the Prisons (Warrington, 1777).
33. Ibid.
34. William Smith, The State of the Gaols in London, Westminster and the Borough of Southwark (London, 1776), 35–6, 76.
35. As quoted in, Hitchcock and Shoemaker, London Lives, 328–9.
36. London Magazine, vol. 46 (1777), 264; Town and Country Magazine, July 1779, 338.
37. Westminster Magazine, September 1778, 455.
38. Hitchcock and Shoemaker, London Lives, 334–7.
39. Jonas Hanway, Solitude in Imprisonment (London, 1776), 4.
40. The Universal Magazine, April 1782, 208.
41. Penitentiary Act of 1779, 19 George III, c. 74.
2 TREASON, TERROR, AND REACTION
1. Henry Clinton, “Manifesto and Proclamation to the Members of Congress,” May 1778. Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, GLC01032.
2. Horace Walpole, Journal of the Reign of King George the Third (London, 1859), vol. 2, 253–4, 277, 282, 284, 301, 303.
3. Sancho, Letters, vol. 2, 76–7. As quoted in Ian Haywood and John Seed, eds., The Gordon Riots: Politics and Insurrection in Late Eighteenth-century Britain (Cambridge, 2014), 2.
4. Haywood and Seed, The Gordon Riots, 2.
5. Robert Shoemaker, The London Mob: Violence and Disorder in Eighteenth-century England (London, 2007), 120–44; John Stevenson, Popular Disturbances in England, 1700–1832 (Abingdon, 1992), 81–4.
6. Arthur Cash, John Wilkes: Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty (New Haven, 2006), 231–3; Rivington’s Gazetteer, July 6, 1775.
7. Sancho, Letters, vol. 2, 88.
8. Ibid., 149–55.
9. The Letters of Horace Walpole, ed. Peter Cunningham (London, 1891), vol. VI, 423; vol. VII, 86.
10. Sancho, Letters, vol. 2, 169, 191; Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, 2014), 138–44.
11. London Public Advertiser, October 25, 1775; London Public Advertiser, October 26, 1775, November 30, 1775; Pennsylvania Gazette, January 31, 1776; Virginia Gazette, February 10, 1776; Maryland Gazette, February 8, 1776; The Pennsylvania Packet, January 29, 1776; Horace Walpole, Journal of the Reign of King George the Third, vol. I, 508–9; Julie Flavell, When London Was Capital of America (New Haven, 2010), 115–62.
12. As with all criminal confessions, John Aitken’s account of his life should be taken with a grain of salt. For one, he seems to have been prone to exaggeration and even outright falsehoods. In addition, by 1777, the confessions or last speeches of condemned criminals had become a familiar literary genre, with their own didactic conventions of the wages of sin and the repentant sinner. In such works, the gravity of the crimes only served to heighten the ultimate repentance before the gallows. The Life of James Aitken Commonly Called John the Painter (London, 1777).
13. Maryland Gazette, July 17, 1777.
14. The Life of James Aitken, 17–19.
15. Jessica Warner, John the Painter: Terrorist of the American Revolution (London, 2004), 92–6.
16. Public Advertiser, March 11, 1777.
17. Cited in William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution, 2nd edn (Oxford, 2003), 63–6; Peter McPhee, Liberty or Death: The French Revolution (New Haven, 2017), 37; Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York, 1990), 25.
18. Doyle, French Revolution, 66; Laura
Auricchio, The Marquis: Lafayette Reconsidered (New York, 2014), 28.
19. Doyle, French Revolution, 66.
20. Auricchio, The Marquis, 29.
21. Ibid., 32–3.
22. Warner, John the Painter, 111–15.
23. Thomas Schaeper, Edward Bancroft: Scientist, Author, Spy (New Haven, 2012).
24. Ibid.
25. Maryland Gazette, July 17, 1777 (reprinted from the London Evening Post).
26. Warner, John the Painter, 167–75.
27. Waterford Chronicle, March 18, 1777; Public Advertiser, March 11, 1777; Maryland Gazette, June 19, 1777.
28. Public Advertiser, March 13, 1777.
29. Waterford Chronicle, March 18, 1777. The account of Aitken’s passport followed directly a story about the French government’s solemn promise not to join the war on either side. The juxtaposition is telling.
30. Ibid.; Public Advertiser, March 13, 1777.
31. James Sharpe, “John the Painter: The First Modern Terrorist,” Journal of Forensic Psychiatry and Psychology 18(2) (2007): 278–81.
32. London Public Advertiser, March 8, 1777; Waterford Chronicle, March 18, 1777.
33. OBSP, o17770219-1; Paul Halliday, Habeas Corpus: From England to Empire (Cambridge, MA, 2010), 249–53.
34. Michael Franklin, Orientalist Jones: Sir William Jones, Poet, Lawyer, and Linguist, 1746–1794 (Oxford, 2011), 137–8; Halliday, Habeas Corpus, 252.
35. Walpole, Journal of the Reign of King George the Third, vol. 2, 342–3, 350.
36. T.M. Devine, Scotland’s Empire: The Origins of the Global Diaspora (London, 2012), 70–3; 171–7.
37. Walpole, Journal of the Reign of King George the Third, vol. 2, 297, 303, 337–8; Michael Fry, A Higher World: Scotland, 1707–1815 (Edinburgh, 2014), 136, 283.
38. Haywood and Seed, Gordon Riots, 3.
39. Ibid.
40. Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies, County Hall, Aylesbury, UK, D/LE/F3/33.
41. Haywood and Seed, Gordon Riots, 6; Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies, D/LE/F3/33.
42. Sancho, Letters, vol. 2, 169–72.
43. Linebaugh, The London Hanged, 334–41.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid., 7–8.
46. Sancho, Letters, vol. 2, 179–81.
47. William Hickey, Memoirs of William Hickey, ed. Albert Spencer (London, 1919), vol. II, 72, 78, 265; James Harris, A Series of Letters of the First Earl of Malmesbury (London, 1870), vol. 1, 462–5.
48. Hickey, Memoirs, vol. II, 265.
49. Ibid.; Sancho, Letters, vol. 2, 181–9;
50. Linebaugh, The London Hanged, 343–54; Nicholas Rogers, “The Gordon Riots and the Politics of War,” in Haywood and Seed, The Gordon Riots, 21–3.
51. Ibid., 347; Walpole, Journal of the Reign of King George the Third, vol. 2, 362.
52. OBSP, t17810711-1.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid; Madame d’Auberade, The Authentic Memoirs of Francis Henry de la Motte (London, 1784).
57. Hampshire Chronicle, August 31, 1782.
58. The official punishment for male traitors since 1351, hanging, drawing, and quartering was officially replaced by hanging and posthumous beheading in 1814. Edward Despard was the last man sentenced to the full punishment when he was charged with treason in 1803, but he was spared the complete ritual and was instead hanged and beheaded. Although his name has been largely forgotten by history, consigned to his fate as one of many who met his end at Tyburn, the trial and execution of François Henri de la Motte long resonated in the minds of Englishmen, first as the arch-fiend and bogeyman, and later as a potent symbol of a brutal and archaic judicial regime. When he wanted to conjure up a trial scene for A Tale of Two Cities pervaded by a sense of the inescapable grotesquerie and horror of eighteenth-century justice, Charles Dickens turned to the trial of François Henri de la Motte for a model. Dickens’ great contemporary rival, William Makepeace Thackeray, went even further, creating a fictionalized account of the tormented and dolorous life of de la Motte and his partner turned condemner, Henry Lutterloh. Neither work attempts to rehabilitate the spy’s image—even fifty years and more after the events a French traitor won little sympathy in Britain—but his legend was reworked to provide a sanguinary lesson on the brutality of English justice and the costs of revolution. Charles Dickens, Tale of Two Cities; William Makepeace Thackeray, Denis Duval.
59. David Lemmings, Law and Government in England During the Long Eighteenth Century (Basingstoke, 2011), 89–92.
60. Ibid., 93.
61. The Letters of Horace Walople, vol. VII, 403.
62. Ibid., 112–13; Drew Gray, Crime, Policing and Punishment in England, 1660–1914 (London, 2016); Stanley Palmer, Police and Protest in England and Ireland, 1780–1850 (Cambridge, 1988), 73.
3 REVOLUTION, REACTION, AND SECTARIANISM IN IRELAND
1. As quoted in Stephen Brumwell, Turncoat: Benedicta Arnold and the Crisis of American Liberty (New Haven, 2018), 217, 220.
2. Sancho, Letters, vol. 2, 91–2.
3. Jonah Barrington, Sketches from his Own Time (London, 1830), vol. 1, 86–7.
4. Middlesex Journal, February 23, 1776. Gay’s play, written in 1728, presented a trenchant opposition Whig critique of the ministry of Sir Robert Walpole, so it seems likely that the reference to rebellious Americans in the epilogue was added to calm the concerns of government supporters who may have seen the performance as a veiled attack on the ministry of 1776.
5. Henry Grattan, Memoirs of the Life and Times of Henry Grattan (London, 1839), 267–70; Jonah Barrington, The Rise and Fall of the Irish Nation (Dublin, 1868); 43; Thomas Bartlett, “Ireland, Empire, and Union, 1690–1801,” in Kevin Kenny ed., Ireland and the British Empire (Oxford, 2004).
6. Barrington, Rise and Fall of the Irish Nation, 43.
7. Grattan, Memoirs, 174, 208–9, 268.
8. Thomas Malone, The Life and Death of Lord Edward Fitzgerald (London, 1832), 9, 12, 16–17.
9. Barrington, Rise and Fall of the Irish Nation, 44.
10. Grattan, Memoirs, 342, 347–8.
11. Ibid., 348–9.
12. Barrington, Sketches from his Own Time, vol. 1, 86–7.
13. Barrington, Rise and Fall of the Irish Nation, 73–4.
14. Grattan, Memoirs, 286, 317, 336.
15. Barrington, Rise and Fall of the Irish Nation, 77–8.
16. Ibid., 81–2.
17. Ibid., 91.
18. Ibid., 115–20.
19. Ibid., 114, 128, 133.
20. Henry Grattan, Speeches of the Late Right Honourable Henry Grattan, in the Irish Parliament in 1780 and 1782 (London, 1821), vol. 1, 19.
21. Barrington, Rise and Fall of the Irish Nation, 180–3.
22. Grattan, Speeches, vol. 1, 4, 10, 18.
23. Christopher Wyvill, The Secession from Parliament Vindicated (York, 1799), 8.
24. Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (Oxford, 1994), 347–9; Frank O’Gorman, The Long Eighteenth Century (New York, 1997), 227–31.
25. Christopher Wyvill, Political Papers (London, 1794), vol. 3, 47, 70, 76, 115–16, 167.
26. Wyvill, Political Papers, vol. 3, 53; Walpole, Journal, vol. II, 359–61, 371–8, 384–90.
27. Barrington, Rise and Fall of the Irish Nation, 32–3.
28. Ibid., 44–5.
29. Grattan, Speeches, vol. 1, 144, 158–9.
30. Ibid., 133–4.
31. Ibid., 133.
32. Ibid., 101–2.
33. Ibid.
34. Thomas Bartlett, Ireland: A History (Cambridge, 2010), 178–9.
35. Warden Flood, Memoirs of Henry Flood (Dublin, 1844), 144–7.
36. Grattan, Speeches, vol. 1, 98–102.
37. Flood, Memoirs of Henry Flood, 191, 235–9.
38. Ibid., 176.
39. Ibid., 148, 261.
40. Grattan, Speeches, vol. 1, 291–5.
41. Ibid., vol. 2, 2–6.
42. Jonathan Bardon, A History of Ulster (Belfast, 1993), 223–5.
43. As quoted in ibid., 226.
44. Malone, Life and Death of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, 173.
45. Ibid., 275.
46. Ibid., 28
47. Barrington, Sketches from his Own Time, vol. 1, 270–3.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid., 274–5.
50. Ibid., 276–7.
51. Franklin and Mary Wickwire, Cornwallis: The Imperial Years (Chapel Hill, 1980), 243.
52. Linda Colley, Britons, 145–52; Eliga Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, 2002).
4 HORATIO NELSON AND THE IMPERIAL STRUGGLE IN SPANISH AMERICA
1. Anon., The Trial of Edward Marcus Despard for High Treason (London, 1803), 174–5, 186, 208–9.
2. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (London, 2013), 272–81.
3. John Sugden, Nelson: A Dream of Glory (London, 2004), 153–72; Benjamin Mosely, A Treatise on Tropical Diseases (London, 1789); Thomas Dancer, A Brief History of the Late Expedition Against Fort San Juan (London, 1781).
4. Roger Knight, The Pursuit of Victory: The Life and Achievements of Horatio Nelson (New York, 2005), 59. In 1792 HMS Lion would be the ship that carried Lord Maratney on his famous diplomatic mission to China.
5. Nicholas Harris, ed., The Dispatches and Letters of Vice Admiral Lord Viscount Nelson, ed. Nicholas Harris Nicolas (London, 1845), 48.
6. Ibid.
7. Horatio Nelson, Sketch of my Life, in The Dispatches and Letters of Vice Admiral Lord Viscount Nelson, ed. Nicholas Nicolas, 3; Knight, Pursuit of Victory, 28–33.
8. Nelson, Sketch of My Life, 1–4.
9. Ibid., 5.
10. Nelson to Captain Maurice Suckling, April 19, 1778, in Nelson: The New Letters, ed. Colin White (Woodbridge, 2005), 131–2.
11. Thomas Chavez, Spain and the Independence of the United States (Albuquerque, 2002), 23–8.
12. Ibid., 29–32.
13. Ibid., 31.
14. Sam Willis, The Struggle for Sea Power: A Naval History of the American Revolution (London, 2016), 252.
15. Ibid., 255–6.
16. Ibid., 255; Dispatches and Letters of Vice Admiral Lord Viscount Nelson, 25–26, 34.
17. Nelson, Sketch of My Life, 5–7; Knight, Pursuit of Victory, 602–3, 663.
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