RADICAL DUKE

A sidelong history that highlights the British forebears and contemporary champions of the American Revolution.

Thomas Paine, perhaps the best-known British supporter of the American colonial rebellion, worked as a tax collector for a time and then disappeared, only to turn up in Philadelphia. What he did in the interim, Harvard political scientist Allen reveals in a brilliant act of archival detective work, was to hone his skills as a radical pamphleteer bankrolled by the Duke of Richmond. An aristocratic soldier, the duke was, as Allen writes, “the first member of the House of Lords to propose recognizing American independence,” understandably earning the wrath of King George III in the bargain. It would not be the first nor the last time the duke defied the crown. Paine’s engagement with Richmond produced the Letters of Junius, a radical ancestor of both Common Sense and, in some respects, of the Federalist Papers. As Allen fluently documents, Richmond’s agitations came at a time when, in the so-called Age of Reason, monarchies were collapsing across Europe. But even though his political activities were the forerunners of modern British party politics in which “aristocrats themselves—the Duke of Richmond first among them—had begun to play a role in the radical project of reform,” Richmond was, in the end, a member of a loyal opposition. George’s head may have rolled in that time of uprising and revolution, but instead, working with the young prime minister William Pitt, Richmond and George “were able to fashion the parameters of modern constitutional monarchy,” thus explaining why Britain has a monarch and America does not. Beyond that, Allen adds, Richmond’s pragmatic devotion to Enlightenment ideals in the remade British Empire contributed to universal suffrage, the abolition of slavery, and other reforms “kept constantly alive by little more than stubbornness.”

An exemplary account of the American Revolution as seen from—and anticipated and abetted in—the mother country.