Exiles, Outcasts and the Human Cost of Choosing the Crown
On June 14, 1801, Benedict Arnold lay dying in a rented house on Gloucester Place in London. According to a persistent tradition, the former Continental Army general -- the hero of Saratoga whose battlefield courage had helped bring France into the war -- asked to be dressed in his old American uniform. "Let me die in this old uniform," he reportedly said. "God forgive me for ever putting on any other." Whether the story is apocryphal or not, it captures the tragedy of a man who had betrayed one country and been shunned by the other. Arnold was buried at St Mary's Church, Battersea, a Georgian parish church on the Thames with no monument to mark his significance. His grave went unmarked for years. Today, a modest plaque inside the church is all that acknowledges one of the American Revolution's most dramatic personal stories.
Arnold was not alone. Tens of thousands of Americans who remained loyal to the British Crown found themselves, when the war ended, on the wrong side of history. An estimated 60,000 Loyalists left the United States during and after the conflict -- proportionally, the largest refugee crisis in American history. Many went to Canada, the Bahamas and other corners of the British Empire. But a significant number came to Britain itself, particularly to London, where they formed a displaced community united by shared loss and the hope that a grateful government would compensate them for their sacrifices. Some were former governors and generals. Some were enslaved people who had been promised freedom. Most discovered that British gratitude had firm financial limits.
Their stories are written into the streets of London, from Marylebone drawing rooms to the legal chambers of Lincoln's Inn.
No family fracture of the Revolution cuts deeper than the one between Benjamin Franklin and his son William. The elder Franklin became one of the foremost architects of American independence. William, the last Royal Governor of New Jersey, chose the Crown -- and lost everything for it.
William Franklin was born around 1730, Benjamin's illegitimate but acknowledged son. The two were exceptionally close. William accompanied his father to London in 1757, studied law at the Middle Temple and in 1763 was appointed Royal Governor of New Jersey through his father's political connections. He governed with competence for more than a decade. But as the imperial crisis deepened, father and son found themselves on opposite sides of the central question of the age.
The breach was final and bitter. William refused to resign his governorship and was arrested by the New Jersey Provincial Congress in 1776. He endured more than two years of harsh imprisonment in Connecticut, confined in close quarters with inadequate food, his health deteriorating. After his exchange in 1778, he became president of the Board of Associated Loyalists in New York, directing guerrilla operations against the patriots -- including the retaliatory execution of a captured patriot officer that strained his relationship with the British military command.
When the war ended, William sailed for England in 1782. He settled on Norton Street -- now Bolsover Street -- in the Marylebone district, a relatively quiet residential area where no blue plaque marks his residence today. He and his father met one final time, in 1785 at Southampton, as Benjamin was returning from his diplomatic posting in Paris. William sought reconciliation, writing that "nature" should overcome political differences. Benjamin was unmoved. The meeting was civil but cold. Benjamin's will left William almost nothing, pointedly citing "the part he acted against me in the late War."
William died in London in 1813, largely forgotten -- a man who had sacrificed his most important relationship, and ultimately everything else, for a cause that lost.
If William Franklin's story is the Revolution's most painful family tragedy, Joseph Galloway's is its most bitter political one. Before the war, Galloway had been one of the most powerful politicians in colonial America: Speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly, a man who dominated Pennsylvania politics alongside his close ally Benjamin Franklin. At the First Continental Congress in 1774, Galloway proposed a Plan of Union that would have created an American legislative body operating alongside Parliament -- a final attempt at compromise. The plan was narrowly defeated. Galloway concluded that the revolutionary movement had been captured by radicals unwilling to negotiate, and he cast his lot with the Crown.
He joined the British when they occupied Philadelphia in 1777, serving as superintendent of police and intelligence under Gen. William Howe. When the British evacuated the city in 1778, Galloway sailed for England with his daughter Elizabeth, leaving behind his wife, Grace Growden Galloway, to protect their extensive estates. Grace's diary, one of the most remarkable documents of the Revolution, records her increasingly desperate efforts to hold the family property amid the hostility of former neighbors. She failed. Pennsylvania confiscated the Galloway estates. Grace died in 1782 without recovering the property or seeing her husband again.
In London, Galloway settled on Queen Anne Street in Marylebone, where he threw himself into political advocacy with an intensity that matched his former legislative career. His 1779 testimony before Parliament's inquiry into the conduct of Gen. Howe was devastating: Galloway argued that Howe had squandered multiple opportunities for decisive victory and that Britain's Loyalist supporters in America had been abandoned by incompetent commanders. His pamphlet Letters to a Nobleman on the Conduct of the War in the Middle Colonies circulated widely.
Galloway also served as the de facto leader of the Loyalist refugee community, lobbying for better pensions and helping other exiles navigate the claims process. But his own immense losses were never adequately restored. He died in 1803, a man who had once wielded more political power than any other figure in Pennsylvania reduced to a pensioner in a foreign city.
The instrument through which the British government attempted to honor its obligations to the Loyalists was the Claims Commission at Lincoln's Inn, established by Act of Parliament in 1783. Over the next decade, under the initial chairmanship of John Eardley Wilmot, a retired chief justice, the commission heard more than 3,000 individual claims from Loyalist refugees seeking compensation for confiscated property, lost businesses and ruined livelihoods.
The process was rigorous and often adversarial. Commissioners cross-examined witnesses, demanded documentary evidence and remained skeptical of inflated valuations. For refugees who had sacrificed everything for the Crown, the experience was humiliating: they were required to justify their losses to bureaucrats who questioned their honesty. William Franklin claimed losses exceeding 48,000 pounds for his confiscated New Jersey estates. The commission awarded a fraction of that sum along with a modest annual pension. Galloway's experience was similar: immense claims met with sharply reduced awards.
The commission ultimately distributed approximately 3 million pounds -- substantial, but far less than the claimants believed they were owed. Many received annual pensions rather than lump-sum payments, keeping them dependent on government goodwill for years. The commission's records, now at the National Archives at Kew, are among the most valuable sources for understanding the Revolution from the Loyalist perspective. Historian Mary Beth Norton's landmark 1972 study The British-Americans first used them to reconstruct the refugees' social world and document the gap between sacrifice and compensation.
It is no accident that so many Loyalist trail sites cluster in a single London district. Marylebone, the area north of Oxford Street stretching toward Regent's Park, became an informal Loyalist enclave during and after the war. The neighborhood was then being developed with new Georgian terraces -- fashionable enough for people of standing, affordable enough for those living on reduced circumstances.
Within a few minutes' walk of each other lived some of the most prominent figures of the Loyalist exile. William Franklin on Bolsover Street. Galloway on Queen Anne Street. Gen. Henry Clinton on Portland Place, where the former commander-in-chief of British forces in North America spent years fighting a paper war over who was to blame for Yorktown. Lord George Gordon on Welbeck Street, the volatile aristocrat whose 1780 anti-Catholic riots had exposed the fragility of civil order in a nation stretched thin by the American war. Admiral Samuel Hood on Wimpole Street, the naval commander whose division never fully engaged at the Battle of the Chesapeake -- the action that sealed Cornwallis's fate at Yorktown.
These men did not choose Marylebone at random. Displaced communities gravitate toward each other. They attended the same churches, patronized the same coffeehouses, submitted claims through the same commission and shared the same bitter sense that Britain had not done enough for those who had remained loyal. The Georgian terraces still stand, many now converted to medical consulting rooms, but the street layouts preserve the geography of this displaced American community.
The war's end brought not just exile but blame, and nowhere was the finger-pointing more vicious than among the military commanders who had lost. Clinton and Cornwallis, the two men most directly responsible for the war's final act, conducted a public feud that consumed their remaining years.
Clinton had succeeded Gen. William Howe as commander-in-chief in 1778. He launched the successful siege of Charleston in 1780 -- the worst American defeat of the war -- but then entrusted the Southern campaign to Lord Cornwallis. What followed was a catastrophic breakdown of command. Clinton believed Cornwallis exceeded his instructions by marching into Virginia without adequate support. Cornwallis believed Clinton failed to provide clear direction and timely reinforcement. When Cornwallis fortified Yorktown in the summer of 1781 and found himself trapped by Washington, Rochambeau and the French fleet under de Grasse, the game was over. Cornwallis surrendered more than 7,000 troops on Oct. 19, 1781. He reportedly pleaded illness on the day and sent his deputy to hand over his sword.
Back in London, Clinton published his Narrative of the Campaign of 1781 from Portland Place -- a pointed defense of his generalship that laid blame squarely on Cornwallis. Cornwallis fired back with his own Answer. The exchange drew partisans across London's political circles. The historian William Willcox described Clinton as trapped in an "endless post-mortem" that defined his later years.
Cornwallis, remarkably, escaped lasting disgrace. His family seat at Culford Park in Suffolk remained intact, and he went on to serve as governor-general of India and lord lieutenant of Ireland. Clinton was eventually appointed governor of Gibraltar in 1794 but died there the following year before taking effective command. The fates of the two men illustrate how unevenly the consequences of defeat fell: Cornwallis was rehabilitated; Clinton died still arguing his case.
The naval commanders fared no better in their mutual regard. Hood, from his Wimpole Street residence, spent years criticizing Rear Admiral Thomas Graves for bungling the Battle of the Chesapeake -- the engagement whose failure left Cornwallis without hope of naval rescue. Admiral Rodney, who later won a spectacular victory at the Battle of the Saints in 1782, had his own critics who argued that his earlier preoccupation with plundering the Dutch island of St. Eustatius had allowed de Grasse's fleet to reach the Chesapeake unchallenged. Rodney died in 1792 at his home in Hanover Square, a national hero whose victory at the Saints had restored some of the Royal Navy's battered prestige. Admiral Richard Howe, whose family's Grafton Street home served as the base for his own post-war political battles, had resigned his North American command in 1778 after growing disillusioned with London's strategic direction.
The Howe brothers themselves had held the unusual dual authority to wage war and negotiate peace simultaneously; their family seat at the Howe estate at Langar in Nottinghamshire, now a country house hotel, is one of the few military trail sites visitors can experience firsthand.
Not every American in wartime London was a political exile. Some came for opportunity, stayed by choice and navigated the conflict from an extraordinary position: American-born artists thriving under the patronage of the very king their countrymen were fighting.
Benjamin West, born in 1738 in Springfield, Pennsylvania, settled in London in 1763 after studying in Italy and never left. George III appointed him historical painter to the king in 1772, and West's Newman Street studio in Fitzrovia became the center of Anglo-American artistic exchange for half a century. His The Death of General Wolfe (1770), which depicted a modern battle in contemporary dress rather than classical costume, revolutionized history painting. Joshua Reynolds objected; popular success vindicated West. In 1792 he succeeded Reynolds as president of the Royal Academy, a post he held until his death in 1820 -- the first American-born artist to achieve such institutional eminence in Europe.
West's studio was also a school. A remarkable succession of American painters came to study under him: Gilbert Stuart, Charles Willson Peale, John Trumbull and -- most significantly for this trail -- John Singleton Copley. Copley, born in Boston the same year as West, had been colonial America's finest portrait painter. His subjects included Samuel Adams, Paul Revere and John Hancock. But Copley was politically cautious and married into a prominent Loyalist family -- his father-in-law, Richard Clarke, was one of the tea consignees targeted in the Boston Tea Party. In June 1774, Copley left Boston. He never returned.
In London, Copley reinvented himself as a history painter, working from his home and studio at 25 George Street in Marylebone (where a blue plaque marks the site today). His Watson and the Shark (1778) and The Death of Major Peirson (1783) demonstrated a gift for theatrical composition. He was elected a Royal Academician in 1779, but his later years brought declining output, deteriorating finances and failing health. He died in 1815, largely forgotten. His son, however, pursued law and rose to become Lord Chancellor of England in 1827 -- an extraordinary social ascent within a single generation.
West and Copley were not political Loyalists in the way that William Franklin or Joseph Galloway were. But their careers depended on the patronage of the British establishment, and their presence in London complicated any simple narrative of American versus British identity.
The most vulnerable Loyalists had no estates to claim compensation for, no political connections to leverage and no comfortable Marylebone addresses. They were Black Loyalists -- formerly enslaved people who had accepted British promises of freedom during the war and found, when it ended, that those promises were worth very little.
During the conflict, Lord Dunmore's Proclamation of 1775 and subsequent British offers drew thousands of enslaved people to the British side with the promise of liberty. After the defeat, Black Loyalists were evacuated -- many to Nova Scotia, others to London. By the mid-1780s, an estimated 1,000 or more Black Loyalists lived in London in extreme poverty, British promises of land and compensation largely unfulfilled.
In January 1786, the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor was formed, eventually settling its meetings at Batson's Coffee House, 17 Cornhill, opposite the Royal Exchange in the heart of the City of London. The committee raised approximately 890 pounds and distributed daily relief at two locations across London. A sick house on Warren Street provided medical care. Olaudah Equiano, the formerly enslaved memoirist and abolitionist, served briefly as commissary for provisions before being dismissed after raising concerns about mismanagement.
The committee's ultimate solution was resettlement. In April 1787, approximately 441 people departed London for Sierra Leone. The settlement was devastated by disease and conflict, though it eventually became the precursor to the later Sierra Leone colony. The story exposes a gap between the Revolution's rhetoric of liberty and its reality that neither side can easily explain. The British offered freedom as a war strategy, not from moral conviction. The Americans, who declared that all men are created equal, enslaved millions. And the Black men and women caught between these hypocrisies found themselves abandoned in London's streets or shipped to a coast where most would die.
No surviving plaque or marker commemorates the committee at the Cornhill site. The building itself is long gone. But the story belongs on any honest reckoning of the Revolution's human cost.
The Revolution's Loyalist story is often told as a narrative of loss -- lost homes, lost families, lost causes. But some figures in this trail complicate the picture by showing how ideas traveled across the Atlantic in ways that resist simple categories of loyalty and rebellion.
Catharine Macaulay, Britain's foremost female historian of the 18th century, was not a Loyalist. She was, in fact, one of the most influential intellectual supporters of the American cause. Her eight-volume History of England from the Accession of James I to That of the Brunswick Line (1763-1783) offered a republican interpretation of the English Civil War that American colonists recognized immediately as an argument for their own situation. George Washington, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin all corresponded with her. Washington hosted her at Mount Vernon for 10 days in 1784, an extraordinary mark of respect.
Macaulay's Bath residence at Alfred House, on Alfred Street, was provided by her patron the Reverend Thomas Wilson, whose devotion was so extravagant he installed a life-sized statue of her in his London church. Her 1778 marriage to William Graham, 26 years her junior, scandalized polite society and cost her Wilson's patronage. She persisted in her scholarly work, publishing Letters on Education in 1790 -- a treatise that influenced Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman. She died in 1791, having lived to see the republic she championed take its first steps.
Macaulay reminds us that the Revolution was a civil war of ideas that split Britain itself. The people on this trail did not divide neatly into heroes and villains. They were caught in a rupture that demanded choices -- and every choice carried a price.
The trail sites in this essay span London and beyond, but many cluster in ways that make them walkable in a single afternoon. The Marylebone circuit -- Bolsover Street, Queen Anne Street, Portland Place, Wimpole Street, Welbeck Street -- covers the heart of the Loyalist exile community in under an hour. The streets retain their Georgian layouts, and even where individual buildings have been replaced, the scale and character of the neighborhood convey the world these displaced Americans inhabited.
Across the river, St Mary's Church in Battersea offers the trail's most contemplative stop. The Georgian church, with its box pews and Venetian windows, dates from 1775 -- the year the war began. Arnold and his wife, Peggy Shippen Arnold, lie in the crypt. J.M.W. Turner painted Thames views from the vestry. William Blake was married here. The church is open to visitors, though hours vary.
Lincoln's Inn, where the Claims Commission sat, remains an active legal institution with grounds generally open to the public. Copley's blue plaque on George Street and West's plaque on Newman Street mark the homes of the two most important American artists in Georgian London. And Wolverhampton's blue plaque for Button Gwinnett, the Declaration signer who married at St Peter's Church in 1757 before emigrating to Georgia, reminds visitors that the Revolution's story begins in British communities as much as in American ones.
These are not triumphalist sites. There are no monuments to victory here, no celebrations of a cause won. Instead, they are places where the Revolution's human cost is written into the landscape -- in unmarked graves, in Georgian streets where displaced Americans once walked, in the legal chambers where loyalty was weighed and found wanting. For visitors approaching from an American perspective, they offer something the Revolution's standard narrative often lacks: a reckoning with the people who lost.