The Rebels in London and the Britons Who Backed Them
On the evening of Jan. 29, 1774, Benjamin Franklin stood motionless in a packed chamber at Whitehall while Solicitor General Alexander Wedderburn tore him apart. For more than an hour, before an audience of Privy Councillors and spectators who had come for the spectacle, Wedderburn mocked Franklin as a thief and a man of "three-fold guilt" for leaking the private letters of Massachusetts Gov. Thomas Hutchinson. Franklin said nothing. He wore a suit of Manchester velvet. Four years later, when he signed the treaty of alliance with France that would help win America's independence, he wore the same suit -- a deliberate act of symbolic revenge against the empire that had humiliated him.
That scene at the Privy Council Chamber captures something essential about the American Revolution's British dimension. The revolt against the Crown was not planned in Philadelphia or Boston alone. It was shaped in London's coffeehouses, debated in Dissenting chapels from Norwich to Manchester, defended by British intellectuals who risked prosecution and mob violence for championing the American cause. The story of the separatist Americans who lived in Britain and the Britons who backed them is a story of overlapping networks -- religious, intellectual, commercial and clandestine -- that made the Revolution as much a British event as an American one.
For nearly two decades, Benjamin Franklin House at 36 Craven Street functioned as an unofficial American embassy. Franklin first arrived in 1757 as agent for the Pennsylvania Assembly, and he would spend most of the next 18 years in London, eventually representing Georgia, New Jersey and Massachusetts as well. He lodged with his landlady Margaret Stevenson and her daughter Mary, who became something like a second family. From these rooms off the Strand, Franklin navigated the deteriorating relationship between Britain and its colonies with a mixture of charm, cunning and growing despair.
Franklin was no revolutionary when he arrived. He was a loyal subject of the Crown who believed the empire could be reformed from within. He dined with lords and members of Parliament, conducted electrical experiments with the Royal Society, and cultivated friendships across London's intellectual elite. But the political ground was shifting beneath him. Each new tax, each new act of coercion, each dismissive speech from ministers who regarded colonial complaints as impertinence pushed Franklin closer to a conclusion he had long resisted.
The Smyrna Coffee House on Pall Mall was one of the places where Franklin processed this transformation. On April 5, 1774, just weeks after his humiliation at the Cockpit, he sat in this gathering place for Whig politicians and composed a satirical open letter to Lord North, using irony and mock logic to expose the absurdity of the government's American policies. The coffeehouse, once frequented by Jonathan Swift, was the kind of place where political ideas circulated as freely as the coffee -- a semi-public salon where a man could write sedition in plain view and call it wit.
By March 1775, Franklin knew that reconciliation was finished. He sailed for Philadelphia and arrived just days after Lexington and Concord. The man who had spent 18 years trying to hold the British Empire together would spend the rest of his life tearing it apart.
Franklin's most important intellectual circle was the Club of Honest Whigs, which met fortnightly at the London Coffee House on Ludgate Hill, near St. Paul's Cathedral. Over supper and conversation, its members discussed scientific discoveries, philosophical questions and the political controversies of the day. Franklin once described these Thursday evening suppers as "one of the chief pleasures of his London life."
The name said everything. "Honest" meant committed to open inquiry. "Whig" meant opposed to arbitrary authority. The membership roster reads like a who's who of pro-American sentiment in London: Richard Price, the Welsh Dissenting minister whose 1776 pamphlet on civil liberty sold 60,000 copies and earned the thanks of the Continental Congress; Joseph Priestley, the chemist and theologian whose open support for the American cause would eventually see his home and laboratory burned by a loyalist mob; and John Canton, the physicist who collaborated with Franklin on electrical theory.
What bound these men together, beyond intellectual curiosity, was religious dissent. As Nonconformists -- Unitarians, Presbyterians, Quakers -- they were excluded from universities, the military and public office by the Test and Corporation Acts. They understood in their bones what it meant to be denied political rights. The theological argument for individual interpretation of scripture mapped neatly onto the political argument for colonial self-governance. When the Club of Honest Whigs debated American liberty, they were also debating their own.
The club served as an incubator for the pro-American intellectual movement in Britain, generating pamphlets, sermons and political arguments that gave the colonial cause a respectable voice in British public debate. Through Price and Priestley, its influence extended far beyond Thursday evenings into Parliament, the press and the broader Dissenting culture. When Franklin sailed for America in March 1775, the club's most significant period effectively ended -- but the networks it had built endured.
The chapels where London's religious dissenters worshipped became, almost inevitably, centers of political dissent as well. The connection between religious nonconformity and support for American independence was not accidental. It was structural.
Essex Street Chapel, which opened on April 17, 1774, was the first explicitly Unitarian place of worship in England. Its founder, Theophilus Lindsey, had resigned from his Anglican living at Catterick after the failure of the Feathers Tavern Petition in 1772, which had sought to relax the Church of England's doctrinal requirements. Franklin attended the inaugural service. The chapel became part of the intellectual infrastructure for pro-American sentiment: if a man could think for himself about God, why not about government?
At Newington Green Unitarian Church, the oldest surviving Nonconformist chapel in London with a brick facade dating from 1708, Richard Price presided over a congregation that doubled as a political seminar. Price, born in 1723 at Tynton Farm in the parish of Llangeinor, Glamorgan, brought the intellectual rigor of Welsh Nonconformity to bear on the crisis of empire. His Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, published in February 1776, argued that the war was unjust, that colonists had a natural right to self-government, and that Britain's coercive policies threatened liberty at home as well as in America. The pamphlet was a sensation. The Continental Congress thanked him personally and invited him to emigrate to help manage the new nation's finances. He declined on grounds of age but continued to correspond with Franklin, Jefferson, Adams and Benjamin Rush. Yale and Harvard awarded him honorary degrees.
The network extended well beyond London. The Octagon Chapel in Norwich, built in 1756 and praised by John Wesley as "the most elegant meeting house in Europe," housed a congregation of merchants and professionals who combined theological heterodoxy with progressive politics. Cross Street Chapel in Manchester, founded in 1694, generated the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society in 1781; its founder, Dr. Thomas Percival, was elected to the American Philosophical Society and corresponded with Franklin. In Birmingham, Joseph Priestley ministered at New Meeting House, where his scientific lectures and political sermons drew crowds and suspicion in equal measure.
The Friends House on Euston Road represents the Quaker dimension of this dissenting web. During the Revolutionary period, the London Yearly Meeting was the most authoritative Quaker body in the world, and the transatlantic Quaker network was one of the most effective channels of communication between Britain and the colonies. In 1767, the Meeting for Sufferings distributed anti-slavery tracts to members of Parliament -- deliberate political lobbying on a moral issue intertwined with the revolutionary crisis. British Quakers were among the best-informed people in the country about colonial conditions, and the moral arguments flowing from American Quaker circles -- equality, the inner light, the illegitimacy of coercive authority -- fed directly into British intellectual life.
Not all of the Americans' British sympathizers operated from chapel pews. Some of the most effective advocates for the colonial cause sat in Parliament.
Edmund Burke, the Irish-born philosopher and Whig MP, delivered two of the most eloquent speeches ever given in the House of Commons on behalf of the American colonies. On April 19, 1774, his Speech on American Taxation called for full repeal of the Townshend duties, arguing that taxation without representation was both impractical and unjust. On March 22, 1775 -- exactly one month before Lexington and Concord -- his Speech on Conciliation with America urged Parliament to accommodate the colonists' spirit of liberty rather than crush it. Burke was early to urge acceptance of American independence, and his political philosophy shaped the Rockingham Whig opposition that would eventually bring down Lord North's government in 1782. His London townhouse at 37 Gerrard Street, now deep in Chinatown, still bears one of the earliest surviving blue plaques in the city, erected in 1876.
John Wilkes, the radical politician and agitator, was a more complicated figure -- libertine, debtor and opportunist as well as principled defender of liberty. But his cause became inextricably linked with the American one. Arrested in 1763 under a general warrant for attacking the King's speech in The North Briton No. 45, Wilkes fought legal battles that established precedents for press freedom and protection against arbitrary arrest. These principles resonated powerfully in the colonies. "Wilkes and Liberty" became a rallying cry in America; the Sons of Liberty toasted him; Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, was named partly for him. As Lord Mayor of London in 1774, he was a persistent voice supporting the colonists and opposing the war, and the City of London under his influence became a center of pro-American sentiment.
The printing presses of London were as important to the American cause as any pulpit or parliamentary speech. A network of publishers and booksellers ensured that colonial arguments reached a British audience -- at considerable personal risk.
John Almon's bookshop at 176 Piccadilly was, as scholar Robert Rea put it, "the single most important figure connecting the London press to the American revolutionary movement." From the late 1760s through the end of the war, Almon's shop served as a clearinghouse for opposition political literature, American pamphlets and parliamentary intelligence. He published London editions of key American texts, most famously Thomas Paine's Common Sense in early 1776, shortly after its Philadelphia debut. Paine's pamphlet was incendiary material in a nation at war -- an uncompromising argument for independence and a withering attack on monarchy -- and Almon put it on British shelves anyway. He was prosecuted multiple times for seditious libel and spent periods in prison, but he never stopped publishing.
Across the City, Edward and Charles Dilly's bookshop at 22 The Poultry performed a similar function. The Dilly brothers, committed Dissenters and Whigs, published the London edition of John Dickinson's Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania in 1768 -- the most widely read American political text before Common Sense. Franklin himself wrote the preface, signaling that this was a serious constitutional argument, not a provincial complaint. Charles Dilly hosted regular dinners above the shop where writers, politicians and intellectuals mingled; James Boswell's journals record evenings where Samuel Johnson and Edward Gibbon debated the issues of the day over the bookseller's table.
At The Public Advertiser on Fleet Street, editor Henry Sampson Woodfall published the pseudonymous "Junius" letters from 1769 to 1772 -- devastating political attacks on the government that included a direct warning to George III of the fate of the Stuarts. Franklin himself published essays in the paper under pseudonyms, including his sardonic Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One in 1773. When Woodfall was prosecuted for seditious libel, the jury in Rex v. Woodfall returned a verdict of "guilty of printing and publishing only," refusing to convict on the seditious charge -- a landmark for press freedom that would contribute to Fox's Libel Act of 1792.
Beneath the public debates ran a shadow war of intelligence and espionage. Paul Wentworth, a New Hampshire-born loyalist who chose to serve British interests, ran intelligence operations from his house on Poland Street in Soho. His most significant achievement was recruiting Edward Bancroft, an American-born physician serving as secretary to the American commissioners in Paris. Bancroft passed information about treaty negotiations, military plans and diplomatic strategy through an elaborate system: reports were deposited in a sealed bottle hidden in the hollow of a tree on the south terrace of the Tuileries Gardens, collected by a British agent, and forwarded to London. Lord North called Wentworth "the most important and truest informer" available to the government. Bancroft's espionage was not confirmed until nearly a century after his death, when British archives revealed the full extent of his betrayal.
The most improbable spy, if spy she was, worked in plain sight. Patience Lovell Wright, a Quaker farm wife from Bordentown, New Jersey, arrived in London in 1772 in her early 50s with a reputation for wax portraiture built in New York and Philadelphia. She modeled wax directly with her hands under an apron -- a technique audiences found both fascinating and scandalous -- and her likenesses attracted sitters from the highest levels of British society, including George III and Queen Charlotte. Her studio on Cockspur Street near Charing Cross drew a stream of MPs, military officers and government officials who possessed information of interest to the American cause. Wright was voluble and politically outspoken about her patriot sympathies, but her openness made her seem artless rather than calculating. She maintained regular correspondence with Franklin in Paris, and her letters contained political and military observations that went well beyond casual commentary. The tradecraft, if it existed, was elegant: messages reportedly concealed inside the hollow heads of wax busts, shipped under the guise of routine artistic commerce. As a woman and an artist, Wright operated outside the categories British intelligence was accustomed to monitoring. She remained in London throughout the war and died in 1786 after a fall, never returning to the independent nation she may have helped create.
No figure better embodies the transatlantic dimension of the Revolution than Thomas Paine, born on Jan. 29, 1737, in Thetford, Norfolk. His father, Joseph Pain, was a Quaker stay-maker, and the young Paine grew up in a world of modest means and Nonconformist values. His years in Lewes, where he served as an excise officer and debated politics at the White Hart Inn, sharpened the argumentative skills that would later set a continent on fire. His first political work, The Case of the Officers of Excise (1772), lobbied Parliament unsuccessfully for better pay for tax collectors -- a prosaic beginning for the man who would write Common Sense.
By 1774, Paine's life in England had collapsed. He was dismissed from the excise service, his marriage fell apart, his tobacco shop went bankrupt. But he had met Franklin in London, and Franklin gave him a letter of introduction to contacts in Philadelphia. In October 1774, Paine sailed for America. Fourteen months later, in January 1776, Common Sense was published. It sold an estimated 150,000 copies in its first year to a colonial population of 2.5 million. George Washington ordered it read to his troops. The stay-maker's son from Norfolk had written the most influential political pamphlet in American history.
And John Almon published it in London.
What connected all these people -- Franklin in his Craven Street parlor, Price in his Newington Green pulpit, Almon behind his Piccadilly counter, Wright in her Cockspur Street studio -- was not a formal organization but a web of overlapping relationships. They attended each other's lectures, published each other's work, passed intelligence through each other's hands, and shared a conviction that the American cause was also the cause of liberty in Britain.
The Dissenting chapels provided the theological framework: liberty of conscience implied liberty of governance. The coffeehouses provided the meeting places. The press provided the megaphone. And the espionage networks provided the practical assistance that turned sympathy into action.
Not all of these sympathizers agreed with each other. Burke wanted reconciliation within the empire; Paine wanted to tear the monarchy down. Price argued from rational Dissent; Wilkes argued from personal grievance and genuine conviction in equal measure. But together, they constituted a British dimension of the American Revolution that is too often forgotten -- a reminder that the struggle for independence was not simply colonies against mother country, but a civil war of ideas that split Britain itself.
Their legacy is written into the streets of London, the chapels of the English provinces, and the pages of pamphlets that crossed the Atlantic in both directions. Today, many of their sites survive. Franklin's house on Craven Street is a museum. Price's chapel at Newington Green still holds services. Burke's blue plaque watches over Chinatown. The network is scattered, but it endures -- a testament to the Britons who chose the losing side of their own country's argument and, in doing so, helped create a nation.