Liberty and Empire

British Radical Solutions to the American Problem, 1774--1776

Robert E. Toohey

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813186696
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia británica

Though little known to most students of the American Revolution, the British Radicals of the 1770s championed the rights of Americans while advocating parliamentary reform and denouncing British colonial policies. Outspoken, eloquent, and innovative, the Radicals encouraged the American cause. They voiced ideas on liberty and empire that would echo through American revolutionary documents.

Liberty and Empir e focuses on five British Radicals. The farsighted John Cartwright's ideas of reformation anticipated the Commonwealth of Nations. James Burgh's treatise on parliamentary reform became a classic text for both English and American reformers and an influence on the thinking of successive generations. The venerable Dr. Richard Price wrote one of the era's most eloquent statements on human liberty and the meaning of the American Revolution. Granville Sharp's advocacy of legislative rights for Ireland and America prophesied later principles of responsible government and home rule. Catharine Macaulay, fervent and notorious, urged the people of Great Britain to side with America.

In this first comprehensive study of the British Radicals, Robert Toohey provides an overview of their political milieu and a synthesis of their ideas about the American crisis and related issues. Toohey outlines the ideological relationships among Radicals of diverse background and character. He discusses their impact on American thinking through their writings and their associations with Benjamin Franklin and others. And he reveals that Americans held no monopoly on enlightened concepts of human liberty, empire, and reformation.

NOTES

The Crisis of Empire

1. David L. Keir, The Constitutional History of Modern Britain since 1485, 9th ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1969), p. 292.

2. L. H. Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, 15 vols. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1936–70), 11: 1–6.

3. G. H. Guttridge, English Whiggism and the American Revolution, 2d ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), p. 61.

4. Ibid., p. 58.

5. Keir, Constitutional History, pp. 363–64.

6. John Brooke, King George III (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1972), pp. 162–63.

7. Dora Mae Clark, British Opinion and the American Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930), p. 242.

On the Eve of the American Revolution

1. Some important studies on British Radicalism at the outset of the American Revolution are the result of research done in the past quarter century, including Lucy Sutherland, The City of London and the Opposition to Government, 1768–1774: A Study in the Rise of Metropolitan Radicalism (London: University of London, Athlone Press, 1959); Ian R. Christie, Wilkes, Wyvill and Reform (London: Macmillan & Co., 1962); George F. E. Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962); Simon Maccoby, The English Radical Tradition (London: Charles and Adam Black, 1966). Dora Mae Clark’s British Opinion and the American Revolution remains quite valuable also.

2. Pauline Maier, “John Wilkes and American Disillusionment with Britain,” William and Mary Quarterly, 20 (1963): 375–77, 395.

3. Herbert Butterfield, George III, Lord North and the People, 1779–1780 (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1949), p. 262.

4. Rude, Wilkes and Liberty, p. 192.

5. I think they give an accurate estimation of Wilkes. For example, see Sutherland, The City of London and the Opposition to Government, pp. 12–15.

6. See O. A. Sherrard, A Life of John Wilkes (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1930), pp. 270–71 and Maier, “John Wilkes and American Disillusionment with Britain,” pp. 373–74.

7. Zealous American radicals like Arthur Lee and William Palfrey were devoted to both Wilkes and his cause. Consult Richard Henry Lee, Life of Arthur Lee, 2 vols. (Boston: Wells & Lilly, 1829), 1: 185–86; and George M. Elsey, ed., “John Wilkes and William Palfrey,” Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 34 (1943): 427–28. Benjamin Franklin thought Wilkes to be a rake, “an outlaw . . . of bad personal character, not worth a farthing.” See John Bigelow, ed., The Works of Benjamin Franklin, 12 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904), 4: 149.

8. Dora Mae Clark, British Opinion and the American Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930), p. 165.

9. Ibid., p. 166.

10. A. Francis Steuart, ed., The Last Journals of Horace Walpole during the Reign of George III from 1771 to 1783, 2 vols. (London: John Lane, 1910), 1: 466.

11. Annual Register, 18 (1775): 149.

12. Ibid., p. 272.

13. Sir John Fortesque, ed., The Correspondence of King George III, 6 vols. (London: Macmillan & Co., 1927), 3: 233. Opposition charges that the government intimidated City newspapers which criticized official American policy are described in Solomon Lutnick, The American Revolution and the British Press (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1967).

14. See Clark, British Opinion and the American Revolution, pp. 160–63. Founded in 1613, the Robinhood, by the time of the American Revolution, was a debating society for City tradesmen and others, including country gentlemen and politicians who cared to attend. The Middlesex Petition and Stamp Act were subjects of bitter debates among members. Such encounters gave occasion for frequent pro-American polemics like those of Will Chatwell. Gentleman’s Magazine, 39 (1769): 289–91.

15. Christie, Wilkes, Wyvill and Reform, pp. 33–34.

16. George S. Veitch, The Genesis of Parliamentary Reform, 2d ed. (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1965), p. 29.

17. Annual Register, 12 (1769): 75.

18. Minnie Clare Yarborough, John Horne Tooke (New York: Columbia University Press, 1926), pp. 41–42.

19. George Otto Trevelyan, The Early History of Charles James Fox (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1904), p. 440.

20. Yarborough, John Horne Tooke, pp. 79–81.

21. Fred J. Hinkhouse, The Preliminaries of the American Revolution as Seen in the English Press, 1763–1775 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1926), p. 201.

22. Yarborough, John Horne Tooke, p. 78.

23. This society statement is quoted from Christie, Wilkes, Wyvill and Reform, p. 49.

24. Charles Francis Adams, ed., The Works of John Adams, 10 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1856), 2: 325.

25. Hinkhouse, The Preliminaries of the American Revolution, p. 171.

26. Clark, British Opinion and the American Revolution, p. 156.

27. See also Joseph Priestley, An Essay on the First Principle of Government and on the Nature of Political, Civil and Religious Liberty (Printed for J. Johnson; London: 1771). A broad description of Priestley’s principles may be found in John A. Passmore, ed., Priestley’s Writings on Philosophy, Science and Politics (New York: Collier Books, 1965). Whereas Richard Price’s concept of liberty was rooted in his moral philosophy, Priestley’s ideas for expanding liberty anticipated the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham. Élie Halévy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism (New York: Macmillan & Co., 1928), p. 22.

28. In 1783 Dr. Kippis spoke for most Honest Whigs in urging a magnanimous peace with America and in reflecting on the historical significance of the American Revolution. “It ...