Did a Rowdy English Nobleman Mastermind the American Revolution?
Americans want to Americanize the American Revolution. We accept the existence of a handful of single-named philosophical grandfathers—Locke and Montesquieu and the rest—and we recognize the help of a few super-friends, like Lafayette, who, in our imagination, arrives to play Aquaman to Washington’s Superman (and Hamilton’s Batman) in an Enlightenment Justice League. But the idea is always that it was made by the forces here at home. Witty Jefferson, stolid Washington, disputatious Adams, Franklin simpering and laughing and making love—we want it to be a kind of farm-to-table act of ideological localism. We resist the notion that the Revolution might instead have been a product of an élite, cosmopolitan, educated transnational set—what one could call the Voltaire class—given to sexual adventure in Paris and political agitation in London as well as Boston. We want it all to have happened right here.
Yet, in recent years, there has been an explosion of well-wrought histories that do indeed see the Revolution as arising from this country-crossing cohort. In Justin du Rivage’s “Revolution Against Empire,” from a decade ago, we were told of the ocean-spanning alliance of the so-called radical Whigs, whose ideology “flourished in Boston, Bristol, and Bengal, while fears of disorder and licentiousness provoked rural elites in both the Hudson Valley and the English shires.” (Du Rivage has since left academia, sighing that “for all of the criticism of American exceptionalism in American historiography I think a lot of historians still are American exceptionalists.”) More recent French studies of Lafayette emphasize his role less as a super-friend than as a supervisory ally.
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This view—that the American Revolution was forged by others and began elsewhere—has never been more aggressively stated than it is in the new book “Radical Duke” (Liveright), by the political theorist, classicist, and Harvard professor Danielle Allen. Although the work is, in format, simply a new biography of Charles Lennox (1735-1806), the third Duke of Richmond, it advances a singularly bold case for the English origins of the American Revolution. “Every act that provided the drumbeat of the march to revolution in the colonies had been foreshadowed in Britain,” Allen assures us. “The rights of man, the theory of revolution, and calls for popular sovereignty—all of these developed earlier in London than in the colonies.” The book’s inciting incident (as the screenwriting guides call it) is Allen’s discovery, a few years ago, of a mysterious and very early copy of the Declaration of Independence in a West Sussex archival record derived from the Duke’s papers, and since then she has searched out the traces of Richmond’s fine hand in the violent disruptions that preceded and shaped our Revolution. In her account, Richmond indeed emerges as its progenitor—through his theorizing, his behind-the-scenes parliamentary and polemical maneuvering, and his patronage of Thomas Paine.
Richmond, Allen thinks, isn’t just the maker of the Revolution. He’s also one of the founders of the modern political party—cross-class gatherings of the like-minded—and the first person to envision the “district-based foundation of modern democratic representation,” with equally populated districts. As if all that weren’t enough, she adds, in a nice mustard tache of conspiracy, a persuasive theory that the notorious “Letters of Junius,” a series that, in the seventeen-sixties and seventies, shook the British establishment and the Crown, was secretly Richmond’s work, with her hero at the center of a cenacle of carefully chosen and well-masked radical writers, including Paine and Edmund Burke.
So who was this guy? Richmond, born in 1735, came from the upper crust’s upper crust: he was the great-grandson of the unfortunate King Charles I and inherited not one but two vast country estates. Extraordinarily good-looking as a youth—he had the long equine face of the British upper classes, Benedict Cumberbatch to the life—Richmond was also rambunctiously heterosexual, feeling up the Venus de’ Medici on his Grand Tour. (“I am in love with the Venus and take great pleasure to stroke her bum and thighs,” he wrote to an in-law.) He soon became an Army officer, but one has the sense that this was more like attending law school today than actually planning to fight battles—one of those things privileged people did while figuring out what they’d actually do.
What he did was politics. A member of the House of Lords, Richmond benefitted throughout his life from a class system that was, confoundingly, both more stratified and more porous to new participants than might have been imagined. On the one hand, he had huge holdings and an ancient and untouchable position—no one was going to mess with the Duke of Richmond. On the other, he was accustomed to dining and sharing conversation with people from far humbler origins, on either side of the ideological aisle: the revolution-minded Paine came from a family in the corset-making trade; the conservative Samuel Johnson, another friend, had an even simpler rural lower-middle-class background. Richmond was a nob without ever being a snob.
Why did he go radical? It seems to have been the inevitable human mixture of the personal and the political. He had been alienated, in the seventeen-sixties, by the new King, George III, who, as Allen explains, was perceived, when he was a young man—before madness and America fell on him—as exceptionally open and well educated, a close reader of Montesquieu. But George had courted, and then snubbed, Richmond’s teen-age sister Sarah, marrying a minor German princess instead. Making a marriage within the domestic aristocracy was, the King’s courtiers thought, a very bad idea, since it caught him up in internecine Whig politics. (The British Royal Family after the Restoration was, by design, never entirely British.) And so Sarah was humiliated, to her brother’s outrage, and then subsequently “crushed” by an illegitimate pregnancy. Luckily, she later became the second wife of George Napier, had many children with him, and restored her social place, which suggests that social disgrace wasn’t quite as irrevocable as we’re often told.
Richmond’s politics were, in any case, not petty. Throughout his life, he knew that the triumph of a democratic ideal would limit the power of his caste and kind. And, like his spiritual grandson, Anthony Trollope’s Plantagenet Palliser, he relished that ideal without necessarily expecting that the thing would happen in his lifetime. Indeed, he seems to have embodied the Whig virtue of being exceedingly sincere and almost completely disinterested, willing to follow a line of reasoning wherever it took him, damn the personal consequences.
Richmond’s move toward political radicalism appears to have had three further catalysts: his experiences in France, both good and bad; the radical Member of Parliament John Wilkes; and, perhaps most dispositively, his improbable alliance and deep friendship with Paine. France, where Richmond journeyed regularly, was his favorite place. But his best friend in the Army, James Wolfe—who, as a general, would lead the battle that brought Quebec permanently into the British orbit—found Versailles repellent, and Allen is certain that Richmond agreed. After he and Richmond visited the court, Wolfe wrote of “a multitude of men and women” assembled “to bow and pay their compliments in the most submissive manner to a creature of their own species” (the French court evidently having the air of a Trump Cabinet meeting). But absolutism and amour ran together in those days, and, on annual summer visits to Paris, Richmond amassed a still unexampled collection of Sèvres porcelain and began a long, seasonal love affair with the great saloniste and beauty Madame Marguerite de Cambis—who was, as Richmond’s sister wrote approvingly, in the polyamorous aristocratic manner of the time, “quite proper dans toutes les formes.” (Richmond, meanwhile, had made a companionate arranged marriage with a fellow-aristocrat back home.) Madame de Cambis brought him sagacity and sex as he needed it. Through absorption in her circle, he learned to embrace the French dissidents Diderot, Voltaire, and Rousseau. Behind it all was his reading of Montesquieu, who combined practicality and philosophy in a distinct way.
At the center of Richmond’s public life was the London-based Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, founded in the seventeen-sixties, which undermined autocracy by its very existence. The Society of Arts, as it came to be known, brought together traditionally low-order artisanal and engineering concerns—how to cultivate vineyards in Virginia, or weave silk in London—with higher-order philosophical and literary ones. Operating outside the usual bounds of British royal patronage, it was transformative, in part, because its inner workings and politics were actually, truly democratic. One man, one vote—and the membership even included, uniquely for that time, women with an equal franchise. As the archivist D. G. C. Allan has noted, enormous attention was paid to the elections to Society posts, exactly because they provided, in miniature form, the look and feel of what democratic elections might become. Indeed, the King would later establish the Instrument of Foundation of the Royal Academy as a more autocratic counterpart.
The Society of Arts was a model third-place institution, Richmond’s own semipublic coffeehouse. But a more critical event in his life was a scandal involving John Wilkes, who was famously ugly, brilliant, radical, and lecherous. Wilkes was a member of the supposedly licentious Hellfire Club, one of those groups (think of Led Zeppelin in our time) known for satanic pursuits that probably were mostly drunken stunts. Yet, despite his politics and reputation, Wilkes got himself elected to Parliament in the seventeen-sixties—and was then expelled by the court party for having previously been convicted of seditious and impious libel. “Wilkes and Liberty” became the rallying cry of an entire generation, accompanied by a wonderful engraving by his enemy William Hogarth showing Wilkes as a hideous, grinning devil, although Hogarth was too good an artist not to also make his devilish figure irresistible. Surprisingly, Richmond took up Wilkes’s cause—like John Kenneth Galbraith taking up Abbie Hoffman’s side in 1968—and continued to support him through a series of trials and parliamentary debates that eventually ended with Wilkes’s reinstatement.
It was during this period that Richmond appears to have first met Thomas Paine, then an aspirant polemicist whose talents and charisma he quickly recognized. In what seems a scholarly scoop, Allen places Richmond at the very center of a ring of anonymous writers who together planned and wrote the Junius letters, and had them published in the Public Advertiser. Eloquent, unafraid, and widely circulated, the letters were passionately democratic and vigorously pro-Wilkes; among them was a letter warning the King that the Crown, which was “acquired by one revolution, may be lost by another.” (The paper’s owner, but not any of the anonymous writers, was then arrested, though acquitted in court.)
The identity of Junius has long remained obscure. Allen argues that Junius was actually a syndicate of authors acting under Richmond’s general direction, with Paine and Burke among the principals. There is an anecdote in a very early biography of Adam Smith in which Richmond is told, by the M.P. William Gerard Hamilton, that there was a good Junius letter coming out, only for a baffled Richmond not to be able to find it in the Advertiser, suggesting that Hamilton must have written it. We can now reinterpret this tale to mean that Richmond was playing the fool, spreading the tale in order to throw the hounds off his scent.
Paine, then, was not the political innocent he claimed to be when he left for America, in 1774. He was what today might be called an “outside agitator,” sent specifically by Richmond to bring the new doctrines of democracy to the outer edge of empire—an Enlightenment Lenin sent to the Boston Harbor.
Then, on June 2, 1780, the Duke of Richmond stood in the House of Lords and introduced a motion calling for universal male suffrage, without property or class restrictions. “It was the first such motion in British history,” Allen writes, and “quite probably the first in the modern world”; given that even Athenian democracy had many qualifications for voting (you not only had to be a man but had to have served in the military), it was likely the first of its kind in Western history. The proposal rested on a simple idea, absorbed from Montesquieu but not dependent on him, that the egalitarian rights of citizenship had to be defined before you could even start talking about the power of the executive.
Things went wrong, of course, as things do. The agitation of the time produced not a popular democratic revolt but merely the Gordon Riots—an insurrection whose ends were perverted, to Richmond’s despair, into narrow, anti-Catholic sentiment, just as the New York City riots during the Civil War turned genuine discontent with the class-based nature of conscription into anti-Black rage. Richmond’s ideal was defeated, and he knew it.
The strange thing is that, though his maximalist ideals had lost, his political power only grew after the British Army was defeated at Yorktown. Richmond went into government and began a tacit collaboration with that Montesquieu-reading King; together, they came to a sort of implicit constitutional settlement. The King was still at the top but was to be somewhat bounded by constitutional restraints, an arrangement that, essentially, is still in place today.
Richmond’s last years were odd. His protégé, Paine, came back and became obsessed with a plan to build an iron bridge over the Seine. But Allen convincingly argues that he also brought with him a gift: an original copy, from 1776, of the Declaration of Independence, which Paine saw Richmond as having fathered. Paine and Richmond had a violent falling out, or, rather, Paine—a lightning bolt of a man who flashed and then shocked in equal measure—turned against Richmond, as he did sooner or later with all his benefactors. Richmond, exasperated, seems to have folded up Paine’s gift into quarters and buried it within his papers.
Reading Allen’s pages, one thinks again and again about a single question: How did the Duke get away with it? Offering views that would have been treasonous coming from others, he breezed past objections and went in and out of government as he liked. Some of this was a matter of the insolence of riches and pride of place. But some of it was from those grooved-in habits of tolerance which groups like the Society of Arts and the “talking shops” around it nurtured, and which the late Jürgen Habermas celebrated: coffee saucers as an altar of Enlightenment. Among the most delightful episodes of English-language biography is Boswell’s account of an improbable dinner party in the fateful year of 1776 that was attended by the hyper-radical Wilkes and the reactionary Samuel Johnson, who became and stayed friends. Both were part of Richmond’s circle, and both were ready to debate an idea without deleting the debater. There were other approaches. Some years later, the Jacobins realized that one way of dealing with dissent was to kill the dissenters, a lesson that they passed on to the revolutionaries and radicals of later eras. The chatter of cosmopolitan élites is the most reviled of all discourses right now. But, by reconciling opposing practices, it has often proved the most reliable ally of liberty.
Do we buy the larger thesis—no Richmond, no Revolution? Certainly, a monocausal account of anything is likely to founder. Inevitably, the Revolution was accomplished by a coalition of many kinds. One only has to think about the British fight against Nazism to be reminded that it was made of imperialists, constitutionalists, stick-in-the-mud aristocrats, and the socialists who first helped put Winston Churchill into power and then five years later helped push him out again. The coalition that made the American Revolution was equally miscellaneous.
Yet it took place in sharp contradistinction to the English Revolution of the previous century, which remained, however much egalitarian afflatus may have flown in its wake, essentially religious and schismatic. The American Revolution was, at heart, frankly and undeniably secularist. In Richmond’s writing, there seems to be a single notable religious referent in which he rather cagily points out that all men can be members of a democracy, just as all are members of a church. But this remark seems more a strategic argument than a deep-rooted impulsion. Indeed, the argument it makes is that the Church, to be taken seriously, must be universal, not sectarian. Certainly, when Richmond later summed up life’s points and pleasures in a memo to his nephew, there was not a single piety among them.
His central idea was that citizenship overrode creedal community, and though he wasn’t the only person to have this idea, he was the one man free to say it when it was hard to say. When he spoke of union with Ireland, he was insistent on a decentralized government, with a new idea of a common humanity—a union, as he said, “of hearts and hands, or affections and interests.” The novelty of the American Revolution, in turn, was the introduction of a word that George Washington could use unself-consciously: “liberal,” and the concepts that went with it. And this vocabulary was the special property of just the kind of educated international class that subsequent polemics have tried to immunize us against. Montesquieu’s words were fed into the mind of Voltaire, who then got busy speaking them into Madame’s ear, who shared them with her boyfriend, the Duke, who offered them to Burke and then sent the package off to America with Paine. . . . It did happen here, but it happened here because it was imagined elsewhere. Its secular cast was not its only imprint. But it was its originality.
Our task, in the year of the United States’ two-hundred-and-fiftieth birthday, is to deprovincialize the Revolution, without unduly deprecating its originality. The American Revolution embraced a cosmopolitan and secular set of doctrines and beliefs: coexistence of many kinds, no preference for any one faith group, and, above all, the reliance on a system of dependable and more or less disinterested justice which we call, weakly, the rule of law.
These Richmondian revolutions, performed by human beings, had predictably human results. The American Revolution installed an admirably designed system that tolerated the continuance of slavery. The French overthrew millennia of arbitrary hereditary rule but soon devolved into terror and war. (The Duke’s mistress had to flee to London.) They were not ideas that grew from American soil; they were part of a wind that blew across the Western world and were the possession of a handful of progressive visionaries before they were shared with the citizenry. Like the Wilkes agitation, they began with the erudite, indignant few, and lit a popular flame with the equally indignant many.
Today, some writers eagerly ascribe the shortcomings of America’s founding documents to the treason of the educated élite, while refusing to acknowledge that it was only an educated élite that could ever have produced them. The ideas that they encapsulate are still remarkable and unique in history: the coexistence of competing faiths, beliefs, and kinds, not as a grudging concession by the majority but as the most natural arrangement for all.
Washington’s postwar letter to a Jewish congregation in Rhode Island continues to be worth celebrating as a succinct statement—from a conservative, slaveholding military man—of beliefs that could not have been publicly expressible half a century earlier: “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens.” The views here about tolerance and citizenship were at one time so radical that it took a duke to voice them. They remain so radical today that they are under perpetual assault. The most American thing about the American Revolution was its revolutionary claim that belonging need not be fixed by birth, blood, or station, that citizenship could be chosen, extended, and remade. It was once the kind of idea that only the very rich and powerful could safely say out loud. Then a revolution happened, and everyone could. ♦