In a New Documentary, One of Britain’s Most Famous Historians Reframes the American Revolution as a ‘Messy Divorce’

In the United States, the story of the American Revolution is often framed as a triumphant fight for independence. But the colonists’ British counterparts had a different perspective. Some agreed with the Americans that the Thirteen Colonies shouldn’t be taxed without representation. Others thought the colonists shouldn’t question how George III chose to rule over his subjects. Still others were simply anxious about the prospect of war and its hardships.

As the U.S. prepares to celebrate the 250th anniversary of its founding on July 4, 1776, a new PBS documentary hosted by the British historian Lucy Worsley spotlights individuals on the other side of the Revolution, from the king and his fellow elites to British merchants and the working class. “Lucy Worsley Investigates: The American Revolution” also examines the events that sparked the Revolution and its aftershocks, with an emphasis on the emotional fallout of this historic rupture.

Worsley’s focus is reflected in the titles of the documentary’s two installments: “The Breakup,” premiering on April 7, and “A Messy Divorce,” which will follow on April 14. “This was a perfect union that went wrong,” Worsley tells Smithsonian magazine. “It could have gone a different way with couple’s therapy.”

LUCY WORSLEY INVESTIGATES THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION – TUESDAY APRIL 7 8PM ON WYES

No taxation without representation

Between 1754 and 1763, American colonists fought alongside the British in the French and Indian War, a subsidiary conflict of the global Seven Years’ War. In the aftermath of the hostilities, Americans largely remained loyal to the crown. But they soon took issue with Britain’s refusal to grant the Thirteen Colonies a representative in Parliament.

Britain’s leaders believed that their country’s population was diverse enough that “at least some members of Parliament were going to represent the views of the Colonies,” Liz Covart, a historian who wasn’t involved in the documentary, tells Smithsonian. “But the colonists end up arguing, ‘Well, we don’t have real representatives, because you won’t seat anybody who comes from America.’”

These tensions came to a head when Britain introduced new taxes to revive its postwar economy. The fees imposed by the 1765 Stamp Act and the 1767 Townshend Acts were lower than the overall taxes paid by people in the British Isles, but Americans maintained their opposition to taxation of any kind without representation.

Some in Britain agreed with the colonists. In December 1768, Peter Verstille, a 34-year-old merchant from New England, sailed to London on business. While there, he visited “disputing clubs,” where large groups of men gathered to discuss political affairs. Whether Britain had the right to tax the Colonies was a regular topic of debate. Verstille recorded in his diary the result of one such discussion: “It was evidently proved to the general satisfaction of the company that it was neither for the interest nor the honor of Great Britain to tax the Americans at this time.”

Verstille closely followed the work of the radical British politician John Wilkes, who’d been thrown into the Tower of London a few years earlier on libel charges, although he was soon released. Wilkes vehemently opposed the Townshend Acts, which taxed imported glass, paper and tea, among other goods. A controversial figure, Wilkes nevertheless had supporters in Britain, so much so that merchants put out a line of teapots celebrating his call for “liberty” from a corrupt Parliament.

In response to the taxes, colonists banded together to stop buying British goods. Some Americans took to the streets in protest, especially in Boston, where local leaders brought in British troops to quell the unrest. On March 5, 1770, British soldiers fired at a crowd of Bostonians, killing five and wounding several others. As Worsley explains in the documentary, coverage of the Boston Massacre in British and American newspapers was “diametrically opposed,” offering “two different ways of looking at the world. Things are shaping up into them and us. And that’s a very dangerous place to be.”

Britain repealed the Townshend Acts in April 1770—with one exception. “They leave the duty on tea, because they figure if the Americans just pay it, then Parliament will have established a precedent where they will have paid a parliamentary tax,” Covart says.

Many Americans resisted buying tea to avoid setting such a precedent. On December 16, 1773, more than 5,000 colonists gathered at Boston’s Old South Meeting House to discuss how to respond to the arrival of ships loaded with unwanted tea. Shortly after, hundreds of men descended on Boston Harbor, where they destroyed more than 92,000 pounds of tea, worth approximately £10,000.

Unsurprisingly, Britain’s leaders condemned the Bostonians’ actions. Prominent Americans did, too: Benjamin Franklin, for instance, wrote that the colonists should “repair the damage and make compensation” to the East India Company, the trading corporation that owned the destroyed tea.

Benjamin Franklin’s shifting loyalties

Despite his disapproval of the Boston Tea Party, Franklin found his sympathies shifting to the colonists in the years leading up to the Revolution. The founding father lived in London between 1757 and 1775, serving as a lobbyist for several Colonies and as joint postmaster general for the British crown. “He always thought of himself as a Pennsylvanian first, but he was proud to be part of Britain, as many Americans were after the Seven Years’ War,” Covart says.

As early as 1769, Franklin wrote that he was increasingly concerned about the possibility of “a breach and final separation” between Britain and the Colonies. These fears were exacerbated in December 1772, when an anonymous source sent him intercepted letters from Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson. In them, Hutchinson pleaded with British authorities to send more troops to Boston.

Franklin shared the letters with colleagues back home under the condition that their contents remain private, but John Adams published them anyway. The British solicitor general was furious over the breach, and in January 1774, he excoriated Franklin for more than an hour in front of the Privy Council, a group of politicians tasked with advising the monarch.

Disillusioned, Franklin departed for America in March 1775, just a few weeks before the Battles of Lexington and Concord kicked off the Revolution. Back home, “Franklin shed his old skin,” Worsley says in the documentary. “He was no longer a British subject but an American patriot. Now, alongside four others, he would help create one of the most famous documents in history”: the Declaration of Independence.

In Worsley’s view, Thomas Jefferson’s early drafts of the Declaration read more like a breakup letter than a foundational document for a government led by the people rather than the crown. “You could see [Jefferson] dealing with all the nuances and perhaps the regrets and the nostalgia and the things that had gone right,” Worsley tells Smithsonian. “He didn’t want to make this brutal cut, which is what the world was coming to.”

How the British experienced the American Revolution

The British response to the war with America was mixed. Some viewed resistance by the colonists against George III, whom they considered ordained by God, as treason. British merchants generally opposed the conflict; they had invested in the Colonies and stood to lose money if the crown no longer had a foothold in North America.

Broadly speaking, “Britain in the 18th century was changing,” Olivette Otele, a historian who is featured in the documentary, tells Smithsonian. “People wanted more rights, and therefore some parts of the population, mainly the working class, didn’t understand why they had to fight their fellow countrymen or cousins. They understood these people were fighting for their freedom and independence.”

At the same time, many in the British Isles failed to fully grasp the complicated political issues underlying the colonists’ rebellion. In a letter, Jane Strachey, the middle-class English wife of a British member of Parliament, expressed confusion over the “ambitious and restless spirit of the Americans,” which had destroyed “the domestic tranquility of many happy families” around her. Still, she added that she wished the colonists only peace.

Public support for the war waned over time. In February 1775, politician Horace Walpole described the burgeoning conflict as “fashionable,” adding that he expected the colonists to capitulate within three months. In his memoirs, historian Edward Gibbon wrote that at first, “the pride of England was irritated by the resistance of her colonies,” leading to widespread approval of the war. As the fighting continued into the 1781-82 session of Parliament, however, “the loss of armies; the accumulation of debt and taxes; and the hostile confederacy of France, Spain and Holland indisposed the public to the American war.”

Unrest in England

Events in England also reflected evolving views of the conflict. In late 1776 and early 1777, a series of arson attacks inflicted damage on royal dockyards in several British cities. The crimes caused a panic; rumors suggested that America or its European allies had sent saboteurs to attack the British on their own soil. The truth of the matter was far simpler: James Aitken, a Scottish-born petty criminal who’d developed sympathy for the patriot cause while living in the Colonies, set the fires on his own—without the Americans’ backing—in hopes of destroying the Royal Navy. He was hanged for his crimes on March 10, 1777.

Aitken’s solo arson campaign wasn’t indicative of a wider American plot to infiltrate Britain. But his actions influenced British perceptions of the war, convincing members of the public that the fight for American independence threatened their own safety.

Interestingly, when violence broke out in England’s capital in June 1780, it was only “indirectly caused by the American Revolution,” Worsley says. The British “were just desperate for troops to send to North America, so they relaxed this rule that had previously existed, which was that Catholics weren’t allowed to serve in the army. This upset Protestant opinion that thought that this was giving too much toleration to Catholics.”

The result was the Gordon Riots, which London shop owner and abolitionist Ignatius Sancho witnessed firsthand. In a letter, Sancho described the “poor, miserable, ragged rabble, from 12 to 60 years of age … all parading the streets—the bridge—the park—ready for any and every mischief.” He also recounted that the rioters didn’t shy away from violence. Lord Sandwich “narrowly escaped with life about an hour since,” Sancho wrote on June 6. “The mob seized his chariot going to the house, broke his glasses, and, in struggling to get his lordship out, they somehow have cut his face.”

Over six days, tens of thousands of protesters swarmed London, burning down and ransacking buildings associated with Catholics. “It started as a protest against [Catholics in the army], but actually it turned out to be something bigger,” Otele says. An increasing number of people were “fed up with war because the country’s coffers were depleting,” she adds, “and more was asked of them—the price of food, everything was becoming much more expensive for people who were already struggling. And on top of that, you had the elites and the crown telling them to basically suck it up.”

George stopped the riots by sending troops out into the streets. The soldiers killed an estimated 300 people and arrested hundreds more. The unrest, once quelled, failed to spark a larger uprising against the crown. “People were still convinced that the king had a divine right” to rule, Otele says. “It wasn’t a deep, profound discontent against the institution of the monarchy. It was just that at one point in time, they wanted more.”

The legacy of the American Revolution

As the war wore on, Britain’s king resisted signing a treaty. “It made sense for him to hold the line, because if he lost the American Colonies”—he reasoned—“he would lose the West Indies, and Ireland would be at risk,” Worsley says. “Britain would lose its superpower status, and he personally would have left the British Empire in a smaller state than he found it.”

The decision so troubled George that in 1782, he drafted a letter saying he would give up the throne. That missive—never sent to Parliament—finds the king struggling with the weight of his responsibilities. “It shows him feeling really vulnerable,” Worsley says. “It shows him thinking, ‘I’m no good at this. I’ve got to step down. I just can’t do what they want.’”

The draft letter, Worsley adds, suggests that George wasn’t the tyrant some made him out to be. “He did ultimately accept that he wasn’t going to get his own way,” she explains. “It would have been petulant of him to go off and not be king anymore. And clearly that isn’t what he did.”

Ultimately, the Thirteen Colonies weren’t the most valuable part of the British Empire. “We Americans like to think of ourselves as the crown jewel of the British Empire, but we were not,” Covart says. “The Caribbean islands and India, it was these places that brought in a whole lot more wealth. … So at that point, it just became easier to let the Colonies go.”

As Britain waged war on multiple fronts, fighting European powers in addition to the Americans, its leaders realized that they could no longer dedicate significant resources to the fight in North America. The Revolution officially came to an end in September 1783, when the Treaty of Paris recognized the U.S. as an independent nation.

Worsley hopes that the documentary’s viewers will gain an understanding of the war’s stakes on both sides of the Atlantic. “I really feel there’s an emotional pleasure to be had through seeing the birth of America, understanding what this meant for Britain and the thrill of the chase, if you like—a sense of the pleasure of following a story,” she says. “There are twists, there are turns. … There’s trials, there’s disasters, there’s hopefully emotion in that, too. That’s what I want, because you can make people think if they’re also feeling.”