Chapter Four

      The Heart of Empire

      “HOW SHALL I describe what I felt, when I first set my foot on British ground?” soliloquized Louisa Wells, a young loyalist refugee from Charleston, when she disembarked on the shores of Kent in 1778. “I could have kissed the gravel on the salt Beach! It was my home: the Country which I had so long and so earnestly wished to see. The Isle of Liberty and Peace.” After what she had endured, Wells had good reason to feel relieved. The daughter of Charleston’s leading printer, a loyalist, she had stayed in the war-torn city to protect the family property against confiscation “as long as one stone stood upon another,” while her relatives fanned out in a loyalist diaspora in miniature.¹ Her parents went to England; her brothers William and James to East Florida, bringing the family press with them; and her fiancé, a former apprentice of her father’s, to Jamaica. Wells painstakingly liquidated family assets in Charleston and invested the proceeds in easily transportable indigo, only to have her cargo seized by patriots as she prepared to sail for England. Then her ship itself was captured as a suspected privateer. She finally made it across the Atlantic, five months after leaving Charleston, plagued by bad weather and fear of French attack.

      Britain may not have been the closest place, geographically, for American loyalists to seek asylum, but as the center of the imperial world, it was in some ways the most obvious. During the war, Britain served as a primary destination for loyalist refugees. It commanded a strength of attachment that no other locale could match, based in language, religion, culture, and for many white loyalists, blood. Yet few if any expressed sentiments resembling Wells’s when they got there. Far more often, they echoed the paradox embedded in her statement.² Her “home,” as she put it, lay in a locale she had “long and so earnestly wished”—but never yet actually managed—to see. For all that many “ Americans had been raised to consider Britain as “home,” this was emphatically a foreign country.³ The tension between familiarity and difference would be the first of several paradoxes loyalists encountered in Britain, as their dearest, most trusted refuge proved an oddly alienating place.

      What a new world this was! Nothing in America could prepare the provincial newcomers for the sensory experience of Georgian London, one of the largest, most diverse cities on earth. “[I]t is absolutely impossible for any American, who has never lived in London, to have any idea of it,” pronounced one colonial visitor.⁴ “[N]otwithstanding the grand Ideas I had formed of it,” a Massachusetts exile explained, London “far exceeded my expectation”—for better and for worse. The best of the city showed itself in elegant squares and town houses and in the graceful greenswards of St. James’s Park, often “throng’d by loyalists.”⁵ The capital offered an inexhaustible series of things to see and do. You could squeeze into a crowd of theatergoers to watch David Garrick play Hamlet.⁶ You could visit the British Museum and handle ancient manuscripts, peer at fossils, and wonder at the curiosities recently brought from the South Seas by Captain James Cook. You could pay your respects at the tomb of General Wolfe in Westminster Abbey, and admire grand historical canvases by Benjamin West and other prominent painters at the Royal Academy. You could make the rounds of London churches to hear celebrated divines preach, or visit the law courts and listen to eminent jurists try cases. You could fill your ears with the swelling choruses of Handel’s Messiah, “the most sublime piece of music in the whole world.”⁷

      But as loyalists reveled in all these activities, they found London to be overwhelming too. Refugees felt buffeted by the crush of humanity in the streets as they navigated among “coaches, carts and waggons etc. continually passing repassing, meeting and jostling,” and swerved around beggars and hawkers, constantly alert for pickpockets.⁸ In London’s East End—where the majority of black loyalists ended up—“Whores Rogues & Sailors” clogged the filthy lanes, while cargoes from India, America, and Africa were unloaded onto docks as busy as whole villages.⁹ Unrelenting grey skies and saturating damp left the Americans depressed and prone to illness. One complained that very few Britons upheld “ancient Hospitality” and “pittied the fate of the Refugees.”¹⁰ “The shyness reserve and unconversibility of native Englishmen is notorious,” grumbled another.¹¹ London seemed an altogether pushy place, where everyone looked out for themselves and foreigners were incidental distractions. Partly for this reason, many loyalists chose to reside in Bristol, Bath, and smaller towns, where prices were lower and the pace of life slower. Loyalists also tended to keep their own company, living near one another and frequenting common haunts. A refugee from Maine found quarters in South Kensington with three Massachusetts exiles, and dined regularly with an “American club” of fellow New England loyalists. Coffee houses—the New England, New York, Carolina, and others—served as their life-lines to America, sources of news, debate, gossip, and convenient places to receive precious letters from home.¹²

      During the war loyalist refugees sadly recorded the anniversaries of their departures from America, and looked forward to a peace that would let them go home.¹³ But the war’s end and the unsatisfying treaty seemed to slam the door to return shut. Instead thousands more refugees arrived on British shores. Because of the high cost of living in Britain, its distance from America, and the incentives offered for settlement in British North America and the Bahamas, only about 15 percent of white loyalist refugees, or around eight thousand, chose to migrate to Britain—less than twice the number of black loyalists who ended up there, often as a result of their military service. The majority of white loyalists crossing the Atlantic were of middle-class status or higher. Their central objective was to win compensation for their lost and confiscated American assets. Joseph Galloway and William Franklin, formerly advocates for imperial union, became leading lobbyists for government