Liberty’s Exiles: The Loss of America and the Remaking of the British Empire.. Maya Jasanoff
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in good schools and on promising career paths. Unsure about how much financial support they might win, or where they might profitably settle, even privileged loyalists found life in Britain uncomfortable. Still, they were fortunate compared to the smaller number of refugees who arrived in Britain in more desperate straits. For hundreds of indigent newcomers—the disabled, the illiterate, single mothers, and former slaves—relief could make the difference between starvation and survival.
And yet as loyalists across the kingdom clamored for assistance, Britain was in a poor position to grant it to them. “Nothing can be worse than this rich, devoted, ill govern’d Island,” growled one fed-up refugee as he approached the tenth anniversary of his exile in 1784.14 Parliament seemed in perennial tumult, with a series of ministries undercut by rivalry and infighting. The costs of war had brought the national debt to its highest level ever, at £232 million (or £25 billion in current terms). Britain’s territorial concessions in the Peace of Paris appeared to its critics to reveal weakness in the face of European rivals. American independence also raised troubling metaphysical questions about what the relationship between nation and empire would look like in the future.15 With the loss of the thirteen colonies, fewer and fewer imperial subjects resembled the British, in ethnicity, religion, culture, or language: Bengal, in eastern India, with perhaps twenty million inhabitants, was easily the largest domain in the British Empire. Nor, as the war had demonstrated, could Parliament claim to represent virtually its white settler colonists in the same manner it represented those in the British Isles. Imperial government had been shaken, but it remained to be seen how it would adapt.
Loyalist refugees brought the social and material consequences of defeat straight to the empire’s heart. Having lost their personal property, livelihoods, and homes, they put a human face on Britain’s own loss of the thirteen colonies. How would the refugees, and the empire to which they adhered, manage to regroup? Postwar Britain became the center of a parallel process of reconstruction. Individual loyalists sought to reestablish themselves with financial aid and new positions, while British authorities set about reforming imperial government and expanding into new domains—laying the foundations of the “spirit of 1783.” But for all that these projects harmonized in many ways, loyalists in Britain ran up against one contradiction after another. Though they strongly identified as British subjects, they felt estranged in this foreign land. Convinced that they deserved compensation, they grew frustrated in their quest for support. And while a newly expanding empire presented them with a panoply of career opportunities overseas, they struggled to make a go of it in Britain itself. The refugees in Britain benefited from imperial recovery, while experiencing firsthand the challenges that went with it.
AMERICANS IN LONDON frequently commented on the spectacular trappings of state power. From the palace of Westminster to St. James’s Palace, from the offices lining Whitehall to the grim brown bulk of the Tower, it was hard not to be awed by the government’s sheer architectural heft. Then there were its personalities. A number of loyalists attended debates in the House of Commons to watch gifted politicians in action, men like the eloquent Edmund Burke, the passionate Charles James Fox, and the precocious William Pitt the Younger, who in December 1783 became Britain’s youngest prime minister at the age of twenty-four. Some caught sight of Queen Charlotte at the theater, with her “lustures of Diamonds” glittering by candlelight. Others spotted King George III riding through the streets in a state coach, pulled by eight white horses bedecked in royal blue ribbons.16 A select few loyalists even had the chance to be presented to the royal family at court levees. No other refugees, however, encountered the monarch in quite the way that Samuel Shoemaker did, one day at Windsor Castle.
Shoemaker was a Pennsylvania Quaker, former mayor of Philadelphia, and a pillar of the New York City loyalist community during the war. (He had served with Beverley Robinson as an inspector of refugees in the occupied city.) Shoemaker left New York in the last evacuation fleet, with Carleton, William Smith, and a number of other associates, and arrived in Britain to find many of his refugee friends already getting settled. He had not seen his fellow Pennsylvanian Benjamin West, however, in at least twenty years, not since the painter had moved to Britain in 1763 to further his career. In the intervening decades, as Shoemaker lived through the breakdown of imperial relations in Pennsylvania, his old friend West surged to prominence as the greatest image-maker of British imperial might. A founder of the Royal Academy, of which he would be president for nearly thirty years, West was now history painter to the king, with whom he was a personal favorite.
Shoemaker enjoyed a fond reunion with his long-lost friend and visited the Wests at their residence in Windsor Castle. One afternoon, he was loitering outside in hopes of catching a glimpse of the royal family on their way to chapel when West popped out from the castle with surprising news: the king had just asked to meet Shoemaker personally. Flustered, Shoemaker had no time to overcome his shock before West whisked him into the royal presence. And suddenly there he was: the leader of the empire, the personification of loyalist hopes and patriot hatred, goggle-eyed King George III himself, with Queen Charlotte and four of their daughters in tow. “Mr. S. you are well known here, every body knows you,” said the king, instantly calming Shoemaker’s nerves. Why, the king wanted to know, was “the Province of Pennsylvania . . . so much further advanced in improvement than the neighbouring ones” that had been settled earlier? Shoemaker, “thinking it wd. be a kind of compliment to the Queens countrymen &c,” generously suggested that it was due to hardworking German colonists. The king returned the favor, saying that Pennsylvania’s prosperity must be “principally owing to the Quakers.” For another forty-five minutes Shoemaker happily chatted with the king and queen—partly in German—about America, his family, and more. The Hanovers swished away, leaving their loyal subject smitten. “I cannot say but I wished some of my violent countrymen could have such an opportunity as I have had,” Shoemaker reflected in his diary. “I think they would be convinced that George the third has not one grain of Tyrany in his Composition, and that he is not, he cannot be that bloody minded man they have so repeatedly and so illiberally called him, it is impossible, a man of his fine feelings, so good a husband, so kind a Father, cannot be a Tyrant.”17
Shoemaker’s unusually long, informal encounter with the king brought him as close as any loyalist to a man so many Americans had only fantasized about, for good and ill. His positive impression of his sovereign gestured toward an important if perhaps surprising outcome of the American Revolution for the monarchy. Although King George III had fervently opposed recognizing American independence, the secession of the thirteen colonies—along with those former subjects who condemned him as a “tyrant”—actually strengthened his symbolic power in the rest of the empire. The king’s popularity surged in Britain in the years immediately following the war.18 Imperial officials overseas, in turn, increasingly used ceremonies, symbols, and celebrations to cultivate emotional connections to the monarchy.19 In many domains royal authority would be fortified at the expense of elected legislatures, a palpable manifestation of the “spirit of 1783.”
But loyalists’ connection to the king overlaid a more ambivalent relationship to Parliament and other branches of government. Their quest for compensation brought these tensions to the fore. In Britain as in America, loyalist concerns centered on the noxious Article V of the peace treaty. The prime minister during the treaty negotiations, Lord Shelburne, had feared that failing to provide adequately for loyalists might give ammunition to his political opponents. He was right. When the treaties with the United States, France, and Spain came up for debate in the House of Commons, the opposition fiercely denounced their terms. Britain’s generous territorial concessions were bad enough. Even worse, Lord North (now in opposition) opined, the poor treatment of loyalists “awakens human sensibility in a very irresistible and lamentable degree”: “Never was the honor of the nation so grossly abused as in the desertion of those men, who are now exposed to every punishment that desertion and poverty can inflict.” His allies promptly chimed in. This “gross libel on the national character,” proclaimed Edmund Burke, “in one flagitious