Volume 4, Chapter 2, The Response in Britain
So zealous and skillful were the American radicals at spreading their account of Lexington
and Concord that, by a feat of seamanship and enterprise, the American version reached
Britain two full weeks before the official dispatches of General Thomas Gage.
Dr. Warren dispatched the skillful young mariner, Captain John Derby, to England from Salem.
Derby reached London before the end of May, quickly placing the papers in the custody
of the radical John Wilkes, by then Lord Mayor of London.
The next day the American version of the affair hit the English press with great impact.
The Reverend John Horne, a leading radical of London, promptly issued an appeal for funds
to aid the widows and orphans of Americans murdered at Lexington. Funds to help our beloved
American fellow subjects, who faithful to the character of Englishmen, preferring death
to slavery, were, for that reason only, inhumanely murdered by the King's troops. For sending
Between the money thus raised to Benjamin Franklin, who had already sailed for America
earlier that year, Horn was imprisoned by the Crown.
For its part, the British government, bereft of information for two critical weeks, could
only deny that such battles had taken place, a denial that made it a laughing stock when
Gage's dispatches finally arrived.
The outbreak of war had a great and critical impact upon the liberal Whigs, many of whom
were high-ranking officers in the British armed forces. Some refused outright to serve
in war against the Americans, including Admiral Augustus Keppel and Lord Effingham. Rather
than lead the war against the Americans, Effingham published his resignation from the army in
September, for which he received public thanks from London, Dublin, Newcastle and other cities.
The British Army was hit by numerous other resignations of conscience-stricken Whigs.
Lord Chatham publicly refused to allow his son, William Pitt the Younger, to fight against
the Americans. A typical Whig defection among leading Englishmen was that of Granville Sharp,
The Man Chiefly Responsible three years earlier for the legal action that outlawed slavery
within England.
When the American Revolution broke out, Sharp was assistant to the Secretary of Ordnance
and was in charge of ordering the munitions for the British Army and the colonies.
By midsummer he obtained extended leave from his duties because I cannot return to my ordnance
Warren declared that the Americans were duty-bound to resist invasion of their rights. This American
victory for the minds of the British people was never entirely erased by the government,
especially since Warren had been careful to appeal to the English's fellow subjects in
natural alliance against the Crown and its armed forces. The Crown, of course, in the
The manor of hardliners throughout history refused to acknowledge that its policy of
coercion had failed.
Instead, so much the more did the Americans need to be suppressed and the rebels and villains
to be taught a lesson.
For the moment, six regiments from the Mediterranean were to be sent to Boston and more enlistments
were hoped for, enlistments that failed to materialize.
Neither was the North Ministry at all apologetic about the failure to cowl the Americans.
Instead, blame was put on subversive Whigs, who had put ideas of liberty and revolution
into the heads of the Americans, and, more specifically, on the supposed incompetence
of General Gage, who had, however, been essentially acting on Crown Orders.