Radical Duke: How One Aristocrat―and the American Revolution―Transformed Britain
About this book
An explosive, deeply revisionist work that reveals how a renegade English Duke and Thomas Paine, the firebrand polemicist, almost brought the American Revolution to Britain.When Danielle Allen discovered a parchment of the Declaration of Independence buried away in Sussex, England, little did she know that she had stumbled onto a larger story that fundamentally changes our understanding of eighteenth-century British and American history. Demonstrating in The Radical Duke that the Age of Revolution began neither with Boston patriots nor with Parisian Jacobins, Allen shows how Charles Lennox, the progressive Third Duke of Richmond, along with radical pamphleteer Thomas Paine secretly fomented a political revolution in which they supported their rebelling American brethren, led the first proposals for universal manhood suffrage, and argued for freedom of the press and religious toleration. Identifying for the first time the anonymous authors of Britain’s seditious Junius letters and revealing that Paine cowrote The Juryman’s Touchstone of 1771, The Radical Duke sets the historical record straight, conjoining radical thought in America and Britain and revealing the complex foundation of modern constitutional monarchy and our own age.