Editor’s Note: This article is part of “The Unfinished Revolution,” a project exploring 250 years of the American experiment.
In the summer of 2016, my family flew ahead of me to England for a vacation. Their taxi driver from the airport to London was chatty, and somehow the conversation drifted to the fact that he was from Lewes, in Sussex. This led to a bit of trivia about his hometown that the driver thought would be of interest to visitors from America: Thomas Paine, the Englishman turned American whose Common Sense would become the best-selling political pamphlet of the 18th century—and tilt America toward independence—had lived in Lewes for six years, working as a tax collector. When my husband relayed this to me by phone that evening, I sat up. I hadn’t known that detail of Paine’s biography but immediately saw its possible relevance to a historical puzzle I was trying to solve.
The research team I directed at Harvard had just made a startling discovery. As part of a project to find all copies of the Declaration of Independence produced between 1776 and 1826, we had stumbled on something special the previous year in the small West Sussex Record Office, in Chichester. Among its holdings was a large-scale ceremonial parchment of the Declaration of Independence. Prior to this find, it had been thought that a single large-scale parchment existed: the one tourists can see protectively encased at the National Archives, in Washington, D.C. Although the Sussex Declaration, as it is now called, has the names of the signatories written out in a single clerk’s hand, rather than with actual signatures, and is engrossed on sheepskin rather than the more expensive calfskin, it is otherwise as grand and impressive as the parchment in Washington. The unanswered question was how it had found its way to West Sussex.
We hypothesized that it had originally belonged to Charles Lennox, the third Duke of Richmond, a man of deeply radical views who was politically active in Britain before, during, and after the American Revolution. Goodwood, the Duke’s family seat, is in Sussex. At some point prior to the 1950s, when it was deposited in the record office, the Sussex Declaration had come into the possession of the law firm that worked for the Duke of Richmond. It was unclear when or how the document might have found its way into the hands of the Duke himself. But that tip from the taxi driver suggested a possible answer: Had Charles Lennox and Thomas Paine known each other?
Unexpectedly for a person of his class—a senior peer of the realm, coming immediately after the Royal Family—Lennox was committed to the political empowerment of British citizens. His commitment was unmatched by any other member of the aristocracy during the Age of Revolution.
Tall, rich, and beautiful, Richmond was hard to ignore. His eyes in particular were “superb,” as one contemporary remembered; Joshua Reynolds, who painted the Duke in his youth, remarked on their “fine and uncommon” dark-blue color.
As lord lieutenant of Sussex, Richmond was the first politician to take up the work of prison reformers and build a new prison within his jurisdiction on principles of rehabilitation. For him, economic and penal reform were necessary to improve the lives of the working poor and people in debt. In the House of Lords, the Duke castigated the ministry for allowing contractors and sinecurists to enrich themselves at public expense. In 1780, he became the first person to introduce a bill in Parliament to extend the right to vote to all adult men in Britain 21 and over. At the time, the franchise was limited to men owning a certain amount of land; some cities had no voice at all, and tiny “rotten boroughs” in the countryside with only a few voters returned members under aristocratic patronage. The result was a House of Commons riddled with corruption and profoundly unrepresentative. Although Richmond’s bill went nowhere, it laid the foundation for a century of reform to come. The Duke’s social standing gave fellow radicals a legitimacy they would not otherwise have had.
And now we surmised that he had possessed a large-scale copy of the Declaration. Textual clues yielded insight. The document appears to have been commissioned by James Wilson, a Scottish American lawyer who himself signed the Declaration, participated in the Constitutional Convention, and became one of the first U.S. Supreme Court justices. Wilson read out the Declaration during the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, in June 1787, and would have needed a large, readable copy to do so. The Sussex Declaration, a colleague and I proposed in a scholarly article, was one of a set of two or three identical handwritten copies produced in advance of that occasion. Only the Sussex copy is known to have survived.
After we discovered the document, I found myself delving ever more deeply into Richmond’s world. At the time of the Duke’s death, his library held some 9,000 volumes. On the shelves at Goodwood you can find not only classics, as you might expect—first editions of Hobbes’s Leviathan and of works by Voltaire and Rousseau—but also, intriguingly, the 1775 and 1776 editions of the Journals of the Continental Congress, a reflection of Richmond’s political interests.
Goodwood remains in the hands of the Lennox family (the current Duke is the 11th). The south-facing wing of the great house contains the Large Library and the Small Library—rooms linked by a hidden door behind a bookcase. The Small Library is a dreamy reading nook, with two floors of books, an ottoman, an armchair, and a desk. As I worked there over several summers, the butler, Monty, in a pinstripe vest and trousers, brought sparkling water, tea, and cookies.
I paid particular attention to the Duke’s extensive collection of political pamphlets, each bound volume stamped with the word Tracts on the spine. Among those dozens of pamphlets, I came across one called The Juryman’s Touchstone, a 95-page essay published pseudonymously in 1771 under the pen name Censor-General. The pamphlet offers a stirring defense of the rights of jurors in support of a publisher named Henry Woodfall. He had printed and distributed the famous anti-government Junius letters, and as a result faced criminal prosecution by the Crown.
The Junius letters grew out of the case of John Wilkes, a radical member of Parliament who had published essays that were vociferously critical of King George III’s administration—and who then faced a charge of sedition. The Wilkes affair provoked some of the most influential newspaper broadsides of the age: a stream of pointed, angry, deeply informed letters about the government, all appearing under the name “Junius.” Published from 1768 to 1772, the Junius letters rocked Britain and took down a prime minister. They also articulated a right to revolution well before the Declaration of Independence, inspiring Americans seeking to defend their own endangered rights.
[From the September 2003 issue: Our reverence for the Founding Fathers has gotten out of hand]
For me, The Juryman’s Touchstone palpably summoned this episode from the past into the present. A few of the pamphlet’s pages bore small corrections from what I knew to be the pen of the Duke. And on the flyleaf of the pamphlet was a handwritten dedication: “To the Duke of Richmond as A Tribute due to him for His Strenuous Efforts & unwearied perseverance in the Defence of Constitutional Liberty this Pamphlet is presented by the Author.”
The existence of the pamphlet in the Duke’s library had been unknown. There are only two other extant copies, one at Yale and the other in the New York Public Library. It did not occur to me at first to wonder if the firm, plain handwriting of the anonymous dedication might belong to Thomas Paine. His first book was widely accepted to have been Common Sense, as he himself maintained, and that book was published five years after The Juryman’s Touchstone. But the pamphlet addressed two matters of great concern to Paine—the Wilkes case and the rights of jurors. And then there was the geographic alert from the London taxi driver. Paine had indeed been living in Lewes, a day’s ride from Goodwood across the wildflower-strewn South Downs. And he was living there when the pamphlet was published.
I eventually went back to the inscription and checked it against examples of Paine’s handwriting. To my eye, it looked like a match—especially the capital T ’s and the capital P. A weightier verdict than mine was provided by the editors of Thomas Paine: Collected Writings. They confirmed the handwriting match and tested the pamphlet’s text by means of computer-assisted author-identification software, applying statistical techniques to word choice and grammar as a way to compare texts of known authorship and texts whose writers are unknown. The comparison produced a match: About half of The Juryman’s Touchstone was written by Paine, the editors concluded, and about half by an American friend of his who had been living on and off in London as a representative of the Pennsylvania colony—Benjamin Franklin. One paragraph, specifically about the House of Lords, appears to be the work of Richmond himself.
So this, not Common Sense, was Thomas Paine’s first book. The inscription not only established for the first time a personal connection between Paine and the Duke of Richmond but also, given the nature of the book’s content, put Paine definitively in the Duke’s intimate circle of radical associates. Here was a crucial piece of validation for our hypothesis about the source of the Sussex Declaration. Richmond had been the first patron of a writer who would do more than any other to stir revolutionary sentiment in the colonies.
It can be easy to think of the American Revolution as a fire lit at the margins of empire, where distance made it hard for central authorities to wield control. The American colonists, we’ve come to understand, learned how to govern themselves partly because the British government was an ocean away. Then, when Crown and Parliament sought to assert more control, the homegrown spirit of self-government rose up to resist.
But this leaves out an earlier chapter, one centered not in Boston but in London, where the memory of Charles I—beheaded by order of a court established by the House of Commons in 1649—and the Glorious Revolution decades later had immense staying power for aristocrats and commoners alike. The theory of revolution, the demand for popular sovereignty, the idea of something called “the rights of man”—all of these developed earlier in London rather than in the colonies. Radical energy spread from the capital across the Atlantic as rabble-rousing dissidents fled London for fear of punishment, and as business and personal letters tied together conversations between the colonies and the mother country.
For every act that provided a drumbeat in the march to revolution in America, something similar had already occurred in Britain. In 1765, the American colonists rioted against a new tax on paper known as the Stamp Act. But in 1763, the British themselves had already rioted against a newly imposed tax on cider, one that hit ordinary people especially hard.
Or consider the Boston Tea Party. The fiercely self-reliant colonists were again protesting economic policies—a tax on tea that gave a protective advantage to the East India Company at the expense of colonial importers. But this came after protests by weavers in London: the so-called Spitalfield Riots. For a sustained period in the 1760s—years before Bostonians dumped shipments of tea into the harbor—weavers in Britain vandalized workshops and organized angry demonstrations to protest government policies that eroded their earnings.
Or take the Boston Massacre. In 1770, British soldiers fired into a crowd gathered outside the statehouse, a modest brick building adorned with a heraldic lion and rearing unicorn that was home to the royal administration in Boston. The soldiers killed five people and further provoked anti-British opinion. But two years earlier, in 1768, British troops in London had fired into a crowd of protesters on the grasslands at St. George’s Fields, just south of the King’s Bench Prison, and killed seven people. The protesters had been angered by the imprisonment of Wilkes. The killings at St. George’s Fields roused England’s radicals to more strenuous effort, just as the Boston Massacre would rouse the Americans.
Paine, the son of a Quaker corset maker from Thetford, in Norfolk, bounced around with unstable employment—as a sailor and then corset maker himself—before becoming, at 25, a collector of excise taxes along England’s eastern coast. He also became immersed in radical politics, writing for London newspapers either anonymously or under a pseudonym, and sometimes in collaboration with others. Paine could pick a fight with his own shadow—as Sarah Franklin wrote to her father, Paine had “at different times disputed with everyone”—but his polemical gifts were unrivaled. Though the nature of Paine’s political writing meant that his identity had to be concealed, his name was widely known among radicals, including prominent men such as the philosopher and politician Edmund Burke. And, as is now clear, Paine was known to the Duke of Richmond.
In 1768, after a period of unemployment, Paine received a new assignment as an excise collector for Sussex, based in the town of Lewes. Given that jobs in excise offices were controlled by local patronage, it is hard to believe that Paine was assigned to Sussex by accident. Paine would be working under the authority of the lord lieutenant in the area—none other than Richmond. As one of 200 voters in Lewes, Paine would have a role to play in local politics, alongside the Duke. And he was ripe for recruitment into the Headstrong Club, a group of Lewes literati and radicals who published anonymous articles in the local paper and met at the White Hart tavern—also the location of the excise office. Securing stable employment for Paine at a place relatively close by would have permitted the Duke to easily engage him for other purposes.
Paine arrived in Lewes during one of the most dramatic election seasons in British history. Wilkes had written to the King to ask for a pardon, stood for election without having received that pardon, and won. The government, however, refused to accept Wilkes as the victor. His subsequent arrest and confinement led to riots. Some 15,000 people turned up outside the prison shouting “Wilkes and liberty!” That was when soldiers had fired into the crowd.
The government called a fresh election for Wilkes’s seat. He ran again, from prison; won again; and was expelled again, producing fresh waves of outrage. The cycle would be repeated several times, before the government insisted on seating Wilkes’s opponent. Meanwhile, the Junius letters had begun to appear. What has only recently become known is that the guiding hand behind the Junius letters was in all likelihood the Duke of Richmond.
The evidence takes many forms, some of it circumstantial. It once was argued that a man named Philip Francis, at the time a clerk in the War Office, later knighted, was solely responsible for the letters. He did play a part, but the writing also displays knowledge and perspective that Francis did not possess. Junius, for instance, had personal acquaintance with the King and his cabinet; had a detailed understanding of the workings of the House of Lords; had access to a certain set of books, nearly all of which are in the Duke of Richmond’s library; and had a memory of the 1747 elections, in which the Duke participated as a surrogate speaker, when Francis was 7 years old.
Independent of my own investigations, computer-assisted identification has in recent years matched the various Junius letters to specific individuals—a small group of radical pamphleteers, including not only Francis but also Paine. We now know from other sources that the major writers identified in this way all had ties to Richmond, and that some had been hired by him on other occasions. The ideas expressed by Junius closely track Richmond’s own, and are fully aligned with his policy agenda. The Duke had a far-flung patronage network at his disposal. And he could handle secretive logistics: His coachmen essentially ran a mail service for him—faster and more private than the post, as Edmund Burke acknowledged in one of his letters. A onetime ambassador to France, Richmond was also accustomed to the use of ciphers.
Whatever their origin, the Junius letters became a cause célèbre on both sides of the Atlantic. One of the most incendiary of them was published toward the end of 1769. Addressed to the King, it began with no invocations of George’s majesty or any of the other polite and florid boilerplate customary at the time. Rather, it started like this: “Sir, It is the misfortune of your life, and originally the cause of every reproach and distress, which has attended your government, that you should never have been acquainted with the language of truth.” Junius characterized the urgency of the moment in words that bring to mind the “When in the course of human events …” language from the Declaration of Independence:
When the complaints of a brave and powerful people are observed to increase in proportion to the wrongs they have suffered; when, instead of sinking into submission, they are roused to resistance …
Junius presented a relentlessly damning account of George’s reign—including the “decisive personal part” the King had taken against the Americans, who, despite being “divided as they are into a thousand forms of policy and religion,” had nevertheless come together in their detestation of the monarch. Junius concluded by recalling the fate of the Stuart monarchs, one of whom, Charles, had lost his head. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 had put the throne into other hands, leading eventually to the House of Hanover and a succession of Georges. But a crown “acquired by one revolution,” Junius warned, “may be lost by another.”
No one had so directly threatened the King in more than a century, and the publisher, Henry Woodfall, was charged with seditious libel. But the damage was done. A few weeks after the letter was published, the King opened a new session of Parliament. Within days, his government fell apart. The lord chancellor attacked his cabinet colleagues over the Wilkes affair, opposing their continued resistance to seating the victorious candidate. King George promptly dismissed him, along with four other royal appointees. Then the commander in chief of the military forces resigned. The new lord chancellor died three days after accepting that office, and was generally thought to have killed himself rather than serve. The collapse was complete when the prime minister resigned.
In the end, Woodfall got off, thanks to a limited judgment by the jury and a mistrial. Remarkably, nothing came to light at the time about the people behind the Junius campaign. If Richmond was indeed the mastermind, his necessary reliance on secrecy is one reason knowledge of that role—and of his association with Paine in the first place—followed him to the grave. His account books and most of his correspondence from the Junius years seem to have been deliberately destroyed. Only now are we getting a clearer picture of the various actors, and the role played by the Duke himself.
Richmond’s energies for political combat were renewed as he watched Britain’s conflict with its American colonies intensify after the fighting in Lexington and Concord. By then, Paine had taken himself to Philadelphia, where he was hired straightaway as editor of the new Pennsylvania Magazine. Soon—telling people he’d never written a word before arriving in America—he published his masterpiece, Common Sense.
Paine was always straining at the leash (and often slipping it). Richmond was not that kind of man, but his political instincts and personal temperament did make him sympathetic to the Americans. When he engaged the rising artistic talent George Romney to paint his portrait, he posed himself in somber dress, reading a book, rather than in bright satins with his dogs, the vogue at the time. He looks like he would be more at home with the American colonists than among the embroidered and bewigged grandees of George’s court. In October 1775, as this portrait was being painted—and as the situation in the colonies continued to deteriorate—debate began in Parliament on what was called the American Prohibitory Bill, which would cut off the colonies from trade with Britain. Under the law of nations, a trade embargo is an official act of hostility—which Richmond pointed out: “I think it a most unjust, oppressive, and tyrannical measure. I perceive, my lords, that this Bill is a formal denunciation of war against the colonies.”
The rhetoric reached a new level in America in early 1776, when Paine published Common Sense, directly arguing for American independence from British rule. The book sold 120,000 to 150,000 copies in the colonies in its first year—this in a population of about 2 million free people. Written in a plain, vigorous style, it laid out the case against monarchical government and hereditary succession, emphasizing the natural rights of individuals and the inherent flaws of the British system. When John Adams returned to the new Continental Congress, a month after Common Sense was published, his to-do list included “Declaration of Independency.”
Richmond saw, perhaps more clearly than anyone, that the conflict with America was not simply a problem of public order but a wide-ranging constitutional crisis. The question of how to incorporate the Americans into the British system of government forced intellectually serious people like the Duke to think hard about British sovereignty and constitutional order, and about representation—what it was, how it should work, what role it should play in a system of governance. Leaving America aside, how should representation function in Britain, where the House of Commons was a decayed institution controlled by the few? How could “the people” make their voices heard in a constitutional monarchy? Universal male suffrage would be one of Richmond’s answers.
He closely followed events in the colonies. On February 6, 1778, Benjamin Franklin and two other American representatives signed the Treaty of Alliance and the Treaty of Amity and Commerce with France. That country’s entrance into the war—against Britain and on the side of America—changed everything. Later that month, before Britain had learned about the agreements and before the United States had ratified the treaties, the House of Lords would debate a set of bills, called the Conciliatory Bills, designed to entice the colonies to cease hostilities—the first serious British peace offer since the outbreak of the war. Richmond was skeptical that the bills themselves were fit for purpose. He was, according to William Cobbett’s parliamentary account of the debate, “convinced, that nothing solid was intended by the peace bills”; rather, they were “framed with a design to divide America on one side, and to keep up appearances with those who supported the measures of government here at home.” Richmond proposed as an alternative that Britain recall its troops from America—a sign of respect—and enter into favorable trade agreements with the Americans before the French could. His proposal did not pass. The Conciliatory Bills did.
And, as Richmond had predicted, they failed to conciliate. The Americans rejected the peace offer. They were committed to independence. The Duke now proposed that Britain send commissioners to the colonies and “arm them with powers to declare America independent, if they chose it.” This, he believed, was the only way to avoid a war with France, as well as the best method “to secure the friendship and commerce” of the colonies in the future. In making this argument, Richmond became the first member of the House of Lords to propose acknowledging American sovereignty.
The Duke had been glad to accept the Revolution, but in the end, he and Paine took divergent and irreconcilable paths. Richmond remained loyal to the British monarchy all his life, but he was equally loyal to the British people and promoted popular sovereignty, embodied in an expanded idea of representation, as essential to the constitutional order. Like the political philosopher Montesquieu, Richmond revered the British constitution, with its balance and its separation of powers among the three estates of monarch, aristocrats, and commoners. His involvement over several decades in rousing the people—to support Wilkes, to support parliamentary reform—made popular sovereignty real in Britain for the first time in the modern era. His unusual gift was to be able to see through the chaos of his age to what his society would ultimately need for durable stability and health: in other words, to envisage the political system that Britain enjoys today. The superb eyes noted by that admiring contemporary are a metaphor.
For his part, Paine became the advocate for a secular republicanism through and through, achieving wide renown and becoming the personification of the revolutionary spirit. He threw his support fully behind the French Revolution, whose terrors made onetime allies such as Burke and Richmond, and indeed most of Britain, recoil. Paine’s break with Richmond would ultimately become bitter and personal. The disagreement was fundamentally about whether popular sovereignty required republicanism or could be made compatible with monarchy.
But relations were not yet fully ruptured in 1787, when the parchment Declaration now in the West Sussex Record Office was delivered, I believe, into the hands of the Duke. Paine had been in Philadelphia in 1787, around the time of the convention, and he was close to James Wilson, the man who had ordered copies of the Declaration made. Paine sailed for France from Philadelphia—returning to Europe after 13 years—just weeks before the convention started, and eventually made his way to England. Paine likely brought the parchment as a gift for his earliest patron. What better memento could there be?
[From the December 1859 issue: Thomas Paine in England and in France]
The gesture would have been in character: Paine was a courier of revolutionary talismans. He visited Paris frequently in the months after the French Revolution began, and in March 1790, the Marquis de Lafayette gave him the key to the Bastille, with a request that he pass it along to George Washington. Paine brought the key back to England, where he entrusted it to John Rutledge Jr., the son of a former governor of South Carolina and delegate to the Constitutional Convention, to carry back to the American president.
You will find it hanging on the wall in the central hall at Mount Vernon to this day.
This article appears in the November 2025 print edition with the headline “Secrets of a Radical Duke.”
