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Fire and freedom: how the American Revolution inflamed passions in Britain
The US celebrates the American Revolution as an uprising by downtrodden colonists on the west side of the Atlantic. But as Tom Cutterham reveals, Britain’s high-handed government also sparked people into action in the motherland – including one young incendiary Scottish saboteur
- Dr Tom Cutterham
Published: June 20, 2026 at 5:00 PM
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The ground must have been rimed with frost as 24-year-old James Aitken left Bristol on foot. At six in the morning in mid-January 1777, the sun had not yet begun to rise. The young man did not look back until he was about three miles out of town. But when he did, it was as if the sky was burning.
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“I thought the whole element was in flames,” Aitken recalled, “so dreadful was the appearance it had at that distance.” Instead of walking on, away from the blazing city, he decided to head back, “to be an eyewitness of the destruction I had wrought.”
This was the last fire Aitken ever set – but not his first.
A few weeks earlier, he had burned down the massive rope-house at Portsmouth Royal Dockyard, causing around £20,000 of damage – double the value of the tea destroyed at Boston harbour by the Sons of Liberty just over three years earlier.
Woodcut of James Aitken in the act of setting fire to the Rope House in Portsmouth Dockyard | Credit: Getty Images
At Bristol, the damage turned out to be less serious than it had seemed in the dawn light. Only a few buildings were destroyed, and no-one had been killed. Aitken’s attack on the city had achieved one thing, though. Everyone in England soon knew there was a firestarter in their midst.
After nearly two years of destructive fighting in the colonies, it was the turn of British people to be afraid for their lives and property. The American Revolution had come to the mother country.
In this 250th anniversary year of the Declaration of Independence, the history of the American Revolution is easily conflated with the origin story of the United States. If we think about the British side of the picture at all, it’s usually to look at the government policies that helped provoke colonial rebellion, or the men who led the war effort to put it down.
There is, however, a much bigger story to be told about Britain’s American Revolution – one that helps us to explain James Aitken and his campaign of incendiary sabotage.
How British ideas inspired revolution
Seeing the revolution from a British perspective helps remind us, too, that there is nothing uniquely American about the struggle for freedom against a corrupt and tyrannical political system. It was, after all, British notions of liberty that inspired the colonists in the first place.
Take the protests against taxes that first galvanised a sense of colonial resistance to the British government in 1765. Americans took to the streets, hanging effigies of tax collectors and, in some cases, tearing down their houses and building bonfires of their possessions. Two years earlier, attempts to raise new taxes in Britain itself had met a similar response, with widespread rioting protesting a tax on cider.
Protests against taxes galvanised a sense of colonial resistance in the mid-1760s. Some Americans took to the streets, hanging effigies of tax collectors, and the Liberty Tree (above) became a mustering point | Credit: Topfoto
Colonists argued that, since they were not represented in Britain’s parliament, it had no right to levy taxes on them – only their own elected assemblies could do that. Many in Britain made the same basic argument. Parliament, with its tiny and unevenly distributed electorate, was not a truly representative institution. It worked only for a corrupt oligarchy, easily manipulated by the king and his ministers.
John Wilkes was a journalist and politician who became a leading symbol of the British opposition in the 1760s. He gained mass support on both sides of the Atlantic, receiving gifts from colonists at his cell in the King’s Bench Prison in 1769. Wilkes, in turn, was a vocal backer of the colonial cause, helping make London a centre of pro-American sentiment in the years leading up to 1776.
While some people – merchants and manufacturers, for example – supported the colonies because they saw the tax crisis as bad for business, others were committed to the principles at stake. The scientist Joseph Priestley, for example, writing in 1768, linked the colonists’ arguments back to the basic axiom that all legitimate government had to come from the people themselves.
John Erskine, the minister at Edinburgh’s Greyfriars Church, also argued in favour of the American cause. His sermon, published in 1769, denied parliament’s right to tax or even legislate for the colonists, warning Britain’s government not to provoke them further. Push things too far, he argued, and “we may drive them into measures, ruinous both to themselves and to us.”
Igniting a firebrand
James Aitken was 16 and living in Edinburgh when Erskine gave that sermon, having grown up attending church at Greyfriars. He also gained an enduring love of reading at the local charity school, known as Heriot’s Hospital, where he read about “the heroes of antiquity” and “the principles of religion and politics”.
Six years later, in 1775, Aitken was travelling from Liverpool through the English countryside to London. He had been on a remarkable journey, including a short stint as an indentured servant in Virginia and, as an escapee, living in the revolutionary hub of Philadelphia.
Yet it wasn’t until he got back to England that spring that he’d started to really associate himself with the American cause. It was only then that he began to realise that the nascent revolution was part of a larger transatlantic struggle. And it was only afterwards that he decided he would have a role to play in it.
In 1775, the imperial crisis was reaching its crescendo. Shots fired at Lexington, Massachusetts in April drove events closer to full-scale war; that August, King George III declared the colonists to be in “open and avowed rebellion”. As Aitken made his way across the country, regiments of soldiers were being raised to go and fight across the ocean.
In August 1775, tensions were further raised when King George III declared the colonists to be in “open and avowed rebellion” | Credit: Getty Images
At the same time, though, British supporters were intensifying their defence of the Americans. The historian Catharine Macaulay denounced what she saw as a policy of tyranny and called on the people to “rouse and unite in one general effort”. The antislavery activist Granville Sharp issued a pamphlet asserting “the people’s natural right to a share in the legislature,” in Ireland and America as well as in Britain itself.
One of the most important contributions to this discourse was the three-volume tract Political Disquisitions, authored by the Scottish-born schoolteacher and religious dissenter James Burgh. He described the book as “an enquiry into public errors, defects, and abuses,” and went into detail on what we might call the British constitution’s democratic deficit. He also came out firmly for the colonists’ rights, and was soon being cited by the revolutionaries themselves.
Aitken devoured such “anti-ministerial” tracts, especially those that “inveighed at monarchical government”. Writers in Britain didn’t explicitly call for the abolition of the monarchy, of course – that would have been treason. But those who read between the lines had little trouble grasping what they meant.
“When kings are base, when tyrants they are grown,” wrote the anonymous authors of The Crisis in December 1775, “may Britons hurl them headlong from the throne.”
British supporters of the revolution included historian Catharine Macaulay, who denounced what she saw as a "policy of tyranny” | Credit: Alamy
Scathing critique of monarchy
By the following spring, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense had shocked and delighted colonial readers with its detailed and scathing critique of monarchy itself. But in England it was another pamphlet that captured public attention. Its author was Richard Price, a Welsh-born dissenting preacher and intellectual who had long moved in the same circles as Priestley and Burgh.
Titled Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, the Principles of Government, and the Justice and Policy of the War with America, the book did little more than rehash arguments already current among parliamentary reformers and friends of the colonies, but it did so with a directness that cut through to readers. As one critic put it, even “dunces, dotards, and drunkards” were among Price’s audience – not to mention “female patriots”. Aitken “always entertained the highest opinion” of “Dr Price’s Tract”.
Price concluded his book with the thought that “an important revolution in the affairs of this kingdom seems to be approaching.” It was an opportunity, he wrote, to be seized now or never: to overthrow the corrupt establishment and restore a more democratic form of British liberty.
John Wilkes, depicted here holding a 'liberty bell' in an engraving by William Hogarth, was a vocal backer of the colonial cause | Credit: Getty Images
Aitken may have taken Price’s sentiments more literally than most. A few months later he was sitting in a pub in Oxford, talking about the war in America. Everyone agreed that Britain’s navy was the linchpin of the empire’s power; without it, there would be no way to carry on the struggle. That night, an idea began to take hold in Aitken’s mind.
Before he lit his first fire in Portsmouth, in December 1776, Aitken spent months making careful preparations. He visited dockyards all over the south of England, learning the layouts and patterns of work, figuring out weak spots. Then he took his notes to Paris for a meeting with Silas Deane, the revolutionary colonists’ envoy to France.
Deane remembered Aitken as a shabbily dressed, unimpressive figure – but one whose eyes sparkled with revolutionary fervour. “I will strike such a blow, ay, such a blow as will need no repetition,” the young Scotsman told him. Deane gave him money, and the address of a spy in London who he said would help.
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As it turned out, most of Aitken’s plans went wrong. He managed to burn down the Portsmouth dockyard rope-house in December, but the contact in London turned him away. Then he made his way to Plymouth, only to find the dockyard there locked down after it received news of the Portsmouth fire.
It was then that he turned to Bristol, a civilian port that was not on his original list of targets. Angry at his disappointment in Plymouth, Aitken “resolved to destroy Bristol entirely, and all the shipping”.
Most people had assumed that the Portsmouth dockyard fire was an accident. The fires in Bristol, though, were clearly deliberate, and they sparked an immediate uproar. The king met with the cabinet at Buckingham Palace and agreed to send troops to the city. A reward was posted for the capture of those responsible. American-born men were rounded up and held for questioning. Parties of citizens patrolled the streets at night.
For Edmund Burke, one of Bristol’s MPs and an outspoken opponent of the war in America, it was a disaster. He knew that supporters of the rebel colonists would be blamed for the arson attack, and that the government would use it to justify further clampdowns. All he could do was distance himself, calling the incident the work of a madman.
Erratic attention-seeker or engaged political actor?
Most of the historians who have written about Aitken – usually using the nickname given to him by the press, ‘John the Painter’ – have taken their lead from Burke’s view. They focus on Aitken’s youth and his erratic behaviour, writing off his sabotage campaign as a cry for attention.
But, as I argue in my new book Empire Ablaze, taking Aitken seriously as an informed, engaged political actor might help us to better understand his moment. After all, he was hardly alone in his bitter hatred of Britain’s oligarchical regime, or in his desire to find new hope in the colonists’ uprising.
Even after France and Spain – Britain’s age-old Catholic enemies – entered the war, support for the Americans and criticism of government tyranny remained substantial. Few British people wanted to get rid of the empire. What they wanted was to reform it on more democratic principles. Political thinkers such as Price, Burke and others grappled with the contradictions inherent in that goal.
Today, 250 years later, people in the US celebrate the American Revolution as a national birthday, but most usually forget that it was a revolutionary moment in British history, too. The spirit of liberty that burgeoned on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1760s and 1770s had long-term consequences all over the world.
Aitken was captured within days of the fires at Bristol, and was brought to London in chains while the authorities built a case against him. After almost a month in jail, he was tried for the Portsmouth dockyard arson in Winchester’s medieval Great Hall. The outcome was never in doubt.
A woodcut of Aitken, aka John the Painter, on trial for the Portsmouth dockyard arson in Winchester’s medieval Great Hall
On 10 March 1777, the young revolutionary was hanged – hauled up by the neck to the top of a warship’s mizzenmast.
“Remember John the Painter,” entreated a writer in the Pennsylvania Packet three years later. He was only a poor man, but he had the courage to strike back against the British empire and its war machine. For many years longer, revolutionaries on both sides of the ocean would continue to need such courage to fight against the odds.
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Tom Cutterham is associate professor of United States history at the University of Birmingham. His latest book is Empire Ablaze: The American Revolution and the Atlantic Working Class (Verso, 2026)
Authors
Dr Tom Cutterham
Tom Cutterham is a historian of Revolutionary America and the late 18th-century Atlantic world, at the University of Birmingham
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