Lucy Worsley Investigates

Lucy Worsley: December 1776.

In a rented room, a man works cautiously.

He's building an 18th-century homemade bomb.

The target... Britain's largest and most vital naval dockyard.

Just five months after America declared its independence from Britain... the American Revolution is about to escalate.

For the first time, the revolutionaries are striking at Britain itself.

[Match striking] In this two-part special, I'm re-investigating one of the most explosive breakups between two nations in history.

This is The Stamp Act.

The whole mess starts here, Lucy.

It's a story that's become part of the mythology of both Britain and the United States... Oh, look at that.

You can just imagine inviting your friends around for a seditious tea party.

Told as a bitter loss of empire... It was the closest we came to an anarchy.

Or the triumphant birth of a new nation.

He is outnumbered just about two to one.

But 250 years since America's Declaration of Independence, there's an untold version of the story, the British perspective.

That's what I want to investigate.

Think James Bond wearing a powdery wig.

Listen to this.

He's giving up the throne.

He's resigning his job.

I'm going to uncover forgotten witnesses.

It's like opening a present.

I'm going to reexamine the original evidence... Damn you.

Fire!

And follow new clues... Aah!

To get closer to the truth.

Historians have very different views.

What do you think?

In July 1776, the American Revolution was raging on, and the fighting had now reached New York City.

The 13 colonies had declared their independence from Britain... And had begun referring to themselves as the United States of America.

Just seven weeks later, though, this enthusiasm for independence would be brutally tested in the battle for Long Island.

It happened just over there in the Prospect Park area of the city.

This was the biggest battle yet of the American Revolution, and the British won it.

In this very park, 20,000 freshly landed British troops squared off against a force of only 10,000 Americans led by General George Washington.

The battle ended with Washington's forces surrounded, their backs to the East River and nowhere left to run.

What saved the Americans was one of the boldest and most successful retreats in military history.

Under the cover of darkness and in thick fog, the Americans went quietly slipping away across the East River to escape.

It's said that the last man to leave Brooklyn was George Washington himself.

I think this battle here in Brooklyn was a real wakeup call for the American colonists.

They weren't guaranteed to win.

It's one thing to declare your independence on paper, and it's quite another to win it on the battlefield.

At this point, it looked like the Americans stood little chance of defeating the might of the British Empire.

Most people believe the Americans did eventually triumph, thanks to their guerilla tactics and their local knowledge.

But I think that's only part of the truth.

That's why I'm continuing my investigation not in America... but 3,000 miles away across the ocean.

There's another side to the story that gets told less often.

While all the battles were unfolding over there in North America, American revolutionaries were also working here in Britain to destabilize this nation.

The royal dockyard at Portsmouth was the main naval depot for the British during the American Revolution, and it was right here in December 1776 that an act of arson set the docks ablaze.

[Flames crackling] I'd like to dig into the detail of this attack to find out if it was an American inside job.

I'm descending to the gun deck of HMS Warrior to meet a terrorism expert.

Man: So, we've got a wonderful description here from one of the investigators.

Lucy: He's brought with him trial documents, including a confession, that reveal exactly how this attack was carried out and by whom.

James, can you tell me about this bomb?

How did it work?

What did it do?

The bomb was quite ingenious for its time.

So, this is a document from the prosecution.

Wow.

The most ingenious bit is this in the middle here, a candle.

So, it's a timed wick.

It's not just what we call today an improvised incendiary device, an IID.

It's a timed IID.

A candle would have been slowly moving towards the zero hour, and then poof.

-Very ominous.

-Gosh.

That sounds quite effective, then.

It really worked.

How much damage did it cause?

In Portsmouth, pretty substantial damage.

He gutted an entire building.

I guess that the people in charge of the navy must have felt immensely vulnerable.

Very.

It was a panic.

I mean, we're talking about a spate of attacks at key ports in the space of a couple of weeks.

The navy is being used to run fresh troops and munitions across the Atlantic, and that's the vital point here, is that it is the literal lifeline for the crown forces over there.

Sounds like the work of a cell to me.

Well, that was the assumption.

The second these fires start, they believe there's a team of saboteurs at work and that they are indeed American-backed.

Turns out that it is just one man, and that comes across in his testimony when he's put on trial, that he has no accomplices.

He sounds like a proper criminal mastermind, doesn't he?

Well, he is, and he isn't.

Contrary to the rumor at the time, he was not American.

He was Scottish.

He went by the name of John the Painter.

His real name was James Aitkin.

His plan was to attack the Royal Navy at a pretty sensitive time in the war, when the Royal Navy has commenced a blockade.

Was he recruited by the Americans to help their cause, then?

He claims that he was there in Boston in December of 1773 to see the Tea Party, perhaps even participate in it, and on that basis, he claims that he was radicalized.

He's not officially American, but he's definitely acting in American interests, isn't he?

Oh, very much so.

I mean, he really thinks that he is a fighter for the cause.

So, the bombing of Portsmouth dock was an attack designed to cripple the Royal Navy at home.

And it was carried out by a British citizen... radicalized by America's new ideas about liberty and putting an end to monarchy.

For the British, what must have felt like a little skirmish happening on the other side of the world had suddenly crossed the Atlantic, become much closer to home, and turned much more troubling.

Here are the 13 colonies.

This is New York.

This was the front line of the conventional war in America, where soldiers were clashing in open battle.

By December 1776, George Washington's army was in retreat, pursued relentlessly across New Jersey by superior British forces.

Five months after the Declaration of Independence, Washington now feared the worst, saying, "I think the game is pretty nearly up."

In desperation and not a moment too soon, the Americans began to devise a bold new strategy.

They were trying to get into bed with Britain's oldest enemy, France.

Benjamin Franklin, their most experienced diplomat, was sent on a top-secret mission to Paris to try to secure French support for the Revolution.

Franklin had once lived in London and been a big fan of Britain.

But now it seems he's become Britain's nemesis.

I've come to the archives at the Royal Society in central London to take a closer look at Franklin's dramatic transformation.

How is he today?

Meet Benjamin Franklin in the London phase of his life.

He looks like a man who'd be, as he was, completely at home here in the Royal Society, where he enjoyed electrocuting himself in the name of scientific progress.

This is Franklin, the loyal subject of the British Empire.

But you've got to see this.

This is the transformation in his appearance that happens when he goes full-on American.

When he's in Paris representing the colonists, he's created a totally new look for himself.

He would now wear a furry hat from some North American animal.

He had a beaver one.

He had a raccoon one.

And he was famous for wearing a homespun shirt.

There was nothing of the courtly or the kingly about him anymore.

He was channeling rough-law American simplicity.

I suppose what he was doing was presenting himself as the... the human face of this new nation in the process of being born.

To the French, this was extremely enticing.

They found him a sort of exotic embodiment of liberty.

Franklin's look was so different to the normal formal powdered dandy thing they had going on at Versailles that the French ladies found him rather attractive.

They would come up to him and stroke his furry hat, which he found amusing but also he was quite pleased about because he was winning them over to his cause.

But underneath his furry old hat, Franklin was hiding a dark secret.

America was on the brink.

Washington's army was running out of money and gunpowder and time.

In a final attempt to turn the tide, Washington launched a surprise night attack on Trenton, closely followed by Princeton.

The Americans fell back on guerilla tactics, using their local knowledge to strike fast and disappear.

[Marching footsteps] But despite these small victories, Washington's army had shrunk from 10,000 to just 3,000 men.

America's hopes now lay in the salons of Versailles.

To the French elite, Franklin was a living legend, the master of scientific experiments.

[Applause] But behind his showmanship, he knew that if he didn't secure French support, the American cause would fail.

But Franklin was being watched by the British.

I'm interested in the man standing just behind Franklin, his protege, Edward Bancroft.

Bancroft wasn't just Benjamin Franklin's right-hand man; he was also a spy working for the British.

The Americans thought that he was working for them, but the British had recruited him as their secret agent.

Think James Bond but wearing an 18th-century powdered wig.

To uncover what Edward Bancroft was really up to in Paris, I've called in reinforcements... A professor who specializes in secret intelligence.

We're meeting at Imperial College London to examine the Bancroft papers.

These were once classified documents, sealed for over a century.

I can see then that things are really hotting up in Paris.

We've got this possible alliance shaping up between the French and the Americans.

How does Bancroft, who's the spy for the British in the middle of it all, get his information out and back to London?

It's classic spycraft.

He is copying material, stealing material to copy it and then secretly return it.

And he gets the messages out by using secret code.

Oh... And you can see... you can see here in...in this document where he refers to Franklin, but to have a bit of tradecraft again, he doesn't use the word "Franklin."

He uses his code number, which you can see there is 58.

58.

And here we have 58 and 45 were up to something, and 45 is Bancroft's code for Silas Deane, who worked with Franklin in Paris.

And what's particularly lovely about this document-- it makes the historian's life a lot easier-- is someone has cracked the code and written in the answers for us.

Number 89 refers to... -The king.

-Yes.

What sort of thing was he sending, then?

He was a fantastically placed spy with access to amazing material, because he was living... he was living with Ben Franklin.

He was living with the people he was spying on.

His job was to copy their work.

He was sending material about the relationship between France and America.

He was sending material about various French ships are setting sail to go and support the fighters.

He's telling them that a deal is on the cards.

He's telling them that the French are, at first secretly and then increasingly openly, supplying weapons and artillery to the... to the rebels.

It sounds like Bancroft is sending pure gold back to London then in terms of information.

What do the government ministers do with it?

He would be feeding intelligence back, which made its way all the way up to the king himself.

But one of the challenges that spies have is to tell truth to power.

And King George didn't like the truth that Bancroft was telling him.

He was telling him the French are gonna get involved properly and it's going to be pretty messy.

And George III thought, "I think that you are exaggerating.

"I think that you are trying to give me "as pessimistic an account as possible.

I don't want to hear this."

Lucy: King George III was increasingly uneasy.

Bancroft's intelligence was clear, but George was still clinging onto the belief that one final decisive victory in America would end the Revolution and make the French threat go away.

[Clock ticking] Yet, as the war dragged on, the French became bolder, smuggling arms and uniforms to the rebels.

But I think France was playing a very risky game here.

So, we've got the Americans fighting for liberty and against the whole concept of monarchy.

But who is secretly bankrolling them from the shadows?

Well, it's only King Louis XVI from France, the most absolute monarch in Europe.

It's almost surreal that a struggle against monarchy is being funded by another monarch.

What could be in it for Louis, then?

Well, what he wanted was revenge.

If the Americans could drive the British out of North America, it would reset the balance of power in Europe, and France would once again be dominant.

By 1777, it had been over a year since the Americans first asked France for help.

But before officially declaring their support, the French wanted to see results on the ground.

The British strategy was to isolate the rebellion in New England and to crush it quickly.

But in the autumn of 1777, that plan unraveled at Saratoga.

Using hit-and-run tactics, the Americans picked off around 2,000 of the British troops before engaging the rest of them directly.

After two bloody battles, the British surrendered nearly 6,000 men.

The French thought they could smell blood in the water.

They calculated that the British were doing so badly on the military front in North America that the Americans might well be able to beat them if France helped out.

And on the sixth of February 1778, George III's nightmare became real.

France signed a formal alliance with the American rebels.

I want to dig into how this news went down in Britain, and I sourced the newspapers from 250 years ago.

The papers are full of reaction to the news of this new alliance between France and America, and the reaction is bad.

It's negative.

People are frightened.

In this article, it's described as "a crisis of national peril and insult, "a menace from the ambition and treachery of a perfidious enemy."

It's described as "a moment of danger "that threatens the very destruction of the British empire."

And this is just how perfidious the enemy is.

Here's a letter that's been written by a French major general.

He says, "How glorious will it be to France "to establish American independence and by that means, ruin the naval power of England."

It's clear where he's coming from.

And people are really angry as well as fearful.

They're angry with the cabinet who got them into this position.

People are complaining here about the folly, the imbecility, and the pusillanimity-- that's the timidity, the rubbishness-- of the British cabinet for allowing this to happen.

And Britain is in big trouble, because now it's got to fight two wars at once, one over the sea in America and another much closer to home.

Weapons are issued to local people.

The militia is roused.

And the coastal towns of southern England get ready for a possible invasion by the French.

How had it got to this point where Britain was not only in danger of losing its 13 colonies, but also of being at war with its oldest enemy?

Makes you turn to drink.

Sixteen French ships set off for North American waters.

Their aim was to protect America's ports and supply lines and to smash through Britain's naval blockade.

But it turns out that France was only just getting started.

In the spring of 1778, something crucial happened.

King Louis XVI of France declared that the 13 colonies were now to be called the "United Provinces of America."

They'd become a proper country with a name that was being recognized by other countries.

And at this point, they also got themselves a new flag.

Remember these stripes from before?

Well, instead of that Union Jack in the top left, they've now got 13 stars for the 13 colonies, not the 50 stars that there are today, but this is getting recognizable, isn't it?

We're well on our way to the Stars and Stripes.

Almost two years after the Battle of Long Island, mainly thanks to Franklin's master diplomacy, Britain was suddenly the one on the defensive.

King George was receiving intelligence reports, including from that spy, Edward Bancroft, warning him that Louis XVI was encouraging his uncle, Charles III of Spain, to join the war as well.

Prime minister Lord North now feared the worst.

Britain was on the brink of a much larger and more costly conflict, one it might not be able to win.

What was going through George's mind?

George III's letters to his prime minister still survive today in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle.

To help decode them, I found someone whose time in politics makes her knowledgeable about affairs of state.

Ruth, what are his particular concerns about the campaign and the way it's going?

What's really interesting in this letter is he works through his thinking.

So, he's seeing at one point that, oh, this only came out from a little tax issue, but now it's grown into the thing that's the most challenging conflict in the world.

He says that really specifically here.

"Should America succeed, "the West Indies must follow them.

"Ireland would soon follow the same plan "and be a disparate state, and then this island would be reduced to itself."

Basically says, "If we lose North America, "we lose everything.

"The West Indies are gonna go.

Ireland's gonna go.

"All our merchants are gonna live somewhere sunnier.

You know, the entirety of Britain will be ruined."

It was going to be one country falls and then another and then another, a domino effect right around the British Empire, which will leave the... as he calls it, the "mother country" as a rampant isolated state.

So, what should George do, then, in this situation, do you think?

I mean, I can imagine that you would send in more and more and more resources, wanting to avoid this domino effect from happening.

Well, we see from the conversations that are recorded in George's voice in these letters that his prime minister is telling him, "Look, we can't actually afford this war.

"We would need to send 40,000 new soldiers "to...to kind of put a rebellion down in a land war over there."

And let's remember, in the 1700s, our population was only eight million people.

This would be a huge army that we would send on top of the troops that are already there.

Is there anything else he could have done instead?

The way usually that you try and avoid conflicts around the world is by signing treaties and doing deals, but he's got no allies in the world.

France are supporting the colonists.

Spain are also trying to help out.

So, he's isolated, trying to fight a continent away, when he's got a mess at home.

He's got almost no money in the public coffers, and he's got no friends in the world.

That explains something I'd always not really understood.

which is why he was so intranscedent as a war leader.

The thing about George was he took time to make the decision, but in a sense, the decision almost made itself.

You can read it in his thinking.

"There are things that cost more than money to our country," even as he's being warned that we can't afford to have a war in a continent across the sea.

So, things can cost a nation more than capital.

"So, what am I going to do?

"I'm gonna risk it all.

"I'm gonna just throw resource at this "and see if we can make it win, and I won't take a backwards step."

Ruth's given me a lot to think about.

George clearly feels he has no choice but to fight.

And the threat he faces comes from not one, but two different sets of problems lining up at the same time.

One of them is a threat that he's familiar with from the old world, the ancient rivalry with France, and Spain, too, is out to grab Britain's colonies.

But then there's a new threat in the New World that's much less tangible.

It's an idea.

The Americans don't want to grab lands.

They want to bin the monarchy.

It's an ideology, isn't it?

And ideologies can be contagious.

[Dominoes rattling] George III had every reason to be worried.

America's revolutionary ideas-- liberty, self-rule, a republic without kings-- they were starting to spread.

[Woman speaking indistinctly on speaker] 250 years later, historians have worked out that there was an American plot-- Benjamin Franklin was pretty involved in it-- to fan the flames of revolution in other countries beyond America.

They wanted to cause trouble for George III in countries much closer to the heart of the British Empire.

And you don't need a PhD in history to work out which country their eyes were looking towards.

That's why I've come to Dublin.

In 1778, Ireland was tense.

Unemployment was soaring after Britain imposed an embargo on trade to the American colonies.

I've dug out a pamphlet that shows exactly how Franklin capitalized on this moment.

This may look like just another boring political pamphlet, but this one was dynamite.

It was a best-seller.

It's purportedly by Benjamin Franklin, and he's addressing the good people of Ireland on behalf of America.

It's basically a rant against the British government.

He says that tariffs should not exist, and it says that the Irish should make common cause with the Americans.

It calls the Irish people "our dear and good friends."

Franklin's prose wasn't just flattery.

It was fuel.

I'm at Collins Barracks, now part of the National Museum of Ireland, to examine a rare weapon.

It was wielded by a citizen army, the volunteers that formed at this tense time.

This is a really beautiful sword head.

Did this belong to one of the volunteers?

This was actually a gift, a gift sword.

And it is... it's stunning.

It says on it, "The sacred rites "of Ireland obtained by the union, courage, and value of its volunteers."

And so, this...this likely was a gift given to an officer or a leader of the volunteers.

What does it say here?

It says, "God, religion, and liberty."

Aha.

So, this is like a manifesto for the volunteers, is it?

Yes.

How did they work, then, these companies of volunteers?

So, the Protestant subjects of Ireland set up these volunteer companies, which are a militia, a group of men that are going to defend Ireland in the place of the military that's gone away.

Oh, because British soldiers have gone to North America to do fighting there, is that right?

That's right.

So, typically, there would have been a large...kind of garrison in Dublin and the military stationed around the island.

And so, that's where the volunteer movement begins.

In Belfast, the first companies begin to form.

And across the island, there's kind of this rage for volunteering.

But the volunteers see early on, with the military forces gone, we have this opportunity to push for political demands.

And so, the first big political demand that they kind of gather behind is free trade.

Yeah.

So, they shift to demanding political concessions from their British masters.

That's right.

But what they're really getting at is this idea of pushing the British parliament to kind of release or to get rid of this embargo on Irish goods being sent to America.

So, what did the volunteers do?

What happens?

So, in 1779, the volunteers decided to stage a big free-trade protest.

Over a thousand volunteers marched through the city to the beat of drums, and they marched to College Green, which is the heart of the city.

They shoot off a volley with their rifles right in front of the Parliament building, right in front of Trinity College.

The volunteers also hung signs around, the last of which read "A free trade or else."

"Or else?"

That's threatening.

A threat that "We want to see these concessions.

"And we've got guns."

Yeah.

If not, what will happen?

And in that sense, it's actually just a kind of desire to fight for the liberty of Ireland.

They've got political demands.

They've got guns.

That's almost a revolution.

If I were George III, I would be seriously worried.

Joel is taking me to a special temperature-controlled room in Collins Barracks to show me a piece of evidence that reveals how the king responded to this wave of unrest.

There it is.

Isn't that lovely?

This is a volunteer flag celebrating free trade and legislative independence.

Beautiful, isn't it?

Really lovely.

Yeah, it's incredible, the detail, the intricacies.

Hoorah for the volunteers.

They've established Ireland's legislative rights.

What a lovely thing.

Threatened on all sides, George III and his government capitulated and allowed Ireland to trade with America.

This was clearly a different strategy than Britain has followed in North America.

Instead of crushing dissent, there was evolution going on here in the hope of avoiding revolution.

George had made concessions in Ireland, but America was a different matter entirely.

He had staked everything on victory there, convinced that losing would mean the collapse of his entire empire and everything he stood for.

Yet the reports from across the Atlantic were grim, and things were about to get even worse.

In 1779, Spain officially entered the war, and Gibraltar was now under siege.

In the Caribbean, Britain was locked in combat with the French navy, trying to keep hold of its lucrative sugar colony in the Battle of Martinique.

And war in America entered its fifth year.

Britain had been forced to abandon the northern colonies, and casualties were mounting.

Britain was on the run, and tensions exploded in the heart of its capital.

I've come to one of the targets of the unrest, the Bank of England.

So far, we've seen protests in Ireland, but if you really want to see uncontrolled political violence, you need to travel to London in 1780.

The Gordon Riots were the biggest and most destructive riot that's ever happened on English soil.

Here's a picture of it.

They're fighting with swords.

Here's a man with a huge sort of hatchet-ax-type thing.

Look, he's injured.

He's down.

He's hurt his head.

Here's a man holding up a little pamphlet that says "England in blood."

This violence was triggered by a new law.

Parliament were desperate for more troops.

So, for the first time, they allowed Catholics to join the army.

But in a country divided by religion, this lit the touch paper.

[Weapons clanging] I'm on the trail of a firsthand account of these riots, the diaries of Ignatius Sancho, an account which has obsessed one of Britain's leading actors.

We've got this shopkeeper, Ignatius Sancho in Westminster, and I think he witnesses the Gordon Riots, doesn't he?

Yeah, he more than witnesses it.

What he does, Lucy, is he writes to his friend John Spink about what he sees.

So, he doesn't just see a bit of it or hears a bit of it.

He literally sees it through the shutters of his door.

The shops are all shuttered up, because the mob has been going for a few days by this point.

And what's really terrifying to me is that he's got kids upstairs.

So, there's this terrifying picture, not just of a man delivering facts, but of the man terrified of his own safety and the safety of his black family upstairs.

These letters, what do they say?

Well, they talk about this narrow... fairly narrow street next to Parliament.

This mob, "thousands of poor, miserable, ragged rabble"-- so, the poorest of the poor-- "from 12 to 60 years of age," sees them attack a carriage and try to pull... I think it's Lord Sandwich, out of his carriage.

And he thinks, "What is this?"

This is Britain, the land of liberty.

Liberty to pull people's carriages apart.

Exactly.

This isn't freedom.

This isn't what freedom should be.

This is anarchy.

And he says, "This is liberty, genuine British liberty!"

And he's got his exclamation marks to sort of mark it out.

But then it turns violent.

Then it turns super-violent.

They just went and attacked everything, particularly areas of authority.

You know, they build these monuments to be strong and to say, "Keep away from us.

We're powerful," and this mob just... wanted to crack it open.

I love the idea that they were going for places like the Fleet Prison.

They were going to release people who were rioters but ended up releasing everybody.

Ah.

Bad move.

Let all the murderers out.

Let all the murderers out and all the people who just wanted to cause total chaos, and so it was.

I guess a lot of people who owned property, had a stake in society were feeling vulnerable for the first time or for the first time in ages at least when the riots started.

Yeah, I can't think of any conflicts that we've had as a nation where the property of the rich was attacked, to actually go to Buckingham Palace, which is what they were trying to do, to actually go to St.

James' Palace, to go to Parliament, to come to the Bank of England, to attack the lord chief justice.

This is very... It was very pointed.

Do you think, though, that maybe Sancho might have had some sympathy with what was going on?

Oh, no.

Sancho was a proper man of the status quo.

He was a monarchist.

He really enjoyed the fact that America was our colony and was in outrage they were leaving.

No, no, he would have wanted this, and he says it.

He thinks this is lawlessness.

So, it's got no chance of turning into a proper revolution really, because the stakeholders in society are not behind it.

I mean, it could have been close, but, as I say, it was so incoherent that it couldn't really have taken off.

But it was the closest we came to an anarchy, where it was like there was nothing you could do about it.

[Voices shouting] For six days, London was effectively in the hands of the rioters... Until George III sent in the army.

Man: Fire!

Lucy: The troops opened fire on the crowds, killing hundreds in these very streets.

By the time order was restored, more than 500 people were dead.

The Gordon Riots could have been this tipping point, the moment that Britain actually had a revolution.

But for revolutions to work, you need the people in the middle part of society to be on board with it all, people like Ignatius Sancho, and in London, they weren't.

They maybe just wanted to change the system a bit, not bring it down.

So, in Britain, the center held.

Franklin was still in Paris, plotting his next move.

At last, French troops had landed on American soil, and not just soldiers, but elite siege specialists.

Every diplomatic gamble Franklin had made had been leading up to this moment.

Britain had stopped fighting in the northern colonies.

New York City alone remained under crown control.

All hopes were now pinned on retaining the south, where General Cornwallis had over 7,000 men.

That's a third of Britain's remaining force.

But after six brutal years of war, both sides were spent, each desperate to strike the final decisive blow.

In August 1781, the British general Charles Cornwallis brought his men here to Yorktown, on the banks of the York River.

This is a super-strategic spot, and his orders were to dig in, to create a stronghold, and to wait.

He was to wait for the Royal Navy to come, either to bring supplies or to evacuate him.

This plan went wrong.

A battle took place here in Yorktown, which brought the American Revolution to an unexpected end.

History remembers it as America's greatest triumph over Britain, George Washington achieving the impossible.

Yet, as with all great victories, the truth is a little more complicated.

Who's where?

Who's where?

All right, so, we've got the British back here with the British flag.

That's Cornwallis.

We've got the Americans over here and the French in this direction.

And this is called The Surrender Field.

It is called The Surrender Field, I'm sorry to say.

Lucy: To understand how the British campaign unraveled right here, I've enlisted a military historian.

Why did this place, Yorktown, end up being so important, the location of the last battle?

And what goes wrong?

The French send a naval fleet from the Caribbean to come occupy the waters in the Chesapeake.

The British come down to try to fight them off, and they fail, and so, he ends up trapped.

He's cut off in there.

He is cut off in the water, and Washington comes down, the Americans and the French come down on land, so he's trapped here, on land by the Americans and French and then by sea by the French.

Cornwallis is doomed, right?

Because no supplies can get to him by sea anymore.

That's right.

He is surrounded, and he is outnumbered just about two to one.

And what's so difficult to imagine when you see this beautiful field is that there were more than 25,000 people, maybe up to 28,000 soldiers here.

There were horses.

There are cannon of different types and sizes that are booming.

There's smoke.

There are cries.

[Cannon fires] So, the French-- Oh!

Goodness me.

They keep firing guns here.

Who were the key players, Christy?

The who's-who of the American Revolution are all here.

So, this means General George Washington is here, General Rochambeau of France is here.

Who exactly is this General Rochambeau?

He is an expert in the modern European ways of large-scale war and...and things like conducting sieges.

He knows how to beat the British.

He knows how to beat the British.

The French are the ones who brought the tools to dig the deep trenches, to build ramparts.

They're the ones who arrived with the different sizes of artillery, the very large cannon down to mortars that would rain shrapnel down into the British lines.

And then they have Rochambeau, who knows how to conduct a siege.

Now, he's in charge of the French army, but he's subordinate to George Washington.

That's exactly right.

How did that work out?

Well, uh, I will say that, uh, when we talk about Yorktown, it's often touted to be Washington's greatest victory.

But in so many ways, because it was the force of the French, the navy, the army, this knowledge, and the equipment and the artillery for how to conduct a siege, in so many way, Washington's victory was based on him listening to the French.

Right, yeah.

And so we could actually consider Yorktown to be France's greatest victory over the British, and it's the one that led to the establishment of a new nation and a new world power.

The loss at Yorktown was catastrophic news.

The scale of the victory stunned the British public.

[Cannon fire echoing] In the short term, the British could have gone on fighting a little bit longer, but in the long term, this war was now lost, which is why, right here in Virginia, they pull out all the stops to reenact the battle, with hundreds of people coming to watch.

[Loud bang] The British government now knew that peace talks were inevitable.

But George III refused to accept that Yorktown was the end.

He couldn't face the fact that, after a hundred years of expansion, the British Empire was now shrinking.

He ordered a detailed map of Yorktown, which showed the exact spot where Cornwallis surrendered.

The Royal Archives at Windsor Castle hold intriguing evidence of what the king did next.

There are thousands of maps and artifacts here from George III's personal collection.

But I'm looking for a document that could have changed the course of British history, an early draft written in George's own hand.

Listen to this.

This is extraordinary.

"His majesty, with much sorrow, finds "he can be of no further utility "to his native country, "which drives him to the painful step of quitting it forever."

He's abdicating.

He's giving up the throne.

He's resigning his job.

And I guess when he says he's quitting the country forever, he probably means he's going to go back to live in Hanover in Germany, where his family came from.

So, what's going on?

Why?

He explains it up here.

He says that "the change of mind that the legislature--" that's his government, about going on with fighting the war, they don't want to fight the war anymore.

He says that this decision of theirs has totally incapacitated him.

He can't go on with the war effort or obtain any peace but on terrible conditions.

So, he's fallen out with his government.

He thinks that they don't want him.

So, he's going to go.

But this is just a draft of his memorandum of abdication.

He didn't actually press "send" on it.

He didn't actually abdicate in the end.

So, what on earth was going on here?

I think that when the government didn't want to go on fighting the war, this went against his wishes.

It hurt him.

It bruised his pride.

He was angry.

He was upset.

This, to me, is a moment of high emotion in the heart of the king.

It's such an insight.

And I think that once he'd calmed down a bit, he realized that the best thing for him to do was, in fact, to carry on, to see things through, to sort things out.

And that's really important.

He knows when to bend a bit and not to break.

With the war now finally over, George III had changed approach from defiance to diplomacy.

And in 1783, he officially recognized America as an independent nation.

At the time, the nation's mint for making coins was at the Tower of London.

It's the perfect place to examine two small objects which reveal a lot about the countries that produced them.

This tiny thing is a bog-standard British penny from the 1780s.

It's such an everyday object.

And anybody who did handle it would have known who was in charge of their empire.

It's King George III.

He's shown here as an emperor, a Roman emperor in his laurel wreath.

This, on the other hand, is something much more exciting and novel.

In 1787, North America got its first official coin.

This is the first cent.

And guess who designed it.

It was Benjamin Franklin.

He gets everywhere, that man.

Instead of putting somebody's face on it, because in a republic, the people are the sovereign-- Instead of a face, he's put 13 interlinked circles to represent the 13 different colonies all working together.

Down at the bottom, it says, "Mind your business."

Mind your own business.

Look to yourself.

It's a very sort of individualistic way of looking at things, isn't it?

These two little things aren't just pieces of money.

They're mini manifestos for two very different ways of looking at the world.

The British one is all about ancient power and stability.

But the American one is racing towards a future in which the individual can flourish.

Franklin's penny was a tiny coin with a radical promise.

The power belonged not to a monarch, but to the people... A promise that became a reality when citizens of America returned to Britain not as subjects, but as equals... opening their first embassy right here in Grosvenor Square in London, the capital of the country they fought so hard to free themselves from.

The American Revolution is usually described as a heroic struggle taking place on American soil.

But that's only half the story.

America didn't just challenge British power overseas.

It also shook the foundations of Britain itself.

But Britain didn't fall apart.

It burned, it bled, but in the end, George III survived by adapting to a new world.

250 years ago, both nations were remade, one by casting off a crown, the other by reshaping it.