The Incendiary Read online

  ALSO BY JESSICA WARNER

  Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason

  Copyright © 2005 by Jessica Warner

  Hardcover edition published 2005

  Trade paperback edition published 2006

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher–or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency–is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Warner, Jessica

  The incendiary : the misadventures of John the Painter, the first modern

  terrorist / Jessica Warner.

  eISBN: 978-1-55199-575-5

  1. Aitken, James, 1752-1777. 2. United States–History–Revolution, 1775-1783–Biography. 3. Terrorists–England–Biography. 4. Sabotage–England–History–18th century. I. Title.

  E280A49.W37 2006 973.3′85 C2005-905963-X

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  75 Sherbourne Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5A 2P9

  www.mcclelland.com

  v3.1

  To Barbara S.F.

  of course

  “Do beating drums, and flying colours, purge a band of robbers and murderers of all guilt? Does it signify as to the nature of the crime, whether he who commits it wears a red coat or a brown? whether he holds a painter’s brush in his hand, or a general’s truncheon? … are we, because our armies are not so large nor so well armed or disciplined as the English, and their clean-handed friends the Hessians—are we, I say, to sit down, and suffer our throats to be cut tamely? Every American, who believes his cause to be a just one, ought to exert himself in whatever way he can be serviceable to his country. If in the field, let him carry arms; if not, let him light a torch.”

  From A Short Account of the Motives which Determined the Man, Called John the Painter; and a Justification of his Conduct; Written by himself, and Sent to his Friend, Mr. A. Tomkins, with a Request to Publish it after his Execution (1777)

  “It is evident from the accounts received from Portsmouth and Bristol, that there are in this kingdom some desperate partizans of the American rebels, who finding that Great-Britain is likely to gain a decisive victory in the field, are endeavouring, by the most hellish plots, to undermine her glory, and prevent her success. Of all bad characters, an incendiary is the foulest. He acts as an assassin armed with the most dreadful of mischiefs, and in executing his diabolical purposes, involves the innocent and the guilty in the same ruin. May every being so lost to humanity live an object of conscience-goading pain, and die an object of universal contempt!”

  From The General Evening Post (18–21 January 1777)

  “The subtlety, and shrewdness of the offender, bespoke him the man of ability, while his conduct in other respects betrayed him a fool.”

  From The Life of James Aitken, Commonly Called John the Painter (1777)

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Preface

  Introduction

  CHAPTER ONE. His Boyhood

  CHAPTER TWO. His Adventures as a Highwayman

  CHAPTER THREE. His Adventures in Colonial America

  CHAPTER FOUR. His Return to England

  CHAPTER FIVE. His Meeting with the American Envoy to France

  CHAPTER SIX. His Attempt to Burn Down the Town and Dockyard of Portsmouth

  CHAPTER SEVEN. His Meeting with a British Spy

  CHAPTER EIGHT. His Many Attempts to Burn Down the City of Bristol

  CHAPTER NINE. His Capture and Subsequent Imprisonment

  CHAPTER TEN. His Trial in Winchester

  CHAPTER ELEVEN. His Last Day

  CHAPTER TWELVE. His Fate and That of Many Others

  Epilogue

  Notes

  PREFACE

  AMANDA FOREMAN, in the introduction to her stunning biography of Georgiana, duchess of Devonshire, admits to being more than a little seduced by her subject.1 I admit to no such thing. The subject of my biography was an ordinary man, and a poorly behaved one at that. He broke into people’s houses and held up stagecoaches. When he worked—and this he did as little as possible—he showed up late and stole from his employers. Once he shot a dog. He even raped a woman who was innocently tending her sheep. Then, in the autumn of 1776, his behavior took a decided turn for the worse. He tried to burn down two English towns. The first was Portsmouth and the second was Bristol. Had he not been stopped, he would have burned down each of the dockyards that kept the Royal Navy afloat, and had he succeeded, the American Revolutionary War might very well have ended in 1777 and not in 1783. An American official, moreover, had given the plot his blessing. That man was Silas Deane, Congress’s representative in France.

  James Aitken, alias James Boswell, alias James Hill, alias James Hinde, is best remembered for the fires that he set. The men who tried and punished him for his crimes knew him only as John the Painter. He was a painter in the most ordinary sense of the word. He did not paint portraits. He did not dabble in watercolors. Instead, he painted houses and the occasional sign. This made him one of the “common people,” and unlike the duchess of Devonshire, he was destined to be ignored while alive, and forgotten once dead. John the Painter was determined not to let that happen to him. If someone had stopped to ask him what he was rebelling against, he would have said obscurity. He was, to quote from one of his confessions, bent on “accomplishing some great achievement.”2 He did this by setting fires in places where they would be noticed.

  He succeeded by half. He was noticed, but in the end he was not remembered. For the briefest of time, for four heady months, he was on everyone’s mind. George III received daily briefings from his ministers. Newspapers printed sensational stories, some true, some not. In Parliament, a bill was rushed through to suspend habeas corpus; such measures, it was argued, were justified when a nation was at war and when there were “traitors unknown to the public; perhaps … incendiaries, the secret agents of America lurking in this kingdom.…”3 The Bow Street Runners were sent after him. Citizens formed patrols, convinced that neither they nor their possessions were safe.

  * * *

  John the Painter was not quite twenty-five years old when he was hanged. In just four years, he saw more of his world than most people saw in an entire lifetime. Not including his time in Edinburgh, where he lived until the age of twenty, he spent perhaps a year all told in London, several months in Philadelphia, perhaps a month in Paris, and untold days in countless towns and villages all across England. By the end of his life, he had, by his own boast, committed a crime in almost every county in England.4 He was forever in motion; he was young.

  My pursuit of John the Painter took me on my own mad ramble across Britain, from Edinburgh to London, and from there to Portsmouth and Bristol. Everywhere I incurred debts. It was Michael Gunton of the Portsmouth Museum and Records Service who gave me the idea to write about John the Painter. For this and much more I am eternally grateful. I bothered so many other people: Alison Brown of the Bristol Record Office, Margaret Cooke and Nicola Pink o
f the Hampshire Record Office, Sarah North of the National Archives of Scotland, Margaret Peat and Fraser Simm of George Heriot’s School in Edinburgh, and, if truth be told, the entire staff of the National Maritime Museum. Not once did they laugh at me—not to my face at least. They should have. Each was competent and kind in equal measure.

  And finally, this book got something that books rarely do these days: good old-fashioned editing. That unhappy task fell to not one but three people: Patricia Kennedy of McClelland & Stewart, Jofie Ferrari-Adler of Thunder’s Mouth Press, and Andrew Franklin, the publisher of Profile Books. Each put up with a good deal of prattle, some spoken, most written. Without them, the book would be naked in places and overdressed in others, but without my agent, the deft and resourceful Katinka Matson, the book simply would not be.

  INTRODUCTION

  BUT WHAT did he look like? He stood five feet seven inches tall, one inch shorter than the typical soldier in George Washington’s army, but exactly the same height as the typical British recruit of the time.1 Silas Deane, the American envoy to France, described him as “a diminutive looking man … of near middle size for height.” But then again, Deane was judging him by the well-fed standards of colonial America.2 William Baldy, a rope-maker at the royal dockyard in Portsmouth, said only that the man he had seen was five feet seven inches tall, and let it go at that.

  The man’s face was covered with red freckles, and his eyelids were “whitish,” a feature sufficiently distinctive to merit mention in advertisements that offered a reward for his capture. His face was thin, his complexion fair, and his hair of a reddish or “light sandy colour.”3

  There was some disagreement about his build. Most of the people whom he met in his mad rambles across the English countryside described him as “thinnish,” but one, a Mr. White, described him as “rather lusty than slender,” lusty being defined in Johnson’s Dictionary as “stout; vigorous; healthy; able of body.”4 But White had met him back in 1775, shortly after the young Scot had returned from America, and before he embarked on a journey that would take him to almost every major town in southern England, and from there to France and back again. When his journey finally came to an end, in the tiny Hampshire village of Odiham, James Aitken (for that was his real name) was weary, thin, and, in the words of one witness, “altered to a great deal.”5

  Somewhere in his many journeys he met with a terrible accident. On his chest, just below his right shoulder, was a large scar where a bullet had pierced his flesh. He could not resist showing people this scar and making up a story about it. He had been wounded “in the wars,” he said.6 This was rubbish. James Aitken had never seen combat. It is true that he joined the British army on at least three separate occasions, but each time he deserted. What he did not tell his listeners was the truth: that he was a thief and a highwayman, and that someone had shot him in the course of a robbery gone wrong. The story provides us with an important clue: in his own mind’s eye, he was neither a thief nor a painter. He was a man of proven courage.

  That he even survived this wound tells us that he was a very healthy man. Time and time again he cheated death. Back in Edinburgh, where he was born, a fifth to a quarter of all infants never lived to see their first birthday.7 In London, where he committed his first crimes, countless immigrants sickened and died within a few years of moving to the capital. In the ships that carried men and women to the New World, passengers and crews dropped like flies from typhus, typhoid, dysentery, and yellow fever.8 And in the various prisons and lockups where he spent the last six weeks of his life, inmates “who went in healthy” were “in a few months changed to emaciated dejected objects.”9 Not James Aitken. He survived even in prison, fending off typhus (otherwise known as “jail fever”), only to die at the end of a rope. Perhaps Mr. White was right after all. James Aitken was decidedly “lusty.”

  In England, where he spent most of his adult life, people laughed at him, sometimes behind his back, sometimes to his face. His problems began the moment he opened his mouth. Almost everyone immediately took him for a Scot, although one witness, a man with no ear for accents, pegged him as an “Irishman.”10 Scot or “Irishman,” it was all the same: he was distinctly unwelcome in England. If William Baldy, the ropemaker, was right, Aitken also had “a little stammering in his speech,” or what Silas Deane described as “a faltering and tremulous tone.”11

  He was very particular about his appearance, and this invariably aroused suspicion. A Captain King, who employed him in January or February of 1776, described him as a “macaroni painter,” which is to say that he dressed like a dandy and “appeared, for his occupation, above the common degree.”12 Mrs. Boxell, his first landlady in Portsmouth, found it odd that he “changed his clothes every day.” So, too, did the publishers of The General Evening Post and The St. James’s Chronicle, both of whom reported on Aitken’s sartorial eccentricities.13 William Baldy could scarcely believe his eyes. First he saw Aitken wearing “worsted stockings, speckled or mixed, which were very dirty as were his shoes”; then, just four hours later, he saw him wearing clean white stockings and clean shoes.14

  People also found it odd that Aitken wore his own hair. Men of all classes commonly wore wigs, and yet Aitken, who was otherwise very fussy about his appearance, did not. “I had to look around a long time in a church or other gathering of people before I saw anyone with his own hair,” wrote Pehr Kalm, a Swedish botanist who visited England in 1748. Even “clodhoppers,” he added, “go through their usual everyday duties all with perukes on the head.”15 Not James Aitken. In the winter of 1776, when he was working in a small town just outside Portsmouth, he wore his hair clubbed, that is, tied up in a queue and stiffened with tallow and perhaps with powder as well.16 By November, he had abandoned this style in favor of a more natural look. The queue was gone, and his hair, to quote Silas Deane, “hung loose on his shoulders, and down his neck.”17 The change was radical, deliberate, and highly significant. It marked Aitken as a new type of man: the Romantic revolutionary. The young men who enlisted in Washington’s army wore their hair this way.18 So, too, did the Jacobins, although they went one step further and wore their hair short. “This coiffure,” Jacques-Pierre Brissot wrote in 1790, “is the only one which is suited to republicans: being simple, economical and requiring little time, it is care-free and so assures the independence of a person; it bears witness to a mind given to reflection, courageous enough to defy fashion.”19

  John the Painter at the time of his trial, as pictured in The London Magazine, 1777. It is tempting to think that this is an exact likeness of Aitken. Certainly it matches the description posted by the Navy Board. The face is thin (some might say haggard), his hair hangs freely, and his clothes are those of a working man. COURTESY OF THE PORTSMOUTH MUSEUM AND RECORDS SERVICE.

  The Macaroni Painter, or Billy Dimple Sitting for his Picture, 1772, by Richard Earlom (1743–1822), after Robert Dighton (circa 1752–1814). A former employer, picking up on Aitken’s numerous affectations, described him as a “macaroni painter.” In this spoof, the macaroni painter is of course the painter himself (Dighton), but in the sitter we can see Aitkens fantasy self. Note in particular the exaggerated fan-tailed hat that identifies its wearer as a fop. COURTESY OF THE LEWIS WALPOLE LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY.

  Aitken had one other affectation: he liked to wear a decidedly foppish hat. The hat that he chose was fan-tailed, so-called because its back flap, which was semicircular in shape, stood up straight; the crown, in turn, was all but hidden by two side flaps.20 The effect was very flashy and was made flashier still by Aitken’s habit of wearing his hat at a jaunty angle, or, as William Baldy put it, “cocked genteelly.”21

  The overall effect, however, was anything but genteel. He was working-class and he looked it. Deane was unimpressed: “His dress no way recommended him at Paris, nor would in the lower stations of life prejudice him anywhere.” Deane’s valet was unimpressed: “You never saw a worse looking fellow in your life.” Edward Evans, a humble soldier
, was unimpressed. How was the defendant dressed? the Crown’s prosecutor wanted to know. “In a brown duffel surtout coat, rather shabbily,” Evans answered.22

  Everyone, starting with Deane’s valet, remembered the musty brown coat. The other thing they remembered was the bundle that he toted wherever he went. In it were all his worldly belongings, starting with the socks and shoes that had attracted William Baldy’s attention. Several times, fearing that he might be caught, he was forced to abandon his bundle. Each time, he left behind clues. There were shirts and shoes and dirty socks, and there were the items that he used to set fires—matches, gunpowder, nitre, and turpentine.

  And there were books. He was forever reading—pamphlets, books, newspapers, anything that fell into his hands. Some he stole and some he bought. In Portsmouth, he left behind three books: The Art of War and Making Fireworks, as Practised by the Army of the King of France, an “English Justin,” and Ovid’s Metamorphoses.23 After fleeing Bristol, he managed to amass yet another bundle, and in it, yet another “little library,” this time consisting of Voltaire’s Henriade and an unspecified number of pamphlets, all pro-American.24 It was an odd assortment, one that identified its owner as a man whose ambitions and intellectual curiosity vastly exceeded his social horizons. The assortment says something else, something just as important: James Aitken, the man in the musty brown coat, drank from the same waters as the great figures of the Enlightenment. He stood, it is true, downstream from Voltaire, Montesquieu and Diderot, from the philosophes and the odd ways in which they read their own ambitions and political agendas into the texts of classical antiquity. But he stood there nonetheless.

  The same man who was forever reading was also forever losing his temper. He was prickly, got into fights, and in general did the sorts of things that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the standard diagnostic reference of the American Psychiatric Association, now associates with “intermittent explosive disorder.” This particular condition, the DSM tells us, is characterized by “several discrete episodes of failure to resist aggressive impulses that result in serious assaultive acts or destruction of property”; such outbursts, moreover, are “grossly out of proportion to any precipitating psychosocial stressors.” Hence Aitken’s many tantrums and outbursts.