Radical Duke

**"Danielle Allen’s excellent book Radical Duke.... [A] meticulous and stylish study... has the potential to significantly rewrite the history of the American Revolution’s intellectual origins.... [It] is a major work of interpretation.... In the 250th year of the Declaration of Independence.... Danielle Allen is to be commended for her own act of resistance. She has written one of the most important, original studies of the American founding and its background to appear in many years." —Jeffrey Collins, Wall Street Journal An explosive, deeply revisionist work that reveals how a renegade English Duke and Thomas Paine, the firebrand polemicist, almost brought the American Revolution to Britain.** When Danielle Allen unearthed a parchment of the Declaration of Independence buried away in Sussex, England, little did she know that she had discovered a story of historical magnitude that would alter our understanding of British and American history. Revealing that the Age of Revolution began earlier than we thought—not with the Boston patriots nor with the Parisian Jacobins, but in Britain itself—Allen demonstrates in Radical Duke that the rights of man, the theory of revolution, and calls for popular sovereignty all emerged from the radical energies of London before they spread across the Atlantic and the Channel. At the center of this new age was Charles Lennox, the progressive Third Duke of Richmond, a rarely cited historical figure who becomes the biographical focus of Allen’s groundbreaking work. Even with royal blood coursing through his veins, the handsome, gallivanting Duke (1735–1806) preferred to rub shoulders with ordinary folk—supporting the rights of jurors, freedom of the press, and religious toleration. As Allen shows, from 1767 to 1782, he was England’s leading voice of opposition to the Crown, and, as the leader of the Sussex militia, even a threat to the King’s power. But the Duke did not challenge the Crown alone.