Episode 20: The Rebellion

Worlds Turned Upside Down
Episode 20: The Rebellion

Written by Jim Ambuske, Ph.D.
Published October 28, 2025

JIM AMBUSKE 

This episode of Worlds Turned Upside Down is made possible with support from a 2024 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

AMBUSKE 

At three minutes past seven in the evening, on Monday, January 16, 1775, King George III sat down at his writing desk in Queen’s House in London to compose a very brief note to Lord North, his prime minister.

AMBUSKE 

Lord North had been so good as to handle a delicate matter on the king’s behalf, that of informing the Duke of Gloucester, the king’s younger brother, that it would be improper for him to request money from Parliament to support his wife and young children.

AMBUSKE 

The king loved his brother, but the Duke of Gloucester had violated their bond of trust by marrying in secret nearly ten years earlier, a fact concealed from the king until September 1774, when the duke's wife, Maria, was expecting their second child. By then, the scandalous marriage of another brother to a common woman had led to the Royal Marriages Act, requiring members of the royal family to gain the monarch’s permission to wed.

AMBUSKE 

Although the duke had not technically broken the law, in the king’s eyes, he might as well have. George III’s sense of duty and propriety ran deeper than his love for his brother, his abhorrence of rebellion deeper still, and his fidelity to Parliament was as precise as the timestamps on his letters.

AMBUSKE 

Lord North broke the news to the Duke of Gloucester that the king would not support his request. That afternoon, he stopped by Queen’s House, what we now call Buckingham Palace, to tell the king of his conversation with the duke. But, finding that the king had gone to dinner, the prime minister made his way back home to Downing Street. At 6 pm, North sent the king a short letter, telling His Majesty that he had been to see the duke, and apologizing for not lingering at Queen’s House, for he had a cabinet meeting that night at half past seven.

AMBUSKE 

A grateful king replied with his short note one hour and three minutes later. North hadn’t mentioned what the cabinet intended to discuss, but then again, he didn’t have to. As George III already knew, the “weighty considerations” under discussion at Downing Street were about “the American business.”

AMBUSKE 

By January 1775, George III had borne the weight of the British crown for nearly fifteen years. He ascended the throne on October 25, 1760 at age 22, one month and seventeen days after Montreal surrendered to British forces. Like his jubilant subjects on both sides of the Atlantic at the end of the Seven Years’ War, George III gloried “in the Name of Briton.” 

AMBUSKE 

Much had changed in the fifteen years since that triumph, making the discussion of “the American business” all the more necessary. Even as secret talks were then underway in London to avoid all the horrors of civil war, negotiations done with Lord North’s quiet approval, the king had come to believe that they now all stood on the banks of the Rubicon, that inevitably, the die would be cast, that blows would decide the fate of British America.

AMBUSKE 

The task of orchestrating those blows would fall to Lord North, George III’s seventh, and so far longest serving, prime minister. He had taken office in 1770, weeks after the massacre in Boston. The two men had known each other since childhood. They made an odd pair: the one was a stout, corpulent fellow born on Piccadilly Street who loathed confrontation and wrote with a sloppy scrawl; the other was a taller, stockier monarch of German genealogy born in Norfolk House, who valued firmness and vigor, attributes evident in the stroke of his pen.

AMBUSKE 

But in each other they had found a reliable partner, and a shared commitment to defending Parliament and the British constitution. North had brought stability to the government, conciliated the colonies with the repeal of most of the Townshend duties, guided the reforms of Quebec and India through the House of Commons and remained resolutely in favor of coercive action after the destruction of the tea in Boston. The king stood behind him.

AMBUSKE 

Three days after he delivered disappointing news to the Duke of Gloucester, North opened the new session of Parliament on January 19th. At the king’s command, he laid 149 “papers relating to the disturbances in North America” before the House of Commons – pages upon pages of letters and other documents from governors, admirals, generals, and secretaries of state.

AMBUSKE 

They told a convincing story of colonies teetering on the edge of rebellion, of colonists’ anger at the Coercive Acts; evasion of customs laws; stockpiles of unsold tea; new boycott movements; the confiscation of cannons; the spiriting of gunpowder, cannon balls, and musket rounds to secret places; militia drills in Massachusetts Bay; the coercive tyranny of local committees who intimidated and attacked the king’s loyal subjects; the suspect actions of an extralegal Continental Congress; of civil government and British authority nearly at an end.

AMBUSKE 

Buried among that “great heap” was Congress’s petition: 

CONGRESS 

“To a Sovereign, who glories in the name of Briton, the bare recital of these Acts must, we presume, justify the loyal subjects, who fly to the foot of his Throne, and implore his clemency for protection against them.”

AMBUSKE 

From the perspective of the king and the majority of Parliament, the petition told a less convincing story of:

CONGRESS 

 “...this destructive system of Colony Administration, adopted since the conclusion of the last war, [from which] have flowed those distresses, dangers, fears, and jealousies, that overwhelm your Majesty's dutiful Colonists with affliction”

AMBUSKE 

And beseeched:

CONGRESS 

 “... your Majesty, that your Royal authority and interposition may be used for our relief, and that a gracious Answer may be given to this Petition.”

AMBUSKE 

 If Parliament would not hear the pleas of His Majesty’s subjects in British America, then surely the king they thought they knew would. Yet, as many were only beginning to understand, they didn’t really know the king nor the empire at all. 

AMBUSKE 

For despite the best efforts of some colonial agents and their supporters in Parliament, the petition remained buried under that “great heap.” The king would give it no answer.

AMBUSKE 

Days later, after hours of debate that stretched long into the night, Parliament presented the king with an address that found Massachusetts Bay in a state of rebellion. In his reply, one drafted by the cabinet and approved by him, George III pledged:

KING GEORGE III 

“the most speedy and effectual measures for enforcing due obedience to the laws, and the authority of the supreme legislature.”

AMBUSKE 

At precisely 50 minutes past eleven in the morning on February 8, 1775,  the king privately told his prime minister that his answer:

KING GEORGE III 

“conveys the sentiments that must be harboured by every candid and rational Mind, this language ought to open the eyes of the deluded Americans but if it does not, it must set every delicate man at liberty to avow the propriety of the most coercive measures.”

AMBUSKE 

Within hours, George III once again sat down at his desk in Queen’s House to write letters, and review lists of regiments and officers to be sent to North America. Secret orders had already been drawn up for General Thomas Gage in Boston to seize and destroy gunpowder and ammunition from the “rude rabble” in the colony. Those orders would soon be sent west aboard a ship, and with any luck, a wavering Gage would act with vigor to kill off a rebellion before it became a civil war.

AMBUSKE 

I’m Jim Ambuske, and this is Worlds Turned Upside Down, a podcast about the history of the American Revolution. 

AMBUSKE 

Episode 20: The Rebellion. 

AMBUSKE 

On December 8, 1774, ships just then arriving in the colonies from London bore troubling news. Two months earlier, the King had issued an order in council prohibiting the export of arms and ammunition out of Great Britain. The order made no mention of the colonies, nor of British Americans’ resistance to Parliament’s laws, but for many British Americans the instructions for provincial governors sent with the edict led to only one unmistakable conclusion: Britain was preparing for war.  

AMBUSKE 

Sympathetic ship captains sent copies of the order and the instructions to local newspapers, where colonists soon read:

NEWSPAPER 

“That Lord Dartmouth, Secretary of State…has signified to [the Governors] his Majesty’s Command, that they do take the most effectual Measures for arresting, detaining, and securing any Gun Powder or any Sort of Arms or Ammunition, which may be attempted to be imported into the Province over which they respectively preside.”

AMBUSKE 

In the weeks that followed, false rumors spread that General Thomas Gage, both the governor of Massachusetts Bay and the commander-in-chief of British forces in North America, had sent soldiers to reinforce Fort William and Mary in Rhode Island. 

AMBUSKE 

Regular militia drills, already underway in several colonies, intensified. Colonists stashed and stored gunpowder, ammunition, and cannonballs where they hoped Redcoats would not find them.  

AMBUSKE 

In New York city, the Sons of Liberty seized a shipment of gunpowder from a customs official, before local merchants intervened, and the powder was safely secured in the city’s powder house.

AMBUSKE 

Up the coast in Rhode Island, colonists commandeered something much bigger. Alarmed by the order in council, and fearing that Gage would capture the cannon in Fort George at Newport, the Provincial Assembly directed some local sailors to spirit them out of the fort before Gage could get there. They made off with some 44 cannons in all.  

AMBUSKE 

When Captain James Wallace of the Royal Navy demanded to know why Rhode Islanders had seized the cannon, Governor Joseph Wanton frankly replied that “they had done it to prevent their falling into the hands of the King, or any of his Servants.” 

AMBUSKE 

Captain Wallace’s report was included among the “great heap” of papers laid before Parliament in January 1775 as evidence of colonists in rebellion. It traveled more than 3,000 miles to reach Westminster Hall, but in many ways it had traveled much further. Twelve years earlier, British Americans had celebrated the end of the Seven Years’ War by toasting the best of kings. But time had taken its toll, and their attachment to the king was weakening. 

FRED ANDERSON 

In the Seven Years' War, they thought they had won a great victory and a great peace for a crown that they believed was the best on Earth. And in the years that followed, inexplicable things happened as a consequence of the Seven Years' War, of that great victory, utterly inexplicable things happened as the British tried to reform an empire and make it coherent and make it pay for itself. After a long period of time when it wasn't paying for itself, it was just running up debts and becoming something that, to the British, looked like it was a monster in the making. The Americans couldn't understand that things had changed, and that all that war, that glorious war that was behind them, had simply transformed their world into a set of circumstances where the Empire wasn't going to work like it did before, like they liked it to I'm Fred Anderson, professor emeritus University of Colorado, at Boulder. What comes after the Seven Years' War, therefore, is the equivalent of the long decline in Amity between a couple who have come to disagree over what they see as the nature of the relationship, and through a lengthening series of arguments and angry silences and brooding find themselves at swords points and discover that the marriage really has come apart when nobody was paying attention. Then they've reached the point where they can acknowledge that there's no answer. The same thing happens between 1763 and 1775 over the course of 12 years, what had been a really pretty happy marriage between British subjects in North America and the king that they leave they had served gloriously. That relationship there comes apart in the same way over that period of 12 years, bit by bit, in crisis after crisis, until at the end, blood is actually being shed on Lexington Green and Concord Bridge.

AMBUSKE 

Even then, even before the effusion of blood, after all the rioting, protests, massacres, and misgivings, many British Americans continued to believe in the idea of a king who would intervene on their behalf and set things right. They feared that his ministers had mangled his mind, keeping the truth from him. They did not understand that George III had a different sense of duty. 

AMBUSKE 

So, how did George III imagine his role as sovereign of the British Empire? How did British Americans venerate their king? And why did their violent break with the king begin in the early morning hours of April 19, 1775 just outside Boston on Lexington Green?  

AMBUSKE 

To begin answering these questions, we’ll head first to London, for an education in kingship. We’ll then sail back to North America, to revel in the cult of monarchy, before marching out of Boston with British regulars to seize and destroy gunpowder, and confront a rebellion. 

BENJAMIN RUSH 

There's a perception that in the late 18th century, Britain was an absolute monarchy, that George III was this cruel, cruel tyrant, and that he was hell bent on suppressing the rights of people everywhere and establishing sort of absolute rule. My name is Brad Jones. I am a professor of history at California State University, Fresno. The reality is that in the middle of the 18th century, British society lived under a constitutional monarchy, a representative monarchy, a system of government, which they celebrated as providing them with a degree of freedom unmatched they thought, at least in the Western world, and the sense that they actually had a representative branch of government the king himself existed post glorious revolution, within this government, he was not an absolutist. He in many ways, held very little power, or was able to express very little power, and that the vast majority of power and authority came from Parliament, of which a branch was representative. So they celebrated this as one of the great tenets of being British is that they lived in a relatively free society.

AMBUSKE 

George III came of age in the aftermath of an earlier revolution that remade the British Empire, one that transformed the relationship between Parliament and the crown.

ANDREW O'SHAUGHNESSY 

The power of the monarchy had been much reduced by what's known, or used to be popular, known as the Glorious Revolution 1688, we use that term less now because it was not so glorious for the Irish and Scottish, but an important constitutional landmark in limiting the power of the monarchy and making Parliament a permanent part of The system of government and essentially making monarchs dependent on parliament in order to govern. My name's Andrew O'Shaughnessy. I'm Professor of History at the University of Virginia. George III still essentially remained the head of government and chose the Prime Minister, but he was limited to choosing prime ministers who had popular support in the House of Commons. When Georges heard tried to appoint someone who was not popular in the House of Commons, he learnt, to his cost, that that was not possible, and he was also important in choosing the ministers of the government. There are other ways in which his power was more limited. No monarch had tried to use the veto since the reign of Queen Anne at the beginning of the century, and no monarch has ever tried to use it. So you could say that that power had fallen into dissuadeatude and he was financially dependent on parliament to vote support for the costs of kingship.

AMBUSKE 

As a young boy, the future king’s mentors instilled in him a sense of duty and obligation to the national interest that transcended personal ambition. In the late 1740s, his father, Frederick, Prince of Wales, drew up a set of maxims for his 10-year-old son. He counseled George “to live with Oeconomy” whenever “the Crown comes into your hands,” to reduce the national debt as quickly as possible, to “let not Your ambition draw you into” war, but never “give up Your Honour nor that of the Nation,” and to “Convince this nation that you are not only an Englishman born and bred, but you are also this by inclination.”

AMBUSKE 

The German-born Frederick had a strained relationship with his own father, the equally German-born King George II, with whom he quarrelled over politics. Frederick did not want that for his own English-born heir, nor did he wish to leave his son without advice on how to rule wisely when his time came. That time arrived sooner than anyone expected. Though he did not know it, Frederick would never wear the crown. In 1751, two years after composing his maxims, Frederick died at the age of 44. George became heir apparent as Prince of Wales.  

AMBUSKE 

Frederick’s early death made George’s education in kingship all the more important. Under the tutelage of the Earl of Bute, the future king read histories of past monarchs, drawing lessons from their successes and failures; explored the origins and foundations of the British constitution; studied the economics of trade; and the politics of foreign powers. Thousands of pages of the king’s handwritten notes and essays survive in the Royal Archives, attesting to his studies. 

AMBUSKE 

More than anything, George’s lessons prepared him to be a Patriot King.

O'SHAUGHNESSY 

There was a work by Lord Bolingbroke called a patriot King that put forward these ideas the monarch who would govern with a view to the best interests of the. The people and would be an active part of government, and supposedly, George the Third was introduced to this by his tutor and eventually Prime Minister, the Earl of Bute.

AMBUSKE 

Henry Saint John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke, was a politician who had been a thorn in the side of George’s great-grandfather. Lord Bolingbroke cavorted with Jacobites and  opposed the governments of the first half of the eighteenth century. His machinations forced him into exile in France, but he later returned to England where he became a leading propagandist against his old political enemies.  

AMBUSKE 

Bolingbroke became enamored with history and political philosophy. Believing that corruption ran rampant in government, and Parliament’s independence remained under threat, Bolingbroke began writing treatises to lay the foundations for a new opposition faction. In the late 1730s, when he learned that Frederick, Prince of Wales, was allying himself with members of Parliament who opposed George II’s ministers, Bolingbroke wrote The Idea of a Patriot King.

BOLINGBROKE 

“A Patriot King will neither neglect nor sacrifice his country's interest. No other interest, neither a foreign nor a domestic, neither a public nor a private, will influence his conduct in government.”

AMBUSKE 

Bolingbroke’s Patriot King would stand above political factions to rule as a  benevolent father to a united nation. He would appoint only the wisest and most capable men to lead his governments. Private virtue would govern his public character. As Bolingbroke concluded:

BOLINGBROKE 

“Nothing can so surely and so effectually restore the virtue and public spirit essential to the preservation of liberty and national prosperity, as the reign of such a prince.”

AMBUSKE 

George III’s 1751 copy of The Idea of a Patriot King survives in his personal library. Lord Bute intended the treatise to mold the future king’s mind in a turbulent era riven with political faction, but some saw darker portents.

O'SHAUGHNESSY 

It would be regarded as very sinister at the time, people thought that Bute was encouraging him to become essentially a dictator and to take unauthorized powers. Been huge debate since this period, and during this period as to whether he was a constitutional monarch or not. He certainly planned to be the ultimate constitutional monarch, but this really involved exercising all of the powers he had at a time when there was an increasing tendency to challenge those powers. Parliament was making greater and greater claims, not least in America, where for the first time, it claimed the right to be able to tax America directly.

AMBUSKE 

When the 22-year-old Prince of Wales ascended to the throne as George III on October 25, 1760, the young king brought these lessons to bear.

O'SHAUGHNESSY 

He wanted to be a patriot King, and really he was something of an idealist. He felt that the politics of his great grandfather and his grandfather's reign had been corrupt, that the same people had governed for much too long, and George III wanted to see change, I think very importantly, he saw himself as very much part of The Constitution of one of the checks and balances, and was against the idea that government was just government by the Prime Minister and the House of Commons. He saw it as his job to hold the House of Commons in check and to really use his power. He intended to be a very active monarch and to bring about change, he very quickly starts sacking ministers, beginning with the Duke and Newcastle had been in power 20 years, then William Pitt the elder, and this actually leads to a decade of instability during the 1760s while He tries to find a prime minister as an alternative who has popular support among members of the House of Commons, there are seven different ministers during the 1760s which must have implications for America.

AMBUSKE 

Despite the instability of seven different prime ministers, each who had varying ideas about how best to reform British America:

O'SHAUGHNESSY 

He saw himself as a patriot king. He saw it as his duty to support the claims of Parliament, and so he did not doubt the right of Parliament to govern America or to tax America. There are few occasions for. You can see that he does, in fact, try to draw back on some of the more draconian policies being proposed by ministers, but for the most part, he's supportive of what his prime ministers are doing. He did agree to the withdrawal of the Stamp Act, and later saw that as one of the main errors of his reign, he felt that the failure to be consistently firm later had been a big error.

AMBUSKE 

George III’s later regret at the Stamp Act’s repeal – at the government’s collective failure to stand firm in the face of British America’s resistance to what the king believed was Parliament’s constitutional right to tax the colonies – paled in comparison at the time to the celebrations on both sides of the Atlantic at the act’s demise and the praise the king received for allowing it.

AMBUSKE 

Britons paraded their king to Parliament in 1766 to give his royal assent to the repeal. The story of the parade soon appeared in newspapers across British America, where it was paired with a report from France about Louis XV’s conduct at precisely the same moment that crowds were cheering George III as he rode to Westminster. Here’s Brad Jones:

BENJAMIN RUSH 

Louis the 15th, the very same moment surrounds himself with soldiers, marches to the Paris parliament, the French court in Paris, and it reminds these men, I'm in charge. I run the show. You are under my power. I am sovereign. I've located that story in newspapers across the Atlantic that was republished everywhere. That's a very common account of the repeal the Stamp Act, and one of which is celebrating again, the beauty of their political system, celebrating George III but they put it in conversation with the tyranny or arbitrary nature of the French monarchy.

AMBUSKE 

Cheering the Stamp Act’s repeal and the king’s role in it was just one of the many ways that British Americans celebrated the British monarchy and strengthened their connection to it. Although most British Americans had never been in a monarch’s presence, to say nothing of public or private audiences with the king, they participated in rituals that bound them to a crown an ocean away.

AMBUSKE 

Some were deceptively simple, yet no less meaningful: the swearing of an oath. For example, in 1768, amidst the Regulator crisis in the North Carolina backcountry, public officials pledged: 

OATH TAKER 

“I do sincerely promise and swear that I will bear true allegiance to His Majesty King George the Third.—So help me God.”

AMBUSKE 

As Katherine Carté, professor of history at Southern Methodist University explains, oaths were a compact between subjects and monarchs, backed by God himself.

KATHERINE CARTÉ 

People really believed that oaths were a sacred declaration of which God was a part. When you made an oath, you were declaring something to be true, and God was judging you on your truth in that moment, and so if you violated it, you were committing a level of religious sin that was far beyond simply lying to the state, but lying to God. That's a big deal.

AMBUSKE 

Judges, jurors, governors, sheriffs, lawyers, and witnesses all swore similar oaths of allegiance before entering office or giving testimony, pledging fealty to the king, his government, and the laws of his province.  

AMBUSKE 

In the eighteenth century, British monarchs swore oaths of their own to defend the Protestant faith. They were head of the Anglican Church and pledged to protect the rights of the Church of Scotland. For Anglicans in colonies like New York or Virginia, their connection to the crown took on a divine dimension, one anointed by God.

AMBUSKE 

Almanacs kept the monarchy and British Protestantism ever present in colonists’ lives by ordering time itself. As readers of the 1758 edition of Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack would have noticed, November was a busy month on the British calendar. 

AMBUSKE 

Colonists remembered the 5th of November with Pope’s Day, to celebrate the defeat of an English Catholic conspiracy in 1605 to blow up Parliament with a hidden store of gunpowder. On the 7th, they could toast to the 1745 birth of Prince Henry, George III’s younger brother. Three days later, they would have heard cannon boom from forts in Philadelphia, Boston, New York, or Charleston, in honor of George II’s birth in 1683. On November 30th, Scots in the colonies could revel in St. Andrew’s Day. 

AMBUSKE 

To mark the end of the Seven Years’ War, more than 200 colonists gathered in Faneuil Hall in the summer of 1763 to toast:

TOAST 

“The King.--The Queen, Prince of Wales, and Royal Family”

AMBUSKE 

The booms of cannon or the huzzahs of toasts might have rattled portraits of kings and queens in public buildings like provincial assemblies, courts of justice, and taverns, or in the private homes of colonists who could afford them. Portraits were visual manifestations of the sovereign’s presence in provincial life, watching over the passage of laws or the administration of justice done in the monarch’s name, or perhaps looking over the shoulders of colonists sharing a pint in their local tavern as they read the latest news from London.  

AMBUSKE 

In London, one British American felt the power of the royal presence more fervently. In October 1768, the Philadelphian Benjamin Rush, then a medical student at the University of Edinburgh, was visiting London when he toured the houses of Parliament. As he told a friend, when he entered the House of Lords:

BENJAMIN RUSH 

“I felt as if I walked on sacred ground. I gazed for some time at the Throne with emotions that I cannot describe.”

AMBUSKE 

Rush pestered his tour guide until he allowed the aspiring doctor to sit upon the throne.

BENJAMIN RUSH 

“I accordingly advanced toward it and sat in it for a considerable time.”

AMBUSKE 

Those moments overwhelmed him.

BENJAMIN RUSH 

“I was seized with a kind of horror which for some time interrupted my ordinary train of thinking…I endeavored to arrange my thoughts into some order, but such a crowd of ideas poured in upon my mind that I can scarcely recollect one of them.”

AMBUSKE 

Composing himself, Rush rose from the throne, and left the House of Lords for the House of Commons. In the other place, he felt a darker presence.

BENJAMIN RUSH 

“This, thought I, is the place where the infernal scheme for enslaving America was first broached. Here the usurping Commons first endeavored to rob the King of his supremacy over the colonies and to divide it among themselves. O! Cursed haunt of venality, bribery, and corruption!”

AMBUSKE 

Rush’s guide pointed to the seat from whence William Pitt had risen to argue in favor of the Stamp Act’s repeal. The young colonist sat on Pitt’s seat, and imagining himself surrounded by Members of Parliament, rose to recite part of Pitt’s speech, crying;

BENJAMIN RUSH 

“Americans are the sons, not the bastards of Englishmen. I rejoice that America has resisted.

AMBUSKE 

 In the years after the Stamp Act’s repeal, some colonies chose to honor the defenders of British American liberty by building public monuments to them. These statues were meant to deepen colonists’ affection for the crown and the Mother Country.

WENDY BELLION 

When the Act is repealed in 1766, several colonies along the eastern seaboard decide that the proper way to honor William Pitt is to order statues of him and to raise statues of him in central areas, highly visible areas within their city. My name is Wendy Bellion. I am a professor and the Sewell Biggs Chair of American Art History at the University of Delaware, where I'm also the Associate Dean for the Humanities. There are a number of colonies that decide to do this. New York and South Carolina are the most prominent, and they are the ones who eventually are able to realize these statues. These are the only colonies that end up commissioning statues of pit and raising them in public spaces

AMBUSKE 

With no sculptor in the colonies capable of undertaking these works, New York and South Carolina instructed their agents in London to find someone suitable. New York followed:

BELLION 

The lead of the South Carolina agent, who says, I found this wonderful sculptor. He's already working for King George III he has a large workshop. He's been trained in Italy. So he understands classical traditions, but he's also a modern sculptor. He also understands that we don't just want a reproduction of something that might have looked like it should have been in ancient Rome. This should be updated in some way for the very modern 18th century, which was a very modern century. His name was Joseph Wilton. Wilton is commissioned to send marble statues of William Pitt to Charleston and to New York City.

AMBUSKE 

The materials Wilton chose for the two statues of Pitt were very specific and deliberate.

BELLION 

When we look at sculpture today, we might not think about the significance of the materials that are used to create them. They were very significant at this time by carving a marble, Wilton was signaling his ability to work in the same kind of manner as ancient classical sculptors would have worked. When we talk about style and form in 18th century, we use the term neoclassical. This was a period of neoclassical revival, a revival of ancient ideas, philosophies, writings and art and architecture, and this helps. To explain why, when folks in New York and South Carolina wanted a sculpture of William Pitt, a man who was famous as an orator, a man who was compared in stature and prowess and persuasion to ancient orators like Cicero, they want him, for all intents and purposes, to look like a classical individual marble. The finest quality marble you could get your hands on was the choice material for neoclassical sculpture, and that's what Wilton was so good at doing. That meant ordering a large block of marble, very often sourced from Italy, from Carrara, if you were working in Europe, it meant that the sculptor would work up the original idea. Much of the labor of carving that block of marble would have been done by very well practiced assistants in his workshop. And then toward the end of the process, is where the sculptor himself would come in. He would do all the fine details. And even though the New York sculpture doesn't survive in very good condition today, the one in Charleston is in much greater condition. And if you ever have the chance to see it in Charleston, try and walk around it, try and peer around all aspects, all corners of this sculpture, because that's how people in the 18th century would have experienced it. They wouldn't have looked at it straight on, like a painting. They would have walked around it and Wilton expended his greatest degree of finesse and energy at the places that would have been at eye level, so that you as a viewer would have been able to appreciate not just the political significance of Pitt, the man pit this accomplished orator who was extending one hand as he was speaking, but you would have noticed all these fine details, these carvings, very delicate carvings. It's his way of demonstrating his technique and skill as this incredibly talented carver.

AMBUSKE 

New York, the headquarters of the British Army in North America, with a major imperial city of trade, also tasked Wilton:

BELLION 

To produce a large equestrian statue of King George III the political landscape of New York is such that a number of colonists realize that it's going to be very bad form if they do not also request a statue of the King.

AMBUSKE 

There was only one problem.

BELLION 

Wilton has absolutely no practice producing large equestrian statues or statues that have been cast in metal. He's a beautiful marble sculptor, but he hasn't really worked in metal. So Wilton does what a lot of sculptors did at that time, they outsourced a large portion of their work. 

AMBUSKE 

Wilton’s subcontractors cast the king’s statue in lead.

BELLION 

The way that this kind of sculpture would have been created is that a mold would have been made, probably in plaster, very hot, molten lead would have been poured into this empty shape, and once it had solidified, the outer pieces of the mold were removed. So what you had on the inside was a solid shape, or more often, large, ambitious sculptures were actually cast in pieces. And it's even possible that this is how the king statue was cast and then shipped, potentially in pieces that could be welded back together upon arrival.

AMBUSKE 

The sculptors made George III in the image of Marcus Aurelius, the ancient Roman emperor and political philosopher, whose own writings stressed self-improvement, service, and duty. He sat upon a magnificent horse, with his right arm stretched out and his hand raised in a benevolent gesture toward his subjects. To complete the statue, the sculptors covered the lead form in gilded gold. 

AMBUSKE 

It was shipped to New York, where it was installed on top of a marble base on Bowling Green in Lower Manhattan, the seat of British power in the colony.

BELLION 

But the problem with lead is that it sags over time, it loses its structure. And we know this because we have accounts of a statue that came out of wilton's workshop, a statue of King George that put up in a London Square at the exact same time that, several decades after its creation, is already starting to fall over. It has to be propped up. And this, of course, becomes wonderful material for satirists to work with in London at the time to suggest that, just like his statue, the king is losing his power.

AMBUSKE 

 By early 1775, colonists had been protesting a slew of imperial reforms and new taxes for more than a decade. And despite temporary victories like the Stamp Act’s rescission, Parliament seemed committed to a pattern of oppression. Here’s Frank Cogliano, Professor of American History at the University of Edinburgh.

DUTCHESS COUNTY 

The people, the men, primarily, but not only, mn who lead this movement to resist British tax policy are doing so because they believe that that policy threatens their liberties. They mean that. They mean that. And so they begin by protesting, but they want to protest in what they see as a responsible manner to make Parliament and the king aware that their liberties are being threatened. They begin by appealing to Parliament, and then they give up on Parliament, and they are appealing directly to George III. They say, well, the king should protect us.

AMBUSKE 

They believed the king had a duty to check Parliament’s power over the colonies. In 1774, Thomas Jefferson wrote A Summary View of the Rights of British America, as a set of instructions for Virginia’s delegates to the Continental Congress. In those instructions, he called on George III directly to take action. Here’s Andrew O’Shaughnessy. 

O'SHAUGHNESSY 

He's won the first to call on George III to intervene. And Jefferson really started to think of the federal empire in which all parts were equal, and that the central government was really something of an umpire with very weak powers, and the monarch helped to adjudicate between the regions. This was a desperate last attempt to try and find some resolution, some way out, because clearly, Parliament was not going to back down, and there was a sense that a monarch could be a check upon the powers of Parliament, even though George Lucert was willing to check the house commons, the idea was that he was king. In parliament, they governed together. And so to question its powers and to undermine it would have been questioning the premises of the revolution of 1688. and he always regarded himself as faithful to the principles of that revolution, even though he tried to exercise its powers to a maximum.

AMBUSKE 

Many British Americans continued to believe deeply in the British Empire that revolution created, with the king at its head. For colonists suspicious of the extra-legal committees who enforced the Continental Congress’s trade boycott, or the pretensions to power by the extralegal Congress itself, for devote colonists who worshiped in Anglican churches, and for colonists who believed that George III was king by right, by law, and by God, the monarchy was a source of strength in a troubling moment. As some residents in Dutchess County, New York proclaimed:

DUTCHESS COUNTY 

“our sovereign lord king George the third, is the only sovereign to whom the British American may, can, or ought to owe and bear true and faithfull allegiance.”

AMBUSKE 

But as their profession of loyalty implied in this moment, expressions of disloyalty were everywhere. Not long after the installation of the King’s equestrian statue in Lower Manhattan, the city council erected an iron fence around it. In 1773, it passed an anti-graffiti act to protect it and the Pitt statue from defacement. As the crisis in North America accelerated with the passage of the Coercive Acts in 1774, some British Americans began losing faith in the king, if not the monarchy itself. 

AMBUSKE 

And they turned on fellow colonists who did not share their sentiments.  

AMBUSKE 

In October of that year, an Englishman named Nicholas Cresswell was traveling through Virginia. While in Alexandria, he confided in his journal:

NICHOLAS CRESSWELL 

“Every thing here is in the utmost confusion, Committees are appointed to inspect into the Characters and Conduct of every tradesman to prevent them Selling Tea, or buying British Manufactures. Some of them has been Tarred and Feathered others had their property Burned and destroyed by the populace. Independent Companies are raising in every County on the Continent[,] appointed adjutants and train their men as if they was on the Eve of a War…….The King is openly Cursed and his authority set at defiance. In short every thing is ripe for Rebellion.”

AMBUSKE 

One evening in January 1775, two New York Sons of Liberty threatened John Case for daring to swear loyalty to the king. Alexander McDougall questioned Case on whether he believed that George III had violated his coronation oath to defend the Protestant faith by agreeing to the Quebec Act and the protections it afforded Catholic French Canadians. Case believed the king had not. Isaac Sears condemned him as a Tory and implied that Case ought to be put to death. When he asked Case if he would fight for the king should Bostonians take up arms against him, Case replied that he would defend the crown. For his crime of loyalty, McDougall and Sears forced Case to sit, shunned, in the corner of the tavern for the rest of the night, guarded by a young Black man. 

AMBUSKE 

In March, a crowd assaulted William Cunningham for yelling

WILLIAM CUNNINGHAM 

“God bless King George.”

AMBUSKE 

Their anger was as much at Parliament as it was now at a king who possessed a sense of duty they could not understand. But it was also George III’s own failure to comprehend the roots of a looming rebellion that made disaster all the more likely.

RICK ATKINSON 

He is committed to the Empire. He's committed to the monarchy, and yet he is, in some ways, an enlightened monarch. He is not an absolute ruler. He's not a despot. He cannot be an absolute ruler under the rules the British have set up for the relationship between Parliament and the monarchy late in the 17th century, and so he observes the requisites of being a British king, which is the parliament shares power with him. I'm Rick Atkinson. I'm an author and military historian. He is committed to holding together the Empire. And so he is determined that whatever it takes, including bloodshed against his own people in America, he will necessarily do.

O'SHAUGHNESSY 

He becomes obsessed with revolt in America, and said there'll be lions as long as we continue to act as sheep with the Boston Tea Party. He basically felt that there was now no turning back. This issue had to be decided militarily, and he becomes the biggest war hawk in Britain.

AMBUSKE 

By March 1775, Boston was a portrait of a die that had now been cast. It was an occupied town. Church spires mingled with the masts of the Royal Navy warships that patrolled the harbor to enforce the Boston Port Act. Thirteen regiments of the British Army were quartered in and around town, amounting to more than 5,000 men. Many also brought their families. They filled every available warehouse, public building, and common ground, dwarfing the number of soldiers sent to Boston in the years before the massacre.  

AMBUSKE 

As in other colonies, an extralegal Provincial Congress had all but seized the reins of government in Massachusetts Bay, though a Son of Liberty-turned-British spy named Benjamin Church assured Governor Gage that moderate men remained in control of it. The same could not be said for the local Committee of Safety, which coordinated the secreting of arms and ammunition to places unknown. 

AMBUSKE 

Knowing full well that colonial militia were drilling in the countryside, and that they had formed rapid response companies called “minute men,” the British had fortified Boston Neck, the narrow strip of land that connected the town to the rest of the colony, to defend against an assault. On more than one occasion, the sounds of soldiers taking target practice or the sight of Redcoats marching out of town had led to tense standoffs, and nearly exchanges of fire.  

AMBUSKE 

Rhetoric inflamed this new reality. In early March, Dr. Joseph Warren was chosen to deliver the fourth annual address commemorating the Boston Massacre. Like Church, Warren was a member of the Sons of Liberty and had been active in the resistance movement. Rising to the pulpit in the Old South Meeting House, Warren declaimed to an audience of farmers, merchants, and British officers:

JOSEPH WARREN 

“Unhappily for us, unhappily for Britain, the madness of an avaricious minister…has brought upon the stage discord, envy, hatred, and revenge, with civil war close in their rear….Our streets are again filled with armed men. Our harbor is crowded with ships of war. But these cannot intimidate us. Our liberty must be preserved. It is far dearer than life.”

AMBUSKE 

The provincials in the audience approved of Warren’s rhetoric; the British officers did not.

AMBUSKE 

Governor Gage was unsure how long this broken peace would last. While on a visit to London a year earlier to consult with the king and his ministers, Gage had confidently asserted that he could control the wayward colony as its new governor and bring it back in line.  

AMBUSKE 

But colonists’ reaction to the Coercive Acts eroded that conviction and as it did British authority in North America. Gage began sending urgent letters home asking for more soldiers. Exaggerating to make his point, he told the Secretary at War that if the ministry had a mind to send a million soldiers, it ought to send a million more. 

AMBUSKE 

Gage remained cautious – far too cautious for the king’s taste –  though it was not without good reason. Few British officials could claim to know the colonists better than him. For twenty years, he had served in the colonies, having marched with General Braddock to his doom along the Monongahela River in 1755, governed a defeated Montreal in 1760, confronted Pontiac’s Uprising in the Ohio Country in 1763, dealt with violence between soldiers and civilians in New York in 1765, sent the regiments to Boston that committed the massacre in 1770, and watched the Coercive Acts create an intolerable situation in 1774, all the while married to a woman from New Jersey named Margaret Kemble.

AMBUSKE 

He knew that the slightest provocation or accident could have unintended consequences. He was unwilling to act boldly unless he received direct orders from home.

AMBUSKE 

Those orders were coming. In late January 1775, less than a week after the Continental Congress’s petition to the king landed on the clerk’s table in the House of Commons among the “great heap” of the other “papers relating to the disturbances in North America,” Lord Dartmouth, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, wrote a lengthy letter to Gage, and marked it “secret.” He had written it in consultation with Lord North and the king. 

AMBUSKE 

Dartmouth delayed sending the letter for some time, hoping that the secret talks he had orchestrated between Benjamin Franklin and Lord Admiral Richard Howe would bear fruit, that a war could be avoided, but as those negotiations came to naught, Dartmouth could delay no further. 

AMBUSKE 

The orders arrived in Boston on board the Nautilus on April 14, 1775, where they were delivered to Gage in the governor’s residence. They read, in part:

LORD DARTMOUTH 

“The violences committed by those who have taken up arms in Massachusetts have appeared to me as the acts of a rude rabble, without concert, without conduct; and therefore I think that a small force now, if put to the test, would be able to conquer them….It is the opinion of the King’s servants, in which His Majesty concurs, that the essential step to be taken toward reestablishing government would be to arrest and imprison the principal actors and abettors in the provincial congress, whose proceedings appear in every light to be acts of treason and rebellion.”

AMBUSKE 

Reinforcements were also on their way. Dartmouth instructed Gage to use his judgment on how best to execute his orders, hoping that all could be accomplished without bloodshed, but as he made clear, the government’s and the king’s patience were wearing thin, and time was running out.

LORD DARTMOUTH 

“The king’s dignity and the honor and safety of the empire require that in such a situation, force should be repelled by force.”

AMBUSKE 

It was now or never.

AMBUSKE 

Gage began making preparations to carry out his orders. Even then, he advanced with care. Dartmouth’s letter had been a copy – a security measure in case the original was lost at sea – and he waited for the original to arrive before pressing on in case it had additional information. When the packet appeared on April 16th, he moved swiftly.  

AMBUSKE 

Believing that running down members of the Provincial Congress like John Hancock and Samuel Adams would be a waste of resources, Gage exercised the discretion afforded him, and chose to ignore that part of his orders for now. Besides, Hancock and Adams were in hiding, somewhere in the town of Lexington. Arms and ammunition were another matter. Here’s Rick Atkinson.

ATKINSON 

The British are trying to understand what it is that the Americans have in mind where they're stashing their munitions. The British have pretty good intelligence, and they learn that there is a substantial munitions depot, meaning where bullets and everything from spoons to extra muskets are kept in the town of Concord, 20 miles or so from Boston.

AMBUSKE 

More recent intelligence supplied by loyal British Americans and soldiers concealed in civilian clothing suggested that militia had already removed most of the military stores from Concord. But not all of it.

ATKINSON 

The decision is made by General Gage that he is going to send an expeditionary force, fewer than 1000 soldiers, and they're going to slip out of Boston and march to Concord and seize this depot, and that will teach the Americans a lesson.

AMBUSKE 

To get to Concord, the soldiers would have to march through Lexington. Gage’s orders to the commanders leading the force were clear. They were to “seize and destroy all artillery, ammunition, provisions, tents, small arms, and all military stores whatever.” But they were forbidden from plundering Concord’s inhabitants or destroying private property. 

AMBUSKE 

On the night of April 18th, three days after the last full moon, sailors began rowing more than 800 soldiers across the Back Bay and the Charles River. They landed at Cambridge and began marching up the road west toward Concord. The officers, including Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith and Major John Pitcairn, knew of their intended target. For secrecy, their men would not be told until hours later.  

AMBUSKE 

The movement of the British troops did not go unnoticed. 

ATKINSON 

You don't slip 1000 men out of Boston in the dark of night without somebody noticing. And the Americans are very alert to what's going on. They also have good intelligence. There's a silversmith named Paul Revere who is on standby to carry the message out into the countryside when the British are, in fact, coming. And that message spreads quickly that there is this armed force that has come out through Cambridge.

AMBUSKE 

Joseph Warren observed the British mobilizing and dispatched Paul Revere and another man named William Dawes to warn the surrounding communities that soldiers were on the march. Mounting his horse, Dawes rode through town and across the Boston Neck to Cambridge, warning the inhabitants, before heading for Concord.  

AMBUSKE 

Revere rode first to the Old North Church, where he instructed another man to hang two lanterns in the steeple to warn colonists across the river in Charlestown that the British had gone by water. Revere then ferried across the river himself, somehow passing undetected by the warship Somerset anchored in the river, before landing in Charlestown and riding on toward Lexington, where he warned Adams and Hancock to flee. 

ATKINSON 

The British are coming is not something Paul Revere bellowed as he was galloping through the Middlesex countryside in the early morning of April 19, 1775 that wouldn't have made sense to people who at that moment still thought of themselves as British. What he's quoted as shouting over and over again is the regulars are coming out, meaning regular British Army troops coming out of Boston

AMBUSKE 

In the dead of night, in the hour of ghosts, the soldiers marched west down the road. In the distance, they could hear church bells ringing and the sound of gun fire – warning shots alerting minute men, militia companies, and civilians that soldiers were advancing.  

AMBUSKE 

Major Pitcairn was leading the British vanguard. At 4 am, he called a halt, and ordered his men to load their weapons and fix their bayonets, before marching on to Lexington. 

ATKINSON 

It's a few miles on the Boston side of Concord, and there is a militia gathering there, and they're standing around. It's very cold. They're shifting from foot to foot, and there's no sign of the British. And they send riders out to look for them, and they come back and say, we don't see any red coats coming this way. And so these men are dismissed, and many of them go into a tavern right there near the Lexington green for a little Grog. Some of them go home.

AMBUSKE 

Captain John Parker, the militia commander, soon learned that it hadn’t been a false alarm when another rider came in, warning that Pitcairn’s men were two miles away.

AMBUSKE 

What was left of the militia company left their pints and reformed outside on the green of the town commons, for the Redcoats’ approach. 

AMBUSKE 

As the king’s subjects approached each other, Pitcairn bellowed:

PITCAIRN 

“Soldiers, don’t fire. Keep your ranks. Form up and surround them”

AMBUSKE 

Captain Parker commanded his men:

PARKER 

 “Don’t molest them, without they being first.”

AMBUSKE 

The king’s subjects were now dangerously close to each other. If they meant to have a war, they had to be.

ATKINSON 

18th century warfare, unlike 21st Century warfare, is unusually intimate. Killing is done up close. That's partly because the musket has not changed much in two centuries. By 1775 it's got great stopping power. It's really a ferocious weapon. It fires a one ounce lead slug that can bring down a charging bull, but it's horrendously inaccurate, basically beyond 80 yards when it's fired in volleys with a group of men standing together firing at the same time again, it can be pretty devastating, but individually, for the most part, it's a pretty crude weapon that requires armies to come in close proximity to each other, first of all, to have some effectiveness with money. Baskets and secondly, the British in particular teach their soldiers that the bayonet is their primary weapon, that the attempt is to get close enough to the enemy to charge with the bayonet. That's as intimate and eyeball to eyeball as you can get.

AMBUSKE 

On that cold morning of April 19, 1775, as dawn broke behind the king’s soldiers in the eastern sky, with nerves fraying, hearts pounding, and officers yelling:

OFFICER 1 

“Throw down your arms, you villains, you rebels!”

OFFICER 2 

“Disperse, you rebels, immediately!”

AMBUSKE 

Someone. Somewhere. Fired a shot.  

AMBUSKE 

And then all hell broke loose as the king’s soldiers fired on the king’s subjects.

ATKINSON 

The British are quite undisciplined at this point in their firing, their officers cannot control the firing, and they mow down these militiamen, ate or killed. Others are badly wounded. It's not a firefight, it's a massacre. British essentially suffer, nobody killed, nobody wounded. The British get together. They are permitted to go huzzah three times, and they march down the road, heading further west toward Concord, which is six miles away.

AMBUSKE 

The militia in Concord were waiting for them.

ATKINSON 

By this point, and it's early morning on April 19, the alarm has spread far and wide to 50 villages and towns, not only in eastern Massachusetts, but even to New Hampshire and to Connecticut, and there are armed men marching toward Concord.

AMBUSKE 

As the soldiers approached Concord after 8 am, militiamen fell back across the North Bridge spanning the Concord River, while the Redcoats began searching farms and thickets for hidden arms and ammunition. They found some, including 500 pounds of musket balls. They promptly dumped them into a nearby pond, and destroyed flour and gun carriages as well. Then, they headed for the bridge.

ATKINSON 

When the British get to Concord, they quickly realize that they're overmatched. There is a bridge famously over Concord River, just outside town, and on this bridge, as the British are going looking again for war materiel, there is a substantial American detachment on the far side of the bridge. They march down the hill. There's a small number of British relative to the size of the rebels guarding the bridge. Shots again are fired this time, there's no doubt the British fire first, that's a mistake.

AMBUSKE 

Captain David Brown yelled,

DAVID BROWN 

“God damn them, they are firing balls! Fire, men, fire!"

AMBUSKE 

It was all over in three minutes. Two militiamen lay dead. Two soldiers were killed in the firefight. A third wounded soldier tried to escape with his fellow Redcoats before a militiaman buried a hatchet in his brains. 

ATKINSON 

And now they're on the run. They fall back into Concord, and they recognize that they got a big problem. It's 19 miles or so back to Boston. They're already tired from having marched out, so it's going to be a long, long afternoon for the British to get back to Boston as thousands of Americans. It's estimated that roughly 4000 armed Americans arrive on the scene and participate, to one degree or another, in this harassment of British troops falling back to Boston.

AMBUSKE 

As they marched back from Concord, and back through Lexington, with miles of hostile road ahead of them, more soldiers fell as a retreat became a running firefight.

ATKINSON 

The only reason that column of Red Coats isn't utterly obliterated is that a plea for help has gone back to Boston, and reinforcements are sent out and in Lexington. These reinforcements show up just in time to prevent what probably would have been a bloodbath of British soldiers. They embrace these dog tired, bleeding British soldiers who have fought earlier in the day in Lexington and then in Concord, and have been harassed and fired on on the road all the way back from Concord, this relief detachment provides enough firepower, enough super to allow the whole force to fall back to Charleston and then to get across the Charles River into Boston.

AMBUSKE 

Samuel Adams rejoiced at the news of this “glorious morning.” A colonist who had been at Concord on that bloody day knew a harder truth:

COLONIST 

“Now the war has begun and no one knows when it will end.”

ATKINSON 

It's a terrible day for everybody concerned. It's the beginning of the war. It's a recognition by the British. That this is going to be a lot harder than anybody thought. And now not only the Charles has been crossed, but a Rubicon has been crossed, and once blood is shed and the wolf is in the gorge, it's hard to turn back.

AMBUSKE 

More than 300 miles to the southwest of Lexington and Concord, an express rider galloped into Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It was April 25, 1775 at 5 in the evening. The rider bore news that the king’s subjects had fired on each other in Massachusetts Bay. Boston was now under siege.

AMBUSKE 

The local printer, Francis Bailey, immediately published a broadside with a collection of letters from committees of correspondence in New England reporting that provincial militia had clashed with the king’s soldiers in the early morning hours of April 19, six days earlier. 

AMBUSKE 

Bailey’s broadside and other printed reports quickly circulated the news “To all Friends of American Liberty” throughout the Shenandoah Valley, where it was carried by Pennsylvanians and Virginians who were then streaming over the mountains to settle new lands in the Ohio Country. 

AMBUSKE 

The Ohio Country had only been at peace now for seven months after hard years of a most intimate war. Pennsylvanians at the throats of Virginians; Shawnee and Delawares defending their lands from avaricious settlers; the Haudenosaunee calculating the costs of protecting their sovereignty; British and Indigenous diplomats struggling to keep their world from coming undone.

AMBUSKE 

Twenty years after the Great War for Empire had begun at the Forks of the Ohio River, the flames of the smoldering long war for the West flickered to life once more.  

AMBUSKE 

Thanks for listening to Worlds Turned Upside Down. Worlds is a production of R2 Studios, part of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.

AMBUSKE 

I’m your host, Dr. Jim Ambuske.

AMBUSKE 

This episode of Worlds Turned Upside Down is made possible with support from a 2024 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.  

AMBUSKE 

Head to r2studios.org to find a complete transcript of today’s episode and suggestions for further reading.

AMBUSKE 

Worlds is researched and written by me with additional research, writing, and script editing by Jeanette Patrick.  

AMBUSKE 

Jeanette Patrick and I are the Executive Producers. Grace Mallon is our British Correspondent.

AMBUSKE 

Our lead audio editor for this episode is Curt Dahl of cd squared.  

AMBUSKE 

Annabelle Spencer is our graduate assistant.  

AMBUSKE 

Special thanks to the Georgian Papers Programme and the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle.

AMBUSKE 

Our thanks to Rick Atkinson, Fred Anderson, Wendy Bellion, Katherine Carté, Frank Cogliano, Brad Jones, and Andrew O’Shaughnessy for sharing their expertise with us in this episode.

AMBUSKE 

Thanks also to our voice actors Anne Fertig, Adam Smith, Evan McCormick, John Turner, John Winters, Grace Mallon, Peter Walker, Craig Gallager, Spencer McBride, and John Terry. 

AMBUSKE 

Subscribe to Worlds on your favorite podcast app. Thanks, and we’ll see you next time.