The American Revolution: Wot it was was the bleedin' Jerries fault. And the Crapauds.

Dan Hannan has an English take on the our Revo. Hint: the same Germans (Jerries ) and French (Crapauds) that are oppressing traditional English Liberties today did it back then. Bloody wogs.

It was these ideals that were set to paper in a small secular miracle at Philadelphia’s old courthouse. As the Virginia-born Lady Astor later put it, the war was fought “by British Americans against a German king for British ideals.”

Don’t take her word for it: Look at the primary sources. The resolutions of the Continental Congress are a protracted complaint about the violations of traditional British liberties. The same is true of the Declaration of Independence itself. As that great Anglo-American Winston Churchill put it:

The Declaration was in the main a restatement of the principles which had animated the Whig struggle against the later Stuarts and the English Revolution of 1688.

Indeed it was, often in the most literal way: the right of petition, the prohibition of standing armies, the protection of common law and jury trials, the right to bear arms — all were copied from England’s Glorious Revolution. Some of the clauses of England’s 1689 Bill of Rights were reproduced without amendment. Here, for example, is the English Bill of Rights on criminal justice:

Excessive bail ought not to be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

And here is the U.S. Constitution:

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

The American Revolution was motivated not by a rejection but a reaffirmation — indeed, an intensification — of British national identity. No one understood this better than the great Edmund Burke, whose 1775 speech on conciliation is as fine as any delivered in the House of Commons:

The colonists emigrated from you when this part of your character [love of freedom] was most predominant; and they took this bias and direction the moment they parted from your hands. They are therefore not only devoted to liberty, but to liberty according to English ideas, and on English principles.

It did not occur to any of the actors to treat the conflict as being between two nations — at least, not until the French became involved in 1778. Indeed, the whole affair would be better understood as the Second Anglosphere Civil War — the first being the one fought across England, Scotland, Ireland, and America in the 1640s.

Read the whole bleedin' thing.