Radical Duke: How One Aristocrat-and the American Revolution-Transformed 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 th