A British Perspective of the American Revolution

Hello, dear readers! Today we welcome my final guest for 2024. Can you believe another year has gone by? I'll be introducing some changes in the new year, so stay tuned for that. In the meantime, enjoy this post from Avellina Balestri about writing a British perspective of the American Revolution for her latest novel, All Ye That Pass By: Gone for a Soldier.

Welcome, Avellina!

~ Samantha

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Remembered with Honor: Writing a British Perspective of the American Revolution

Guest Post by Avellina Balestri

This past July, I finally published first book of a projected trilogy set during the American Revolution. It is entitled All Ye That Pass By: Gone for a Soldier. I am already hard at work on the subsequent volumes, Kingdom of Wolves and Blood of the Martyrs.

This story has been a long time coming. It first began to take shape when I was twelve and found myself simultaneously reading The Autobiography of a Hunted Priest by Father John Gerard, SJ, and An Original and Authentic Journal of Occurrences during the Late American War by Sergeant Roger Lamb. The 16th-century English priest who suffered torture and imprisonment for his Catholic Faith inspired me in one way; the 18th-century Anglo-Irish soldier who suffered privations and imprisonment for his King and Country inspired me in another. 

Their stories of survival against the odds spoke to me down through the centuries and made me feel as if I had come to know both men intimately. Their hopes and fears bled through the pages, and their personalities burned brightly from the hearth of history. My youthful high spirits and intense emotions assured that their stories would overlap in my imagination to create a singular spiritual vision, dealing with the dichotomy of what it might mean to be, in the words of St. Thomas More, the King’s good servant but God’s first. 

In terms of my chosen focus and setting for this narrative, I have always found the British and Loyalist experience of the American Revolution particularly compelling because of my lifelong love of Britain and her multifaceted heritage. When I was in my tweens and early teens, before my family owned a computer or printer, I would save up loose change and go to my local library branches to pay for print-outs about historical figures who struck my interest. Most of them were “redcoats”, British soldiers from the Age of Horse and Musket, clad in their tell-tale scarlet tunics. I would compile whole folders of their biographies, then file them into volumes, and read through them regularly for story ideas to expand upon in my notebooks. I would become invested in the ups and downs of each character’s journey, and see them not solely as a part of Britain’s legacy, but of America’s as well, for we once were all one people, and perhaps on a level deeper than most of us are willing to admit, still are. On both sides of the sea, we remain the children of Lady Britannia.

The cultural roots of America, based in the original thirteen colonies, produced an out-growth of Albion in the New World. This fundamental fact put the historical framework into perspective for me, especially as a native of Maryland, the only colony established by English Catholics. The more I researched the Revolutionary Era, the more the division of the Anglosphere and cessation of America’s ties to kingship seemed tinged by tragedy and drenched in kindred blood, a reality rarely addressed with the solemnity it deserves. Brother slew brother, but unlike in the case of the American Civil War, in which the Union won, we are taught to downplay this aspect when it comes to the American Revolution because separatists triumphed and the split is celebrated. 

I, for one, could never help but grieve for the lost dual identity of British Americans, once proudly held and defended by so many before and during the war, and came fairly early to consider myself as a latter-day Loyalist at heart. I am an American, by birth and upbringing, shaped by my native land in countless ways, and yet I have always felt a spiritual tie to the kings and queens of Britain far more than any president because monarchy appeals to a transcendent authority, an incarnational sacredness, and a historical continuity that stretches back beyond the year 1776 or ‘83. I do celebrate the 4th of July, but not so much out of an enthusiasm for the Declaration of Independence as out of a general appreciation of America and all the good she has to offer.

Beyond this background, the reason I wanted to write a story focusing on the British experience of the Revolution was due to the very fact that they lost. In the great turning point of the war, the Saratoga Campaign, I cannot help but see a classical tragedy of fallen knights and broken tables, in which all the best and worst aspects of the British character are on full display. This little apocalypse, brought on by pride and passion, is pregnant with the potential to explore correlating topics and profound truths that were important to me as a Catholic author. If the Revolution resulted in a political schism, it reflected an earlier religious schism, when England severed herself from the See of Rome. The arguments made for both forms of separation could eerily parallel each other, and in some ways, they feel like a mirror being held up to one another. I imagine Catholics inhabiting the British Empire at the time would have seen the pattern and reacted to it in different ways. This story explores one such possible reaction through the pilgrimage of the protagonist. 

In some aspects, this tale retells the life of the famous Jesuit martyr St. Edmund Campion, if it were put forward from the 16th to the 18th century, switching out a priest for a layman and altering his career trajectory from that of a scholar to that of a soldier. As such, the premise is both quite original and quite familiar. St. Arsenios of Paros said, “The Church in the British Isles will only begin to grow when she begins again to venerate her own saints.” This story pays homage to the tradition of hagiography, for the saint is the only true revolutionary in the world. Christ was creating the universe while dying on the Cross, and the martyr recapitulates all things in Christ through the witness of blood.

In other parts of this story, I strove to go back even farther than Campion’s Elizabethan influence, touching upon the earliest consciousness of English identity and mythic history that permeates my Robin Hood series, The Telling of the Beads. I wanted Britannia to feel both thoroughly real and also more than real, with poetry infused into the mundane, for without a soul, the land is nothing. And if Britannia is nothing, America is nothing. This realization is something sadly lacking in most fiction dealing with the American Revolution, which reduces the Mother Country to a cartoonish landscape generated by revolutionary propaganda as opposed to our very womb, where we gained our first understanding of liberty and loyalty. 

When it comes to the process of writing characters, I believe that every person is “an allegory,” as J.R.R. Tolkien once said, “each embodying in a particular tale and clothed in the garments of time and place, universal truth and everlasting life.” We can never completely de-mythologize history any more than we can fully de-spiritualize mankind, though our increasingly secular society may work its woe. I take this principle equally seriously when writing stories set during the Early Modern Period as I do with stories set during the Middle Ages. It is fundamental for us as human beings to believe that our stories are worth telling, for all their bitter glory, and through Christian eyes, I see each passing generation as another act of a Mystery Play, unfolding the secrets of salvation in manifold ways.

This, boiled down to creedal basics, is the power of Christ’s dying and rising, which shall never be emptied. It is the foundational concept behind this trilogy and all those who pass by within it. Each man and woman finds themselves fighting the long defeat, living as crucibles of a fallen world, and to greater or lesser extents, being drawn into the drama of the Cross. When all earthly goods are despoiled, and death itself beckons the soul, they must confront the Absolute, that relentless Hound of Heaven from whom they can no longer escape, for He draws all men to Himself from the height of Golgotha.        

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