Every morning when he lived in London, the great American thinker and politician Benjamin Franklin would throw open the shutters of his upstairs windows and take an 'air bath' — stark naked. Breathing in the pungent odours of Craven Street, between the Strand and the Thames, he let the bracing city breezes fumigate his body. If that's how he cleansed himself, lord only knows what he smelled like otherwise.
What the locals thought about these ablutions, Lucy Worsley didn't say, as she investigated the history of The American Revolution. She did tell us Franklin's image (fully clothed) still appears on the U.S. $100 bill, but didn't mention that he was one of 17 children, and the youngest son. Probably a good thing: the cast of this whistle-stop history was already too numerous to count.
Romantic that she is, Prof Lucy repeatedly compared the American Revolution to a break-up between lovers. She must have seen some pretty dramatic separations in her time, because this one involved battles, riots, massacres and 342 chests of tea, dumped into Boston Harbour. When the revolutionaries tore down a statue of George III and beheaded it, the metal was melted down and turned into musketballs. As divorces go, this one was acrimonious.
Lively re-enactments gave us a flavour of the events, though they were all mime with no dialogue. Lucy, who rarely dresses up any more, took no part in them. She did try a pot of mulberry tea, which patriotic Americans drank instead of the English brew. 'I can tell you it's pretty disgusting,' she grimaced. 'Eughh! Seaweed!'
She was wearing her trademark scarlet, with dresses and jumpers to match her lipstick and the British redcoats. Her colour scheme emphasised the storytelling: this account is very much from a UK viewpoint, with plenty of sympathy for King George and an underlying theme that hinted the world might have been a better place if the United States had remained under our government. Even some of the Founding Fathers thought so. Lucy unearthed an early draft of the Declaration of Independence, handwritten by Thomas Jefferson, which lamented, 'We might have been a free and a great people together.' That line was taken out of the final wording, which doesn't make it any the less true.
So far, George Washington hasn't entered the picture. Most American retellings of the revolution paint him as a saint, but I'm hoping this version, with its pro-British perspective, will highlight his character flaws. According to the great U.S. newspaper columnist Bill Nye, writing 150 years ago, Washington might not have been able to tell a lie but everything else about his language was furious, foul and fulminating. The future President, Bill said, 'could reproach his subordinates in a way to make the ground crack open and break up the ice in the Delaware river'. Really, it's a good job those re-enactments are silent.
