Liberty’s Exiles: The Loss of America and the Remaking of the British Empire.. Maya Jasanoff

in the most animated style,” to underscore their outrage. In short, as an opposition member passionately summed up:

      Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, beheld the dismemberment and diminution of the British empire. But this, alarming and calamitous as it was, was nothing when compared with another of the crimes of the present peace—the cession of men into the hands of their enemies, and delivering over to confiscation, tyranny, resentment, and oppression, the unhappy men who trusted to our fair promises and deceitful words.²⁰

      Few could have doubted where all this invective would lead. In the winter of 1783, the House voted to censure the peace treaties, delivering a crippling declaration of no confidence in the ministry. Shelburne promptly announced his resignation, leaving another government broken on the wheel of civil war. (He would be replaced in April 1783 by a coalition anchored by the unlikely duo of Lord North and the radical Charles James Fox.²¹ This government also proved short-lived and fell at the end of 1783, leading to the premiership of William Pitt.)

      Although the issue of loyalist compensation helped bring down the Shelburne government, it must be said that the loyalists’ own sturmund-drang rhetoric did not always win them friends. In the later years of the war, many politicians had grown weary of loyalists’ chimerical visions of faithful Americans rallying to the British flag; British opponents of the war increasingly blamed the loyalist lobby (and especially Joseph Galloway) for unnecessarily prolonging an unsuccessful conflict. “They talked and acted like foolish gamesters,” said one MP, “whose passions bound them more strongly to persevere the more their losses galled them.”²²