Of all the American Presidents, George Washington was perhaps best known to the British at the time of his inauguration. Notable exceptions are arguably Ronald Reagan and Donald J. Trump, whose previous careers as entertainers had reached widespread British audiences, but Washington stands alone in the extensive admiration he received.
As Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army, Washington had led the colonists’ military efforts in their bid for independence from Britain. For Britain, the American Revolution arguably proved to be the most expensive, protracted, and unsuccessful conflicts in the history of its empire. It was also highly publicized and deeply controversial. The blossoming newspaper and periodical press came of age during the American war and in the decade-long crisis that preceded it, with the many dozens of newspapers around Britain churning out tens of thousands of copies daily whose reach transcended geography, gender, and social class. In this context, Washington became a household name. Remarkably, the acclaim he received in Britain during his lifetime was second only to the veneration he enjoyed in America.
Between the outbreak of what would become the Seven Years’ War in America in 1755 to the conclusion of the American War of Independence in 1783, the American colonies first featured in and then dominated news cycles in Britain. The subject was increasingly controversial, with ordinary Britons and the elite alike openly expressing an array of shifting opinions, often including sympathy for the American complaints, if not the case for independence. As a reader of the Salisbury Journal remarked in March 1776: “I Believe there is not a person in this kingdom but is more or less interested in the present struggle between us and our American Colonists, and not many so totally divested of all concern for the event, as to take no side in it; but every one seems to have attached himself to one or the other.”
There was much for the British to dislike about the American Revolution. A revolving door of ineffective generals stung Britons’ martial pride. The king and Parliament’s failure to avert and then quell the rebellion led to greater debts and taxation, while also risking renewed war with Britain’s ancient enemies of France and Spain, which sparked frustration and fury. At the same time, depictions of the rebels leaned towards that of petulant children. As the Derby Mercury reflected in 1775, there was plenty of blame to go around: “To Point at any one Man as the Author of these Evils is rather too severe.” The colonists, it continued, were guilty of “extravagant Zeal for Liberty . . . without considering that nothing is so essential to the Purpose as a due Obedience to the Government,” but the “Government have been equally blameable” for having too much confidence in the power of the strength of arms to bring the Americans to heel.
Against this backdrop stood George Washington, a lone magnet for admiration. Washington famously consciously fashioned himself as the modern Cincinnatus—the reluctant leader dutifully serving his country rather than himself—and benefited from an admiring American public that desperately wanted to believe the hype. The British reading public, who were exposed to many of the same stories in the press, followed suit. Opinions about the American cause did not seem to matter when it came to their feelings about Washington. In the same 1780 issue in which London’s Critical Review, long a vehement critic of the American rebels, described Bostonians as a wretched people “used to tarring and feathering those who have been so unhappy as to offend them,” it described Washington’s character as “very respectable” and proclaimed, “we have a high opinion of this hero.”
In fact, Washington was so widely regarded that the British general John Burgoyne asked him for a letter of reference after surrendering his army at Saratoga in 1777. Upon returning to Britain on parole the following spring and appearing before the House of Commons, Burgoyne read the letter aloud in defense of his conduct. While Burgoyne was widely condemned in and out of Parliament for his defeat, Washington’s reputation as a magnanimous gentleman soared as newspapers reprinted his letter. “Far from suffering the views of national opposition to be embittered and debased by personal animosity,” Washington’s letter assured, “I am ever ready to do justice to the merit of the gentleman and the soldier; and to esteem, where esteem is due, however the idea of a public enemy may interpose.” Commentators fawned over the American commander, comparing him favorably to Britain’s military and political leaders. As the Westminster Magazine representatively proclaimed after lamenting the conduct of Britain’s leaders, “General Washington will be regarded by mankind as one of the greatest military ornaments of the present age, and that his name will command the veneration of the latest posterity.”
Despite national praise of Washington, the general view of the government he served and America’s future as an independent nation was decidedly pessimistic. As London’s General Evening Post in October 1780 bluntly stated: “the democracy now gaining ground in America, should terminate as democracies always have done, in an oligarchy.” Few had faith in democracy, unchecked by a powerful elite, as a viable government. As the Edinburgh Magazine explained: “The government of the American nations has dissolved into the hands of the people. The people, as in other countries, are narrow minded, short-sighted, revengeful, and cruel.”
Discussion about the American Republic’s Constitution and creation of the presidency was stifled by the French Revolution, which violently erupted in the same year that Washington was inaugurated as president. These events consumed British attention and diminished national interest in the American Republic to a passing gaze, framed largely in terms of fears of a renewed Franco-American alliance. The United States was inconsequential militarily, but it was the Atlantic world’s granary that fed the burgeoning European armies.
Yet once again, Washington proved himself the hero. By checking French ambitions in the Americas, refusing to ally with the French Republic, and fiercely advocating for neutrality in European affairs, Washington won public praise in Britain. As former sympathizers of the American Revolution, such as Edmund Burke, publicly renounced the radicalism of the French Revolution, Washington became an icon of conservative republicanism—a reminder that not all revolutions would result in the bloodbath soaking France and seeping across Europe.
When Thomas Paine, the one-time voice of the American Revolution who subsequently joined the French cause, publicly turned on Washington by publishing a public letter lambasting the President for his betrayal of the revolution, the British public came to his defense. The Westminster Forum, a popular London debating society, deliberated whether the radical Thomas Paine’s printed attack on “the Character of General Washington . . . deserved the reprobation of every Friend of Liberty and Humanity.” Yet despite the Forum’s reputation for radicalism, the motion to side with Washington “carried with universal approbation, by an audience consisting of upwards of five hundred persons.”
Despite wartime alliances and increasingly powerful multimedia machines, none of Washington’s forty-four successors enjoyed the same widespread admiration. Not even Donald J. Trump, who claimed in 2021 that he would have defeated Washington in an election.
This piece is part of a Broadsides series on Britain and the US Presidency, you can read the rest of the series at the links below.
"Britain's Entangled Connections with the US Presidency" by Amanda Perry
"A Fictional Special Relationship" by Michelle Tusan
"London and the Making of Herbert Hoover" by Tammy Proctor
"Public Utterances and Private Thoughts: A Perspective on the Eisenhower and Churchill Relationship" by Justin Olmstead
"In the Graveyard of Empires: The United States, Britain and the Afghan War" by Sarah Burns
Troy Bickham is a professor of history, Susanne M. and Melbern G. Glasscock Director’s Chair, and director of the Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M University.
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