On a warm August evening in 1765, Thomas Hutchinson, lieutenant governor of the British colony of Massachusetts, sat down to supper in his mansion, one of the finest homes in the colonial city of Boston.
As he prepared to eat, word reached Hutchinson that an angry mob was advancing. He swiftly “directed my children to fly to a secure place” and withdrew to a nearby house, “where I had been but a few minutes before the hellish crew fell upon my house with the rage of devils and in a moment with axes split down the door and entered”.
The horde tore apart Hutchinson’s mansion, from room panelling to roof tiles, drinking his wine and stealing silverware and money. By the following day, he wrote, “nothing remained but bare walls and floor”.
The rampage that wrecked Hutchinson’s home on 26 August 1765 was the culmination of months of unrest among colonists protesting the wildly unpopular Stamp Act, passed by the British parliament in March 1765. This act, which would take effect the following November, imposed a tax on legal and official papers and publications circulating in Britain’s 13 North American colonies. Heated opposition had flared in cities including New York, Boston and Newport, Rhode Island, with strident objections published in pamphlets and newspapers. And just 12 days before the attack on Hutchinson’s mansion, an effigy of Boston’s stamp tax agent had been hanged, stamped on, decapitated and burned.
この記事は BBC History UK の Christmas 2023 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、8,500 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です ? サインイン
この記事は BBC History UK の Christmas 2023 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、8,500 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です? サインイン
The Aztecs at war
RHIANNON DAVIES discovers why war was so important to the Mesoamerican people - and why they believed a badly cooked meal could prevent a soldier from shooting straight
Towering achievement
NATHEN AMIN explores a 13th-century stronghold that was built to subdue independent-minded Welsh people, yet has since become a symbol of courage in the face of overwhelming odds
Eighteenth-century mushroom ketchup
ELEANOR BARNETT shares her instructions for making a flavourful sauce with roots in south-east Asia
Goodbye to the gilded age
JOHN JACOB WOOLF is won over by an exploration of the Edwardian era, which looks beyond the golden-era cliché to find a nation beset by a sense of unease
The power of the few
Subhadra Das's first book catches two particular waves in current publishing.
The 'badass' icon
One of the problems with biography, if an author is not careful, is that it can quickly become hagiography.
Ghosts of Germany's past
KATJA HOYER is impressed by a study of a nation's attempts to grapple with the crimes it perpetrated during the Second World War
A window onto England's soul
SARAH FOOT has high praise for a book that traces the evolution of English Christianity over the course of 1400 years, through the lives of its greatest thinkers
"There was a general perception that Queen Victoria's mourning was neither normal nor acceptable”
JUDITH FLANDERS talks to Rebecca Franks about her new book, which delves into the customs surrounding dying, death and mourning in Victorian Britain
"Indigenous children were forcibly separated from their families"
HIDDEN HISTORIES... KAVITA PURI on the legacy of Canada's residential schools