“Who is this? And what is here?

And [then] died the sound of royal cheer; 

And they cross’d themselves for fear.”

~adapted from The Lady of Shalott, by Alfred Lord Tennyson

Centuries had passed since legendary King Arthur pulled a sword from a stone claiming his right to the throne of England, but, once more, swords were being pulled in King Arthur’s land as guards tried to repel a crowd surging forward to get a glimpse of captive Patriot Ethan Allen and some of his Green Mountain Boys as they were dragged towards Pendennis Castle in Cornwall, England. 

Barely having his land-legs under him after disembarking the ship that had brought them from Canada, as Allen later wrote, he saw “multitudes of citizens…excited by curiosity, crowded together to see us…. The throng was so great, that the King’s officers were obliged to draw their swords, and force a passage to Pendennis castle, which was near a mile from the town, where we were closely confined, in consequence of orders from General Carlton, who then commanded in Canada.”

General Carlton was not pleased when Ethan Allen and his small army of Green Mountain Boys showed up on September 25, 1775, and attacked Montreal. The Green Mountain Boys had already captured Fort Ticonderoga on May 10, 1775, and Fort Crown Point on May 12. When Allen and his (as King George III called them) “rebellious children” attacked Montreal, General Carlton decided that was enough and it was their turn to be captured.  

Too valuable to keep near the colonies, Allen was shipped to Cornwall, England, the legendary land of King Arthur and his knights of the round table. Like Arthur and his loyal knights, Allen was accompanied by a number of his men who had voluntarily given themselves into captivity rather than leave their commander alone to his fate. Their fame preceded them, and as the crowds of men and women strained to see them, Allen and his men found their attention “equally gratifying to us.” 

That gratification may not have lasted long as Allen’s confinement in the stone castle in the far southwest corner of England turned into years, and Allen may have contemplated the day that led to this, April 19, 1775.

It was on that morning in Concord, Massachusetts, that the now famed “shot heard round the world” was fired at the North Bridge. To quote Thomas Malory’s King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table, “Then stood the realm in great jeopardy.” As British commander Lt. Col. Francis Smith reassembled his ~700 troops in Concord center, all around them, alerted by midnight riders to the search of Concord and the deaths of fellow Patriots on Lexington Green, hundreds of minutemen and militia were closing in.

Among them, leading his minuteman company roughly eighteen miles from Reading, MA, was twenty-two-year-old Captain John Brooks. As described by William Sumner, a friend of Brooks who later wrote Brooks’ account of events, when Brooks “came near the main road from Concord to Lexington, he saw the flank guard of the British army on this side of a hill which intervened and kept the main body from his sight…. Finding that his position could not be outflanked, he ordered his men to advance.” At Meriam’s corner (today at the intersection of Lexington Road and Old Bedford Road), taking cover behind stone walls, the Reading minutemen fired upon the Regulars. Within moments, as the rest of the British column approached, nearly one thousand militia arrived and the day-long fierce fighting along the battle road began, driving to the hilt a cracking of once-unified Englishmen into opposing sides of Loyalist or Patriot. 

A month later, as Ethan Allen was busy capturing forts in New York, the Second Continental Congress met in Philadelphia with John Hancock presiding as president. Members of the Congress did not want a war with Great Britain, and while their resolutions included creating the basis for the Continental Army, delegates called for “a day of fasting and prayer… by the inhabitants of all the English colonies on this continent… and to bless our rightful sovereign King George the third, and [to] inspire him with wisdom to discern and pursue the true interest of all his subjects, that a speedy end may be put to the civil discord between Great Britain and the American colonies, without further effusion of blood.”

In a speech to Parliament on October 26, 1775, King George III said, “I have acted with the same Temper, anxious to prevent, if it had been possible, the effusion of the blood of My Subjects, and the calamities which are inseparable from a State of War; still hoping that My People in America would have discerned the traitorous views of their Leaders, and have been convinced, that to be a Subject of Great Britain, with all its Consequences, is to be the freest Member of any Civil Society in the known World. The rebellious War now levied…is manifestly carried on for the Purposes of establishing an independent Empire. The Spirit of the British Nation [is] too high…to give up so many Colonies.”

The war continued. 

Reading minuteman Captain John Brooks became a lieutenant colonel in the Continental Army, serving throughout the war including in the Battle of Saratoga. 

Bringing reinforcement troops from Britain, Sir Archibald Campbell, lieutenant colonel of the 71st Regiment of Highlanders, arrived in Boston on June 16, 1776, and was not kindly welcomed. He was captured before he could get off the boat and ended up imprisoned in the jail in Concord. Unlike Ethan Allen who wrote about the good food and company he was given in Pendennis Castle, Sir Campbell’s personal narrative revealed he initially hated the food, most of the people, and the jail in Concord and would likely have given his whole experience one star.

On the 6th of May 1778, in a grand prisoner exchange, Ethan Allen was traded for Sir Archibald Campbell, and the men returned to their respective countries. 

The American Revolutionary War ended with the signing of the Treaty of Paris on September 3, 1783. Written around that time, an undated paper in King George III’s hand read, “America is lost!” 

The American government took root. John Hancock was Massachusetts’ first elected governor, followed, in time, by Lt. Col. John Brooks (11th governor), who had once fought at Meriam’s Corner with the Reading minutemen. 

In 1860, crowds pressed into the streets of Boston to view King George III’s great-grandson Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, who was making the first royal visit to America after the American Revolution. The Prince of Wales was greeted in Boston by Massachusetts’ own literary version of King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table, “the fireside poets,” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, all of whom were grandsons of American Revolutionary War soldiers. 

The Prince of Wales did not visit Concord.

For a list of sources, email BarrowBookstore@gmail.com.