The riddle of the British liberal attitude towards America in the years following 1775 is its unwillingness to come to terms with independence, but this is a conundrum for historians to unravel, not one which liberal thinkers at the time recognized, far less tried to explain. The key puzzle of American independence for conservative thinkers and writers in Britain was one which they themselves were perfectly ready to acknowledge: they simply failed to understand why on earth the colonists in America might have wanted to sever their connection with the mother country. It was ‘madness’, ‘an instance of infatuation unparalleled in the history of mankind’. While radical writers admired and envied American revolutionaries, and liberal thinkers sympathized with and defended the colonists' position, conservative politicians and polemicists between 1774 and 1791 refuted the arguments of the Americans and the ‘Friends of America’ in Britain, and they explained why they did not believe that the American republican experiment would work. Their certainty regarding the impracticality of an independent republican America, and their opposition to it, allowed them to discuss their expectations of it at far greater length than the liberals did.

Once again it will be seen that the writers examined here did not offer uniform views on the American question. While Peter Stanlis is accurate in stating that there was ‘no monolithic conviction’ regarding the American crisis among any British political group between 1766 and 1783, however, Paul Langford is also correct to maintain that ‘only very occasionally were there serious differences in the anti-American camp’ in Britain. The major variance was less one of political principle than one of practical policy. Josiah Tucker (1713–99), Dean of Gloucester Cathedral and a prolific pamphleteer on the subject of the American crisis, has sometimes been counted a ‘friend of America’ because he argued for acquiescing with rather than resisting the colonists' demand for independence. Yet his political principles were conservative, and his attitudes towards the Americans were far closer to those of conservatives who supported resisting American independence by force than they were to those of liberals who defended the colonists' right to secede.