Kathleen Wilson has argued that if the loss of Minorca in 1756 constituted ‘the symbolic emasculation of the British nation’, then later military successes across the globe were widely regarded as manifesting a true Britishness that was independent, incorruptible, and able to impose itself on the world wherever and whenever it chose. As others have emphasized, however, the scale of British territorial acquisition additionally raised new problems of authority and governance, in relation to India as well as to North America, and colonial conquest was attended by anxiety that the growth of empire might trouble the integrity of the state and the meaning of home and belonging. From the Treaty of Paris to the American Revolution, Britons were, in Linda Colley’s words, ‘captivated by, but also adrift and at odds in a vast empire abroad and a new political world at home which few … properly understood’. The enthusiastic popular response to events such as the taking of Quebec in 1759, the ‘year of victories’, may therefore be interpreted as evidence of an ‘imperialist sensibility’, but for many it was impossible to dissociate such rejoicing from consideration of the longer-term implications of Britain’s new status as a global superpower. Thomas Gray wrote in August 1759 that ‘[t]he season for triumph is at last come,’ but in October of the same year he queried as to whether the nation ‘will … know how to behave itself, being just in the circumstances of a Chambermaid, that has got the 20,000£ Prize in the Lottery’.