Hunting down the King

So I decided to write the first chapter- a small, focused one on the Assassination of King George III and William Pitt in New York City in 1776.

George, of course, was axed, dragged, beheaded and made into bullets by the Continental army the day the Declaration of Independence was first read to them. The fascination of the story for me was more in what happened after the actual felling of the king that in the event itself. He was, in fact, melted into bullets as a cottage industry in CT (so that, as a pundit said, British troops could have "melted majesty" shot at them). Slices of him were found in a CT swamp where they were dumped or buried. One rescuer who found the first pieces had a nervous breakdown, dropped out of Yale, and was murdered by some of the students he tutored. Others have been infighting ever since.

Though our own fearless George, Washington by name, disapproved of the shenanigans, he was pilloried by the Loyalist playwrights who dragged him through the mud for that and a bunch of other scurrilous gossip. (There's nothing- NOTHING- like reading centuries old slander!)

The Pitt, which was mutilated in retaliation, was dumped in a city storage yard where the lamp oil was kept, rescued by a curio museum hotel owner, and finally ended up at the Museum of the City of New York where no one seems to know where he is these days. It took me a whole afternoon to find him, and that was only because a guard vaguely remembered someone answering his description hanging around outside the snack bar.

The fascinating thing was doing the research. So many of the facts (dates, mostly) were wrong. Especially in articles written around the turn of the 20th century. Even the most famous picture of the assassination was wrong because there were no women, children, blacks or Native Americans with blanket and feathers in the lynch mob. And the statue wasn't clothed in royal robes- it was pretty much an exact replica of Rome's Marcus Aurelius with toga and all and a Hanover head... (see above picture)

I got chills down my back when I actually saw Gov. Hutchinson's diary entry from 1777 when he recorded what was to be the last documented sighting of George III's head, which had been shipped to the Townshend's house in London. And when I ran across a broadside that was making the rounds in New York when Pitt arrived, I nearly had an attack of the vapors... Called The Speech of the Statue it was supposedly what the marble mouth itself would have said on dedication day.

Unexpectedly, I found a lot of side discoveries, like what a tragic figure Hutchinson was, he who had been a Tory and left MA to move to England, then realized how wrong he had been. I found a treasure trove of primary sources in the American Newspaper Collection that spans back to the late 17th century. Digitized full text retrieval. Find it at a University near you!!!