The Full History of “Rebellion to Tyrants Is Obedience to God”

The epitaph for John Bradshaw that Bryan Edwards sent to another gentleman in January 1775, quoted yesterday, varies slightly but significantly from every other surviving example of “Bradshaw’s Epitaph.”

All the others have the same wording, though they differ in line breaks, punctuation, and capitalization, as was common at the time. Here are the differences between that set and the version Edwards supplied (on the right):

• Ere thou pass, contemplate this (CANNON / marble):
• despising alike (the pagentry of courtly splendor / what the world calls greatness),
• who (fairly and openly / openly, and fairly), adjudged
• Charles Stuart, (Tyrant / King) of England,
• thereby presenting to the (amazed / astonished) world,
• and (never, never / never) forget

The weightiest difference is the first. Most versions describe the epitaph as already carved on the cannon that marked Bradshaw’s grave. Edwards’s January 1775 letter instead describes a cannon planted near the grave over a century before and proposed a “cenotaph” of “marble”—which hadn’t actually been created.

I suspect, therefore, that the epitaph never was engraved on metal or stone, and that all the reports that it actually had been carved were too wishful. The monument never got past the planning stage. “Bradshaw’s Epitaph” always and only existed on paper.

Edwards’s letter doesn’t give a date for when the epitaph was composed, but it seems to have been a few years before 1775. The letter refers to a moment when Edwards “repeated” those lines to his correspondent, showing that he was spreading them around. He may also have revised the lines since first distributing them, which would account for the difference between this version and the one that circulated before appearing in print in Philadelphia, months after the letter.

Samuel Johnson defined the word “cenotaph” to mean “A monument for one buried elsewhere.” In using that word in his letter, Edwards accepted that Bradshaw’s remains hadn’t actually been buried on Martha Brae in Jamaica.

It’s interesting to put the 1775 letter alongside Edwards’s remarks about the Bradshaw story in his 1793 History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies. Together they suggest that he had become even more dubious that Bradshaw’s “dust” was ever brought to Jamaica. Edwards also appears to have grown less excited, after the American War and the early French Revolution, about the whole notion of “Rebellion to tyrants…”

This, then, is my hypothesis of the origin story for the line “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God”:

• The sentence was coined by Bryan Edwards and perhaps some friends on Jamaica in the early 1770s as part of a tribute to the English republican John Bradshaw.
• Edwards and possibly his friends shared the epitaph in letters to other parts of the British Empire, including Annapolis and London by 1773.
• Thomas Hollis copied the epitaph into his historical collection by 1774, believing that it had already been engraved on a cannon in Jamaica and posted in houses in many other American colonies.
• Benjamin Franklin copied the epitaph and brought it to the Second Continental Congress in 1775, showing it to Thomas Jefferson and others. Those men believed that the epitaph was a relic of seventeenth-century English republicanism.
• Franklin or a colleague supplied the epitaph to the printers of the Pennsylvania Evening Post in December 1775, and it was finally put into print.
• Jefferson entertained doubts about the epitaph’s authenticity in the mid-1770s but eventually accepted it and used its final line as a motto.
• Meanwhile, Edwards had come to doubt the lore of Bradshaw’s body, and in 1793 tried to downplay the whole story in his history of the Caribbean.

Under this theory, “Bradshaw’s Epitaph” was at no point a deliberate hoax, knowingly passed on with false information. But people who liked the lines were too quick to assume that they had already been engraved at Martha Brae, then that they had been composed back in the seventeenth century. The man who knew the most about the real story, Bryan Edwards, cast doubt on it in print without ever coming out and admitting his own role in launching the tale.

The line “Rebellion to tyrants is resistance to God” is thus not a creation of Thomas Jefferson, nor a hoax by Benjamin Franklin. It’s most likely a sincere product of the political movement in Britain’s North American colonies resisting new Crown measures in the 1760s and 1770s—but not on the mainland.

(Shown above: A medal minted by Virginia in 1780 to give to Native allies displaying the motto “Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God.”)

“It was proposed to erect a cenotaph to the President’s memory”

The quotable line “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God” comes from a tribute to John Bradshaw, the Member of Parliament who presided over the trial and death sentence of Charles I.

And the search for the origin of that epitaph has led to a statement by Jamaican planter, politician, and historian Bryan Edwards in 1793 that it was, “to my own knowledge, a modern composition.” What knowledge was Edwards referring to?

We find the answer in George Wilson Bridges’s Annals of Jamaica, published in 1828. That book quoted a letter from Edwards then “in the possession of a branch of the ancient and respectable family of the Bradshaws, who possess property at Chipping Sodbury in Gloucestershire.” (And what source is more dependable than the landed gentry of Chipping Sodbury?)

January 13th, 1775.

My dear Sir,

I have great pleasure in obeying your commands in regard to the epitaph I told you of on John Bradshaw.

The circumstances of his burial in Jamaica are said to be these. The President died in England a year before Cromwell. His son, James Bradshaw, seeing from the general spirit which began to prevail, that the restoration of the royal line would probably take place on the Protector’s death, and being well assured on that event that such of the late king’s judges as should be then living could have little hopes of safety, was apprehensive that even the grave would not protect his father’s ashes from insult; and having many friends and relatives among Cromwell’s soldiers who had lately settled in Jamaica, on the conquest of that island from the Spaniards, he embarked thither with his father’s corpse, which the soldiery on his arrival interred with great honour, on a very high hill, near a harbour now called Martha Brae, and placed a cannon on the grave by way of memorial.

James’s apprehensions were well grounded, for the parliament, on the restoration, ordered the bodies of Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw to be dug up, and hung up at Tyburn,—a foolish and impotent mark of vengeance which, however, the remains of Bradshaw, through the pious care of his son, fortunately escaped. Certain it is that the body of Bradshaw could not be found in Westminster Abbey where it was supposed to be buried.

Such is the tradition which prevails in Jamaica: but though I always entertained a great respect for the memory of this distinguished person, as well as from the firmness and ability which he displayed on the king’s trial, as from his uniform conduct and steady virtue in his opposition afterwards to the tyranny of Cromwell, yet I should have treated the tradition as wholly fabulous, had not a gentleman of strict honour and veracity, now living in Jamaica, assured me, that in consequence of it he had caused a search to be made for the cannon said to be placed on the grave, which he actually found on the reputed spot.

The place is now so entirely covered with wood, that he believes no human footstep has trod there for a century past, and it is clear that a great exertion of human strength, which is seldom bestowed (voluntarily at least) in such a climate, on trivial occasions, must necessarily have been employed in placing the cannon where it lies. This gentleman found also, by searching the public records, that the land was afterwards patented in the name of James Bradshaw.

On this concurrent testimony it was proposed to erect a cenotaph to the President’s memory; and the lines which I repeated to you were intended by way of inscription, a copy of which you have herewith. I wish this account may give you satisfaction, being, with great regard, &c. &c.

Bryan Edwards.

That story shows why Edwards was confident in calling the epitaph “a modern composition,” not one from the late seventeenth century when Bradshaw was reportedly reburied on Jamaica. He had been witness to its creation.

Edwards used the passive voice to disguise who actually came up with the idea of a cenotaph and the lines to be put on it (“was proposed,” “were intended”). I suspect he was following eighteenth-century genteel etiquette and not taking credit for himself—while at the same time placing himself so close to the action that anyone could guess he was deeply involved.

I’m not the first to reach that conclusion. In Monumental Inscriptions of the British West Indies from the Earliest Date (1875), J. H. Lawrence-Archer called the lines a “spurious epitaph, written by the historian, Edwards.” But American historians have credited the epitaph to Benjamin Franklin.

TOMORROW: Going deeper into Edwards’s 1775 letter.

“It is, to my own knowledge, a modern composition”

Bryan Edwards (1743-1800) inherited several slave-labor plantations in Jamaica in 1769. He became a leading legislator there, then returned to Britain to run for Parliament. It took a while, but he finally secured a corrupt seat in 1796.

In the House of Commons Edwards was a voice for the interest of Caribbean planters, meaning he supported freer trade with the new U.S. of A. and opposed any move that limited slavery.

Edwards also wrote histories, essays, and poems about the Caribbean. In 1793 he published The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies, which took note of “Bradshaw’s Epitaph,” as published in London thirteen years earlier:

It is reported also that the remains of President [John] Bradshaw were interred in Jamaica; and I observe in a splendid book, entitled Memoirs of Thomas Hollis, an epitaph which is said to have been inscribed on a cannon that was placed on the President’s grave; but it is, to my own knowledge, a modern composition. President Bradshaw died in London, in November 1659, and had a magnificent funeral in Westminster abbey.

Several later historians have cited that passage as showing that Bryan dismissed the whole story of “Bradshaw’s Epitaph”—that the regicide’s remains were ever brought to Jamaica, that there was a cannon placed as a monument to him, that the lines were genuine.

I think that interpretation missed a crucial detail. Edwards didn’t cast doubt on the epitaph by, for example, saying he had walked all over the Martha Brae hill where that cannon supposedly stood and saw no such thing.

Instead, Edwards wrote that the epitaph was “to my own knowledge, a modern composition.” The only way he could have had first-hand knowledge that the epitaph had been written recently was if he was somehow involved in the writing.

TOMORROW: The smoking cannon.