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 obedience 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 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.

“Often seen pasted up in the houses in North America”

I’ve seen two signs that “Bradshaw’s Epitaph,” with its final line “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God,” was circulating before the Pennsylvania Evening Post printed it on 14 Dec 1775.

Those hints appear in books published after that date, so they’re not as probative as an actual earlier publication would be. If anyone does find the epitaph quoted in British or Caribbean publications, or a dated manuscript, by all means tell me!

The first of those publications is the Memoirs of Thomas Hollis, published in 1780 by Francis Blackburne. Hollis (1720-1774, shown here) was a British scholar and political activist with a great interest in America. He corresponded with several colonial gentlemen and published American political writings in London. Hollis died in 1774.

Appendix II of Blackburne’s book is titled “Respecting Virtù, and a general Idea of Mr. Hollis’s Collection.” It printed transcripts of a great many manuscripts that Hollis had accumulated. Number 98, on page 789, was “Bradshaw’s Epitaph,” introduced this way:

THE following Epitaph is often seen pasted up in the houses in North America. It throws some light upon the principles of the people, and may in some measure account for the asperity of the war carrying on against them. The original is engraved upon a cannon at the summit of a steep hill near Martha Bray in Jamaica.

That’s the same source for the epitaph that the Pennsylvania newspaper cited in late 1775. The newspaper treated that item as news while Hollis (wishfully?) believed it was already popular in America.

The crucial point is that if Hollis added that epitaph to his collection before he died in 1774, then it couldn’t have been composed by Benjamin Franklin in late 1775. Now it’s possible this manuscript had been added to the collection after Hollis’s death by his dear friend and heir, Thomas Brand (who also took the Hollis name). But the book presents it as Hollis’s own.

The other indication of the epitaph predating the Philadelphia publication appears in Charles Symmons’s Life of John Milton, published in 1810. That book says of John Bradshaw:

Enough has been said of Bradshaw to satisfy the demand of my subject: but for the amusement of my readers I am inclined to insert in this place an inscription on this resolute but mistaken republican, written by an American pen and deeply blotted with the intemperance of party. It is transcribed from a copy, dated, Annapolis, June 21, 1773, and is here given merely as a curiosity, and as a symptom of that fiery spirit which was working in the bosom of our colonies before it acquired its full strength, and, in consequence of the injudicious measures of our government, burst into pernicious action. The inscription is stated to have been engraven on a cannon; whence copies were taken and hung up in almost every house throughout the continent of America.

Symmons then quoted the epitaph, even though he disagreed with regicide, calling it “an act in atrocious opposition to the law and the constitution of England” and “a MURDER.”

Symmons reported that he was looking at “a copy, dated, Annapolis, June 21, 1773.” That could have been Annapolis, Maryland, or Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia. That date was a Sunday, so Symmons was looking at a letter or manuscript, not a newspaper. The 1773 date fits with the Pennsylvania Evening Post’s late 1775 statement that the epitaph was “made out three years ago.”

Whatever his source was, if we accept that Symmons stated the right date, “Bradshaw’s Epitaph” was circulating on both sides of the Atlantic two years before it saw print in Philadelphia.

TOMORROW: Off to Jamaica.