America turns 250 this July 4th. And most of what you’ll read this summer will be about the winners.

The Founding Fathers. The ideals of the Declaration of Independence. The extraordinary story of a colonial people who decided they had the right to govern themselves and fought, at enormous cost, to make it happen.

All of that is worth celebrating. The ideals at the heart of the founding — liberty, equality, government by consent of the governed — are not small things. They changed the world. They are still changing it.

But I find myself thinking about the other Americans.

These were the Loyalists: Americans who had opposed the war. They lost their homes, their land, their businesses, and their communities. Many were driven out by their own neighbours, sometimes violently. They had no legal recourse, no right of appeal. They were simply gone.

Most ended up in Britain or Canada, where the government had promised to compensate them for their losses. The Loyalist Claims Commission sat for years, processing the claims of tens of thousands of displaced people. Most received little or nothing. The commission required written proof of property ownership — proof that was often impossible to produce when you’d been driven from your home with nothing but the clothes on your back.

These were not, for the most part, villains or traitors in any meaningful sense. They were ordinary people — farmers, lawyers, merchants, tradespeople — who looked at the same world as their neighbours and reached a different conclusion. Some had deep ties to Britain. Some believed that reform was possible without revolution. Some opposed the war on moral grounds. Some were simply afraid.

They paid an enormous price for that difference of opinion. And history largely wrote them out.

I spent a year researching the Loyalist experience for my MA dissertation, and there is one thing I found that I have never quite been able to put down.

The American Revolution was justified, intellectually, by social contract theory. In the tradition of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, this holds that legitimate government rests on the consent of the governed. If a government violates the natural rights of its citizens, those citizens have the right — some would say the duty — to withdraw their consent and dissolve it. This is the argument of the Declaration of Independence. It is the founding logic of America.

It is also, in a deeply uncomfortable way, the argument that was used to destroy the Loyalists.

Here is how the logic ran: if you refused to support the Revolution, you were withholding your consent from the new social order. And if you placed yourself outside the social contract, you forfeited the protections it afforded. Your property could be seized. You could be imprisoned or exiled. The rights the contract was supposed to guarantee — to liberty, to property, to civic status — no longer applied to you, because you had chosen not to participate.

This is not a fringe interpretation. It was articulated openly, by serious thinkers, during the Revolution itself. The Committees of Safety that drove Loyalists from their homes were not simply acting on rage or greed — although both were present. They were acting on a coherent philosophical framework that said: you have forfeited your place in this society. We owe you nothing.

The ideals that the Revolution proclaimed are tested most truly not by how we treat our heroes, but by how we treat those who disagree with us. And by that measure, the story of the Loyalists sits very uncomfortably alongside the founding ideals of America.

I don’t think this diminishes the Revolution. I think it complicates it. And I think that complication is worth sitting with — especially in an anniversary year.

The philosophical argument had physical consequences. Nowhere is that clearer than Simsbury Mine.

In 1773, an exhausted copper mine in Connecticut was converted into a prison. Prisoners were lowered underground by rope into tunnels with no natural light and very little air. Disease was rampant. Conditions were deliberately brutal. The men sent there were not always tried or convicted of anything beyond political opposition to the war.

The mine operated throughout the Revolution. Men died there. Those who survived rarely spoke about it.

Simsbury Mine sits uncomfortably alongside the founding ideals of the Revolution because it was, in a grim way, entirely logical. Those who refused to support the new order had placed themselves outside the social contract. Outside the contract, the law no longer owed them its protection. Simsbury Mine was the physical expression of a philosophical argument.

This is the history that doesn’t make it onto the commemorative mugs this summer. But it is real, and it matters, and I think the 250th anniversary is exactly the right moment to remember it.

I’ve been living with the Loyalists for several years now. Not as abstractions or historical footnotes, but as specific people with specific losses — and one of them in particular.

Samuel Hutchinson of Rosemont, Rhode Island is fictional. But he is made of real history.

He is a lawyer who loves his country and believes the Revolution is a catastrophic mistake. He says so, loudly and clearly and at some cost to his social relationships, because he believes a man has the right to his own opinion and should not have to lie about it to stay safe.

He is wrong about the Revolution, in most of the ways that matter. The novel doesn’t pretend otherwise.

But he is not wrong about the principle. And when Amos Holden’s Committee of Safety arrives at his door with tar and torches, Sam Hutchinson becomes something more than a man who lost an argument. He becomes a test of the very ideals the Revolution claimed to be fighting for.

The man Sam loves — Nathaniel Tanner, a Patriot and an agent of the Continental Congress — believes in everything Sam opposes. He has staked everything on the cause. He has no clean answer to Sam’s argument. And when the mob comes for Sam, Nate stands silent in the crowd.That silence is the wound at the heart of King’s Man. Five years later, when fate drops them back into the same room in London, they have to decide whether love is enough to survive what history did to them.

I did not write King’s Man to argue that the Loyalists were right. The novel is too honest for that — both Sam and Nate are right about some things and wrong about others, as people generally are.

I wrote it because I wanted to insist that their story is part of America’s story. That the people a nation casts out in the name of its great causes are worth remembering. That the question of what we owe those who disagree with us — even when we’re right and they’re wrong — is a question that has never been fully answered.

Before the Revolution broke Sam and Nate apart, there was a summer in Rosemont, Rhode Island.

There were long evenings by the fire, reading Rousseau aloud in translation. There were arguments about political philosophy that ran so long the candle burned to a stub. There was a Latin inscription in the front of a borrowed book: amicus est tamquam alter idem. A true friend is a second self.

And there was a summer evening on the banks of the Pawtuxet River, when Nate read Sam a poem by the Elizabethan poet Richard Barnfield, published in 1594 and understood by those who needed to understand it.

Sam went completely still. The fishing pole went slack in his hands.

That is where Rebel begins — the short prequel to King’s Man, about an hour’s reading, set in the golden days before history intervened. It ends happily. I recommend reading it first.

The Outlawed series is queer historical romance set against the American Revolution. Slow burn. Second chance. The other side of history.

Rebel — Start Here

Rhode Island, 1774. Two young law clerks. A friendship that becomes something neither of them quite has a word for. The falling-in-love story, before everything went wrong. About an hour’s reading. Available on Kindle now.

King’s Man — Outlawed Book 1

London, 1783. Five years after the war. Sam is penniless and bitter, picking locks for a living in the city’s criminal underworld. Nate is an agent of the Continental Congress, in London on a dangerous mission — and carrying Sam’s ring on a cord around his neck. He never took it off.

When fate drops them back into the same room, they have two weeks, one dangerous mission, and everything left unsaid between them.

Thief Taker — Outlawed Book 2 — Coming 2026

Elias Cole is a thief taker. He catches criminals for a living. He told Sam that love was too dangerous for men like them.

He was wrong.

The highwayman known only as Wessex has been robbing coaches on Hampstead Heath for two years. Cole has been hunting him for almost as long. When he finally gets his man, neither of them is prepared for what comes next.

Enemies to lovers. Coming later this year. Sign up to the newsletter to be the first to know.

Everything in this piece about the Loyalist experience is grounded in real history. The Loyalist Claims Commission, Simsbury Mine, and the use of social contract theory to justify the treatment of political dissenters are all documented historical facts, not fictional inventions.

The history of the Loyalists is not well known outside academic circles, which is partly why I wanted to write about it — and partly why this anniversary seems like exactly the right moment to share it more widely.

If you’d like to know more, I’ve been sharing research and history across my social channels throughout the summer. Come and find me there.