Despite the outbreak of hostilities at Lexington and Concord on April 19—and the immediate response of New Hampshire militia joining the Siege of Boston—Royal Governor John Wentworth tried to maintain control. He convened the provincial assembly in late May, but its members, largely aligned with the patriot cause, refused to consider Lord North’s Conciliatory Resolution, intended to ease tensions. Wentworth responded by adjourning the assembly, hoping time would cool revolutionary sentiment. It did not. On May 30, rebel militias began occupying and fortifying Portsmouth, further straining an already volatile situation. Tensions worsened when Captain Andrew Barclay of HMS Scarborough began impressing local fishermen and seizing supplies for British forces in Boston. Wentworth narrowly avoided disaster by persuading Barclay to release the captives.
Just weeks later, on June 13, Wentworth’s personal safety was directly threatened when a mob of armed men surrounded his home, seeking to arrest a Loyalist militia officer. He and his family fled under cover of darkness to Fort William and Mary, which lay under the protection of the Scarborough’s guns. As conditions deteriorated and his authority collapsed entirely, Wentworth boarded the Scarborough and sailed for Boston on August 23, 1775. After sending his family to England, he remained in Boston until the British evacuation to Halifax in March 1776. He then traveled with the fleet until the capture of New York in September, before eventually returning to England in early 1778.
Wentworth’s departure marked the end of royal governance in New Hampshire. In his absence, revolutionary leaders moved quickly to establish independent institutions, culminating in the drafting of the first written state constitution in January 1776. The newly formed government seized most of Wentworth’s property but made a notable exception—allowing his family portraits and personal furniture to be preserved. Though he would later serve the Crown in Nova Scotia, John Wentworth’s flight from New Hampshire remains a symbolic moment of irreversible change—the collapse of colonial rule and the rise of self-governance in the Granite State.
Bibliography
Bouton, Nathaniel, ed. Documents and Records Relating to the State of New Hampshire during the Revolutionary War. Vol. 7. Concord, NH: State of New Hampshire, 1874.
Bunker, Nick. An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014.
Library of Congress. American Memory Collection. Accessed August 2, 2025. https://memory.loc.gov.
Morison, Samuel Eliot. The Founding of Harvard College. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935.
New Hampshire Historical Society. “John Wentworth Collection.” Accessed August 2, 2025. https://www.nhhistory.org.
Leave a Reply