“The United States of America have appointed me their minister plenipotentiary to Your Majesty,” Adams began, nearly overcome by emotion. “I felt more than I did or could express,” he later wrote. Before him, in the flesh, was the “tyrant” who, in the language of the Declaration of Independence, had plundered American seas and burned American towns, the monarch “unfit to be the ruler of a free people,” while to the King, he himself, Adams knew, could only be a despised traitor fit for the hangman’s noose.
