As Copley grew increasingly homesick for Boston, the unending denunciations he heard of the American rebels drove him so far from his non-partisanship in politics that he began to believe the revolution he had once opposed a glorious thing; the former peace­maker became a rabid patriot. When in 1782 he painted the Ameri­can merchant Elkanah Watson, he resolved to place in the back­ground "a ship bearing to America the acknowledgments of our independence." Such a ship should fly the stars and stripes, but the cautious painter was afraid to depict that revolutionary flag lest he offend his other sitters. For a long time the picture stood against the wall unfinished. On December 5, however, he accom­panied Watson to the House of Lords to hear the King acknowl­edge American independence. Sitting there with as non-committal an expression as he could muster, he saw West also in the audience, also holding a vacant look. But when the meeting was over and the King.had pronounced, though hesitantly, the fatal words, Copley in great excitement invited Watson to return to his studio. "There," his sitter wrote in his diary, "with a bold hand, a master's touch, and I believe an American heart, he attached to the ship the stars and stripes. This, I imagine, was the first American flag hoisted in England."

Copley's historical paintings continued to bring him money and renown. When the Corporation of London commissioned him to paint The Repulse of the Floating Batteries^ at Gibraltar, he laid out a vast canvas, twenty-five feet by twenty, on which he worked laboriously for six years. A visitor to his studio reported that he was literally fighting the battle in his studio, for he had models of the rock, the fortifications, the attacking ships, the guns, and even of the men. These he soberly grouped into the composition he de­sired. He stood on a platform, and fixed his canvas to rollers so that he could manipulate any part of it within reach of his brush. During 1787, the Corporation of London sent him to Germany, where he painted the portraits of four Hanoverians who had taken part in the defence.

When the picture was finally completed in 1791, he could find no gallery large enough to contain it; he set up a tent in the Green Park. But the crowds who flocked to see the structure angered the fashionable residents of Arlington Street, particularly the Duke of Bolton, and Copley was forced to move to another site. Here, how­ever, his huge pavilion obstructed the view of some householders. Copley was forced to move again. He was in despair, until the King came to his rescue, inviting him to put the tent near Buckingham Palace. "My wife," he is reported to have said, "won't complain." The royal family attended the opening, and some sixty thousand people followed their example. Again Copley offered competition with a Royal Academy show, and took away so much business that it was a failure.

Fame and prosperity did not keep the artist from becoming in­creasingly homesick, and when his two youngest children, who had been born in England, died within twoweeks of each other during an epidemic of "putrid sore throat," probably diphtheria, his wife received a shock from which she never recovered. From that time on she, like her husband, walked about their elegant house with a perpetually melancholy face.. Wild and meaningless apprehensions scudded through the minds of the nervous pair.. Although money was rolling in, the spectre of poverty haunted them continually;

Copley felt so alien to his English environment that he was sure it would rise up and overwhelm him in the end. Eager to capitalize on the American savings he had invested in his eleven acres of Beacon Hill, he placed them on the market and in 1795 was delighted to receive an offer of three thousand guineas, about five times what he had paid. Only after he had accepted the offer and a thousand-dollar deposit did he learn that the new State House was to be built on Beacon Hill, and that what he had regarded as farm land would soon become a flourishing part of the city.

Indignantly insisting that he had been defrauded, he sent his young barrister son, John Singleton, Jr., to America to see if he could break the contract. Now that his last tie to America seemed about to be taken from him, Copley felt a wild urge to return to his homeland, to the land where he would again be the most famous of painters, to the land whose social liberty he had grown so pas­sionately to desire. Although his wife dreaded leaving the mild British climate and the greater comfort of their London home, Copley instructed his son to look into the possibility of their re­turning to America. He gave the boy a letter Of introduction to his old opponent, Samuel Adams. The then governor of Massachusetts, whose radicalism made him anathema to the moneyed classes of Bos­ton, must have read with amazement the sentiments of the man who had tried to stop the revolution, for the painter complimented him on having "borne so distinguished a part in promoting the happi­ness and the true dignity of his country."

After the younger Copley had arrived in Boston, he wrote to his sisters: "Shall I whisper a word in your ear? The better people are all aristocrats. My father is too rank a Jacobin to live among them." And twenty years before Copley had been regarded by many as a Tory!