In the summer of 2016, my family flew ahead of me to England for a vacation. Their taxi driver from the airport to London was chatty, and somehow the conversation drifted to the fact that he was from Lewes, in Sussex. This led to a bit of trivia about his hometown that the driver thought would be of interest to visitors from America: Thomas Paine, the Englishman turned American whose Common Sense would become the best-selling political pamphlet of the 18th century—and tilt America toward independence—had lived in Lewes for six years, working as a tax collector. When my husband relayed this to me by phone that evening, I sat up. I hadn’t known that detail of Paine’s biography but immediately saw its possible relevance to a historical puzzle I was trying to solve.

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The research team I directed at Harvard had just made a startling discovery. As part of a project to find all copies of the Declaration of Independence produced between 1776 and 1826, we had stumbled on something special the previous year in the small West Sussex Record Office, in Chichester. Among its holdings was a large-scale ceremonial parchment of the Declaration of Independence. Prior to this find, it had been thought that a single large-scale parchment existed: the one tourists can see protectively encased at the National Archives, in Washington, D.C. Although the Sussex Declaration, as it is now called, has the names of the signatories written out in a single clerk’s hand, rather than with actual signatures, and is engrossed on sheepskin rather than the more expensive calfskin, it is otherwise as grand and impressive as the parchment in Washington. The unanswered question was how it had found its way to West Sussex.

We hypothesized that it had originally belonged to Charles Lennox, the third Duke of Richmond, a man of deeply radical views who was politically active in Britain before, during, and after the American Revolution. Goodwood, the Duke’s family seat, is in Sussex. At some point prior to the 1950s, when it was deposited in the record office, the Sussex Declaration had come into the possession of the law firm that worked for the Duke of Richmond. It was unclear when or how the document might have found its way into the hands of the Duke himself. But that tip from the taxi driver suggested a possible answer: Had Charles Lennox and Thomas Paine known each other?

The Sussex Declaration, discovered in the West Sussex Record Office in Chichester in 2015—the only known large-scale parchment of the Declaration of Independence other than the one on display at the National Archives (West Sussex Record Office, Add Mss 8981)

Unexpectedly for a person of his class—a senior peer of the realm, coming immediately after the Royal Family—Lennox was committed to the political empowerment of British citizens. His commitment was unmatched by any other member of the aristocracy during the Age of Revolution.

Tall, rich, and beautiful, Richmond was hard to ignore. His eyes in particular were “superb,” as one contemporary remembered; Joshua Reynolds, who painted the Duke in his youth, remarked on their “fine and uncommon” dark-blue color.

As lord lieutenant of Sussex, Richmond was the first politician to take up the work of prison reformers and build a new prison within his jurisdiction on principles of rehabilitation. For him, economic and penal reform were necessary to improve the lives of the working poor and people in debt. In the House of Lords, the Duke castigated the ministry for allowing contractors and sinecurists to enrich themselves at public expense. In 1780, he became the first person to introduce a bill in Parliament to extend the right to vote to all adult men in Britain 21 and over. At the time, the franchise was limited to men owning a certain amount of land; some cities had no voice at all, and tiny “rotten boroughs” in the countryside with only a few voters returned members under aristocratic patronage.