Traitor or hero? Statue of George Washington stirs mixed reaction in London.

LONDON – Even a long-dead American president creates a hubbub when he pops up in the British capital, and so a crowd quickly gathered on a recent June morning to watch the tall, Colonial-clad figure moving across Trafalgar Square.

“Is that … George Washington?” wondered one commuter or tourist after another as the flatbed truck beeped into position.

An even more frequent question was, “What is he doing here?” That’s what London resident and garden writer Emma Townshend asked while workers maneuvered the life-size bronze statue of the first American president to a place of honor amid statues of King George IV, King Charles I and Adm. Horatio Nelson.

Why was a rebel commander and vanquisher of redcoats – the confounding father of a breakaway republic – ascending a pedestal in a plaza devoted to Britain’s own heroes, including the eldest son of the king Washington routed in the Revolution?

To most of those pausing to watch, there were no hard feelings about that 18th-century unpleasantness. But Washington’s arrival was a bit of a head-scratcher to many, given the current transatlantic tumult and the state of the special relationship 46 presidents later.

“At least it’s not Trump,” Townshend concluded with a shrug before going on her way.

“We’re not completely happy with America right now,” said Judith Webster, visiting London from the city of Sheffield in the north of England. “I’m not really sure I want him here.”

In fact, the metal commander in chief was not a newcomer.

The sculpture was sent in 1914 by the commonwealth of Virginia, a gift from former colony to former colonizer to mark the 100-year anniversary of the Treaty of Ghent, which formally ended decades of war between the United States and the United Kingdom. It was a cast copy of a marble statue by French master Jean-Antoine Houdon, sculpted from a plaster mask of Washington’s face. The original statue stands in the Virginia Capitol to this day.

Trafalgar Square, near the Charing Cross rail station in central London, is a bit more exposed to the elements. So after a century of the replica steeping in London pollution, a group of Virginians had it taken away in May for restoration and the construction of a new limestone plinth.

It was rededicated Wednesday in a ceremony featuring Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, the American and British ambassadors, and former prime ministers Theresa May and David Cameron.

But Washington’s spot flanking the entrance of the National Gallery – Britain’s National Gallery – has always been an oddity, showing up on lists of London’s weird wonders and a fun fact for taxi drivers to share with American tourists. Tour guide legend holds that the statute was set on a patch of dirt transported from Virginia to honor Washington’s reputed pledge to never set foot on English soil.

Locals, meanwhile, in online message boards and tour groups, periodically debate the propriety of honoring a British subject who went on to best the British army and slice off a valuable hunk of the empire.

“George Washington was indeed a traitor to the crown,” a poster said last year in a thread on the topic on Quora.

But to most of the visitors and workers surging through Trafalgar every day, he is just one more garden-variety great man in the sculptural clutter of central London.

“Everyone walks past statues all the time without looking at them,” said Alexandra Jackson, a Blue Badge tourist guide. “It was really more noticed when it disappeared. People were wondering if it was taken away because someone might throw something at it.”

The rebooting of Trafalgar’s Washington began when John Gerber, an architect and developer from McLean, Virginia, did a double take when he passed the familiar figure during a visit last year. He was delighted to read the inscription that it was a gift of his home state but distressed to see how worn it was, particularly the pedestal.

Gerber formed a fundraising group, Friends of the Washington Statue, and pitched the idea of a rehab to Youngkin and British architect Norman Foster, who agreed to oversee the work. In May, workers wrangled the figure and the 1.3-ton pedestal to the studio of art conservator Rupert Harris.

“It’s never touched the ground since it’s been here,” Harris said in his east London workshop this month, with the Father of America standing serenely amid the dismembered heads and torsos.

For weeks, Washington stood elevated on a wooden pallet as he was stripped of grime, repaired, and buffed to high gloss with repeated coats of the black wax used on many London sculptures. That just was normal procedure, but Harris was also aware of the whole never-touch-English-soil thing.

Which, as it turns out, is not true. Nothing the researchers could find suggests Washington ever said he was loath to set foot in England, nor that Virginia clay was brought for the statue to stand on.

“It seems to be completely made up,” said Douglas Bradburn, president of Mount Vernon, Washington’s Virginia home, now a museum and popular tourist stop. “It goes completely against the character of George Washington, who made it clear he did not resent the people of England.”

Washington never visited Britain (his only trip abroad was to Barbados), but he considered himself a proud English subject for the first part of his life, Bradburn said. He was popular in Britain even during the American Revolution, known to be magnanimous in victory and respectful to defeated officers.

George III himself, upon hearing that the general who pried America from his royal grasp gave up his command and returned to farming, called Washington “the greatest man of the age,” according to Troy Bickham, a Texas A&M University historian who has written about the post-Revolution relationship between the two countries.

“The English public were frustrated with their own generals, who weren’t able to win,” Bickham said. “And here was this American guy, a gentleman farmer. He wouldn’t even take a salary.”

This reputation made it an easy sell when, 131 years after the Revolutionary War, Virginia offered London a Washington of its own. The statue arrived in 1914, and King George V personally approved Trafalgar for its home.

World War I intervened, and it wasn’t until 1921 that the statue was dedicated. By then the countries had become true allies, this time fighting together in a devastating war. It was the moment some scholars say the special relationship actually began.

“Why do we as Englishmen gladly welcome the statue of Washington?” George Curzon, the foreign secretary at the time, asked at the original unveiling. “It is because he was a great Englishman, one of the greatest Englishmen who ever lived.”

Preservation authorities stopped Harris and his crew from replacing the original plinth, which is a protected object, but they repaired its lead drainage channels and gave it several coats of lime wash.

Carvers chiseled some of Curzon’s words on a new two-step base they had cut from the same Dorset quarry as the plinth. On the surface of one, soon to be hidden from sight, they added 13 six-pointed stars, representing the American colonies, as an Easter egg for the next workers to take everything apart, maybe a century from now.

On the morning Washington was ready, specialist art movers packed him up for the return drive to Trafalgar. The crew had hauled a Queen Victoria, a Prince Albert and a Walter Scott through the streets of London, but never an enemy commander.

“This is my first American hero,” said Tom Ruffla, easing the wrapped and strapped first president onto the bed of his truck with a forklift.

Two hours later, Ruffla was guiding the artwork into place as onlookers shot video. Washington was cleaner than before, and he now stands on a couple of things that weren’t underfoot for his first century in London. One is a time capsule that the organizers buried beneath the base.

The other is a fine scattering of soil that William Rogers, one of the project managers, brought back from his research visit to Mount Vernon, a souvenir he had to explain to security agents at Washington Dulles International Airport.

If the soil legend wasn’t true before, it is now.