BOOK REVIEW / NONFICTION : Now, Their Version of the Revolution : THE LONG FUSE: How England Lost the American Colonies, 1760-1785 by Don Cook; Atlantic Monthly Press $24, 387 pages

By CHRIS GOODRICH

Jan. 10, 1996 12 AM PT

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

The line between myth and history can be extremely fine. Five members of an angry, jeering mob shot dead by a handful of frightened soldiers in 1770--subsequent events transformed what could have been an unfortunate, soon-forgotten clash into the Boston Massacre. Who now cares that the soldiers’ first shots were very likely accidental, that the mob threw chunks of ice? The “massacre” rendering of the event, in this country at least, is more politically pleasing than the equivocal historical facts, so it’s the massacre version that survives.

You might think that Don Cook, in telling the story of the American Revolution from the English side, hopes to produce in “The Long Fuse” a “balanced,” even culturally “sensitive” account of the War for Independence. But Cook, a former European correspondent for The Times who died last year, is more thoughtful than fashionable; he knows that good historical analysis usually shadows and deepens, rather than repudiates, standard historical interpretations.

The American Revolution, ripe with nationalistic myth, practically begs for ill-judged historical revisionism. Cook avoids that trap. King George III remains the great adversary of the nascent U.S., but in this book he’s neither mad nor bloody-minded nor even particularly autocratic; he’s a sovereign prey to bad advice, one who believes his distant subjects require correction, not independence.

Benjamin Franklin likewise remains a canny back-room negotiator, but even more brilliant and flexible than the textbooks suggest; in 1775 he proposed to pay the English out of his own pocket for the cargo destroyed during the Boston Tea Party, hoping the offer would jump-start serious peace talks.

The most absorbing parts of “The Long Fuse,” though, highlight the profound differences in English opinion with regard to the rebellious colonies. We expect to hear Paymaster General Charles Townshend (whose subsequent lobbying for an American tea duty can be called a proximate cause of the Revolution) refer to the colonists, during a 1765 speech in the House of Commons supporting the Stamp Act, as “children planted by our care, nourished by our indulgence.”

But even then the Americans had principled defenders. Col. Isaac Barre answered Townshend, “They, planted with your care? No! Your oppression planted ‘em in America. . . . They, nourished by your indulgence? They grew up by your neglect of ‘em; as soon as you began to care about ‘em, that care was exercised in sending persons to . . . spy out their Liberty, to misrepresent their actions, to prey on ‘em.”

Barre wasn’t alone. Horace Walpole, son of England’s first prime minister, recognized that England’s treatment of the Colonies could be best described as “salutary neglect”; Gen. William Howe, later commander in -chief of the British army in America, believed the Colonists were being treated unfairly and proclaimed, at one point, he wouldn’t fight them; once-and-future minister William Pitt the Elder declared the Stamp Act “a crying injustice,” saying “I rejoice that America has resisted. Three millions of people, so dead to all feelings of liberty as voluntarily to submit to be slaves, would have been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest.”

“The Long Fuse” is not a book of original research, although Cook--also author of a well-received biography of Charles de Gaulle--has obviously combed many long-neglected historical records. Its originality lies elsewhere--in Cook’s shedding a different and fascinating light on the (all too) familiar, his demonstrating that the same set of stars can make up a very different constellation. One final example: the anecdote with which Cook closes this book, John Adams’ account of being received by King George upon being appointed the first U.S. minister to England.

The king, to Adams’ surprise, said he understood the new minister wasn’t particularly fond of France, to which Adams diplomatically responded, “I have no attachment but to my own country.” “The King replied as quick as lightning,” Adams wrote John Jay, “An honest man will never have any other.”

Cook understands--as did Adams, as did the king--that George was acknowledging and admonishing Adams at the same time, pointing out that if the new minister believed he was right to support the American Revolution, the King believed he was equally right to oppose it. In choosing this moment with which to close the book Cook shows once again the fine judgment that makes “The Long Fuse” a model of popular history.