In his biography of Edmund Burke, John Morely notes that the war of [American] Independence was virtually a second English civil war:
The ruin of the American cause would have been also the ruin of the constitutional cause in England; and a patriotic Englishman may revere the memory of Patrick Henry and George Washington not less justly than the patriotic American. Burke’s attitude in this great contest is that part of his history about the majestic and noble wisdom of which there can be least dispute.
This reminds me of The True History of the American Revolution. Modern Americans see the Revolution as a war of Americans versus Brits, when it was really a war of Whigs against Tories — and many of the British generals were Whigs.