For five days between June 2 and June 7, 1780, riotous mobs turned the city of London into chaos, physically intimidating members of Parliament, sacking their houses, and indiscriminately destroying property. The younger son of a Scottish peer, Lord George Gordon, had ignited the anarchy by appealing to popular passions against Roman Catholics. The ostensible provocation was a recent Act of Parliament that removed some of the legal penalties to which Catholics were subject. London’s mob responded with volcanic energy to Lord George’s cry of “No Popery.”

Urban violence was inescapable in a city whose population approached a million and lacked any semblance of a modern police force. The Gordon riots did not end until 15,000 troops were deployed and an unknown number of individuals, certainly hundreds, had perished. But, ironically, the riots confirmed the stability of the British state more than they undermined it: The mob had scrupulously respected the king’s person and property, while the middle and upper orders, deeply divided over the American war, were now prepared to support any government that shielded them from anarchy. Once the rioting subsided, politics continued much as it had before with the exception of the offending act.

London’s populace had other grievances they might have rioted over. The city had opposed the war against the rebellious American colonies (as had most of the rest of the populace).The struggle, begun in 1775, gradually broadened to include France and Spain. Then, at the end of 1780, Britain added Holland to the list of nations it was prepared to fight in her efforts to recover her North American colonies. Britain’s American war would not end until 1783, when a general European peace recognized the independence of the United States as a nation.

Stanley Weintraub’s “Iron Tears” (Free Press, 400 pages, $28) tells the story of how Britain lost her American empire. The other side of that coin, the Americans winning their independence, figures heavily, but less authoritatively. Mr. Weintraub ducks the question of whether a different set of leaders pursuing different policies might have changed the outcome; instead, he concentrates on what it was like to be a Briton as that nation’s first empire unraveled.

He is especially fascinated with the response of the British press to the American war. Though printers were free from prior restraint, the possibility of being prosecuted for seditious libel still existed, forcing those who would criticize the crown and its ministers to resort to allusion, innuendo, and satire. Only members of Parliament were free from these restraints, though they remained subject to the discipline of their peers. Mr. Weintraub is a master at deciphering the allusions peppering the satirical verses that appeared in the newspapers and magazines of the era. Many of these assumed a familiarity with literature or court gossip that limited their intelligibility to the political class.

Mr. Weintraub also devotes attention to a new art form known as the cartoon. Cartoons combined comic images of public figures with words on single broadside page. Reputable artists like Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827) and James Gillray (1756-1815) established artistic reputations with their cartoons. (The New York Public Library is currently exhibiting some of Gillray’s from a slightly later period.) Mr. Weintraub sees the published verses and cartoons as commentary from the British street on the American war. And though British politics was less dependent on public opinion than America’s politics, the Gordon riots demonstrated the government could not entirely ignore it.

Many aspects of Britain’s political landscape will be familiar to today’s reader. Beyond the basic division between hawks and doves were stock figures who have their obvious analogues in our experience. The lead role still belonged to the king, who staked his reign on recovering the colonies and seriously considered abdicating when it became clear the nation would no longer follow him after Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown (1781). Directly beneath the king were three ministers charged with principal responsibility for conducting the war.

As the reluctant leader of the government, Lord North was the best known of the three. But he was not as significant as Lord George Germain, the American secretary, or the Earl of Sandwich, who was in charge of the Navy. When things went wrong, Germain and Sandwich were held most responsible, and during the war all three became the objects of controversy.

None, though, was quite as unpopular as Germain. The youngest son of the first Duke of Dorset, Germain had been forced by primogeniture to make his own way in the army. Though he had risen rapidly to command British forces in Europe during the Seven Years’ War (1756-63), at the battle of Minden in modern Germany he failed to commit his cavalry against the French as ordered by Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, the allied commander-in-chief. For this Germain was court-martialed and dismissed from the service. Nonetheless, he remained unrepentant and eventually became influential after inheriting great wealth from his aunt. In 1775 George III appointed him American minister largely because of his hawkish views.

Germain was held responsible for the loss of America, but Mr. Weintraub’s account demonstrates that two obstacles prevented anyone from meaningfully directing the war from England. One was that it took three months at minimum – and usually considerably longer – to exchange messages across the Atlantic. The other was the aristocratic leadership of the military services. Germain’s deputies in America were able to do pretty much what they wanted with impunity after 1776 because the government supplied them with the alibi that they lacked the necessary forces. High-ranking military officers who did not have seats in Parliament possessed connections who did. One way or the other, they experienced little trouble in placing responsibility for defeats on one over whom the shadow of Minden still lingered.

Reading Mr. Weintraub’s text often resembles listening to the evening news where events are presented discontinuously; viewers are left to decide for themselves the import of what they have seen. Yet as a poignant evocation of Britain experiencing humiliating defeat, I know of no better account.

Mr. Weintraub’s story is not just an unrelenting tragedy. British opponents of the war saw a silver lining in the peace and the independence of the American Republic, which even George III eventually came grudgingly to accept. Despite the enormous cost entailed in losing her American colonies, Britain went on to prosper and to triumph over France in a prolonged struggle of 25 years that commenced with the French Revolution and ended with the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815.

Mr. Buel is the author of “America on the Brink: How the Political Struggle over the War of 1812 Almost Destroyed the Young Republic” (Palgrave MacMillan).