THE rebellious schooldays of one of America's founding fathers has been brought to life in a piece of graffiti discovered at an East Lancashire college.

The link between Charles Carroll, one of the signatories of the American Declaration of Independence, and Stonyhurst College was discovered in one of the college's collections.

Carroll, who became one of America's most famous elder statesmen, defaced an ancient book of Latin poetry when he was a pupil at the Jesuit English College of St Omers, near Calais, France, the fore-runner to Stonyhurst College. When Jesuits were driven from France after hostilities, the college re-formed in Bruge and Liege before settling in Stonyhurst Hall.

Charles displayed some of the rebellious qualities that earned him his place in history, when he risked the wrath of his Jesuit schoolmasters by defacing the poetry book, which even then was 100 years old.

He defaced the baroque style engraving, giving two Greek goddesses pipes to smoke and adding fancy shoes. He also scrawled his signature and the date of 1751 on the first page.

Stonyhurst archivist, David Knight, said: "It is wonderful to find a tangible link to one of our more illustrious former pupils. It shows he had a rebellious trait from early on. It will be of considerable interest to people in America and to former Stonyhurst pupils living there."

The graffiti was discovered when Professor Morris Whitehead from Swansea University was researching the college collections for a thesis on the early history of Stonyhurst. Professor Whitehead couldn't believe his eyes when he turned the pages of the book Casamir, published in Antwerp in 1632, and discovered the young Carroll had drawn on the engraving on the the first internal page.

CHARLES CARROLL: HIS PLACE IN HISTORY

n Charles Carroll was born in 1737 into a staunchly Catholic family in Maryland, Baltimore, during a time when Catholics were still being persecuted by The Crown and deprived of equal political rights.

n At the age of 11, he was sent to St Omers to be given a sound Jesuit education. Charles was sent to school abroad because, in Maryland, it was illegal to educate children in Catholic schools.

n Incensed by a double land tax imposed on Catholics in Maryland, Charles joined the revolutionary Patriot Committee, and in 1776 accompanied Benjamin Franklin to Canada in the hope of persuading the Canadians to join them in their bid for independence.

n On August 2nd, 1776, he became one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence, and was elected to Congress on the same day.

n He died in 1832, aged 95, and his death was greeted in Baltimore with the headlines "The last of the Sacred Band is dead".