by Nick Bunker
At the heart of Whiggery there lay a simple notion: that freedom was in danger from an evil coterie of autocrats and fellow travelers of Rome. And so in 1677, Uncle Benjamin wrote another poem inspired by the Old Testament to which he gave the title “Israel’s Oppression and Deliverance.” Immensely long, and very obscure—he felt he had to wrap his meaning in a veil of allegory—the poem likens the Protestant dissenters to the Hebrew slaves in Egypt. They lie at the mercy of Pharaoh, the tyrant: by whom the author means King Charles. Hard reading though it is, the poem gives us the authentic voice of a Franklin, anxious that his faith and the kingdom are in peril. The following year, a story broke that seemed to prove that Benjamin Senior was correct.
In the summer of 1678, while walking in the park Charles II was accosted by an informant, bearing news of a conspiracy against the realm. Led by the French and the Jesuits, the conspirators intended to murder the king, and after that, they would place his Catholic brother on the throne: or so it was alleged. At that moment, there began one of the most shameful episodes of English history, the saga of the Popish Plot: a witch hunt of a kind, with many more victims than those who died at Salem.
The affair will be linked forever to the name of the chief informer, Titus Oates, a turncoat and a pedophile, whose evidence sent scores of martyrs to the gallows. But in the eyes of the Whigs, it seemed that the moment had come to assert themselves. If Oates was telling the truth, and the Jesuits, the French, and their Catholic friends in England were planning a rebellion, then the firmest of countermeasures were required.13
Taking the Popish Plot as their opportunity, in Parliament the Whigs began a campaign against James, Duke of York, with the aim of excluding him or his heirs from the throne. The consequence was this: the Exclusion Crisis, a long and complicated business, dragged out over three acrimonious years. At last in 1681 it came to an end, with a victory for Charles II and his brother, so that James the Catholic was assured of his succession to the crown.
During the Exclusion Crisis, the Whigs brought their political ideas to a new height of sophistication. Even so they were defeated, many of them went into exile, and this was how Josiah Franklin came to be in Boston as a refugee. It was something the young man could never have predicted when he completed his training as a dyer of silk.
THE BANBURY CONNECTION
Two weeks after the revelation of the Popish Plot, with the streets of London filled with talk of wicked Catholics and a French invasion, Josiah returned to Dyers’ Hall to sign the register of freemen. It was August 27, 1678. Although he was still four months short of twenty-one, he already had a wife and a baby daughter. The previous year, Josiah had married an Ecton girl, Anne Child, from another farming family, known to the Franklins for half a century. Free from his indentures he could go where he wished, and he chose the Oxfordshire town of Banbury, a day on horseback to the west of Ecton.14
Like a miniature version of the City of London, the borough of Banbury ruled itself, with a charter, a mayor, and a platoon of aldermen who steered their own course in matters of religion. With a tradition of Puritan sympathies, it was a borough where, protected by the aldermen, you could go to the official, Anglican church on Sunday morning and pray at the dissenting chapel in the afternoon. It made an ideal home for Josiah, where he and his brothers could perhaps aspire to join a local elite whose Whig opinions they shared.
The Franklins had known the town for many years. Josiah’s mother, Jane, had come from Banbury, and in about 1667, when Thomas Franklin was nearly seventy, too old to work his forge, he had retired there to live. The old man had fallen out with his eldest son, leaving Thomas Junior with the smithy at Ecton. Later John Franklin had followed his father to Banbury, setting up in business as a dyer.
The town had a small textile trade, weaving cloth for lining suits and making colorful uniforms and stockings. There John began to prosper. A gentle spirit, kind and fraternal, he was a man “of very pleasant conversation,” said Benjamin Senior, “and did, when he pleased, insinuate himself into the good opinion of persons of all qualities.” Successful and popular, sought after by young women, he shared his good fortune with his siblings.15
John Franklin brought his sister Hannah over from Ecton to keep house; he invited Josiah up to Banbury to join him in the dye works; and then he stepped in once again to save their brother from a catastrophe. Working in London in wretched conditions, Benjamin Senior suffered one ailment after another: dropsy, scurvy, and some strange industrial complaint that left his arm half paralyzed. His emotional life was turbulent as well, as he sinned, repented, and sinned yet again.
Often he felt at the mercy of Satan; and in 1679, when the young man fell ill with a fever, he took it to be a punishment from God. As the fever reached its climax a spiritual doctor appeared, in the shape of a preaching friend of Nathaniel Vincent who joined in tearful prayers above the sickbed. At last the fever broke, and Benjamin felt his terror of damnation ebb away. Soon afterward John arrived from Banbury, and took him home to the town for ten months of convalescence. It was a typical Franklin thing to do—the brothers were very close—and in Banbury they grew still closer. John had found a wife, another Anne, who brought with her some money, and he and Josiah began to raise large families. In the years that followed, John and Josiah and their two Anne Franklins took eight children between them to be baptized at Banbury Church.16
A page from the Freedom Book of the Dyers’ Company of London. The signature of Josiah Franklin, Benjamin Franklin’s father, can be seen three quarters of the way down, recording his completion in the summer of 1678 of a seven-year apprenticeship as a silk dyer and his admission as a freeman of the company.
In his autobiography, Franklin said that he had been born and bred “in poverty and obscurity.” In writing that, America’s favorite son was telling the truth—yes, he grew up in a crowded tenement in Boston, the son of a workman—but behind his simple words there lies a story with far more nuance. The fact of the matter was this: in the England of the 1680s and 1690s the Franklins did extremely well, they were far from poor, and they found new friends among people who could never be described as obscure.
At some unknown date, but no later than 1682, John Franklin became a trusted ally of Banbury’s leading Presbyterians. Merely by making their acquaintance, the Franklins climbed another rung of the social scale. Better still, they found a well-born partner for Benjamin Senior. The woman he married, Hannah Welles, took the Franklins into an alliance with an extended family of gentlefolk: an alliance that would help to lift the Franklins into the town’s inner circle of godly politicians.17
At Banbury the dissenters found their spiritual leader in a clergyman, Samuel Welles, Hannah’s father, whose connections were exceptionally good. A moderate Puritan of Palmer’s kind, Welles had married into the landed gentry, taking as his wife one Dorothy Doyley. Her brother Edward Doyley, a colonel in Cromwell’s army, had taken part in the conquest of Jamaica in 1654, fighting the Spanish so bravely that he became the island’s first English governor. Eight years later, Samuel Welles lost his post as vicar of Banbury on Black Bartholomew’s Day, but when the Franklins settled in the town he was still preaching in private under the patronage of the aldermen.18
Mr. Welles was, said Benjamin Senior, a man “of cheerful disposition, and of a large and liberal heart.” He and Dorothy produced ten children, Hannah being the youngest, and when the old man died she was still single. As the niece of a colonial governor, she would make a splendid catch for a tradesman with ambition. So John Franklin became a marriage broker, in the hope of easing his brother’s emotional turmoil. In 1682, the widowed Mrs. Welles and her daughter moved to London, where Benjamin Senior had found a job in one of the largest dye works in the capital. The following year he married Hannah Welles.
It was a love match but also a coup for the Franklins. By marrying so well, Benjamin Senior entered the upper echel
on of London’s dissenting community. Dorothy Welles lived with the young couple in the city, where her Doyley cousins counted among their friends the foremost preachers of the period. Benjamin and Hannah did not have much money, and his career had many ups and downs. But the milieu they inhabited—dissenting and Whig, but also commercial—was the kind of environment in which the Franklins would always feel most comfortable, on both sides of the Atlantic. In Banbury meanwhile, John Franklin continued to prosper, with the prospect of rising to become a member of the borough’s ruling class: but only if the Whigs were not destroyed.19
* Nathaniel Vincent exerted a deep and lasting influence on the Franklin family. In Boston in 1722, when Benjamin Franklin was apprenticed to his brother John’s printing firm, they reprinted three of Vincent’s sermons from Benjamin Senior’s notes, with a preface describing his character and his preaching style.
Chapter Three
COMING TO AMERICA
In the spring of 1682, at last old Thomas Franklin passed away, surviving his friend John Palmer by three years. Born late in the reign of Elizabeth, in a decade of plague and hardship, Thomas had lived to be eighty-three and to see an age in which his children were thriving. And yet, at the hour of the old man’s death, the Protestant cause in which he believed seemed to lie in danger of obliteration.
The previous year, the Dyers’ Company of London had chosen as their leader a linen draper called Samuel Shute, a dissenter and a rampant Whig. In the summer of 1681, Shute and a fellow Whig won election as the sheriffs of London and Middlesex. In doing so, they provoked Charles II to mount a direct attack on the city, its preachers, and its guilds, including the dyers, that formed so hard a nucleus of Whiggery.1
The king’s officials had arrested Lord Shaftesbury for treason. In November, a grand jury chosen by Shute and his fellow sheriff slung out the charge and the earl walked free; but this gesture of Whig defiance served only to antagonize the king. His Privy Council told the magistrates to enforce the law against conventicles. On the waterfront they raided the meeting house where Benjamin Senior sat at the feet of his favorite preacher, Nathaniel Vincent. As Mr. Vincent went to prison, the king’s attorneys began a legal assault on the metropolis. Just before Christmas, the lord mayor and the sheriffs were served with a writ of quo warranto. In plain English, this meant that Charles II intended to revoke the city charter, and to end the independence of London from the Crown.
While Vincent survived to fight another day—he too was rescued by a friendly grand jury—the Whigs as a party were driven into abject retreat. Not only in London but up and down the country, including the counties of Oxford and Northampton, in 1682 the authorities struck at the roots of Whiggery, seeking to penalize men and women who were seen as agents of sedition, with among them the squire of Ecton, Thomas Catesby. North of the border the authorities created an army, the Highland Host, with firing squads to shoot those Scottish Presbyterians who would not come to heel.
In the middle England of the Franklins, the bishops drew up new lists of dissenters, with the aim of making the following Easter another Black Bartholomew’s Day, this time with laypeople as the target. Meanwhile in London the writ of quo warranto proceeded through the courts, bringing ever nearer the subjection of the city to the king. Again Nathaniel Vincent was thrown into jail.2
It was during this dangerous period that Josiah Franklin made his plans to leave for America. Ninety years later, when his famous son described Josiah’s departure, he did so in a passage in his autobiography so brief and so laconic that it has rarely been awarded the attention it merits. What Franklin wrote was this: “Josiah, my father, married young, and carried his wife with three children unto New England…The conventicles having been forbidden by law, and frequently disturbed, induced some considerable men of his acquaintance to remove to that country, and he was prevailed with to accompany them thither, where they expected to enjoy their mode of religion with freedom.”
Since the 1930s, biographers of Franklin have tended to ignore this plain statement of the case. Instead they have mostly preferred another narrative, portraying Josiah as an economic migrant, driven out of England merely by a lack of business opportunity. This version of the story has only one item of evidence to support it: a cursory remark by Benjamin Senior, to the effect that Josiah left Banbury “things not succeeding there according to his mind.” This might be taken to mean that Josiah Franklin left the town for one reason only: because in Oxfordshire he could not make a career on his own as a dyer of silk. However, the language is simply too vague and ambiguous—“things not succeeding there”—to carry so heavy a weight of interpretation. It need not be construed as a reference to problems in Josiah’s business life.*
The bulk of the evidence points very clearly in another direction. It falls squarely into line with Franklin’s account of his father: an exile for the sake of faith and politics, not a poor man in search of better pay and prospects. The conventicles had been “forbidden and disturbed,” no question: that is a matter of historical fact. And by the end of 1682, it was indeed the case that “considerable men” were looking for places of safety in America. Among them was Lord Shaftesbury. In 1669, when the settlers of Barbados wished to create an outpost on the mainland, the Whig earl had helped them finance their new colony in South Carolina. Together with his friend the philosopher John Locke, he drafted the colony’s first constitution. Thirteen years later, while temporarily locked up in the Tower, Shaftesbury briefly thought of going into exile in Charleston, only to opt for the Netherlands instead.
As a dyer in Banbury, of course Josiah Franklin had no direct connection with a Whig as exalted as the earl, but the Franklins knew a local family that did: a family that shared the earl’s belief that America might offer a political safe haven. Banbury had recently chosen as its mayor a merchant in textiles, an old Puritan alderman named James West, whose son was as close as could be to Lord Shaftesbury. The young Robert West was a lawyer and a Whig, deeply engaged in London’s underground.
In the summer of 1682, Shaftesbury had hired Robert West to defend a fellow Whig accused of treason; and the earl’s confidant, John Locke, gave West a room in his house in Oxford. Meanwhile Robert had his own designs upon America, where an opportunity arose to create a refuge for rebellious Whigs. That same year, the colony of eastern New Jersey came up for sale, and it was bought by a consortium of twelve investors who hoped to build a town on the Raritan River. While eleven of the purchasers were Quakers, the twelfth was Robert West, the Banbury Whig.3
Since Josiah did not write a memoir, we may never know precisely how he decided to leave England. However, the Franklins certainly knew the West family—they too were Presbyterians, close friends of Mr. Welles the preacher—and so the Wests must have been the “considerable men” who encouraged Josiah to sail to the colonies. Nobody else at Banbury is known to have taken an interest in America. Josiah’s motivation is equally plain. As 1682 drew to a close, many Whigs and dissenters felt driven to desperate measures. For some, it seemed that they were left with little choice but armed insurrection; or failing that the path of exodus.
UP OUT OF EGYPT
For Josiah, the point of no return arrived in the middle of 1683. Step by step, the king and his ministers had carried through a purge of their opponents. In London, there were more arrests, of booksellers, preachers, and members of Parliament. Nathaniel Vincent was jailed for three months and told that next time, he would be hanged or expelled from the kingdom. And then, in the summer, Charles II seized his chance to destroy the topmost tier of the Whig opposition.4
Shaftesbury had fled to Holland, where he died; but before he passed away, the earl had left behind a plot for a coup d’état. An audacious plan, it called for the assassination of the king and his brother at Rye House in Hertfordshire, as they returned from the races at Newmarket. The plot never came to fruition, but it was treason nonetheless, and it gave the king his moment of opp
ortunity.
Addicted to meeting in taverns, where wine was the fuel of sedition, the Whigs could never keep a secret. One of the plotters, a Baptist, suffered a fit of conscience or of terror and went to the Privy Council with the story. This was in the middle of June. His evidence led straight to Robert West of Banbury. Clapped in irons and threatened with torture, Mr. West began a hunger strike. For three days, he stuck it out; and then, to save his neck from the gallows, he revealed the names of the Rye House conspirators.
There followed the usual orgy of violence by the state. The men who led the Rye House Plot went to an appalling death. The first to go was the Earl of Essex, who slit his throat in the Tower; though some said it was murder, committed by the warders. Next it was the turn of Lord William Russell, beheaded by a clumsy fellow who required three blows of the axe. After that, the authorities executed Russell’s comrade, Algernon Sidney. In the century that followed, Americans would come to regard Mr. Sidney as a prophet of liberty, revered by Thomas Jefferson as one of his forerunners.5
It was a brutal time, when it seemed that dissenters and Whigs were to be stamped out forever. And at just this moment, so full of disaster, Josiah Franklin and his family traveled down to London from their home in Oxfordshire. This was something his brother, Benjamin Senior, would never forget: that Josiah had passed through the city “at the time when the noble Lord Russell was murdered.”
This Tory broadsheet from 1683 tells the story of the Rye House Plot against King Charles II, with the Whig Lord Shaftesbury conferring with his accomplices. The images show the fate of the conspirators, including the beheading of the Whig martyr Lord William Russell.
