Franklin

by Thomas Fleming

  The next day, the two Franklins went to the offices of the textile merchant Peter Collinson “in Grace Church Street at the Red Lyon.” It was through his Quaker friend, John Bartram, the leading botanist of Philadelphia, that Franklin had been prompted to post to Collinson reports of his celebrated experiments with electricity. Collinson combined his Quaker faith with a keen interest in science, and his many contacts with members of the Royal Society had been instrumental in awakening this elite body to Franklin’s electrical achievements.

  Collinson’s political connections were equally strong. He was a close friend of Lord Bute, the Scottish peer who was tutoring young Prince George, the future King. Another friend was the immensely wealthy Henry Fox, better known as Lord Holland. But for the moment at least, politics were not on Peter Collinson’s mind. His pleasure at meeting Benjamin Franklin in person was immense. He sent messengers scurrying across London to other friends Franklin had made with his busy pen. Soon there was a veritable congregation of Franklinophiles embracing Benjamin and William in Collinson’s offices.

  One of the first to arrive was William Strahan, a fellow printer who published, among others, Dr. Samuel Johnson. For over a decade Strahan had been selling books through Franklin’s Philadelphia shop. The two shared many things besides their trade. They were about the same age, both bulky, hearty types, who loved good jokes, good food, and good wine. They had long been kidding each other about the size of their waistlines. Informing Strahan that he was coming to England, Franklin had written, “If a fat old fellow should come to your printing house and request a little smouting [part-time work], depend upon it, ‘tis your affectionate friend and humble servant.”

  It is a tribute to Franklin’s extraordinary talent for friendship that he could make admirers out of men before they even met him personally. From America his friend John Bartram was writing him another testimonial of this gift. “Pray, my dear friend, bestow a few lines upon thy old friend. . . . They have a magical power of dispelling melancholy fumes and cheating up my spirits, they are so like thy facetious discourse in thy southern chamber when we used to be together.”

  But not everyone in England was in love with Benjamin Franklin. Robert Hunter Morris, ex-governor of Pennsylvania, had sent a letter to Ferdinand John Paris, the Penns’ attorney, shortly after Franklin sailed, in which he called him “a sensible, artful man, very knowing in American affairs, and was his heart as sound as his head, few men would be fitter for publick trust; but that is far from being the case, he has nothing in view but to serve himself, and however he may give another turn to what he says and does; yet you may be assured that is at the bottom and in the end will shew itself.”

  If Franklin had any illusions about solving the problems of Pennsylvania quickly, he soon lost them when he conferred with yet another friend of Peter Collinson, Dr. John Fothergill. One of the most accomplished physicians in England, he was intimately acquainted with the great and near-great, and he made it clear to Franklin that there was no hope of altering the constitution of Pennsylvania at this time. England was fighting for her life, and the men in charge of the government simply had no interest in the relatively minor argument between a single colony and its proprietors. Moreover, Ferdinand John Paris’ long years of experience in dealing with American affairs had given him a network of connections on the various boards and councils that governed the empire. Until Franklin acquired some contacts of his own, it would be madness to fight Paris on ground that favored him so thoroughly. Far better, Fothergill advised Franklin, to approach the Proprietors directly and see if they would agree to negotiate the differences between them and the province on a personal basis.

  Meanwhile, there was the more pressing matter of getting Franklin and his son settled in London. No one stayed permanently at inns like the Bear. His friends found four rooms for him at No. 7 Craven Street, the home of an agreeable, wealthy widow named Mrs. Margaret Stevenson. The house was only a few steps from the Thames, and near the government buildings in Whitehall Palace, and the Houses of Parliament, places the Franklins would be visiting often. Outgoing and cheerful, Mrs. Stevenson hit it off with the Franklins instantly, and so did her pretty teenage daughter, Mary, known as “Polly.” Franklin was soon a contented member of the Stevenson household, a second father to Polly, and almost a husband to Mrs. Stevenson.

  He set up his electrical equipment in one of his rooms, and friends and acquaintances flocked to see his performances. Another Franklin diversion was the musical evening at which he and some chosen friends played (Franklin could play on both the harp and the violin) their favorite songs. The Stevensons quickly got used to running a semipublic house. They also cheerfully adjusted to other Franklin idiosyncrasies, such as swimming in the Thames, and his daily air baths. From his boyhood, Franklin had been an avid swimmer. On his first visit to England, he had (on a bet) jumped into the Thames and swum over three miles. He attracted so much attention that he considered setting up a swimming school and making it his life’s work. His air baths were part of his belief that fresh air was good for the health. Each morning he arose, opened all the windows in his room, and sat around for an hour or so in the altogether. Not even winter weather discouraged him. He often recommended the practice to other people, but almost everyone who tried it received “such a shock to their constitutions,” in the words of one man, that they rarely continued it. Apparently only a man of Franklin’s robust build could tolerate freezing temperatures in the buff.

  One unexpected visitor who showed up on Franklin’s doorstep was James Ralph. The sight of him transported the American philosopher back to his first visit to London, nearly four decades earlier. Ralph had come with him from Pennsylvania, dreaming of finding recognition and perhaps fame as a poet. Alexander Pope had extinguished this ambition by skewering him in the second edition of The Dunciad. Ralph had turned to writing plays and had been successful in a modest way, producing The Fashionable Lady, the first play by a born American to hit the boards in London. Later, he displayed a wicked pen in the political wars of the 1740s and early 1750s, so wicked, in fact, that he was given a pension by the ministers in power at the time on the promise that he would abandon all political writing.11 Eleven years older than Franklin, Ralph had left behind him a wife and daughter in Pennsylvania and had acquired another family in London. He was near the end of a rather feckless life, and he was pathetically swept by nostalgia for America and the family he had abandoned so long ago. Franklin brought him news of them - largely the uncertain consolation that they had gotten on pretty well without him. He also promised that he would say not a word about them to Ralph’s English wife.

  Perhaps it was seeing Ralph that inspired Franklin to go down to the old printing house in Wild Court, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where he had worked as a boy, and lent the penniless poet Ralph unwise amounts of his earnings. There was the same press he had sweated into so long ago. Franklin introduced himself to the two men who were working it, and sent out for a gallon of beer. “Come, my friends,” he said, “we will drink together; it is now forty years since I worked like you at this press as a journeyman printer.” The printers eagerly joined in his toast: “Success to printing.”

  In spite of his friends’ suggestion that he bargain directly with the Penns, Franklin decided it would do no harm to try a little politicking with men of influence. When he heard that John Hanbury - a wealthy Virginia tobacco merchant - was eager to meet him so that he could introduce him to Lord Granville, the president of the Privy Council and one of the most powerful men in England, Franklin arranged to visit the next morning. Naturally he charmed Hanbury, and soon he was riding through London’s odoriferous streets to Lord Granville’s house. If he had stopped to think about Lord Granville, Franklin might not have rushed so eagerly to meet him. He was married to the sister of Lady Juliana, wife of Thomas Penn, and this inclined him to take a decidedly jaundiced view of Franklin’s role in Pennsylvania and the whole argument between the Assembly and the Proprietors.

/>   After a few polite questions concerning politics and the war effort in the colonies, Granville suddenly tore into Franklin with grandiose arrogance. “You Americans have wrong ideas of the nature of your constitution,” he intoned. “You contend that the King’s instructions to his governors are not laws, and think yourselves at liberty to disregard them at your own discretion.” He proceeded to lecture Franklin on how instructions to the governors were drawn up - first by judges and then the Privy Council and eventually signed by the King. “They are then so far as relates to you, the law of the land, for the King is the legislator of the colonies.”

  Franklin saw at once that it would be a waste of time to try to ingratiate himself with Lord Granville. His mind was already made up. So Franklin coolly and politely read him a lecture in return. “This is new doctrine to me,” he said. “I always understood from our charters that our laws were to be made by our assemblies, to be presented indeed to the King for his royal assent. But that being once given, the King could not revoke or modify them. And as the assemblies cannot adopt permanent laws without his assent, so neither can he make a law for them without theirs.”

  Granville told him that he was quite mistaken. With a polite bow, Franklin took the mortified Hanbury by the arm and departed. Although he chatted cheerfully with the Virginia merchant on the way back to Craven Street, and showed not the least evidence that he was ruffled by the encounter, Franklin found it deeply disturbing. If the rest of the English nobility thought this way about the colonies, the future of freedom for Pennsylvanians, or any other Americans, was grim. As soon as he could find a pen and paper in his rooms, Franklin wrote down the conversation so that he could be sure to remember it accurately.

  Not a little chastened, Franklin now made an appointment with Thomas Penn. That acerbic man must have been more than a little annoyed to see the Pennsylvania agent debarking in front of his house at Spring Garden from a carriage that would be the envy of a London nabob. Franklin was spending twelve guineas a month on it, partly for the convenience, but also because he wanted Penn and the rest of London to understand that Americans were not penniless parvenus, crawling to beg favors from their masters.

  Franklin did his best to negotiate amicably with Thomas Penn. “I am ready to do everything in my power to settle the differences between us,” he told him. But Penn declined to discuss anything. His brother John was vacationing in the country, and he stalled until he returned a week later. The Penns then said that they wanted to see something in writing, and Franklin prepared a short memorandum which he entitled “Heads of Complaint.” The Penns turned this over to Ferdinand John Paris, who tried to torpedo Franklin with a hundred legal quibbles and objections. Franklin refused even to talk with him, insisting that face-to-face negotiation with the Penns was necessary. They then went into a near frenzy of pretended anger because he had neglected to address them by their official titles, “True and Absolute Propriethries of the Province of Pennsylvania.”

  Whether it was the Penns or London’s traditionally miserable fall weather that sapped Franklin’s strength, he suddenly came down with one of the most serious illnesses of his life. For almost two months, he was a feverish, coughing, wheezing prisoner of Dr. John Fothergill, who pumped him full of the atrocious remedies of the day. That Franklin survived is one more sign of his physical resilience. While he was suffering, the Penns gave him no rest. They launched a propaganda attack in the newspapers, slandering the Pennsylvania Assembly and the Quakers as the cause of all the colony’s woes. William Franklin replied with a spirited rebuttal that was printed three times in the London papers, as well as in the respected Gentleman’s Magazine, thanks largely to the influence of William Strahan. It was also reprinted in The Pennsylvania Gazette, and William made the mistake of writing to his beloved, Elizabeth Graeme, asking her opinion of it.

  Elizabeth replied that she considered the letter and Benjamin Franklin himself, “a collection of party malice,” and deplored William’s “attachment to a party.” This was the end of the romance. A few months later, William wrote to a mutual friend explaining that he had broken off all contact with Betsy. She had changed, he said. Otherwise, how could she have called the man “whom she knew to be next to her in my heart” such terrible names? William then lashed into the Penns. He had written his public letter to refute their “little dirty aspersions [which] they were continually publishing.” He said he hoped that once the Proprietors were publicly refuted, and they saw they could not win a propaganda war; they might listen to “proposals for a friendly adjustment” of the argument. But for now, his father had laid aside “all thoughts of an amicable accommodation.”

  The reason for this harsh decision was a face-to-face confrontation that Franklin finally had with the Penns early in 1758. He pointed out to Thomas Penn that his father William’s charter expressly guaranteed the Assembly of Pennsylvania all the powers and privileges of freeborn subjects of England.

  “My father granted privileges he was not by royal charter empowered to grant,” Penn coolly replied.

  “Does this mean,” Franklin asked, “that your father was a liar when he published this statement all over England and Europe to attract settlers? Are you saying that those original settlers were deceived and betrayed by William Penn?”

  Penn burst into a shrill, triumphant laugh. The look on his face reminded Franklin of a swindler who had just successfully cheated someone in a horse trade. “If they were deceived it was their own fault,” Penn said. “The royal charter was no secret.”

  Franklin found it hard to believe his ears or to control his temper. This man was willing to sacrifice his father’s reputation for the sake of a few hundred pounds a year from his rents. Remembering the scene later, Franklin said he felt at that moment “a more cordial and thorough contempt” for Thomas Penn than he ever felt for any other living person.

  But, as usual, Franklin controlled his temper. “The poor people who took your father at his word trusted him,” he said. “They didn’t think they had to consult lawyers to deal with William Penn.”

  With a look on his face that made his disdain all too visible, Franklin walked out.

  By this time, William had enrolled as a student at the Middle Temple and was combining the law with his work as his father’s right-hand man. In a letter William Strahan wrote to Deborah Franklin, William was described as his father’s “friend, his brother, his intimate and easy companion.” The letter was part of a strategy that Strahan launched to convince Deborah to come to London. He unleashed all his considerable verbal powers on Mrs. Franklin, pointing out that no one had been lost on a voyage from Philadelphia in recent memory, annotating the pleasures of London and hinting that he would like to meet her daughter Sally and possibly marry her to one of his sons. He also did not hesitate to point out a less obvious reason for her to risk the voyage. The ladies of London liked her “amiable” husband every bit as much as his men friends. Deborah should come over “with all convenient speed” to look after her interests. “Not but that I think him as faithful to his Joan as any man breathing,” Strahan hastily assured her. “But who knows what repeated and strong temptation, may in time, and while he is at so great a distance from you, accomplish.”

  The hearty Scotsman was wasting his time. Deborah’s hatred of long sea voyages remained strong. Franklin tried to bridge the gap between them with presents. Even during his two months of illness, he managed to purchase a “crimson satin cloak” for Deborah. Meanwhile, William sent Sally “a scarlet feather muff and tippet” and a box of fashionable linen to make her a dress. Deborah responded with a blizzard of advice on taking better care of himself. Was he airing his shirts? If he burned wood instead of coal, the air in his house would be cleaner. Did he have warm night clothes? Was Peter, his black slave, misbehaving as usual? Wasn’t he any help in running errands? Why didn’t he get a carriage?

  Franklin did his best to reassure her, and he accidentally gives us some fascinating glimpses of life in London at the
time. Burning wood was a waste of time, unless you could convince everyone in the city to do it. “The whole town is one great smoaky house, and every street a chimney, the air full of floating sea coal soot.” Peter was behaving quite well and now was comfortable enough with London to “go anywhere” on errands. Mrs. Stevenson took good care of his shirts. As for his night clothes, he was sleeping in a “short callico bed gown with close sleeves, and flannel close footed trousers; for without them I get no warmth all night.” Franklin blamed his new susceptibility to cold, not on his illness, but on his growing older.

  Soon Franklin was moving around London once more, acquiring new friends. One of these was Richard Jackson, a lawyer with whom he had corresponded when in America. Something of an amateur scientist, like so many other eighteenth-century intellectuals, Jackson was a hugely successful lawyer, with a keen interest in American affairs. He served as the agent for the colony of Connecticut and knew everyone worth knowing in London, as well as everything in the arcane reaches of the common law. Friends dubbed him “Omniscient Jackson” because of his encyclopedic knowledge of government, science, and literature. Through him, Franklin met a prominent nobleman, Lord Shelburne, not yet at the very pinnacle of power but close enough to it through his blood connection to William Pitt, “the Great Commoner,” and a leading figure in Parliament, who was rapidly emerging as the most influential person in the British government.

  Around the world, the British war effort against France was going badly. Disaster after disaster engulfed British Armies in America and on the continent, largely because the British system was government by clique, and men in power selected generals and admirals on the basis of family relationship and influence rather than skill. Pitt was a fierce opponent of this practice, and more and more Englishmen were beginning to see the wisdom of his denunciations.