Franklin

by Thomas Fleming

  Eight days later, Franklin followed up this interview with a masterful letter, which made it clear that he thoroughly understood the game Vergennes was playing. Franklin began by asking for what he knew he could not get, eight ships of the line, completely maimed, which the Americans wanted to hire in the same way that George III was hiring Hessians and other German soldiers. This, of course, might lead France into war with England. But Franklin was sure that by “the united force of France, Spain [allied to France by the so-called Bourbon family compact], and America, she [England] will lose all her possessions in the West Indies, much the greatest part of that commerce which has rendered her so opulent, and be reduced to that state of weakness and humiliation which she has, by her perfidy, her insolence, and her cruelty, both in the East and the West, so justly merited.” This was not a bad summation of Vergennes’ war aims. It could only have stirred the veteran diplomat to fresh admiration of Franklin’s diplomacy. He also undoubtedly appreciated the way Franklin referred to “the private purchase made by Mr. Deane,” and then squirmed as Franklin pointed out that since the exportation of Deane’s “articles” was forbidden, he wished to buy in the name of the American Congress “twenty or thirty thousand muskets and bayonets and a large quantity of ammunition and brass field pieces, to be sent under convoy.”

  Then, with the same suave serenity, Franklin laid a warning card on the table. “While the English are masters of the American seas, and can, without fear of interruption, transport with such ease their army from one part of our extensive coast to another, and we can only meet them by land marches, we may possibly, unless some powerful aid is given us or some strong diversion be made in our favor, be so harassed and be put to such immense distress, as that finally our people will find themselves reduced to the necessity of ending the war by an accommodation.” Finally Franklin dangled even more boldly the bait of America’s commerce, “which in time will be immense.” The opportunity, if neglected, “may never return again; and we cannot help suggesting that a considerable delay may be attended with fatal consequences.” Vergennes was much too shrewd to answer this letter in any formal way. Instead, he sent his undersecretary, Conrad Alexandre Gerard, to reply verbally. The eight ships were out of the question. The French Navy could not spare them. Even with the addition of the Spanish fleet, the Bourbon allies were not yet equal to Great Britain on the ocean. By the end of the year, they hoped to achieve naval parity, and perhaps supremacy. Then, if all went well, France might speak boldly on behalf of America. For the time being, aid must continue to be secret. But in a few days, the commissioners would see “proofs” of France’s sincerity.

  Within a week, King Louis XVI approved an additional loan of 2,000,000 livres to the Americans, and the French Farmers General, the government trading company which handled the imports of staples such as tobacco and wheat, advanced another million. The absolute necessity to keep the aid secret was so strictly enjoined that Franklin did not even tell the truth in a dispatch he wrote a few days later to the secret committee of Congress. He explained the loan as the result of “the inclination of the wealthy here to assist us,” and added, to make sure the committee got the message, “We have accepted this generous and noble benefaction.”

  Unfortunately, the British ambassador in Paris, Lord Stormont, knew about the loan, and in fact about every detail of France’s secret aid long before Congress heard about it. George III spent 80,000 pounds a year on the British Secret Service. The French ports swarmed with British agents checking on the cargoes and destinations of French ships. But the best return the King (he read the reports of most of the agents personally) got on his money was the 500 pounds a year he paid Edward Bancroft. The man whom Franklin trusted so implicitly, whose name he had given Silas Deane in the original instructions for the American mission in Paris, and who was working as Deane’s personal secretary, had been on the British payroll for over a year. By the time Franklin arrived in Paris, Bancroft had probably corrupted Silas Deane as well. But the nature of this corruption was as peculiar as the kind of war the Americans were fighting.

  During the summer of 1776, Deane had collaborated with an English fanatic, known as John the Painter, to burn the naval dockyards at Portsmouth. The fugitive fled to Bancroft’s house in London for refuge, with the British secret police in angry pursuit. The terrified Bancroft got rid of the Painter only hours before he was seized and duly hanged. This and other evidence suggests that Deane’s corruption, at least, was more motivated by the opportunity Bancroft dangled before him to speculate on the British stock market, using their insider’s knowledge. By slipping the British a little “harmless” information now and then, Bancroft would have the right to move freely between England and France. Bancroft himself may have thought he could play this murky game in the beginning. During 1775 and 1776, when the quarrel remained inside the family of the British Empire, it was easy to see right and wrong on both sides. Morally, a kind of twilight quality prevailed. But as the conflict escalated into all-out war, and independence became America’s aim, it was impossible to straddle the political fence, and Bancroft, already compromised, became a full-time spy. Whether Deane knew everything or, compromised himself, only half-dreaded, half-feared, and tried to ignore the worst possibilities, is a mystery which will remain unsolved forever. Many of Deane’s papers were destroyed and Bancroft’s grandson, on the discovery of his treason, burned his papers. But we now know, thanks to our access to the British Secret Service files, that Bancroft was feeding the enemy comprehensive reports on everything about the Americans in Paris, from their weapons shipments, to William Carmichael’s taste for expensive tarts.

  Enmeshed in such a web of moral and political duplicity Franklin’s mission would seem to have been doomed from the day he landed. But Franklin had a priceless asset on his side; he had no illusions about his friends and he knew his enemy. His years in England had enabled him to acquire a unique insight into the way the British government operated and the British mind worked. When a Philadelphia woman, living in France as a chaperone to five English girls, wrote Franklin a note warning him that the British Secret Service had eyes and ears everywhere, he replied that he had no doubt her information was “well-founded.” Then he coolly revealed the tactics that were to frustrate George III and his 80,000 pound-a-year Secret Service payroll.

  “It is impossible to discover in every case the falsity of pretended friends who would know our affairs,” Franklin serenely declared, “and more so to prevent being watched by spies.” The only solution was a rule “which prevents any inconvenience from such practices.” What was the rule? Franklin, who was conducting secret negotiations in violation of solemnly signed treaties between France and England, summed it up as “simply this: to be concerned in no affairs I would blush to have made public, and to do nothing but what spies may see and welcome.... If I was sure, therefore, that my valet de place was a spy, as probably he is, I think I should not discharge him for that, if in other respects I liked him.”

  This was, of course, pure nonsense from a man of Franklin’s age and experience. As he demonstrated when he was fighting Lord Hillsborough for the Ohio colony, and negotiating with the British government on the eve of the war, he knew as much about operating secretly as the most seasoned European statesman. But with that intuitive intelligence that went to the heart of every problem from science to politics, Franklin had already seen why he could afford to ignore George III’s spies, and even use them against him. Vergennes might want to keep French aid as secret as possible because it was not yet clear in his mind, or in the mind of his King, whether the American cause was worth a war with England. But Franklin, thinking of America first, saw it was to his country’s advantage if the English knew as much as possible about what he and Deane and the other members of his mission were doing in France. The more George III found out the more his gorge would rise and the more likely would be an English declaration of war on France.

  It did not matter to Franklin whether England d
id the declaring or France. His mission was to get France into the war on the American side and the quicker the better. Of course, he continued to play the game of formal secrecy with Vergennes, but he did it hoping and praying that there was a British agent close enough to hear every word that was being spoken, which, in the person of Edward Bancroft, for all practical effects there was.

  The excitement of this sport was like champagne to Franklin. His letters in these first months practically bubble. To Polly Stevenson Hewson, still in London, he wrote: “My dear, dear Polly: Figure to yourself an old man with grey hair appearing under a marten fur cap, among the powdered heads of Paris. It is this odd figure that salutes you, with handfuls of blessing on you and your dear little ones. . . I have with me here my young grandson, Benjamin Franklin Bache, a special good boy. I shall give him a little French language and address, and send him over to pay his respects to Miss Hewson [Polly’s daughter].” In a postscript he added: “I must contrive to get you to America. I want all my friends out of that wicked country. I have just seen in the papers seven paragraphs about me, of which six were lies.”

  To an older English lady, Emma Thompson, who had written him from St. Omer, he was even more high-spirited. “You are too early, hussy, as well as too saucy, in calling me rebel: you should wait for the event which will determine whether it is a rebellion or only a revolution.” Mrs. Thompson, a widow, was bored at St. Omer and was thinking of moving to Brussels, but wondered if she could afford it. Franklin told her that a single woman with an income of 200 pounds a year ought to be able to maintain herself comfortably anywhere and me into the bargain. Do not invite me in earnest, however, to come and live with you; for, being posted here, I ought not to comply, and I am not sure I should be able to refuse.”

  As for winning the war, he had a unique plan which he was sure Mrs. Thompson would appreciate. If every lady and gentleman in France “would only be so obliging as to follow my fashion, comb their own heads as I do mine, dismiss their friseurs and pay me half the money they pay to them” he would be able to finance the American war effort painlessly. Moreover, he would then enlist these friseurs, who were at least a hundred thousand strong, turn them into an army, and “make a visit with them to England, and dress the heads of your ministers and privy councillors; which I conceive at present to be un peu de’rangees.” Meanwhile, stories about Franklin and his mission swirled through France. One whisper had him allying France and an independent America, another had him negotiating a truce with England which guaranteed American independence, and another had him weaving all Europe into a war against English arrogance. He was a scientist conferring with fellow French savants on new weapons, he was a magician who had already hypnotized Vergennes and was now working on the King, and he was in secret communication with Frederick the Great in Prussia, an avowed English hater, and Catherine the Great in Russia, who supposedly had troops for sale. Franklin contradicted none of these wild tales. As he told the American lady who had warned him against spies, “The various conjectures concerning my business here . . . do me no harm, and therefore it is not necessary that I should take the least pains to rectify them.” The more people talked about him, Franklin knew, the more outraged the British would become.

  Already the British ambassador, Lord Stormont, had strenuously protested Franklin’s very presence in Paris; warning Vergennes that tolerating him was an unfriendly act. The foreign minister had earnestly assured Lord Stormont that, as far as he knew, Franklin was in Paris as a private citizen.

  Behind the façade, Franklin maintained his pressure on Vergennes. On February 1, 1777, he went beyond his original offer of a commercial treaty and offered France a military alliance. A long letter had arrived from Robert Morris, the head of the secret committee on commerce, warning the envoys that from where he sat the future looked ominous. The Continental dollar was depreciating and trade was at a standstill, thanks to the British blockade, and there was alarming evidence that England was girding for a tremendous effort to end the war in 1777. But Vergennes, like the master diplomat he was, parried Franklin’s offer and did the same thing with a memoire from Congress asking for a two million pound loan.

  Undaunted, Franklin decided that the best thing to do, if he wanted to start a conflagration, was to strike a few sparks on his own. Poker-faced, he asked Vergennes if there was any objection against Captain Lambert Wickes doing a little cruising against British vessels and possibly bringing his prizes into French ports. The British ambassador had protested violently over Wickes’ first experiment in this department, when he brought Franklin to France. Vergennes, trapped between prudence and aggression, had to admit that there was no objection if Wickes’ ship was “a vessel in distress.” As for the prizes, that would depend on how loudly the British yelled. Captain Wickes promptly stood out of Nantes and in a matter of days picked off four small British merchantmen. Next, on direct orders from Franklin, he captured the royal mail packet to Lisbon, the HMS Swallow. Then he opened his seacocks until there was enough water in his hold to prove his “distress” and sailed his prizes back into Nantes.

  The seizure of the Swallow was one more escalation in the psychological war Franklin was conducting against George III and his ministers. He knew that the one thing they could not bear was humiliation (an experience he did not particularly like himself) and for the monarch of the ocean to have one of his official packets captured on the high seas by these rebels his ministers had so often scorned in his palace and Parliament was humiliation to the nth degree, especially when the insult took place only a few miles from the headquarters of the British home fleet.

  Once more Lord Stormont protested wildly. Vergennes cooled him off by ordering Wickes and his prizes out of French waters within twenty-four hours. Of course by this time all the prizes had been sold, taken offshore and hastily repainted, and their cargoes transferred to other ships. In a deadpan report to Congress, Franklin, with Deane as a cosigner, admitted that Wickes had given “some trouble & uneasiness to the [French] court.” But in the very next sentence they coolly added, “We have ordered him to make another cruize before he returns to America.”

  Before Wickes put to sea again Franklin found an even likelier candidate for splashing salt water into the royal eye. His name was Gustavus Conyngham. A hot-headed daredevil from County Donegal, he had a score to settle with the British. Their protests had forced him to abandon his ship, The Charming Peggy, loaded with war materiel and in Dutch waters; and corrupt Dutch officials had seized it and sold it for next to nothing. Franklin put Conyngham in command of a lugger, The Surprise, which had been fitted out in Dunkirk. On May 3 1777, he captured an even juicier diplomatic prize, the British packet, Prince of Orange, loaded with the confidential mail the government was sending to its ambassadors in Europe. He also snapped up a brig loaded with wine, lemons, and oranges.

  This time Lord Stormont almost went berserk. Conyngham had made the mistake of taking his prizes back into Dunkirk, a port which the British partially controlled, thanks to a concession wrung from the French at the end of the Seven Years’ War. Stormont insisted that Conyngham was nothing but a pirate and demanded his surrender for public hanging. Vergennes, badly shaken by Stormont’s threats of war, tried to soothe the foaming British lion by arresting Conyngham and his crew. But he managed to avoid surrendering them as pirates.

  Meanwhile, Franklin and Deane were exultantly reading the secret correspondence of the British government. They noted how strenuously the British were telling all their ambassadors that the war in America was practically over. This passionate desire to stifle the facts was aimed, of course, at discouraging other European nations from backing the American cause. It inspired Franklin to one of his best bon mots. Lord Stormont, being in the most sensitive capital, was the most assiduous spreader of slander about the defiant Americans. One day a French friend rushed to Franklin to repeat the latest story about America’s collapse, which he had heard from the British ambassador. Six battalions in Washington’s a
rmy had laid down their arms. “Was it true?” the Frenchman asked.

  “Oh, no,” replied Franklin gravely, “it is not the truth, it is only a Stormont.”

  Within a day the story had swept Paris and stormonter became a new Gallic synonym for lying. Lord Stormont grew so agitated that one day he wrote no less than nine letters to London about Franklin’s activities.

  About the same time Franklin destroyed another member of the British establishment with his wit. Edward Gibbon, who had already published (on William Strahan’s presses) the early volumes of his magnificent Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was visiting Paris and happened to find himself eating at the same inn with Franklin. The American envoy invited the historian to join him at his table. Gibbon, a stumpy, myopic little man who was a member of Parliament voting blindly with the North majority at the time, primly replied that a servant of the King could not have any conversation with a rebel. Franklin sent back his regrets and then could not resist adding that if Mr. Gibbon ever decided to write a book on the decline and fall of the British Empire, he would be happy to supply him with “ample materials.”

  Using French funds, Franklin now equipped Captains Conyngham and Wickes with ships and guns to carry the war into England’s home waters. Wickes, commanding a squadron of three ships, destroyed ten vessels and seized eight prizes off the Irish coast. But this was only a warm up for Conyngham’s next voyage. Standing out in a cutter aptly called the Revenge, Conyngham cruised for two months, seizing and sometimes destroying British ships in the North Sea and the Baltic and on all the coasts of England and Ireland. He sailed completely around the British Isles, even landing once on the northwest coast of Ireland to replenish his water supply, and then hauled off for the Spanish port of Cap Ferrol. Insurance rates in London soared and panicky British merchants began using French ships. Franklin chortled with delight when he heard that there were no less than forty French vessels in the Thames, taking on cargo, a sight that must have driven First Lord of the Admiralty Sandwich almost mad with exasperation.