The Howe Dynasty

by Julie Flavell

  But on Benjamin Franklin’s first visit to Grafton Street, on December 2, 1774, politics did not intrude. He had been invited to play chess. Almost seventy years old, Franklin had by now grown into the image best remembered by posterity, that of a balding, genial figure with shoulder-length hair and plain clothing. The woman he found pitted against him across the game board was sixteen years his junior, also no follower of fashion, dark-complexioned, of forthright manners, yet unmistakably aristocratic. Franklin recalled that he “play’d a few Games with the Lady, whom I found of very sensible Conversation and pleasing Behaviour, which induc’d me to agree most readily to an Appointment for another Meeting a few Days after.”

  The two rapidly became friends; Franklin succumbed to Caroline’s charm offensive, and for the next three months they met regularly to compete over the chess board. His calls at Number 12 became a familiar sight to her neighbors. In a tribute to Caroline, Franklin wrote, “I had never conceiv’d a higher Opinion of the Discretion and excellent Understanding of any Woman on so short an Acquaintance.”

  Franklin was a man who liked the company of lively, intelligent women, and in Caroline he found one whose interests matched his own. She shared his love of chess and mathematics. Her aptitude in the latter was, in Franklin’s experience, “a little unusual in Ladies.” They talked about the transactions of the Royal Society, which would have delighted Caroline, recalling to her the visits she and John Howe made to Matthew Raper at Thorley Hall years earlier, when they had discussed recent scientific discoveries. Franklin gave Caroline a copy of his Experiments and Observations on Electricity, which she found “great entertainment”—and which gave her an excuse to invite him once again to play chess.58

  Although Caroline had an ulterior motive, one suspects that she was keen to meet the famous American for reasons of her own. She must have heard all about him from the Shipley ladies. The philosopher was gregarious, amusing, and a lover of games, especially chess. Caroline also prided herself on her skill at the game; she had played it for years with her husband, with friends, and with relatives.59 Now she would challenge the great Dr. Franklin.

  It is a tragedy that neither of the antagonists left a record of their results during three months of matches. They were players with very different styles. Franklin saw chess as a metaphor for life; in his famous “Morals of Chess,” he asserted that “[L]ife is a kind of chess,” that chess inculcated virtues such as foresight and circumspection, and that the game had the civilizing effect of requiring one to show the utmost consideration to one’s fellow player. One should never cheapen the game, cautioned Franklin, by resorting to tricks such as hurrying or distracting one’s opponent, or feigning a bad move to put him off guard. And one should not, of course, crow at a victory or “show too much pleasure; but endeavour to console your adversary.”60

  Caroline, by contrast, played to win, and she was not above crowing when she did win. She let Lady Spencer know when she played “two games at Chess with General Conway, and what is more have won them both.” Nor did she hide her triumph when she defeated Lady Spencer’s brother: “I have just won a Guinea of him at Chess, giving him a Knight.”61

  Yet perhaps Caroline was simply more honest than her American adversary. His contemporaries painted a rather different picture of his behavior over the chessboard to that suggested in his “Morals of Chess.” He was known as an impatient player, and as determined to win as Caroline. He was reputed to drum his fingers on the table to distract his opponent, sometimes even moving pieces when a back was turned.62

  And so the two battled it out—the aristocratic Englishwoman and the Pennsylvania philosopher. One thing seems certain: If Franklin had not found a challenge in Caroline Howe, he would not have visited so often. Franklin’s friendly chess games with fashionable French ladies while he was in Paris during the War of Independence are famous. Caroline Howe was their English counterpart.

  The chess parties at 12 Grafton Street, interwoven as they were with the business for the Ladies’ Society, provided a mechanism for indirect communication among the Howes, Benjamin Franklin, and Lord Dartmouth without attracting attention. The matches with the American were scheduled close to Caroline’s meetings with Lady Dartmouth, enabling the discreet exchange of information. On December 2, for example, she mentioned Franklin’s first visit to Lady Spencer: “I really shall have no writing time today, I have for the first time these 10 days played ½ a dozen Games of Chess. It has been with Dr. Franklin.” She had also attended two meetings about Ladies’ Society business the day before, she reported, one of them “a long confab with Ly Dartmouth.” Now she had society correspondence to complete (in between receiving the usual callers), and by six o’clock she was to meet Lord Spencer at the theater to see David Garrick in Hamlet.63 Two days later, when she played her second match with Dr. Franklin, she scheduled a four-hour visit with Lady Dartmouth.64

  At first, Franklin saw nothing beneath the surface of his games with the charming Mrs. Howe. At their second meeting, on the fourth of December, they briefly discussed the American crisis, in terms that could be described as flirtatious. When they had finished with their game, Franklin recalled, “[W]e fell into a little Chat.”

  “And what is to be done with this Dispute between Britain and the Colonies?” his hostess asked him. “I hope we are not to have a Civil War.”

  ‘They should kiss and [be] Friends,” he replied. “[W]hat can they do better?”

  Here Caroline inserted a little flattery: “I have often said, says she, that I wish’d Government would employ you to settle the Dispute for ’em. I am sure no body could do it so well. Don’t you think the thing is practicable?”

  Franklin demurred. The British Government would not employ him on such a mission; “they chuse rather to abuse me. Ay, says She, they have behav’d shamefully to you. And indeed some of them are now asham’d of it themselves.”

  Caroline’s quick sympathy no doubt moved Franklin to wax optimistic. If Britain and America wanted peace, he told her, it was eminently practicable, for they had “no clashing Interest to differ about. It is rather a matter of Punctilio, which Two or three reasonable People might settle in half an Hour.” The American did not want to spoil the atmosphere of a pleasant afternoon. That very evening, he met with Dr. Fothergill and Mr. Barclay and agreed to draw up a list of “Hints” upon which to base a plan of conciliation. At the time, he recalled, he still saw no connection between his meeting with the two emissaries and his “accidental Conversation” with Mrs. Howe that afternoon.65

  It was not until Christmas Day that Franklin began to see things in a new light. No sooner had he arrived in Grafton Street when his hostess asked whether he would like to meet her brother, Lord Howe. “[S]he was sure we should like each other,” he recalled. Within minutes, Richard Lord Howe was in the room, expressing “some extreamly polite Compliments” on the honor of meeting the American. But Lord Howe quickly made it clear that this was no social visit. The situation in America was alarming, he said, and he and others in his circle believed that Dr. Franklin was the man best placed to reconcile the two sides. Richard stressed that he was acting as an independent member of Parliament who was concerned for the good of the empire, but that he was well assured that certain ministers sought a formula for peace.

  In what must have struck Franklin as a repetition of his dealings with Dr. Fothergill and David Barclay a few weeks earlier, Lord Howe requested the American to draw up a set of terms that would be acceptable to the colonies, promising to act as a go-between and convey them to the ministers. But why ask for terms from me, wondered Franklin, when the petition of the Continental Congress to the king was now at hand? He read aloud some of its ringing phrases, which called in dutiful terms “for peace, liberty, and safety” and professed loyalty to King George. The words “seem’d to affect both the Brother and Sister,” he recalled. But Richard returned to the point: In case the petition seemed to ask too much, could Franklin put together a realistic alternative
set of terms? Franklin agreed; they would meet again in three days at Caroline’s house, where Franklin now called so frequently that his appearance would raise no curiosity.66

  At their next meeting, on December 28, Lord Howe made his role in the secret negotiations much clearer. He admitted to Franklin that he had already seen the “Hints” that Dr. Fothergill had promised were to be kept under wraps; he named Prime Minister Lord North and American Secretary Lord Dartmouth as the ministers who were interested in finding a peaceful accommodation; and he asked what Franklin thought of the idea of sending a commissioner to the colonies to “enquire into the Grievances of America upon the Spot.”67 With these words, Richard revealed that he was involved in the only unequivocal conciliatory proposal being considered in the British cabinet by the end of 1774.68

  It was Lord Dartmouth, of course, who was proposing a commissioner in the cabinet, but the idea had a much longer pedigree. Dr. Fothergill had suggested it to Dartmouth during the crisis that ensued after the enactment of the 1765 Stamp Act. Benjamin Franklin’s friend Thomas Pownall, sometime governor of Massachusetts and brother of John Pownall, was pushing the idea a few years later.69 He had written to Dartmouth in 1773, seeking to be employed as a special commissioner for conciliation. The subsequent Boston Tea Party, however, closed the ears of ministers to such moderate measures.70

  Now, at the end of 1774, a little band of peacemakers—the Quakers Barclay and Fothergill, Lords Dartmouth and Hyde, the Howes and Franklin—were looking for a solution to a confrontation that was framed in terms of abstract questions of principle and seemed irreconcilable. Perhaps the uncompromising issues could be sidestepped—“blurred,” so to speak—so that everyone would be satisfied. What was needed was a formula that resolved some of the immediate grievances, defusing the atmosphere of crisis without requiring Parliament to renounce explicitly its right to tax, or the colonies to acknowledge that it had that right.71 If everything could only be slowed down, negotiations could replace the move toward armed conflict.

  Since early December 1774, Fothergill and Barclay had been actively working with Benjamin Franklin to achieve this, going over his list of “Hints” in several intense meetings. Franklin’s original “Hints” were not a blueprint for imperial governance but rather a list of specific suggestions designed to resolve the collective conflicts of the previous decade. On the point of taxation, for example, he proposed that all duties laid on the colonies for the regulation of trade be paid into their respective colonial coffers; that in wartime, the colonies might be requisitioned to contribute to the cost of imperial defense, but only with the consent of Parliament and in a fixed proportion to the amount raised in Britain. The authority of the British government over the empire was to be conceded by the reenactment of the Navigation Acts—legislation that restricted much of colonial trade to the mother country—in all the colonial assemblies. By this mode of acquiescence, the colonies would be consenting to, rather than submitting to, the Navigation Acts. Parliament was to disclaim the right to legislate for the colonies on internal domestic matters.72

  At the core of the conflict was the issue of the sovereignty of Parliament. The story is usually told as one of an overweening central authority claiming power over nascent local governments. However, it is more accurate to say that Parliament had problems of its own that made it impossible to accommodate the demands of its colonies. In the eighteenth century, Britons still feared that the power of the Crown could increase to become an absolute monarchy of the sort that had existed under the Stuarts. It was the British Parliament that stood in the way of this happening. Because of this, the ministers who were dealing with the crisis in 1774 would never succeed in pushing legislation through Parliament that diminished its authority.73

  Ironically, George III, the supposed tyrant, was just as committed to a constitutional monarchy as were his ministers. Putting thirteen colonial assemblies on an equal footing with the British Parliament, all under the Crown, threatened to subvert British liberty and enhance the power of the Crown. In the nineteenth century, when the monarch was more clearly a figurehead, such an arrangement became feasible; in the 1770s, it was not. As one British lord—who sympathized with American grievances—put it to Lord Dartmouth, the idea of an American and an English parliament united under the authority of one crown “would add exceedingly to the weight of the Crown & at home, to which I can’t say at present that I think any Increase at all necessary.”74 The delicate balance between the Crown and its eighteenth-century Parliament was not to be disturbed.

  The big question in 1774, then, was this: Could both sides agree to a set of compromises that would back away from armed confrontation, and at the same time avoid thrashing out abstract questions of the rights of British versus colonial legislatures? In addition, there were important practical points of substance that needed to be addressed. Most British MPs were eager to find a way to get the colonies to contribute to the cost of imperial defense. They also wanted reassurance that the Navigation Acts—essential to protect Britain from predatory enemies in a world of global trade—would be obeyed by colonists. Franklin tried to address both these issues in his “Hints.”

  In the present crisis, the government also needed a face-saving offer from the colonies that would allow Britain to climb down from its uncompromising response to the Boston Tea Party. Ministers had hoped that Boston would offer to pay for the ruined tea, paving the way for reconciliation, but the Boston town meeting voted overwhelmingly against this measure in the summer of 1774.75 Hopes that the First Continental Congress would offer to pay were dashed when its disappointingly extreme resolves reached London.76 As the colonies continued to refuse to back down, a military “solution” loomed ever closer.

  The peace proposals circulating during this critical period are liable to be misunderstood if they are seen as attempts at final answers to the constitutional impasse. There were leading figures on both sides who did not want war and believed it unnecessary to agree upon a final settlement of the constitutional relationship between Britain and the colonies—at least, not right then. Some British statesmen privately thought it preferable to watch the American colonies gradually free themselves from the bonds of empire. The presumption was that they would naturally become larger and wealthier over time, thus moving peacefully toward a virtual independence and obviating the need for a bloody conflict that might destroy the prosperity of both Britain and America.77

  Richard’s political patron William Pitt, Lord Chatham, offered a plan for conciliation to the House of Lords in two stages in early 1775. Although it was rejected, its contents are worth examining as a demonstration of what British legislators were prepared to concede at this stage of the conflict. Chatham’s conciliatory proposal did not address all of the issues raised by the First Continental Congress, but it clearly opened the door to some kind of resolution. He proposed that the British troops in Boston should be withdrawn as a goodwill gesture; that Parliament’s authority outside of Britain should be limited to matters that solely affected the empire, such as the regulation of trade; and that Parliament would not tax a colony without the consent of its legislature. Chatham was careful not to open himself up to the charge of denying parliamentary sovereignty, as he had done during the Stamp Act Crisis. Parliament would agree not to tax the American colonies as a concession, not as an admission of the colonies’ right to tax themselves. Congress would be declared legal on a temporary basis in order to consider the bill and consent to Parliament’s authority as defined in it. Congress would also be asked to consider contributing a permanent revenue to the king, to be granted by the colonial assemblies.78

  When Parliament rejected Chatham’s proposals, the Virginia Assembly declared, “Lord Chatham’s bill, on the one hand, and the terms of the congress, on the other, would have formed a basis for negotiation, which a spirit of accommodation on both sides, might perhaps have reconciled.”79 The defining word here is might, for by 1775, not all the American leaders would have agreed t
o talk, even on the basis of the terms set out by Lord Chatham.

  The Howes and their associates working behind the scenes were better informed on opinion in the cabinet than was the maverick Earl of Chatham. They were also closer to the mood in Parliament. In both places, the upstart Continental Congress was abhorred; the idea of opening talks with the illegal body was met with incredulity. An undersecretary recalled the reaction in the cabinet when John Pownall tried to convince ministers to appoint commissioners “to meet deputies from the Colonies to discuss & settle all claims & Parliament to confirm if approved.” At first, the cabinet was receptive to the idea. A bill appointing the commissioners could perhaps be brought into Parliament. But, on second thought, the prospect of the Continental Congress elevated to a legal footing “carried so much the appearance of an American Parliament that the whole Cabinet revolted against it.”80

  On the eve of the American War of Independence, the British government neither wished nor saw the need to tear up its constitutional arrangements in order to pacify recalcitrant colonists. It is not surprising, then, that when Benjamin Franklin met Lord Howe, he found that the admiral was less interested in hammering out precise terms than in finding a face-saving opening for the British government to make concessions. Over the next two and a half months, Richard revisited time and again the issue of reparations from Boston as an overture for a peaceful initiative from the British government. A military man like Richard would understand the problem of how Britain, a leading world power since 1763, could retreat from a confrontation with its colonies without appearing weak. Lord Barrington, the Secretary at War, had written to Lord Dartmouth along the same lines on Christmas Eve, putting forward his doubts over the practicability of coercion. He insisted that armed enforcement of colonial taxation was out of the question, and that Britain should look for a way to make concessions “with dignity.” He also suggested that withdrawal of the army from flashpoints like Boston should proceed immediately, coupled with a blockade of troublesome New England and possibly a repeal of the tea duty for colonies to the south that had not associated with the Continental Congress.81 New York, given its sympathetic loyalist population, was the colony that stood out in such a scheme. Its Assembly had decided by early 1775 to break with the Continental Congress and send a separate address to London, appealing for conciliatory measures.82