The First American

by H. W. Brands

  The bad feelings between Franklin and Thomas Penn certainly did nothing good for accommodation between the Assembly and the proprietors. In November 1758, after a delay of more than a year, the Penns finally delivered their response to Franklin’s original complaints. Ferdinand Paris placed the burden of obstruction on Franklin’s shoulders, although without deigning to name him; reaffirming his clients’ commitment to “that harmony which they most sincerely desire,” the Penns’ lawyer lamented that the Assembly had not designated some “person of candour” as its representative to the discussions. Paris went on to assert that the members of the Assembly had not pointed out “clearly and distinctly any grievances they thought themselves under.”

  Franklin could dismiss the lack-of-candor charge as ad hominem flummery; the assertion that he had failed to delineate Pennsylvania’s grievances rang hollow when the proprietors would not even respond to his general complaints. More troublesome was the crux of the proprietors’ argument: “The Charter (when read in its own language) gives the power to make laws to the Proprietary.” The role of the Assembly was to provide “advice and assent,” but the initiative rested with the proprietors. This was just the opposite of the view of Franklin and the Assembly, who judged the initiative in lawmaking to reside in the people, with the proprietors reduced to the advise-and-assent role.

  The personal animus between Franklin and the Penns continued to obscure this essential political difference. Bypassing Franklin, Thomas and Richard Penn wrote directly to the Pennsylvania Assembly charging Franklin with “disrespect,” again aspersing his “candour,” and asserting that fruitful relations between Assembly and proprietors necessitated “a very different representation.” Franklin attacked the proprietors’ response as of a piece with all of their actions. “I need not point out to you the studied obscurity and uncertainty of their answer, nor the mean chicanery of their whole proceeding,” he wrote Isaac Norris. Franklin added, “Thus a final end is put to all farther negotiation between them and me.”

  Yet this hardly ended the struggle between the people of Pennsylvania and the proprietors. To Franklin it simply suggested a change of venue. Form required his offering to resign as the Assembly’s agent. “The House will see that if they purpose to continue treating with the proprietors, it will be necessary to recall me and appoint another person or persons for that service, who are likely to be more acceptable or more pliant than I am, or, as the Proprietors express it, persons of candour.”

  But he advised against this, suggesting instead the radical alternative of replacing rule by the Penns with rule by the Crown. “If the House, grown at length sensible of the danger to the liberties of the people necessarily arising from such growing power and property in one family with such principles, shall think it expedient to have the government and property in different hands, and for that purpose shall desire that the Crown would take the province into its immediate care, I believe that point might without much difficulty be carried, and our privileges preserved.” He added, “In that I think I could still do service.”

  Not many years would pass before Franklin’s preference for Crown rule above propriety rule would appear hopelessly naïve. At the moment it reflected both his terminal contempt for Thomas Penn and his increasing enchantment with things British.

  That his son William shared his enchantment increased it the more. Before leaving Philadelphia, William had fallen in love. Elizabeth Graeme was the belle of the city—bright, vivacious, beautiful. Her father, Thomas Graeme, was wealthy and distinguished, a leading member of the proprietary party. This political connection bothered Franklin somewhat—and may have contributed to his invitation to William to accompany him to England. If so, the strategy worked, for merry London soon banished thoughts of Betsy. “The infinite variety of new objects, the continued noise and bustle in the streets, and the viewing such things as were esteemed most curious, engrossed all my attention,” he wrote Betsy, by way of explaining why he had not written earlier.

  Whether or not Franklin had intended the relationship to end this way, he did not mourn its demise. Yet at times he must have wished that William had remained faithful to his lover across the sea. Just as Franklin himself had done in his own youth, William began consorting with the “low women” of London. And just as Franklin had done, William fathered a son out of wedlock. William Temple Franklin was born about 1760. His mother was as lost to history as William Franklin’s own mother.

  A bastard child had not been convenient to Franklin three decades earlier, but he took it in. William made a different decision—perhaps from his own experience growing up a bastard and a stepchild. He put William Temple in a foster home and for some years disguised his connection to the boy. Franklin almost certainly felt inhibited from criticizing his son on this point; he paid the bills for his grandson and kept quiet.

  Otherwise William’s life went according to plan. He entered the Middle Temple shortly after arrival in London; by the end of the following year he had completed his law studies and put on the gown of the barrister. Franklin’s pride in his son was matched by his appreciation of William’s usefulness. No lawyer himself, and a failed judge, Franklin valued William’s advice on the legal points of the dispute with the Penns.

  William joined his father on a journey to Scotland in the late summer and autumn of 1759. Edinburgh had asked to honor Franklin; upon arrival he was named a burgess and guild-brother of the city. Glasgow presented a similar award. St. Andrews bestowed the freedom of the burgh.

  With continued repetition such notice would lose some of its appeal; for now each mark of esteem delighted him. Equally delightful were the friends Franklin made on this trip. Sir Alexander Dick and Lady Dick knew Franklin by reputation; on hearing of the Franklins’ visit they invited father and son to stay with them at Prestonfield, their manor near Edinburgh. Sir Alexander, like several of Franklin’s admirers, was a physician and more; at the time of Franklin’s visit, he was president of Edinburgh’s College of Physicians and a member of the Edinburgh Philosophical Society. He would help found the Royal Society of Edinburgh some years hence, but only after winning a gold medal for growing the best rhubarb in Britain.

  Franklin charmed Sir Alexander and Lady Dick and the assorted guests they brought to meet the marvelous American. Franklin was in fine form, reciting one of his literary hoaxes, a blasphemous revision of the Bible, contending for religious toleration. The first verses of this chapter recounted how Abraham received a visitor, an old man bowed with age. Abraham offered him food and a place to sleep, only to be dismayed when the visitor failed to bless Abraham’s God. Annoyed, Abraham queried why he did not.

  7. And the man answered and said, I do not worship the God thou speakest of; neither do I call upon his name; for I have made to myself a God, which abideth always in mine house, and provideth me with all things.

  8. And Abraham’s zeal was kindled against the man; and he arose, and fell upon him, and drove him forth with blows into the wilderness.

  9. And at midnight God called unto Abraham, saying, Abraham, where is thy stranger?

  10. And Abraham answered and said, Lord, he would not worship thee; neither would he call upon thy name. Therefore have I driven him out from before my face into the wilderness.

  11. And God said, Have I borne with him these hundred ninety and eight years, and nourished him, and clothed him, notwithstanding his rebellion against me, and couldst not thou, that art thyself a sinner, bear with him one night?

  Lady Dick insisted that Franklin send her a copy of this “Parable Against Persecution,” as it came to be called; so also did Lord Kames, a Scottish jurist who had a reputation as a hanging judge but otherwise was a merry fellow. Franklin and William spent a few days with Kames and his family. While William conversed with the young people of the household, Franklin and Kames rode about the neighborhood on horseback, philosophizing about law, agriculture, mechanics, fish, religion, fireplaces, population growth, and history.

  Upon ret
urning to London, Franklin wrote Kames regretting that he and William had not had the company of the lord and his lady on the long journey south. “We could have beguiled the way by discoursing 1000 things that now we may never have an opportunity of considering together; for conversation warms the mind, enlivens the imagination, and is continually starting fresh game that is immediately pursued and taken.”

  Retrieving a thread of their conversations, Franklin raised the critical issue of Canada. “No one can rejoice more sincerely than I do on the reduction of Canada; and this, not merely as I am a colonist, but as I am a Briton.”

  And not merely a Briton, but a British imperialist—one with a vision grander than almost any found in Whitehall or Westminster.

  I have long been of opinion that the foundations of the future grandeur and stability of the British Empire lie in America; and though, like other foundations, they are low and little seen, they are nevertheless broad and strong enough to support the greatest political structure human wisdom ever yet erected.

  For this reason Canada must be retained.

  If we keep it, all the country from the St. Lawrence to Mississippi will in another century be filled with British people. Britain itself will become vastly more populous by the immense increase of its commerce; the Atlantic Sea will be covered with your trading ships; and your naval power thence continually increasing, will extend your influence round the whole globe, and awe the world!

  Evidently Kames had not shared all of Franklin’s grand vision, for Franklin terminated this part of his letter: “But I refrain, for I see you begin to think my notions extravagant, and look upon them as the ravings of a mad prophet.”

  Yet the prophet was not without honor in his own country—that country being the one he shared with Kames and Collinson and the dons of Cambridge and the guild-brothers of Edinburgh. The honors he had received and the friends he had made since arriving in Britain were enough to win any man; this recent trip to the north of the United Kingdom added further friendships to still more honors. Franklin wrote Kames, “The time we spent there was six weeks of the densest happiness I have met with in any part of my life. And the agreeable and instructive society we found there in such plenty has left so pleasing an impression on my memory that, did not strong connections draw me elsewhere, I believe Scotland would be the country I should choose to spend the remainder of my days in.”

  14

  Briton

  1760–62

  British pride was in the air that season. Just months after Franklin’s declaration of “I am a Briton,” a new monarch was crowned in London, and in his first speech from the throne declared, “I glory in the name of Briton.”

  Or it may have been “Britain” he gloried in the name of; the homonyms were hard for listeners to distinguish. Yet the point was the same: George III, unlike his Hanoverian forebears, considered himself British before anything else— just as Franklin did. Eventually Britain would prove too small for the two of them together, but for now the blessed isle seemed to bless them both.

  George III’s path to the throne was not an easy one. His grandfather, George II, ruled for forty years, to the vexation of his son and heir apparent, Frederick. During much of that time Frederick thought his father was clinging to life to spite him—as indeed he was, at least in part. British politics in the eighteenth century almost guaranteed conflict between a monarch and the next-in-line. The eldest son of the sovereign was both Prince of Wales and Duke of Cornwall, and as such commanded income and influence independent of the throne. This income and influence in turn attracted those who had personal or political reasons for opposing the government, and those thus attracted typically made a habit of whispering oppositionist, if not seditious, thoughts in the ear of the impatient heir.

  To this institutional conflict George II and Frederick added the bad blood that characterized the house of Hanover. Queen Caroline evinced a hatred toward her son almost inconceivable in a mother. “My dear firstborn,” she was reported to have said, “is the greatest ass, and the greatest liar, and the greatest canaille, and the greatest beast, in the whole world, and I most heartily wish he was out of it.” In her final moments, when Frederick expressed a desire to see his mother, she refused, saying, “I shall have one comfort in having my eyes eternally closed—I shall never see that monster again.” Frederick’s father—whose experience with his own father foreshadowed that with his son—shared his wife’s hatred and disdain for their son. “Bid him go about his business,” George said in response to Frederick’s plea for a last chance at reconciliation, “for his poor mother is not in a condition to see him act his false, whining, cringing tricks now, nor am I in a humour to bear his impertinence.”

  If Frederick thought that mourning for Caroline would shorten George’s life, he was mistaken. It was Frederick who died first, nine years before his father, after catching a chill playing tennis in the rain. George’s death, when it came, was in its own unexalted way similarly indicative of the hazards of ruling-class life. The rich diet of the rich in eighteenth-century England led to gout and other maladies, including constipation. On October 25, 1760, George II awakened at Kensington Palace to his usual cup of chocolate, after which he retired to the royal water closet for his morning effort. The effort proved too much for the royal blood vessels; a critical one burst and killed the king.

  George III was twenty-two when his grandfather died, and, although he had been training since birth to take the throne, he was woefully unprepared. A princely youth is a sure recipe for arrested development—princes rarely encounter the reverses that constitute essential elements of the maturing process—yet young George’s development was arrested even by royal standards. He was awkward socially, and emotionally dependent on John Stuart, the Earl of Bute. The merest accident had brought Bute to the attention of the royal family. One day in 1747 a downpour suspended a cricket match Frederick was attending (he had bad luck with weather and sports); while waiting for the storm to lift, the prince proposed a card game but discovered that his party was one man short. Bute was pressed into service, made a favorable impression, and was attached to the royal retinue. He became a lord of the bedchamber and later groom of the stole. He also became, upon Frederick’s death, the mentor, father figure, and beau idéal of the new prince.

  In George’s eyes Bute was everything the young man could never be: intelligent, cultivated, handsome. Everything, that is, except king, which made the younger man’s deficiencies the more distressing. A mild correction from Bute conjured the specter of rejection—deserved rejection. “If you should now resolve to set me adrift,” the prince said, “I could not upbraid you, but on the contrary look on it as the natural consequence of my faults.” When George fell in love for the first time he submitted that frightening emotion to Bute’s approval. “I surrender my future into your hands,” George wrote, “and will keep my thoughts even from the dear object of my love, grieve in silence, and never trouble you more with this unhappy tale; for if I must either lose my friend or my love, I will give up the latter, for I esteem your friendship above every earthly joy.”

  As it turned out, Bute disapproved, and the prince forgot the young lady and put on the stiff upper lip that proved his Britishness. “I am born for the happiness or misery of a great nation,” he said, “and must consequently often act contrary to my passions.” He thereupon asked for a list of those young ladies Bute deemed acceptable—“to save a great deal of trouble,” given that “matrimony must sooner or later come to pass.” When it did, Queen Charlotte dutifully bore her husband fifteen children. (Known, perhaps unfairly, for her lack of physical beauty as a young woman, Charlotte grew in the opinion of her husband’s subjects, at least comparatively. Horace Walpole commented that as the queen aged, “her want of personal charms became, of course, less observable.” Walpole mentioned this to her chamberlain, who agreed. “Yes,” the chamberlain said, “I do think the bloom of her ugliness is going off.”)

  As a protégé of Frederick,
Bute naturally imbibed the prince’s distrust of George II and his ministers; as the protégé of Bute, George III imbibed the same distrust of the same men. “The conduct of this old K. makes me ashamed to be his grandson,” the grandson said. William Pitt, then at the height of his wartime glory, was described by the young George as “the blackest of hearts” and “a true snake in the grass.”

  To some extent the young monarch was simply jealous of Pitt. At almost the moment when George III mounted the throne, the city of London dedicated a new bridge across the Thames as a monument to “the man who by the strength of his genius and steadfastness of his mind and a certain kind of happy contagion of his probity and spirit” had saved the empire. Needless to say, the authors of this encomium were not speaking of the new king, who for just such reasons felt obliged to demonstrate—to Pitt and everyone else—that he, George III, was king. “I am happy to think that I have at present the real love of my subjects,” he wrote Bute, “and lay it down for certain that if I do not show them that I will not permit ministers to trample on me, that my subjects will in time come to esteem me unworthy of the Crown I wear.”

  Proving his fitness to rule became a preoccupation with George III, coloring his relations with his ministers and subsequently with his American subjects. Bute, warned by the Duke of Devonshire that as long as the war with France lasted, the new king could not dispense with Pitt, replied, “My Lord, I would not for the world the king should hear such language. He would not bear it for a moment.” “Not bear it!” rejoined the amazed duke. “He must bear it! Every king must make use of human means to attain human ends, or his affairs will go to ruin.”

  But George would not bear it. In his first meeting with the ministers he emphasized the need to bring to a conclusion the present “bloody and expensive war”—Pitt’s war, as all present, including Pitt, understood. Pitt resented this slap; he equally resented his eclipse by Bute. Within the year the Great Commoner resigned—so discouraged regarding his future as to risk his reputation as tribune of the people by accepting a peerage for his wife and a pension for himself. “Oh, that foolishest of great men, that sold his inestimable diamond for a paltry peerage and a pension,” lamented one of his disappointed partisans.