THE CROWD THAT GATHERED that morning in the square mile of streets, yards, and parks surrounding Westminster Abbey was the largest that had ever been seen in Europe. A million Britons had come from all over the kingdom to witness the crowning of King George III and his bride, Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburgh.
Every house, inn, and tavern was jammed. People couldn’t sleep for the shouting and singing, the ringing of church bells, and the hammering of scaffolds. From St. James’s Park to the banks of the Thames, nobles and peasants, merchants and plowmen, flower girls, jugglers, and piemen filled the streets in hopes of a glimpse of the royal procession. Such is the power of the British monarchy that a famous American scientist of the day might have likened the choir of the Abbey—with its ancient chair of Saint Edward in which the king would be crowned—to a magnetic pole enforcing order on the field of humanity surrounding it.
The hopes of a quarrelsome empire waited upon the young king.
Even the elements of nature were moved. It had drizzled rain upon the city since Sunday. Yet on Tuesday morning the sun dispersed the clouds and fog and shone throughout the day of the pageant, an omen inspiring the London Chronicle’s bard to write:
Since then, great Prince, it looks like heaven’s decree
Ev’n to our sunshine we should owe to thee
Let this day represent thy future reign
Clear after clouds, and after storms serene…
For the nobles, gentlemen and ladies, bishops and choristers commanded to walk in the procession ahead of the king, and for those with engraved tickets that reserved places in Westminster Hall where the procession formed, there was a great deal to see. The splendor of the spectacle would exceed the expectations that had been building since the death of King George II nearly a year before.
Westminster Hall, cavernous beneath its hammer-beam oaken roof, had been emptied of all but the floor and steps of the king’s law court that convened here. A new floor of planks had been laid from the North Gate up the middle of the half-acre space to those steps and covered with woven matting. Immense galleries had been erected on either side, up to the beams, three levels seating thousands of spectators. Fifty-two chandeliers, each surmounted by an imperial crown of gold, were ready to light a postcoronation banquet with a thousand candles.
There were few Americans in London, fewer who could witness the coronation of their sovereign, and only one who was entitled to walk in the procession. He was William Franklin, the thirty-one-year-old son of the famous American scientist Benjamin Franklin. The older Franklin sat on a plank in the packed gallery. He had purchased his place in the open market, where they were changing hands for five guineas or more (a workingman’s wage for a fortnight).
Ben Franklin gazed down at the privileged ranks of bedecked, bedizened, and bejeweled humanity: judges in scarlet robes, choirboys with scarlet mantles, heralds in tabards, and all the nobility in their robes of state, their coronets in their hands.
And there on the edge of that rainbow of heraldry stood his son, William, in his drab coat of broadcloth, his tricorn hat in his hand. Benjamin Franklin regarded this scene with that blend of intense curiosity and amusement that often animated his bright blue eyes. He was by temperament and practice an observer of life as much as an actor in the human drama, both critical and self-aware.
William, his only son, a keen observer and student of manners himself, was more naturally a man of action, a confident frontier soldier, a man of law, a scientist in his own right, and—as his father’s aide—a colonial advocate. Pennsylvania had sent father and son to England on a fateful mission. Proprietor Thomas Penn’s refusal to pay taxes on his vast property had crippled defenses on the colony’s western frontier. Success for the Franklins with Parliament would mean safety for their countrymen; failure would mean more Indian raids, more massacres. Success depended upon their harmonious collaboration. It would also depend upon the grace of the new king.
William was handsome, an endowment his father must have noticed served him well in his unique role on this glorious day. His face was long and lean, his nose perfect, his chin strong and prominent, his mouth in repose a bow with upturned corners; his eyes were dark with long lashes and arched brows well drawn by nature. It was a comely face saved from androgyny by the force that animated it when he spoke or laughed. A friend had written to Mrs. Franklin, soon after meeting him in London: “Your son I really think one of the prettiest young gentlemen I ever knew,” in a century when the word “pretty” bore no unmanly connotations.
The Franklins’ friend William Strahan was forty-six, a publisher whose circle included such luminaries as David Hume, Dr. Samuel Johnson, and Edward Gibbon, all of whom he edited and befriended. His wide-set eyes shone with humor; kindness showed in his easy smile, force in the tilt of his chin. Equally at home with lords and commoners, he covered the proceedings in Parliament, publishing his remarks in journals, including Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette. In the same letter Mr. Strahan, a good judge of character, praised William Franklin’s “solidity of judgment, not very often to be met with in one of his years.” The English publisher, a man of the world, had never met such a father and son—strong personalities who worked in perfect collaboration, without envy or friction.
Although Mrs. Franklin might take pride in William’s level-headedness, having reared him, she took no credit for the man’s beauty, an endowment (and souvenir) bestowed by the woman of mystery who had been her husband’s mistress before he commenced his civil union with Deborah Read. The origins of that common-law marriage, and Deborah’s adoption of its bastard issue, are noteworthy.
DEBORAH READ HAD KNOWN Benjamin Franklin from the day of his arrival in Philadelphia at age seventeen. She was the first girl to take notice of the stranger, bedraggled, disheveled, ill shod. Standing by her father’s door on Market Street she watched him pass, munching a large, puffy bread roll while holding two others, one under each arm. She later recalled that the lad made “a most awkward ridiculous appearance.” He may have heard her giggle. Benjamin had run away from his apprenticeship in Boston and wanted lodging. By chance this turned out to be the home of Deborah Read’s father, John, a carpenter, who owned the house of Franklin’s new employer, the printer Samuel Keimer. When Franklin’s trunk and his clothing arrived, the boy made a better impression upon Miss Read than he had the day he passed by her door chewing the bread.
They became friends and more than friends, sharing the same hearth and table on Market Street. At eighteen he expressed his desire to marry her, soon after her father’s untimely death. The governor of Pennsylvania was about to send this charming journeyman to London to purchase a letterpress and type, with the commission to set up as the province’s official printer; he could leave Keimer’s employment. With such prospects Franklin was confident he might start a family upon his return. As much in love with the attractive, bright Deborah Read as she was with him, he wanted a wedding, or at least an engagement, before he set sail, so as not to lose her to the tides of time and distance. Her mother, Sarah, citing those same uncertainties—their extreme youth and the long sea voyage—opposed the betrothal, arguing that a marriage “would be more convenient” after his return. By then he might be well established in his business, an enterprise she wisely considered to be founded more upon wishes than probabilities.
Minding her mother, Deborah bade Benjamin farewell. He sailed for England, where his hopes were dashed upon the ground of the governor’s empty promises and a lack of credit. He toiled in London print shops for a year and a half. Enjoying the heady life of a bachelor abroad, he neglected to write to Miss Read.
When he returned to Philadelphia at age twenty-one he found his Deborah married to one John Rogers, a potter. She was married, but now alone. The shiftless potter had gone through her dowry in a matter of months. Rumor had it that Rogers was also married to a woman in London. Hearing of this, Deborah left him. Rogers then ran away to the West Indies, where he may or may not have been killed in a brawl. So Deborah was married, and perhaps a widow, living with her mother when Franklin returned from his unprofitable adventure to England.
Not married in the true sense, nor free to marry in the legal sense, Deborah was in a painful situation. Benjamin not only pitied her, he felt guilty. A frequent visitor to the Read household, where he was welcome not only as a friend but also as an adviser in the family’s affairs, he found that Deborah was usually dejected, rarely cheerful, and avoided company. He believed that his own neglect and frivolity during his year in London was the cause of her unhappiness, even though Mrs. Read insisted upon taking the blame. It was she who had opposed their engagement, she who had encouraged the other match in Franklin’s absence.
Deborah was grateful for his attention and loved his company. Gradually their old affection was rekindled. But now there were many obstacles to their union. If Rogers was indeed married to someone in London, Deborah’s marriage was null and void. But at such a distance the fact could hardly be proved. If he was dead, stabbed in a barroom in Barbados or Grenada, then she was a widow; this was likewise unlikely to be proved. Inquiries had been made, and perhaps time would tell, but the corporal punishments for bigamy in those days were so severe that no one dared to risk it.
Meanwhile, twenty-one-year-old Benjamin Franklin was a man about town, not only in Philadelphia but in nearby Burlington, New Jersey. He and Samuel Keimer were busy there printing the official colonial currency in the spring of 1728, and doing what young men do in their spare time. He later confessed to his helplessness in managing his sexual urges: “That hard-to-be-governed passion of youth had hurried me frequently into intrigues with low women that fell in my way, which were attended with some expense and great inconvenience, besides a continual risk to my health.”
About that time Franklin fell into an intrigue with a woman unlikely to pose a risk to his health, not a low woman but one who would cause him considerable inconvenience, as he did her. Although her identity remains a mystery, unknown at the time even to Deborah, the woman in question was one who could keep a secret. She was someone who had at least as much to lose as Benjamin, if not more, than Benjamin, by the divulging of the secret trysts, the affair, the pregnancy, the birth. Most likely it was someone of breeding, and perhaps a woman already married, whose husband was out of the picture for months or years, a sea captain or merchant trading in China or Africa. For the sake of discretion, so much the better if the woman in question lived at a distance, anywhere but Philadelphia, where no one could keep a secret, someplace like Burlington, over the river. Deborah would be kept wondering, as would the whole world, for the sake of that woman’s honor, which was only as safe as the knowledge of William’s true parentage. Three may keep a secret if two of them are dead, wrote Poor Richard, famously and sagely.
The woman in question was confined sometime in 1729 or 1730. The child was born and put to nurse. His father—who at the time was practicing to become a saint, or rather a moral paradigm, as his writings show—resolved to adopt this baby, William, as his own. He meant to rear the boy and acknowledge him despite the world’s vain and idle opinions. This was a rare course of action for a man of Franklin’s class, although not unheard of. Usually bastards were reared by their mothers, when they were not abandoned. But Franklin was no ordinary man. In 1730 he was refining his “Art of Virtue,” a manual that was no less than a “project of arriving at moral perfection,” and responsible fatherhood seemed as good a place as any to begin.
Now things grew complicated and inconvenient, if not expensive, for the unwed father. The mother returned home with her honor intact and a terrible grief that time might heal. Her child was lost, and the world need know little more about it than that. Franklin, the would-be saint, went back to his lodgings, after the weaning, with a bastard to mix into the bargain of his marriage contract, for he had every intention of living with Deborah Read. “Better to be married than burn,” Saint Augustine advised, and Benjamin Franklin at twenty-four wanted badly to be married. He wanted a mother for this baby, and a wife. His choices were limited by his paternity, especially with respect to a dowry. Years later he would blame the limitation on his trade: As the printing business was generally thought a poor one, he couldn’t expect a dowry along with a wife, unless it was such a woman as he would otherwise think disagreeable. The truth is rather that Benjamin Franklin was an eligible and engaging bachelor, talented, charming, handsome, and full of promise, with one liability—his bastard son.
This is where his needs coincided with Deborah’s. They were equally damaged goods. They had been in love when they were eighteen. Six years later, sadder and wiser, they nourished a mutual affection that would ripen into conjugal love. While Deborah waited for sworn testimony of her husband’s death in order to marry again, Ben Franklin faced the contingency that as Rogers’s successor he would be held liable for the late husband’s debts, which were considerable. He would have to accept such bad news with the good. Deborah, for her part, had to accept the role of mother to the bastard son Benjamin had sired in a passion that was neither impetuous nor insignificant, in all probability. It was a bitter pill. He had probably been in love with her, whoever she was, since he had gone to such lengths to care for the child and protect her anonymity. He had made love to her sometime after returning from England, and God only knew what he felt for her now.
Understanding these things they agreed to enter into a common-law marriage. On September 1, 1730, they invited friends and family to an informal ceremony in which they declared their intention to live together as husband and wife. They set up housekeeping in Franklin’s residence at 139 Market Street about the time little William was taking his first steps. Two years later, on October 20, 1732, Deborah gave birth to a son, Francis Folger Franklin. Assisting with the delivery of the newborn as well as the care of the toddler William was Deborah’s mother, Sarah, who had come to live with them. She also helped in the stationery store Deborah managed on the ground floor.
Little Frankie was his mother’s darling, longed-for, prayed for in the trying presence of his handsome half brother. The new baby arrived during a year of ample fortune and prosperity for the little family. Benjamin had paid off his debts and consolidated his publishing, printing, and stationery businesses; he had brought out the first edition of Poor Richard’s Almanac, which would soon make him rich. Perhaps it was the pressure of business or the feeling of invulnerability that comes with lavish good luck that caused Franklin to neglect inoculating this baby against smallpox. William had been treated. It was a curious oversight. He had been an early champion of the controversial experiment, studying its statistical results and sharing his opinions in the Gazette. In 1736, smallpox swept the city, and Frankie died of it. Now his father would have to explain to critics that the child had not died of the inoculation, but of the disease itself. He would never forgive himself. In death the little boy seemed to him to possess every human grace and promise of greatness—in any case, this was what he told Deborah and the world.
She could not wish harm to any child, but it must have seemed cruel to the grieving mother that Death would pass over the bastard son and carry off the only baby she and her husband were ever likely to have. They both came from large families that prized fecundity, and like most couples of their generation, they wanted many children. Franklin loved children. In the almanac he had written: “A ship under sail and a big-bellied woman / Are the handsomest things that can be seen common.” For whatever reason, they had failed each other in this. It was not for a lack of trying. Now she was twenty-nine, and an entire decade would pass between fruitful pregnancies. On August 31, 1743, at the age of thirty-five, she gave birth to a daughter they named Sarah after her grandmother. They would call her Sally. The girl was as fine a specimen of her sex as Frankie might have been of his, with all of her parents’ virtues, strength, beauty, and intelligence. William adored her. Her father was so proud of her that he joked with Mr. Strahan about arranging a marriage between the seven-year-old Sally and Strahan’s ten-year-old son.
Meanwhile, the gossips of Philadelphia either did not know or did not care that William Franklin was illegitimate until the early 1760s, about the time of the coronation of King George III. In that decade the rumor would be useful to the Franklins’ enemies. Until then, all the world—including Mr. Strahan—took for granted that Deborah Franklin was mother of all three children.
It was through Strahan’s influence, in part, that William stood by his side in Westminster Hall, about to walk in the procession. Although Strahan had not met the Franklins until their arrival in London in 1757, he had corresponded for many years with Benjamin and had heard intriguing stories about young William as he came of age on the American frontier.
THE BOY HAD BEEN bright and headstrong, precocious like his father before him. And had he not also been charming, the task of rearing William in adolescence might not have seemed worth the trouble.
At fifteen he tried to run away from home on a privateer, longing for adventure and plunder. Benjamin fetched the boy from the ship, later protesting that no one could say it was hardship at home that prompted him, for Franklin was by all accounts not only an attentive but an indulgent father. When he himself had run away from home as a teenager, it was to escape a harsh apprenticeship to his brother James, a printer of inferior talents who whipped him to get even. William had no such complaints, being favored and coddled. He had received the best education available in Philadelphia in the 1730s and ’40s: a private tutor, then a desk at Annand’s Classical Academy at age eight. The boy wrote a fine hand and knew his Latin declensions. He danced, and rode well on his own pony.
Benjamin would have liked to see his son follow him in the printer’s trade, but the boy declined. If he could not go to sea, he was hell-bent on being a soldier, and in no time he proved he was good at it. At sixteen he enlisted in the king’s army; by eighteen he had distinguished himself, having risen to the rank of captain during King George’s War. In the seemingly endless war with France, the enemy and her allies (various Indian tribes) engaged in gruesome raids upon the settlements of the New England borders, and in battles on the high seas. French-led Indians burned Saratoga in 1745 and murdered trappers and British patrols in Albany in 1746. William marched north to Albany and wintered there with his company under severe and dangerous conditions, with rusted guns, spoiled beef, and cutlasses so soft they would bend and stay bent like wax. Sixteen British soldiers were killed in a single Indian ambush.
While dozens deserted, William Franklin stood his ground, and he volunteered to join a march on French forces at Saratoga. He came home briefly in May 1747, as a captain charged with hunting down deserters and hauling them back to camp. Captain Franklin, seventeen years old, discharged this duty with a zeal and efficiency his father admired.
That year, French privateers plundered plantations along the lower Delaware. When the pacifist Quaker-dominated Assembly refused funds for arms, Ben Franklin campaigned for a voluntary defense association. Within days he gathered a thousand signatures to his proposition; weeks later he had ten thousand men armed and drilling in several companies around Philadelphia. They built a fort below the city and bought thirty-nine cannon from Boston. In all of this military business young William’s advice was indispensable.
As it turned out, the kings of England and France grew weary of the distant conflict before William did, resulting in the flimsy Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in the autumn of 1748. He returned home to Philadelphia a hero, achieving the highest rank a colonial soldier might attain without paying for a commission. Now he was welcome to dance the minuet at the Dancing Assembly of Philadelphia under the approving gaze of high society, including Dr. Thomas Graeme, whose beautiful daughter Elizabeth was soon to play a crucial role in William’s life. His father was proud of the youth, who had risked his life for Crown and country at an age when most boys of his generation were serving as apprentices. With his head full of dreams of glory, he would have liked to continue as an officer, but after 1748 he had to agree with his father that the timing was wrong.
“As peace cuts off his prospect of advancement in that way,” Ben Franklin wrote to Strahan, “he will apply himself to other business.” The other business was not so dangerous as fighting Indians, but nearly as challenging: befriending them. Some war veterans, officers who knew William’s courage and trusted his capability in the field, put his name forward for an expedition to the west. Virginia and Pennsylvania had put aside their disagreements about borders and trade, cooperating in order to negotiate a treaty with the Miami nation. The tribe had grown bitter over the high prices and shoddy goods of their recent partners, the French.
The time was ripe for the English to win the confidence of these native people, and to accomplish this, the emissaries were ordered to call upon the Indians in their own domain, the Ohio Valley territory. The distinguished interpreter Conrad Weiser had been chosen to lead the way into the Indian country on this expedition—the first ever west of the Alleghenies—and Captain Franklin was named as his personal guard.
On August 11, 1748, the embassy set out from Weiser’s home in western Pennsylvania. The party included two experienced fur traders, the half-breed Andrew Montour, old Reverend Richard Peters, a Captain Trent, who had served with William in the war, and Trent’s partner, a fast-talking, wily Irishman named George Croghan who would get rich acquiring land as one of the king’s Indian agents on the frontier.
Franklin was fifteen years younger than any other member of this delegation, yet they looked to him for strength and leadership on the unfamiliar path. Riding ahead of a train of twenty pack horses saddled with provisions, rum, and presents for their hosts, the men took the Kittatinny path northwest through mountain passes, a trek of one hundred seventy miles in two weeks, in heavy rain. Arriving at the banks of the Allegheny River on August 25, William and several others, including Weiser, went ahead of the team in a bark canoe, coming ashore in Logstown two days later, eighteen miles down the Ohio from the Forks.
When their canoe scraped on the north bank, the delegation looked up the hill at the tepees of the trading village, and the natives in deerskin and feathers greeted them as if they had been awaiting them for weeks. The meeting with the Iroquois, Mohicans, Shawnees, and Delawares went on for days with feasting, rum drinking, and promises of friendship while the Indians waited for their presents to arrive. At last the pack horses appeared on the path curving below the escarpment, carrying the gifts of gold coins, guns, knives, blankets, and thousands of beads of wampum that sealed the pact.
“Brethren,” said Conrad Weiser, “some of you have acquainted us that you had taken up the English hatchet…and made use of it against the French, and that the French had very hard heads, and your country afforded nothing but sticks and hickories which was not sufficient to break them. You desired your brethren would assist you with some weapons sufficient to do it.” The conference concluded with a peace treaty based on the king’s willingness to provide weapons fit to crack the Frenchmen’s skulls, an arrangement the good-hearted Weiser and his friend the Reverend Peters might not have realized could backfire, while Franklin and Captain Trent, who had fought the French and Indians above Albany, knew the danger. The Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle that derailed William’s military career was only a pause in the epic war between England and France.
WILLIAM HAD KEPT A journal, which is lost. But his father’s correspondence with Strahan shows that the real significance of the adventure was not in the diplomacy, or even the view of native American manners. The epiphany was the land itself, what Weiser once called “the country back of us.”
From the bluffs over the Shenango, on Pennsylvania’s western border, William Franklin had glimpsed the outlines of a colossus in the green vistas and panoramas of the Ohio Valley cut with silver streams, the canvas and many-colored palette upon which his generation would paint the picture of American prosperity. William was one of the first white men to see that landscape, and the impression would mark him for life. In the words of the Reverend Peters, “the moment you leave the last ridge of hills the lands are exceeding good and continue so uninterruptibly.”
William realized that investment in such fertile land would make men rich. He hoped to buy acreage there in the West, farmland and timberland along watercourses for the fur trade. His father, already wealthy from the printing press that had spawned Poor Richard’s Almanac (ten thousand copies sold per year, every year), was not so easily beguiled. Yet he agreed with William that England must not waver in laying claim to the Ohio territory.
In April 1750, Ben Franklin wrote to his mother, “As to your grandchildren, Will is now nineteen years of age, a tall proper youth, and much of a beau,” and was pleased to report that the youth had applied himself to his studies and would likely become a hardworking man. Meanwhile the proud father, retired from publishing at forty-five, submerged himself in the study of natural philosophy, of weather and electrical phenomena, that would soon make him one of the most famous men in the world.
In those quiet years of the midcentury, Ben Franklin engaged the aristocratic young lawyer Joseph Galloway to tutor William in the law. And he welcomed William, in his spare time, as a partner in those celebrated scientific studies. In June 1752, father and son flew the kite in the thunderstorm that has become as finely etched in our minds as the story of Isaac Newton and the apple that fell on his head. And in the summer of the following year it was William, charting the course of a lightning bolt that struck a three-story house, who ascertained that the visible electrical charge of lightning moves from the ground up and not from the clouds down, as it might appear.
All of these things and many others Ben Franklin recounted in the transatlantic correspondence with Strahan that went on for a decade before they met, letters that promised true friendship. This was instantaneous upon the Franklins’ arrival in London—for all three. Strahan was struck by William’s readiness in optimizing “the daily opportunities he has of improving himself in the company of his father, who is at the same time his friend, his brother, his intimate, and easy companion.” For four years, since their arrival in 1757, the two Americans had lived happily together in rooms on Craven Street, companions in work, travel, and study.
It was a rare chemistry indeed, a dynamic that seemed to Strahan unique—or at least uniquely American. It had been forged in a strange crucible, both military and political, a foreign climate that few Englishmen could understand as well as he, not the lords and ladies that surrounded them, glittering, in Westminster Hall, and certainly not the young king himself.