AFTER FOURTEEN YEARS OF lively correspondence it is fair to say that neither of the letter writers—Ben Franklin or William Strahan—was disappointed when at last they came eye to eye.
On the very morning of the Franklins’ arrival in London, the men shook hands in the parlor of their mutual friend the naturalist Peter Collinson in Mill Hill, north of the city. The ocean voyage of twenty-seven days had been favored by winds but perilous. They were chased twice by privateers and nearly wrecked upon the infamous granite rocks of Scilly, off the coast of Cornwall, the night before landing in Falmouth. William remarked, “Let the pleasures of the country be ever so great, they are dearly earned by a voyage across the Atlantic.” And his father added, “Were I a Roman Catholic, perhaps I should on this occasion vow to build a chapel to some Saint, but as I am not, if I were to vow at all, it should be to build a lighthouse.”
The hours passed swiftly for these men who had been virtual friends for so many years. They were wits for whom conversation was sport, pastime, and a necessity like air and water. Strahan was captivated. “For my own part,” he wrote to Mrs. Franklin, “I never saw a man who was, in every respect, so perfectly agreeable to me. Some are amiable in one view, some in another, he in all.”
By correspondence Strahan had come to know Ben Franklin, as one printer to another. Franklin had longed for a London “agent” who could keep him abreast of current events in the capital and send him books and papers. He had given Strahan a blanket order to send him any book worth reading—excepting theology. By 1745 the two publishers were exchanging crates of their books wholesale, and the American was ordering most of his printing supplies, lead fonts, press parts, and stock from Strahan. Their letters eventually became personal: from regards to wives and children (Strahan had married young and happily and had many offspring), the correspondents turned to matchmaking. By the 1750s they were referring to Franklin’s seven-year-old daughter Sarah and Strahan’s ten-year-old son Billy as betrothed, daughter-in-law and son-in-law, in good fun.
And when the time came to guide William Franklin’s career it was Strahan who entered the young man’s name in the rolls of the Middle Temple of the Inns of Court, where William would now commence his law studies. The king’s printer would use all of his influence and knowledge of English politics to help these American agents achieve a goal he knew to be salutary to the whole empire—the fair enfranchisement of the British colonists.
From the time of Ben Franklin’s arrival in London until the day of George III’s coronation in 1761, he faced challenges that would have daunted an ambassador with much greater experience and authority. He was, in fact, not an ambassador at all but the humble agent of a colonial assembly that had little legal power apart from what the proprietary governor granted.
Franklin must base his claim upon the natural rights of Englishmen, rights promised by the ancient Magna Carta but not, at present, by the colonial charter of Pennsylvania. Underlying every point of his argument must be the potential might of the American people, the dagger beneath the cloak. If the Empire was going to thrive, then the colonies must be secure against the French and the Indians. For Pennsylvania to survive, it needed an army, and the Penns must pay for their fair share of it. What reasoning stirred on the other side of this argument was rooted in medieval history, the feudal belief in the sanctity of property rights, of private ownership.
If Franklin presumed his Assembly’s powers were akin to Parliament’s, Lord Granville, president of the Privy Council (the king’s cabinet), was quick to correct him. Granville, born John Carteret, was as famous at age sixty-seven for his knowledge of Greek, German, and philosophy as for his diplomacy. The American scientist—advised to call upon the great Lord only days after arriving in London—may be forgiven for thinking they might be like-minded.
Perhaps he called too early. Fond of burgundy, John Carteret was not cheerful before noon. In any case, Franklin was stunned by his abruptness: “You Americans have wrong ideas of the nature of your constitution; you contend that the King’s instructions to his governors are not laws, and think yourselves at liberty to regard or disregard them…but…they are the Law of the Land, for THE KING IS THE LEGISLATOR OF THE COLONIES.”
This was news to Franklin, who recorded it, his capital letters capturing Granville’s tone of voice. He understood that the king might veto the Assembly’s laws, but he believed that the king had no right to make a law without its consent.
“He assured me I was totally mistaken,” Franklin reflected, after leaving Lord Granville’s gilded chambers in dismay, painfully aware that the president of the Privy Council was related by marriage to the Penns. Making short work of the meeting, Granville had informed him that the final arbiter of the dispute was his Privy Council, who would advise the king, whose word was law.
Dr. John Fothergill, a friend of Collinson’s, had advised Franklin that he should appeal to the Penns first, but that he must also honor Lord Granville. No more than a week in London, and the second most important man in government had warned Franklin that his very presence in court was a presumption.
As his coach made its way through late morning traffic up Whitehall toward the center of the city, Franklin brooded in the August heat. On his right hand rose the palatial Tudor façade of Northumberland House, home of Sir Hugh Percy, Earl of Northumberland, and a bastion of Tory power. Two blocks past it the coachman reined his horse, slowing to turn into Craven Street under the stone arch. It framed a narrow passage of cobblestone out of the Strand that grew wider as the coach put into the block of modest brick houses, twenty on the west side, fifteen on the east, the cul-de-sac fronting south on the embankment and a weathered wharf.
The dwellings looked alike, three stories high, brick fronts with recessed window openings, iron railings at the street level, iron balconies outside the second-story windows, dormers above, tiled roofs. He had liked the modest elegance of the place immediately. He liked his landlady, Mrs. Stevenson, exactly his age, fifty-one, and her bright daughter, Polly, sixteen years old.
The hackney slowed to a halt at No. 7 on the left, the east side, not far from the river. Ben Franklin carefully descended, in a state of mind as near to panic as this man—famed for his equanimity—was likely to experience. He had decided the moment he left Lord Granville that he would transcribe their dialogue verbatim as soon as he got home, so that his excitement would not subject his memory of the important matter to any distortion.
The gracious widow Margaret Stevenson would understand his haste and preoccupation now as she greeted him beneath the arch of the door, then watched her lodger pass from the paneled hall and reach for the stair rail purposefully. He was like no man she had ever seen, this American, reserved but witty, kind and resolute. The sound of his determined steps echoed as he climbed up to the rooms he shared with his son on the second floor. Up there were four paneled rooms, spacious, bright. The front room parlor looked out upon Craven Street through three large windows. If he leaned out the window he could see the river. The tide surged darkly under the white arches of Westminster Bridge. The midday light shone from the windows upon the chimney piece of carved wood with pilasters to the jambs; a few chairs, a cupboard, chests, and a writing desk where Franklin sat down, took up his quill, dipped it in ink, and wrote down Granville’s words concerning the Crown’s instructions to colonial governors: “They are first drawn up by judges learned in the laws; they are then considered, debated & perhaps amended in Council, after which they are signed by the King. They are then so far as relates to you, the Law of the Land…” If a man of Franklin’s age could be made to feel like a schoolboy, that was precisely Granville’s intention.
FRANKLIN AWAITED A NOD from the proprietors. Thomas Penn lived nearby in a mansion befitting one of the richest men in England, in Spring Gardens, a byway that gave onto St. James’s Park, not five minutes’ walk from Craven Street. The chief proprietor and the colonial agent could hardly avoid each other in their comings and goings in the shadow of Northumberland House, or skirting the statue of King Charles upon his horse in the center of Charing Cross junction.
Thomas Penn might have met Franklin in Philadelphia back in the 1730s, but only in passing. Their differences in station and principles made them natural enemies. Penn’s business in those years was defrauding the Indians, swindling them out of their land, and attempting to banish the Roman Catholics from the colony. More recently he and Franklin had exchanged letters on the subject of electricity; but since Franklin had founded the militia in 1748, Penn had been convinced that this was a person to be avoided if at all possible.
In 1751, Penn, at forty-nine years of age, had returned to England for good. He joined the Church of England, and married the twenty-two-year-old daughter of an earl. The most un-Quakerly son of William Penn, he grew so impatient with the opposition of the Quaker-dominated Assembly that he campaigned—one year before Franklin’s arrival—to remove all Quakers from office by ordering an oath of loyalty in every colonial legislature. As their faith prohibited them from swearing oaths, the law would have shut them out of the government. But Penn’s lobby failed and the Quakers kept their seats. They interfered constantly with his policies and browbeat his deputy governors, and now they had sent this upstart inventor to insist that his land be taxed.
At fifty-five, Penn was slender and fine-boned, with delicate features, bright eyes, and a dimpled chin. He had an air of supercilious mischief about him, and a smile ready to turn into a sneer. His portrait shows him dressed impeccably in an embroidered silk coat of grayish lilac, dun breeches, and a long white satin waistcoat.
When Franklin had been in his neighborhood for a few days, Penn sent word via Dr. Fothergill that he would receive him in his drawing room toward the end of the third week of August.
Franklin visited his antagonist in his home with all the rituals of courtesy. Penn was civil, inquiring about friends, complimenting the inventor on his book Opinions and Conjectures concerning electricity. Franklin had sent it to him in appreciation of Penn’s having provided the Philadelphia Library Company “a complete electrical apparatus” for his experiments. Such pleasantries soon gave way to business that Penn would have preferred to avoid, including promises of a reasonable accommodation, as Franklin recalled, adding that each side had its own notion of what was reasonable.
Franklin began by stating the Assembly’s complaints. First, Governor Denny’s power of making laws with the advice and consent of the Assembly, and raising funds for the country’s safety, had been abridged by Penn’s instructions that Denny might grant no defense funds without the proprietor’s assent. In wartime this posed a great risk to British soldiers, even the total loss of the colony to the enemy.
Second, the Assembly’s right to purchase supplies in wartime had been infringed by similar “instructions” that the governor refuse any bill for raising money that did not meet with Penn’s approval in every particular. Thus the Assembly was forced either to lose the country to the enemy, or to give up the people’s freedom to make their own laws.
Third and last, the proprietors had instructed their governor “to refuse his assent to any law for raising money by a tax, tho’ ever so necessary for the defense of the country,” unless their lands were exempt.
Franklin concluded by saying that the people of Pennsylvania regarded this as unjust and cruel. He later recalled that Penn justified his conduct as well as he could—which meant that he invoked his rights and duties as a grand seigneur. Just as Thomas Penn was responsible to King George for the colony of Pennsylvania, so was the Assembly answerable to the Penns, and the governor to his instructions. The proprietor and his governor had to protect the king’s interest in every particular; the governor’s control over the purse strings was standard practice.
“We now appeared very wide, and so far from each other in our opinions, as to discourage all hope of argument,” Franklin later reflected. Nevertheless, before seeing his guest to the door, Thomas Penn asked Franklin to present his complaints in writing, and said that he and his brother would consider them. Franklin complied, drawing up the document on Sunday, August 20, to be delivered to Spring Gardens by one of his servants that day or the next.
Franklin settled in to his new lodgings, six city blocks distant, to await the proprietor’s formal response. That was August 1757, and the Penns would keep him waiting for a long, long time, hoping he might give up and go away.
Anxious, fatigued, and far from home, the traveler got sick a week later. “A violent cold and something of a fever,” he wrote to his wife, “attended by great pain in my head, the top of which was very hot, and when the pain went off, very sore and tender.” Dr. Fothergill was worried and prescribed the powder of contrayerva root, Jesuit’s bark (quinine), and hartshorn drops. He grew alarmed as Franklin’s fits of pain continued twelve hours at a time, and once as long as thirty-six. The patient grew delirious, suffering continually from vertigo and a maddening ringing in his ears. “Too soon thinking myself well I ventured out twice, to do a little business and forward the service I am engaged in, and both times got fresh cold and fell down again.”
This went on for weeks, then months. He heard the sound of bees in his head and saw faint twinkling lights. He kept trying to get up. Dr. Fothergill grew furious and denied him not only permission to leave his bed, but also the use of pen and ink. It is hard to say from this distance in time what ailed him—probably some strain of encephalitis, a brain inflammation—and he was fortunate it did not carry him off that summer. On December 15 he wrote to Deborah that he was better, “but have not yet quite recovered my strength, flesh, or spirits. I every day drink a glass of infusion of bark in wine, by way of prevention, and hope my fever will no more return.”
Not until the new year would Franklin be strong enough to renew his petition. He was fortunate in having an excellent doctor who did not bleed him to death or poison him; and “the good lady of the house,” Margaret Stevenson, grew very fond of him and “nursed me kindly.” Above all he was fortunate in having William’s attention. “Billy was also of great service to me, in going from place to place, where I could not go myself.” This, like some other crumbs of praise Franklin scattered throughout his writings, is an understatement. “Billy” was not just running errands for his father as he passed in and out of consciousness. At twenty-six, he had virtually taken over the consulate his father was too feeble to command.
William wanted foremost to focus upon his law studies at the Middle Temple, one of the schools or Inns of Court, a cluster of medieval and Gothic buildings at the east end of the Strand. The Inner Temple, as the enclosure was called, lay between Fleet Street and the river, not fifteen minutes’ walk from Craven Street. While his father conferred with Granville and Thomas Penn, William explored the ivy-covered haunts of his future academy: such as the Middle Temple Hall, with its stained glass windows, oak paneling, and heraldic coats of arms. Elizabeth the First had dined here, and Sir Francis Drake. The last school term was just ending, and the next would not begin until November.
So when his father was stricken, William was able to devote full time to their mission. Indeed, during the months of September and October, there was very real concern on the part of the Franklins and their friends, and mean-spirited hope on the part of their enemies, that the agent for Pennsylvania might not live to complete his task. The Penns were taking no chances, organizing a public relations campaign to discredit the colonists, placing malicious, unsigned articles in the London papers. These letters claimed that the lamentable state of the colony’s defenses had one cause: the craven Quakers, whose faith excused them from taking up arms against their enemies or even offering support to those who would.
As Benjamin Franklin was in no condition to respond to these libels, his son took up his pen and wrote “To the Printer of the Citizen,” dated September 16, 1757, beneath the casual return address “Pennsylvania Coffee-house, London.” His letter of several thousand words begins by quoting a venomous paragraph from the London Citizen of September 9, “calculated to prejudice the public against the Quakers and people of Pennsylvania,” then sets forth six paragraphs meant to set the record straight.
The slanderer called Pennsylvania a colony where Indians had overrun the country, scalping innocent people while bills to raise funds for defense sank because of the Quakers. William answered out of hard-earned experience: First, the scalping of citizens was not peculiar to Pennsylvania but common to all the colonies. Second, the frontiersmen weren’t Quakers but Presbyterians and Moravians quick with saber and gun. Third, the disputes between the governors and the Assembly were caused by a foolish law that exempted the Penns from taxes. Fourth, while the Quakers declined to bear arms, when they had dominated the Assembly they had voted along with the rest to grant funds for the king’s use, which were then applied to defense.
William refuted the charge that the Indians were at the heart of the country, and that political bickering hindered efforts at defense. He pointed out that more had been done in Pennsylvania to defend the frontier than in any other colony: Fifteen forts had been raised; dozens of cannon were purchased, thousands of rifles and pistols—all of these deployed without benefit of a shilling from other colonies or the Crown.
In closing, William described himself as one who had recently left Philadelphia, was now in London, was not and never had been a Quaker, and wrote “purely to do justice to a province and people” recently abused in anonymous articles. He called upon the slanderer to come forth with proof for his charges—or to take shame upon himself. This was a persuasive letter fortified with facts. Readers unaware of Benjamin’s grave illness may have believed it had originated from the father’s hand and not the son’s, but the writing was all William’s. He took pride when the letter appeared in The London Citizen, then in The London Chronicle of September 17–20, 1757, at the cost to the writer of one pound. It soon was reprinted in The Gentleman’s Magazine, as well as in The Pennsylvania Gazette, where his fiancée read it.
BETSY HAD WRITTEN HIM on the first of October, no doubt wondering why she had not heard a word since his arrival in England on July 17. His letter to her on December 9 is an apology and explanation for his delay.
William is writing by candlelight at two o’clock on a Friday morning. The faint fragrance of wax lightens the coal fumes. His father is sleeping fitfully in the bedroom next door. He can hear his heavy breathing, then the hoarse cry of the night watchman telling the hour and the weather, a cloudy morning. “No doubt you must be much surprised at so many vessels arriving at different parts of America from England, without so much as a single line from the man who has so often, and so warmly professed himself your friend and admirer.” He can imagine what thoughts, what suspicions must run in her head—it physically pains him. But he has an excuse.
From the moment he arrived in London he has been so assaulted by sights and sounds, the great towers, castles, palaces, and steeples; the teeming streets, crossings and markets; bells, the cries of street vendors, the voices of ballad singers, the clatter of carriages and gilded coaches, the jostling of sedan chairs; everyone rushing who knew where in the labyrinth of the metropolis. At first it was all he could do simply to witness and adjust to the scale of his new environment.
Moreover, William had been obliged to take up his father’s business in society and court, meeting with politicians, philosophers, and men of business, men like Thomas Penn, and Governor Morris of Pennsylvania, and Governor Shirley of Massachusetts; the publisher William Strahan, who knew Dr. Samuel Johnson, and the historian Edward Gibbon, and the philosopher David Hume. They heard opera at Covent Garden, visited the British Museum, saw Garrick act Hamlet.
If he could not share it with her he longed to describe the pleasure he enjoyed in visiting Windsor Castle and the other places she herself had recommended to him: “the enchanting scenes at Vauxhall,” with its immense pipe organ in the center of the Garden’s main space, the lamplit paths where beaux and ladies strolled and flirted, “the elegant paintings and sculptures with which the boxes, the grand hall, and orchestra, are adorned; the curious artificial fall of water…” Such things would have made her think of the Elysium of the Ancients, Miss Elizabeth Graeme, with her poet’s soul—so would the picturesque country villages. And yet none of these things, he wrote, could rival her company.
Knowing how she disliked politics, he has less to say on that score. But since it is his business—or was his business before he began his law studies in November—he must inform her that he sees no prospect of any end to his father’s mission for the Assembly. The lords of the Privy Council most concerned with colonial affairs are so prejudiced against Pennsylvania, and they are so preoccupied with European troubles, Prussia being at war with Russia, they have no patience with the Franklins’ suit. This state of affairs, “joined with the obstinacy and wickedness of the proprietors render his task very uphill and difficult.”
Now the lover has reached a point where he risks putting his pride as well as his political concerns above his commitment to her. He had promised Betsy the year before that he would not allow politics—his father’s quarrel with Thomas Penn, her family’s friend—to come between them. William had promised faithfully to speak of the Penns with respect.
She would admit he was justified, however, in speaking of the proprietors with something less than respect if she knew that they were two-faced hypocrites. All the while the Penns pretended to settle things amicably with Benjamin Franklin they were publishing scandalous lies against the good people of Pennsylvania. Trusting in Franklin’s sincerity, while they delayed and stalled, they thought that he might not take notice of anonymous attacks in a newspaper. They may have deceived themselves in this thought, “this piece of low cunning,” for a while, but not for long under his watch.
The earnest suitor steps forth in his letter, as he had in life, admitting to his Betsy, with all possible humility and without apology, that he had written the letter published in the Citizen that caught the wicked slanderers dead to rights. The letter did “vindicate the honour and reputation of my country when I saw it so injuriously attacked!” Manfully he put his name to the paper, and the place where he could be found, the Pennsylvania Coffee-house, as a challenge, so as to put a stop to the anonymous attacks—otherwise the public would give no more credit to one side than the other.
And the stratagem worked. No adversary came forward.
It had been more appropriate for him to publish this, as a Pennsylvanian student visiting England, than for his father as the official agent for the colony. “I am told the Proprietor is much incensed against me on that account, though he don’t venture to complain as he is sensible that he was the aggressor.”
William seems to be flushed with confidence that his fiancée will share his exhilaration at his eloquence, bravery, and fame. By now she will have read the piece, so will her father and mother and most citizens of Philadelphia. The letter had echoed in print all over the English-speaking world; and he would be grateful if she would report to him any comments that she might have heard. “For my own private satisfaction I ask this favor,” he assures her, and for no other purpose.
The candle is nearly burnt down and his eyelids grow heavy. In haste he tells her he has taken the liberty of sending her, with this letter, some love tokens. She had sent him a silk watch chain she had braided herself. He was sending her a fashionable muff and tippet as are “worn by the gayest ladies of quality at this end of the town,” and a basket for the little ivory counters used in card games, woven by “a poor reduced lady of family who has no other way of getting her livelihood.” The muff was an erotic literary allusion. Betsy liked to compare him to Tom Jones for his gallantry, and Jones had a fetish for his lady Sophia’s muff. Now he commits his words and presents into the care of an Irish friend who would leave the next morning bound for Philadelphia. “Farewell, God bless and preserve you, is the sincere prayer of, Dear Betsy, your truly affectionate—Wm. Franklin.”
In this overdue letter William Franklin mentions, optimistically, that his father had had “several interviews” with the proprietors at Thomas Penn’s house in Spring Gardens, and that each time they had treated him with great civility. This may have been true, but they certainly had done nothing in the way of answering Franklin’s formal letter of complaint.
Benjamin Franklin did not realize for some time that the Penns were incensed even by the address of the letter: “To the Proprietors” should have read “To the True and Absolute Proprietaries.” Franklin’s omission of the glorious adjectives was taken as such an affront that Thomas Penn and his brother, for all their civility in the parlor, refused to deal directly with the complaints. They turned the letter over to their lawyer, Ferdinand John Paris. Franklin described Paris as a proud, angry man who had “conceived a mortal enmity” to him from years of antagonistic correspondence concerning the colony’s affairs. When Franklin declined to discuss his business with the disagreeable lawyer, the proprietors turned the matter over to the attorney general and then the solicitor general for their opinions.
And everyone waited.
Yet Ben Franklin persisted, as soon as his health allowed, relying on his charm and the Penns’ civility to get himself invited once more to the mansion around the corner from Charing Cross. Sometime in the second week of January, Franklin got out of bed, dressed formally for the battle, took up his tricornered hat and his stick, and walked to Spring Gardens. When he and Thomas and Richard Penn had finished asking after one another’s health and toasting the king’s, when they had passed some time and breath in banter before the fireplace, Franklin got down to business. In a letter to his friend Isaac Norris, Speaker of the Assembly, he recorded the conversation.
Franklin asked if it was not a right of the House of Commons to name officers to enforce laws, and to have those commissioners stand without a challenge. Thomas Penn admitted this was so; but, he continued, just because this was a privilege of the House of Commons it did not follow that it was the right of the Pennsylvania Assembly. Pennsylvania was a corporation chartered by the king, with no rights or privileges but those granted by its charter. The privilege you now claim, said Penn, is nowhere mentioned.
But your father’s charter, Franklin pleaded, “expressly says that the Assembly of Pennsylvania shall have all the power and privileges of an Assembly according to the rights of the freeborn subjects of England, and as is usual in any of the British plantations in America.”
“Yes,” said the son of William Penn, from a chilly eminence, “but if my father granted privileges he was not by the Royal Charter empowered to grant, nothing can be claimed by such a grant.”
Then Franklin’s mask of good humor tightened; his eyes betrayed their insight into a long-ignored infamy. “If your father had no right to grant the privileges he pretended to grant, and published all over Europe”—the sentence had swelled beyond temper and was threatening to go off—“as granted,” so that a generation or more of immigrants “came to settle in the province upon the faith of that grant and in expectation of enjoying the privileges contained in it”—Franklin, his face drawn after his illness, needed a breath, and took it—then those who came to settle in the province upon the faith of that grant “were deceived, cheated and betrayed.”
“They should have themselves looked to that,” his host responded. Franklin could hardly believe the man’s words or the expressions that ensued. “The Royal Charter was no secret! They who came to the province on my father’s offer of privileges, if they were deceived,” Penn said, laughing, “it was their own fault.”
And Ben Franklin sat wide-eyed, appalled at Thomas Penn’s insolence, the very idea that anyone would “thus meanly give up his father’s character.” Franklin later compared the man’s manner as “such as a low jockey might do where a purchaser complained that he had cheated him in a horse,” a phrase that found its way into the newspapers and back to the Penns. If there had been any reserve of goodwill remaining in January 1758, this interview exhausted it. “I conceived that moment a more cordial and thorough contempt for him than I ever felt for any man living—a contempt that I cannot express in words, but I believe my countenance expressed it strongly.” Penn’s brother Richard, looking hard at Franklin, observed it, as well as the color the discussion had raised in the older man’s cheeks. Franklin could think of no more to say in response to Penn’s remark “than that the poor people were no lawyers themselves and confiding in his father did not think it necessary to consult any.”
Thomas and Richard Penn forwarded Franklin’s complaints to the solicitor general for his opinion, “where it lay unanswered,” Franklin recalled, “a year wanting eight days.” That year, 1758, passed pleasantly enough. Ben Franklin rented a good coach, stocked the cellar with fine wine, and spared no expense upon tailors and cobblers to make father and son fit for London society. The Assembly would reimburse him by and by. William began his studies at the Middle Temple, which required attending lectures, reading for oral examinations, and “dining in” six or more times in the oak-paneled banquet room of the school, with a view to being called to the bar sometime in early autumn of 1758. In this adventure he enjoyed the company of a debonair thirty-six-year-old bachelor named Richard Jackson, a brilliant lawyer and politician who had been dubbed “Omniscient” by Dr. Johnson for his vast learning. Jackson had excelled at Cambridge and now was a fixture in the Inner Temple, a writer the Franklins admired for his knowledge of colonial affairs, especially charter rights. He took an immediate liking to William and became his guide not only through the Inns of Court but to the sites and amusements of the city on the Thames.
William must have been a quick study, and well prepared by Joseph Galloway’s tutorials in Philadelphia. A glance at the Franklins’ itinerary shows he was on the road with his father or Jackson for much of the spring term (April 15–July 31) prior to his final examinations rather than bent over his books. As much as father and son loved London and their rooms on Craven Street, there were discomforts in the city. The grate in the fireplace burned sea coal, and the fuel burned dirty, filling the air of the sitting room with thick oily smoke. Windows and mirrors had to be wiped daily. “The whole town,” said Franklin, “is one great smoky house, and every street a chimney, the air full of floating sea coal soot.” The only way to get a breath of sweet, pure air was to travel miles into the country for it.
In May they rode to Cambridge to meet John Hadley, a professor of chemistry, and conduct some experiments in evaporation. Franklin wetted the ball of a thermometer, not with alcohol, which was usual in such experiments, but with ether. They took turns pumping the bellows to evaporate the ether, watching the mercury drop to twenty-five degrees below freezing. “From this experiment,” Franklin wrote, “one may see the possibility of freezing a man to death on a warm summer’s day.”
In July the Franklins headed for Northampton and the hamlet of Ecton, sixty miles north of London. Franklin’s ancestors had lived there for generations before his father sailed for America. The ancestral home had been turned into the village school. The rector of the Ecton parish brought out the church register and showed them pages recording births, marriages, and deaths in the family going back two centuries. The rector’s wife led them to the cemetery and pointed out the Franklin gravestones, so mossy that the dates and words were invisible until she sent the sexton for a brush and pail of water. Peter, Franklin’s servant, scoured the stones for all to read. Then William, with paper and coal, took rubbings to send home.
The inventor and his son were fascinated by the new machinery in the factories in Birmingham—the flying shuttle and the carding machines in the cotton mills. This was the wave of the future, an industry that must soon make its way to the shores of America.
Ben Franklin returned to London in late August. William stopped at Tunbridge Wells, a fashionable resort in West Kent, in the company of his friend Richard Jackson, who was there brokering a marriage contract. William wrote to his father on September 3 telling him of his plan to stay there a week until Jackson had finished his business. Then they would return to London later in the month for a few days before setting out on a pleasure tour of Norfolk, the low-lying county in East Anglia on the North Sea.
In William’s letter to his father an expression of gratitude borders on abject apology: “I am extremely obliged to you for your care in supplying me with money, and shall ever have a grateful sense of that with the other numberless indulgences I have received from your paternal affection.” William was twenty-eight. At that age Benjamin’s income had come from his ownership of the most widely read newspaper in the colonies and his brainchild Poor Richard’s Almanac. He was father of two boys, guardian of his orphaned nephew, and grand master of the Pennsylvania Masons.
William, by contrast, was still a student. While by no means idle or profligate, he was financially dependent upon his fifty-two-year-old father, and Ben Franklin was keeping score, pound for pound, of William’s expenses: to Christopher the Tailor, Forfar for Hats, Regnier for Cloaths. Although some of these bills would eventually be charged to the Pennsylvania Assembly, Franklin would never let his son forget them.
“I shall be ready to return to America, or to go to any other part of the world, whenever you think it necessary,” William promised. He would soon be thirty, an age when most men had settled down, in an era and social stratum that frowned upon bachelorhood after that age of discretion. His father wanted to see him married.
He had not forgotten Elizabeth Graeme. When he returned from East Anglia on October 24, William found a letter from her. He had last written her in December expressing his affection. He was not a prolific correspondent, yet she had not been very responsive, either. Surely it had not taken two months for the London, the vessel bearing his letter, to reach her with all its passion, and the tippet and muff, or more than the same time for one of her letters to reach Craven Street. Yet summer had come and gone and he had heard nothing from Betsy.
Now he broke the seal on this letter dated May 7. The contents shocked him. Her original letter has been lost, but essential passages of it have been preserved in another that William wrote to Margaret Abercrombie, a friend of the lovers, to whom he confided his heartbreak.
Betsy had read his political letter to the Citizen when it was published in The Pennsylvania Gazette on December 8, 1757, five months before. His words blaming the proprietors disturbed her, she wrote, as she remained loyal to her father’s opinions and the Penns’ friendship. He was forsaking his promise never to allow politics to come between them. She called him a “collection of party malice” concluding that his carelessness was proof he no longer loved her. She condemned his selfishness in not admitting that his own frivolity, or his father’s conniving, or his attachment to party politics kept him from continuing “in the tender passion” he had promised her, and said she was neither so humble nor so abject that she would consider marrying anyone like that. “It would be folly, nay madness to think of running all risks” with such a man.
He was amazed by her fury. She did not understand that his goal since his arrival in London—especially his letter to the Citizen—had been to resolve his differences with the proprietors whom he looked upon, William wrote, “as the bane of my future happiness as well as that of my country.” He had hoped that once he exposed their lies, they would come to the table and listen to proposals for a friendly and honorable settlement of the dispute. How could she doubt his sincerity? He and Betsy had agreed “that in case of any change of sentiment, or that either should think the obstacles to our proposed happiness insurmountable, to give immediate notice.” Now he could not doubt it, she had changed. She had even gone so far as to dismiss his gifts of the tippet and muff as “Gawdy gee-gaws.”
He had been about to pick up his quill and write to her about the hopelessness of the negotiations with the Penns. Now this would be unnecessary. He would not write to her again. It would be his burden “to learn forgetfulness.” Certain that she had called off their engagement, he wrote a letter to Margaret Abercrombie in Philadelphia with the understanding that she would convey its anguished contents to his former fiancée, informing Betsy that he accepted, with deep sadness, her decision.
THIS WAS A SEASON of meaningful changes. Three weeks later Benjamin Franklin wrote proudly to his sister Jane Mecum that William had donned his gown as a lawyer and been called to the bar in Westminster Hall. Father and son marked the occasion, November 10, 1758, by having their wigs refurbished and purchasing new suits of clothes.
Then on November 27, the Penns finally answered the complaints Franklin had presented a year earlier. It was hardly what he had hoped for after so long a wait. The response to his formal complaint was not even addressed to the agent Benjamin Franklin but instead written as a “Message to the Assembly” from the Penns’ lawyer, Ferdinand John Paris. Without so much as naming Franklin, Paris claimed that Franklin’s original “Complaints” were vague and rude, and that ever since then, the agent had done nothing to advance negotiations, or attain the harmony they sincerely desired. In short, no sort of harmony or agreement was possible with such a person as Benjamin Franklin. “We are ready to receive the fullest information, and also to enter into free conferences on all these several subjects with any persons of candour, whom you shall authorize and empower for that purpose.”
“I need not point out to you,” Franklin later wrote to Isaac Norris, Speaker of the Assembly, “the mean chicanery of their whole proceeding.” Nevertheless “a final end is put to all farther negotiation between them and me.” The Assembly would have to recall him and appoint someone likely to be more pliant. This ought to have happened, yet somehow it didn’t. Franklin’s resignation was never accepted.
In that same letter to his friend Norris that might have ended in despair, Franklin offered another strategy, broader and bolder, to attain the ends for which he had sailed from America in the first place. If the Penns would not deal with him, there were others in power who would. He had been gathering support from liberal Englishmen and Scottish intellectuals. What Franklin was about to propose to Norris was a direct appeal to the Crown to disenfranchise the Penns. He had this plan in mind previously, when he had petitioned the king in the autumn of 1757 to take over responsibility for Indian affairs from the inept proprietors.
Franklin’s optimism was dazzling. He told Norris that the Assembly had advised him “to make no application to Parliament” before hearing further instructions. “Yet I shall immediately permit the publishing of a work that has been long in hand, containing a true history of our affairs and disputes.” From this forthcoming book, the work of Richard Jackson and William Franklin, he has high hopes. The whole sorry, sordid tale would be told, from the time the proprietorship descended from William Penn to his sons: Thomas’s tyranny; his cruel dealings with the Indians; his suppression of the Roman Catholics; finally the Penns’ infernal instructions to the governors shackling the Assembly, blocking not only the taxation of their lands but every bill necessary to defend the colony. “The proprietors will be gibbeted up as they deserve,” he vowed, “to rot and stink in the nostrils of posterity.” An Historical Review of the Constitution and Government of Pennsylvania, scathingly written, was published in June 1759.
That same month, news came from America that offered the Franklins enormous encouragement. In the face of relentless Indian attacks, Governor William Denny finally permitted the Assembly to pass a supply bill appropriating £100,000, a fund for defense that levied taxes on all land—including the proprietors’. He had defied their instructions, then left office, and left town.
At last the Franklins had a formal bill upon which to mount their case against the proprietors. The lawyer, Richard Jackson, would argue that the Penns had no right to review the bill in question or appeal to the Crown, because Governor Denny, their own deputy, had signed it. Thus under the terms of the royal charter, the bill had become the law of Pennsylvania.