Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (26 page)

In the cosmopolitan mix of old and new classes that made up London, Franklin quickly found favor among the intellectual and literary set. But despite his reputation for social climbing, he showed little inclination to court the members of the Tory aristocracy, and the feeling was mutual. He liked to be among people with lively minds and simple virtues, and he had an inbred aversion to powerful establishments and idle elites. One of his first visits was to the press where he had once worked. There he bought buckets of beer and drank toasts to the “success of printing.”

Strahan and Collinson formed the nucleus of a new set of friends that replicated for Franklin his old Junto but with more sophistication and distinction. He had been corresponding with Strahan, a printer and part-owner of the London
Chronicle,
since 1743, when Strahan provided a letter of recommendation for his apprentice, David Hall, whom Franklin hired and later made his partner. They had exchanged more than sixty letters before they even met, and when they finally did, Strahan was smitten by the larger-than-life Franklin. “I never saw a man who was, in every respect, so perfectly agreeable to me,” he wrote Deborah Franklin. “Some are amiable in one view, some in another, he in all.”

Collinson, the merchant with whom he had corresponded about electricity, introduced Franklin to the Royal Society, which had already elected him its first American member a year before he arrived. Through Collinson he met Dr. John Fothergill, one of London’s foremost physicians, who became his doctor and helped advise him on dealing with the Penns, and also Sir John Pringle, a crusty Scottish professor of moral philosophy and later royal physician, who became his traveling companion. Collinson also brought him into the Honest Whigs, a discussion club of pro-American liberal intellectuals. Among its members, Franklin befriended Joseph Priestley, who wrote the history of electricity that secured Franklin’s reputation and went on to isolate oxygen, and Jonathan Shipley, the Bishop of St. Asaph, at whose home Franklin would write much of his autobiography.
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Franklin also got in touch with the wayward friend of his youth, James Ralph, who had been his companion on his earlier trip to London, during which they had a falling-out over money and a woman. Ralph’s character hadn’t changed much. Franklin carried from Philadelphia a letter to Ralph written by the daughter he had abandoned, who was now the mother of ten children. But Ralph didn’t want his own English wife and daughter to learn of his connections to America, so he refused to write back. He merely told Franklin to pass along his “great affection.” Franklin had little to do with Ralph after that.
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For the fashionable gentlemen of the aristocracy, elegant eating and gambling clubs, such as White’s and later Brookes’s and Boodle’s, were starting to spring up in St. James’s. For the burgeoning new class of writers, journalists, professionals, and intellectuals whose company Franklin preferred, there were the coffeehouses. London had more than five hundred at the time. They contained newspapers and periodicals for the patrons to read and tables around which discussion clubs could be formed. Fellows of the Royal Society tended to meet at the Grecian coffeehouse in the Strand, just a short walk from Craven Street. The Club of Honest Whigs met on alternate Thursdays at St. Paul’s coffeehouse. Others, such as the Massachusetts and Pennsylvania coffeehouses, provided an American connection. Franklin, always fond of clubs and the occasional glass of Madeira, frequented these and others.
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And thus he created an embracing new set of friends and hangouts that replicated the joys of the Junto and provided him with a modest power base among the city’s intellectuals. But it was, as Thomas Penn had predicted, a somewhat limited power base. The Proprietor had reassured his own allies, after Franklin’s appointment, that he might find favor among those who cared about his scientific experiments, but these middle-class Whiggish intellectuals were not the ones who would decide Pennsylvania’s fate. “There are very few of any consequence that have heard of his electrical experiments, those matters being attended to by a particular set of people,” Penn wrote. “But it is quite another sort of people who are to determine the dispute between us.” Indeed it was.
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Franklin came to London not only as a loyalist to the Crown but as an enthusiast for the empire, of which he felt that America was an integral part. But he soon found out that he labored under a misconception. He believed that His Majesty’s subjects who happened to live in the colonies were not second-class citizens. Instead, he felt they should have all the rights of any British subject, including that of electing assemblies with legislative and tax-writing powers similar to those of Parliament. The Penns might not see it that way, but certainly the enlightened British ministers would, he believed, help him pressure the Penns to revise their autocratic ways.

That is why it was a rude surprise to Franklin when, shortly after his arrival, he met Lord Granville, the president of the Privy Council, the group of top ministers who acted for the king. “You Americans have wrong ideas of the nature of your constitution,” Lord Granville said. The instructions given to colonial governors were “the law of the land,” and colonial legislatures had no right to ignore them. Franklin replied that “this was new doctrine to me.” The colonial charters specified that the laws were to be made by the colonial assemblies, he argued; although the governors could veto them, they could not dictate them. “He assured me that I was totally mistaken,” recalled Franklin, who was so alarmed that he wrote the conversation down verbatim as soon as he returned to Craven Street.
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Franklin’s interpretation had merit. Years earlier, Parliament had rejected a clause that would give the power of law to governors’ instructions. But the rebuke from Granville, who happened to be an in-law of the Penns, served as a warning that the Proprietors’ interpretation had support in court circles.

A few days later, in August 1757, Franklin began a series of meetings with the primary Proprietor, Thomas Penn, and his brother Richard. He was already acquainted with Thomas, who had lived for a while in Philadelphia and even had bookplates printed at Franklin’s shop (though Franklin’s account books show he did not pay all of his bills). Initially, the sessions were cordial; both sides proclaimed their desire to be reasonable. But as Franklin later noted, “I suppose each party had its own idea of what should be meant by
reasonable.”
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The Penns asked for the Assembly’s case in writing, which Franklin produced in two days. Entitled “Heads of Complaint,” Franklin’s memo demanded that the appointed governor be allowed “use of his best discretion,” and it called the Proprietors’ demand to be exempt from the taxes that helped defend their land “unjust and cruel.” More provocative than its substance was the informal style Franklin used; he did not address the paper to the Penns directly or use their correct title of “True and Absolute Proprietaries.”

Offended by the snub, the Penns advised Franklin that he should henceforth deal only through their lawyer, Ferdinand John Paris. Franklin refused. He considered Paris a “proud, angry man,” who had developed a “mortal enmity” toward him. The impasse served the Proprietors’ ends; for a year they avoided giving any response while waiting for legal rulings from the government’s lawyers.
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Franklin’s famous ability to be calm and congenial abandoned him at a rancorous meeting with Thomas Penn in January 1758. At issue was Penn’s right to veto the Assembly’s appointment of a set of commissioners to deal with the Indians. But Franklin used the meeting to assert the broader claim that the Assembly had powers in Pennsylvania comparable to those that Parliament had in Britain. He argued that Penn’s revered father, William Penn, had expressly given such rights to Pennsylvania’s Assembly in his 1701 “Charter of Privileges” granted to the colonists.

Thomas replied that the royal charter held by his father did not give him the power to make such a grant. “If my father granted privileges he was not by the royal charter empowered to grant,” Penn said, “nothing can be claimed by such a grant.”

Franklin replied, “If then your father had no right to grant the privileges he pretended to grant, and published all over Europe as granted, those who came to settle in the province…were deceived, cheated and betrayed.”

“The royal charter was no secret,” Penn responded. “If they were deceived, it was their own fault.”

Franklin was not entirely correct. William Penn’s 1701 charter in fact declared that the Pennsylvania Assembly would have the “power and privileges of an assembly, according to the rights of the free-born subjects of England, and as is usual in any of the King’s Plantations in America,” and thus was subject to some interpretation. Franklin was nevertheless furious. In a vivid description of the row, written to Assembly Speaker Isaac Norris, Franklin used words that would later, when the letter leaked public, destroy any chance he had to be an effective lobbyist with the Proprietors: “[Penn spoke] with a kind of triumphing, laughing insolence, such as a low jockey might do when a purchaser complained that he had cheated him in a horse. I was astonished to see him thus meanly give up his father’s character, and conceived at that moment a more cordial and thorough contempt for him than I have ever before felt for any man living.”

Franklin found his face growing warm, his temper starting to rise. So he was careful to say little that would betray his emotions. “I made no other answer,” he recalled, “than that the poor people were no lawyers themselves, and confiding in his father, did not think it necessary to consult any.”
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The venomous meeting was a turning point in Franklin’s mission. Penn refused any further personal negotiations, described Franklin as looking like a “malicious villain,” and declared that “from this time I will not have any conversation with him on any pretence.” Whenever they subsequently ran into one another, Franklin reported, “there appears in his wretched countenance a strange mixture of hatred, anger, fear and vexation.”

Abandoning his usual pragmatism, Franklin began to vent his anger to allies back in Pennsylvania. “My patience with the Proprietors is almost, though not quite, spent,” he wrote his Pennsylvania ally Joseph Galloway. He was, along with his son, preparing to publish a history of the Pennsylvania disputes, one “in which the Proprietors will be gibbeted up as they deserve, to rot and stink in the nostrils of posterity.”
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Franklin’s ability to act as an agent was thus pretty much over, at least for the time being. He was nevertheless still able to provide his Philadelphia friends with inside intelligence, such as advance word that the Penns were planning to fire Gov. William Denny, who had violated his instructions by allowing a compromise that taxed the Proprietary estates. “It was to have been kept a secret from me,” he wrote Deborah, adding with a bit of Poor Richard’s wit: “So you may make a secret of it too, if you please, and oblige all your friends with it.”

He also was effective, as he had been since a teenager, at using the press to wage a propaganda campaign. Writing anonymously in Strahan’s paper, the London
Chronicle,
he decried the actions of the Penns as being contrary to the interests of Britain. A letter signed by William Franklin, but clearly written with the help of his father, attacked the Penns more personally, and it was reprinted in a book on the history of Pennsylvania that Franklin helped compile.
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As the summer of 1758 approached, Franklin faced two choices: he could return home to his family, as planned, but his mission would have been a failure. Or he could, instead, spend his time traveling through England and enjoying the acclaim he found among his intellectual admirers.

There is no sign that Franklin found it a difficult decision. “I have no prospect of returning until next Spring,” he reported to Deborah rather coolly that June. He would spend the summer, he reported, wandering the countryside. “I depend chiefly on these intended journeys for the establishment of my health.” As for Deborah’s complaints about her own health, Franklin was only mildly solicitous: “It gives me concern to receive such frequent accounts of your being indisposed; but we both of us grow in years, and must expect our constitutions, though tolerably good in themselves, will by degrees give way to the infirmities of age.”

His letters remained, as always, kindly and chatty but hardly romantic. They tended to be paternalistic, perhaps a bit condescending at times, and they were certainly not as intellectually engaging as those to his sister Jane Mecom or Polly Stevenson. But they do convey some genuine fondness and even devotion. He appreciated Deborah’s sensible practicality and the accommodating nature of their partnership. And for the most part, she seemed accepting of the arrangement they had made long ago and generally content about staying ensconced in her comfortable home and familiar neighborhood, rather than having to follow him on his far-flung travels. Their correspondence contained, until near the end, only occasional reproaches from either side, and he dutifully provided gossip, instructions about how to dismantle his lightning rod bells, and some old-fashioned advice about women and politics. “You are very prudent not to engage in party disputes,” he wrote at one point. “Women should never meddle in them except in endeavors to reconcile their husbands, brothers and friends, who happen to be on contrary sides. If your sex can keep cool, you may be a means of cooling ours the sooner.”

Franklin was likewise solicitous, but again only mildly so, about the daughter he had left behind. He expressed his happiness at receiving a portrait of Sally, and he sent her a white hat and cloak, some sundries, and a buckle made of French paste stones. “They cost three guineas, and are said to be cheap at that price,” he wrote. If he felt the tug of his family, it was not particularly strong, because he had a mirror one in London. As he noted in a cavalier postscript to a rambling letter to Deborah that June, “Mrs. Stevenson and her daughter desire me to present their respects.”
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