The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (95 page)

Franklin
half expected to be home in time for the gathering. His two hours in the Cockpit erased what thoughts remained of retiring to England. He still had friends in Britain; he hoped he always would. But that part of imperial politics he had been able to put aside as superficial—the place-mongering, partisanship, sheer personal nastiness—he now saw as the central theme of London life. What had appealed about England was its intellectual openness, the opportunities it afforded to share ideas with men (and the occasional woman, such as Polly Stevenson) of curiosity, ingenuity, and a willingness to challenge received wisdom. But there was nothing open about a system determined to stifle the most fundamental liberties of a large portion of its people simply because they lived across the ocean.

Franklin was no stranger to political abuse; the proprietary party in Pennsylvania had circulated slanders petty and grand against him for years. But until now—and this had been one aspect of England’s appeal—those kinds of criticisms had gained little currency in London. The Penns muttered against him, of course, and Lord Hillsborough. But for the most part the British were courteous and respectful, even admiring.

No longer. In the London papers he was assailed as “this old snake” and “the old veteran of mischief.” He was called a “traitor,” “old Doubleface,” a “grand incendiary,” the “living emblem of iniquity in grey hairs.” His living quarters became “Judas’s office in Craven Street”; in that place were conceived and hatched his “vindictive subtlety, watchfulness, and politician tricks.” To his face—Franklin was in the gallery—Lord Sandwich castigated him before the House of Lords as “one of the bitterest and most mischievous enemies” Britain had ever known.

Franklin took the slanders for what they were worth. “You know that in England there is every day in almost every paper some abuse on public persons of all parties,” he wrote an Austrian acquaintance. “The King himself does not always escape; and the populace, who are used to it, love to have a good character cut up now and then for their entertainment.” He comforted himself that his friends were able to pierce the propaganda against him. “I do not find that I have lost a single friend on the occasion. All have visited me repeatedly with affectionate assurances of their unalterable respect and affection.”

In fact things were not so simple. Franklin’s friends were indeed
willing to give him the benefit of the doubt—but they did have their doubts. Joseph Priestley’s were fewer than most others’; he stood by Franklin, literally, in his hour of distress. Priestley described the denouement of the Cockpit scene:

Dr. Franklin, in going out, took me by the hand, in a manner that indicated some feeling. I soon followed him, and going through the anteroom, saw Mr. Wedderburn there, surrounded with a circle of his friends and admirers. Being known to him, he stepped forwards as if to speak to me; but I turned aside, and made what haste I could out of the place.

The next morning Priestley ate breakfast with Franklin and heard his friend’s reaction to events of the previous day. “He said he had never been so sensible of the power of a good conscience; for that if he had not considered the thing for which he had been so much insulted, as one of the best actions of his life, and what he should certainly do again in the same circumstances, he could not have supported it.”

David Hume was not present for Wedderburn’s performance, but he heard all about the Hutchinson affair. He wanted to believe the best of Franklin yet found it difficult. He wrote William Strahan:

I hope you can tell me something in justification, at least in alleviation, of Dr. Franklin’s conduct. The factious part he has all along acted must be given up by his best friends. But I flatter myself there is nothing treacherous or unfair in his conduct; though his silence with regard to the method by which he came by these letters leaves room for all sorts of malignant surmizes. What a pity, that a man of his merit should have fallen into such unhappy circumstances!

Hume added an anecdote he thought applicable to the case of Franklin and America. Hume had been visiting the Earl of Bathurst, whose son was currently Lord Chancellor. Discussion turned to America, and the authority formerly exercised over the colonies.

I observed to them that nations, as well as individuals, had their different ages, which challenged a different treatment. For instance, My Lord, I said to the old Peer, you have sometimes, no doubt, given your son a whipping; and I doubt not but it was well merited and did him much good. Yet you will not think it proper at present to employ the birch. The colonies are no longer in their infancy. But yet I say to you, they are still in their nonage, and Dr. Franklin wishes to emancipate them too soon from their mother country.

John Pringle defended Franklin against Hume’s aspersions. “I think your notion of his being naturally of a factious disposition unjust,” he wrote Hume. Yet the physician did not defend everything his erstwhile traveling partner had done. “I do not dispute his being carried by zeal for his country, and for the better serving those who employed him, to do things which cannot be easily justified.” Pringle considered himself one of Franklin’s closer friends; he was struck that during the whole Hutchinson affair Franklin had not uttered a single word to him on the subject. Pringle thought this confidentiality a fault, one that had led to the current imbroglio. “He could have advised with no mortal of common sense and common delicacy but who must have dissuaded him from availing himself in that manner of a private correspondence between two friends, much less transmitting of those letters.”

Having said this, Pringle again defended Franklin’s motives. “I must do him the justice to say that as long as there was any prospect (at least in his eyes) of accommodation, he laboured to bring it about; and that if his advice had been taken, all this mischief would have been prevented, and England and her colonies had been again on the best terms possible.” Hume had registered a belief that the Americans had been searching for a pretext for rebellion against the mother country; Pringle disputed this, especially as it applied to Franklin. “I can witness for our friend that, for the first seven years he was amongst us, I never heard a word intimating any thing else than a perfect satisfaction in the happiness the colonies enjoyed in the state they were in. And this sentiment continued with him and them until the unlucky act of Mr. Grenville [that is, the Stamp Act].”

Horace Walpole, a rather more distant observer, concurred that Franklin had been badly treated. Describing Wedderburn’s speech as “most bitter and abusive,” yet “much admired” by those present, Walpole continued, “The Ministry determined to turn Franklin out of his place of postmaster of America, which could but incense him and drive him (a man of vast abilities) on farther hostilities, and recommend him as a
martyr to the Bostonians.” (The editor of Walpole’s journal subsequently appended his own comment on the Cockpit scene, calling it “a capital one in giving date to the American war.”)

Edmund Burke shook his head at the fatuity of the entire affair. And as it became clear that the mind-set of Wedderburn characterized that of the government, Burke observed, “A great empire and little minds go ill together.”

“Your
popularity in this country, whatever it may be on the other side, is greatly beyond whatever it was,” William wrote his father from America. Popular evidence certainly indicated as much. Indignant crowds carried effigies of Wedderburn and Hutchinson through the streets of Philadelphia; the tag on the Wedderburn figure read, “Such horrid monsters are a disgrace to human nature, and justly merit our utmost detestation and the gallows, to which they are assigned, and then burnt by
ELECTRIC FIRE.
”

Franklin was gratified at the support, but he was more interested in what it was leading to. “I rejoice to find that the whole Continent have so justly, wisely, and unanimously taken up our cause as their own,” he told Thomas Cushing as the Continental Congress gathered in Philadelphia. Even now Franklin hoped history might be rescued from those who would foolishly wreck the empire. “I have been taking pains among them to show the mischief that must arise to the whole from a dismembering of the empire, which all the measures of the present mad Administration have a tendency to accomplish.” The Philadelphia meeting was what kept him in London. “Much depends on the proceedings of the Congress. All sides are enquiring when an account of them may be expected. And I am advised by no means to leave England till they arrive.” Those advising him not to leave gave him cause for optimism, which he passed along to Cushing. Referring to the resolutions expected from the Congress, he predicted, “Their unanimity and firmness will have great weight here, and probably unhorse the present wild riders.”

If he allowed himself some small hope, it came not at the expense of his determination. Indeed, his views hardened with the passing months. In the immediate aftermath of the Boston Tea Party he had argued for compensation to the East India Company as a magnanimous gesture, but now that the British government was insisting, he changed his mind and counseled withholding that satisfaction. To a Boston merchant (who
happened to be married to Franklin’s niece) he urged steadfastness: “If you should ever tamely submit to the yoke prepared for you, you cannot conceive how much you will be despised here, even by those who are endeavouring to impose it on you. Your very children and grandchildren will curse your memories for entailing disgrace upon them and theirs, and making them ashamed to own their country.”

He suffered no illusions as to the stakes of the game. If the British government failed to respond to reason, war was a real possibility, if not indeed a likelihood. General Gage had replaced Thomas Hutchinson as governor of Massachusetts; the military grip was tightening. “I am in perpetual anxiety lest the mad measure of mixing soldiers among a people whose minds are in such a state of irritation may be attended with some sudden mischief,” Franklin told Cushing. “For an accidental quarrel, a personal insult, an imprudent order, an insolent execution of even a prudent one, or 20 other things, may produce a tumult, unforeseen, and therefore impossible to be prevented, in which such a carnage may ensue as to make a breach that can never afterwards be healed.”

His own personal welfare was in jeopardy. “My situation here is thought by many to be a little hazardous,” he said, “for that if by some accident the troops and people of N[ew] E[ngland] should come to blows I should probably be taken up, the ministerial people here affecting every where to represent me as the cause of all the misunderstanding.” Friends advised his departure. But he would accept the risk, and stay till the outcome of the Continental Congress was known.

In fact
he stayed longer. There was nothing new in Franklin’s lingering in London; he had been doing that for nearly two decades. But this time he really wanted to leave. He would have, but for an unusual chess match with an unexpected outcome.

In November 1774 Franklin heard from one of his fellows in the Royal Society that a certain distinguished lady, the sister of Lord Howe, had taken a fancy to the notion of playing chess with the famous Dr. Franklin. Though the good doctor was celebrated throughout Europe for his keen mind and quick imagination, she believed she could beat him. Would he accept the challenge?