Young Benjamin Franklin

by Nick Bunker

  If Franklin had a favorite noun, it was this one, a term that conveyed in the eighteenth century a far richer meaning than it carries today. In one form or another, the words “ingenious” and “ingenuity” appear seventeen times in his memoirs, used by Franklin to describe his father, his uncles, and all the other people he respected. When Franklin spoke of ingenuity, he had in mind a quality of being with as many facets as he had himself.

  It was a hybrid virtue, a blend of many different ingredients: intellect, of course, but also imagination and skills with the hand and with the eye as well as with the brain. Ingenuity required not only diligence and learning but also an element of playfulness and sociability. Once achieved, it could be a source of happiness as well as a way to make money. Everyone would want to meet ingenious people, because they were fascinating, fun to be with, and filled with curiosity. Their ingenuity might also take them up the social ladder, because the qualities they had, of wit, variety, and flair, were those that a gentleman was meant to possess: and a lady, too, if only she were given the opportunity to shine.

  Adopted from the Latin, the word had been current in English for centuries, but suddenly, in the 1650s and the 1660s, a moment arrived when ingenuity became the height of fashion. When Josiah was a boy, at the time when Newton was making his earliest discoveries, it seemed that an age of ingenuity was dawning, an era of progress and invention, with the English poised to take the lead—or so it seemed to them—as the world’s most ingenious people. And so the word was endlessly repeated, in books and pamphlets and in poetry. Josiah brought it with him to the colonies, where the pursuit of ingenuity became the guiding principle of Benjamin Franklin’s career.

  None of this came easily in an era when, however brilliant they were, people from the social rank of the Franklins had the odds stacked against them by a culture of deference, on both sides of the Atlantic, that only the most determined men and women could surmount. The Franklins always strove to be ingenious. For a while they were so successful that they briefly won acceptance as members of the gentry. Even so, in England their luck ran out, so that their quest for advancement ended in frustration. In America Josiah Franklin had to work still harder to secure his family’s future. On arrival he was treated as a nobody. In Boston it took Josiah more than twenty years to win the esteem his brothers had fleetingly enjoyed at home.

  All of this left its mark on his son. In Benjamin Franklin’s early life, his principal emotions were ambition and the fear of failure. He wanted to be ingenious and he wanted to be a gentleman: in his eyes the two things went together. Desperate to be successful, Franklin pushed himself hard, waging long battles against the temptations that ruined so many young people. By the time he came to Paris, Franklin knew how to pretend that he was always serene. But as Houdon the sculptor saw so well, behind the charm of the affable sage there lay a life with many layers: an odyssey complete with episodes of guilt and phases of anxiety.

  This portrait of the scientist as a young man begins with an incident of strife that occurred a hundred years before his birth. It took place in the heart of Shakespeare’s England, where the Franklins were a family of upstarts.

  Part One

  BEGINNINGS

  Chapter One

  HIS INGENIOUS KIN

  Seventy miles from London and beneath the turrets of a Norman castle, there stood the town of Northampton, spilling down a gentle slope toward the River Nene. In the early 1600s, it was a borough mainly built with wood and thatch, prosperous but overcrowded, and squalid with the smell of tanneries and leather. Most of its citizens earned their living making shoes, and so the fields around the town were filled with herds of cattle. The wealthiest men in the region were the graziers, whose cows and sheep had come to dominate the county.

  With many people hungry for some land of their own, its price was increasing rapidly, and few slices of real estate in the English Midlands were as precious as the valley of the Nene. To the south of the town, the ground rose up from the river toward a village by the name of Houghton Magna. It was here, in the course of a dispute about the tenure of the soil, that the Franklins left their earliest traces in history as anything more than brief entries in a parish register.

  The village had a splendid site, with a distant prospect of the castle. The houses were sturdy, built of stone, so that a few of them can still be seen today; but the most attractive feature of the place was the earth on which they stood. Fertile and easy to plow, the soil at Houghton Magna was “the best…in all Northamptonshire,” in the words of a surveyor at the time. Anyone who knew his land could see how good it was, and among the men who hoped to settle in the village was a blacksmith in his early thirties. His name was Henry Franklin: the great-grandfather of the sage of Philadelphia.1

  More than a hundred years later, living in retirement in Boston, one of Henry’s grandsons composed a family history: a remarkable document, colorful and rich in anecdote, of a kind that seldom survives from the working folk of England at this period. The author was Franklin’s uncle, another Benjamin, writing at the age of sixty-nine. His manuscript begins with old Henry, whom he revered as a man of principle who defended the villagers against an overbearing clique of landlords.

  As Benjamin Senior admitted, he had only “a dark idea” of his ancestor’s biography. Indeed his account of old Henry is garbled and mistaken when it comes to dates and details. However, the records that remain from the area are excellent, and they show us that the gist of the tale was correct. A resilient man, eager to rise in the world, Henry Franklin was something of a local hero, fit to inspire his descendants with an example of courage. Far into the eighteenth century, his story would help to fashion the view the Franklins took of themselves as people who refused to be done down by those who claimed to be their superiors.2

  Henry Franklin was born in 1573, four miles from Houghton Magna in the parish of Ecton, another hillside village above the River Nene. There he plied his father’s trade as a smith, making plowshares, horseshoes, bolts, hinges, and iron rims for wagon wheels. Away from the forge he was also a husbandman; or as we might say, a small farmer, owning a few dozen acres of land and some animals. In 1595—a year of plague and famine, when the laboring people of England were at their lowest ebb—he married Agnes Jones. She had a brother called Michael.

  His descendants remembered Henry as a dour, unsociable person, but he made friends with Michael Jones and they became partners in business. In about 1604, when James I had recently become the king, the two men bought some land at Houghton Magna, fine tillage for grain with a share of the hay from the meadows. And then the trouble started. The events that followed will lead us into the world from which the Franklins arose: a society whose harsh realities gave them their yearning to do better, but also taught them how to be pragmatic as they strove to climb above their circumstances.3

  In the sixteenth century, most of Houghton Magna had belonged to the Treshams, a renegade crew of Roman Catholics, led by an elderly patriarch, Sir Thomas, who suffered the persecution to which his faith was subject. For the crime of clinging to the old religion, he was sent to prison and made to pay huge fines. Being one of the richest of the graziers, of course he tried to make his tenants foot the bill. Not only did he raise the rents as high as they would go; Sir Thomas Tresham also hit upon the technique of enclosure. In London, which was growing fast, city dwellers wanted beef and mutton and the nation also needed wool to feed the textile trade. It made economic sense, or so the Treshams thought, to sweep away small farmers and replace their fields of grain with oblongs of grass, fenced and hedged for their vast flocks of sheep.4

  In 1601, Sir Thomas’s eldest son joined the Earl of Essex in his disastrous rebellion against Elizabeth I. To save the young man from the scaffold the family had to raise more money; and so they began to dispose of their estates, including Houghton Magna, which so far they had left unenclosed. At the end of 1604, the Treshams sold thei
r holding in the village to investors led by a fellow Catholic, one Ferdinando Baude. He set about at once to fence in the fields: including the tract of land that Henry Franklin had recently acquired.

  As often happened at the time, the title deeds at Houghton Magna were ambiguous and open to dispute. And so there were arguments aplenty: about who really owned each acre, and the rights they had to graze their animals or sow their crops. Soon Ferdinando Baude met with stiff resistance from the peasantry, who broke down his hedges and continued to plow their land. The villagers were “every day more obstinate,” he wrote. And among the awkward squad at Houghton Magna, none were more stubborn than Franklin and Jones.

  Mr. Baude hired ruffians who beat up Henry Franklin; and when that tactic did not work, he took him and Michael Jones to court, accusing them of fraud in the way they bought their piece of soil. As Mr. Baude saw it, he was on the side of progress, with his plans for what he thought was “a lawful and reasonable improvement,” while the likes of Jones and Franklin were nothing more than malcontents. “Covetous and troublesome”—those were the words Baude used about them: the earliest description we can find of any member of the Franklin family.5

  Now Henry was not the surrendering sort and neither were his friends on the farms at Houghton Magna. The villagers found their own attorney, a Puritan with a seat in Parliament, and meanwhile they also turned for support to the people of Northampton, a Puritan town where a Catholic landlord could expect to be vilified. And then, in November 1605, the nation reeled back aghast at some horrifying news: the Gunpowder Plot against King James, with Catholics like Mr. Baude to blame and the Tresham family among the plotters.

  Early in 1606, at what must have seemed to be an ideal moment, Jones and Franklin issued their legal defense against the lawsuit from the enclosers. In doing so they tried to occupy the moral high ground of virtue and the common good. In Henry Franklin’s eyes, the scheme to fence in the fields was nothing but a plot by powerful men to “prejudice the common wealth,” throwing the poor off the land, by what he and Jones called “the decay of tillage, and subversion & decaying of many houses…and the diminishing of people.”

  Eloquent though they were, Henry and his business partner failed to win their fight for justice. The details are obscure, but one thing we know: Jones and Franklin lost their bit of land at Houghton Magna. It appears that for a while Henry lost his liberty as well. In 1743, when Benjamin Franklin was trying to research his ancestry, he received a letter from his father in which Josiah added some more information. According to Josiah, Henry Franklin went to prison “on suspicion of his being the author of some poetry that touched the character of some great man.” The man he libeled must have been Mr. Baude or one of his cronies.6

  The times were hard, the economics cruel, and when Henry was defeated he was only one of many people dispossessed. Across a broad swathe of the English Midlands, the landlords went to work, enclosing the fields. Tenants were evicted, houses torn down, and livestock took the place of people; until at last, in the spring of 1607, in three counties in the region the peasantry could take no more. Taking up their billhooks and their scythes, they rose in a futile rebellion that ended with the bloodiest form of retribution.

  The authorities crushed the Midland Rising, hanged its leaders, and mounted their heads on the gates of the nearest town. In an effort to prevent more trouble, King James appointed a board of inquiry to investigate the enclosures. From the tattered records the board left behind, it is clear that the evictions at Houghton Magna had been some of the most destructive. When the members of the board came to Northampton, and summoned Ferdinando Baude to give evidence, he refused to appear: because he feared that a mob would lynch him in the streets.7

  It seems that Henry Franklin never joined the armed rebellion. Which is just as well, since if he had done so the Franklins might have vanished forever. The desperate truth was this: the landlords had won the day, and soon enough the government chose to take their side. The inquiry of 1607–8 was the last occasion when the English crown made any serious effort to halt the process of enclosure. In the years that followed, the Stuart kings fell in love with economic projects of the kind that Mr. Baude had called “improvement.” As a way to enhance the wealth of the nation, and to raise some revenue, the monarchy issued a host of permits and royal patents, not only for more enclosures but also for schemes to drain marshes, plant new crops, dig canals and mines, breed silkworms, and to found plantations, in Ireland or America. In these new outposts in the west, King James and his successors hoped to bring the benefits of progress to the heathen and the Irish, and of course there were profits to be made as well.8

  Eighty years had yet to pass before Josiah Franklin left for the colonies. In the meantime his forebears had to find a way to prosper at home, surrounded by powerful landowners whose estates grew ever larger as each decade went by. In this new environment, it made little sense to try to win an outright battle with the men of property. Instead, if a blacksmith wished to be successful, he would have to find ways to make himself useful to people of rank. And this is precisely what the Franklins did. Putting their talents to work for the local gentry, whom they could serve as craftsmen, secretaries, and surveyors, the Franklins acquired an education, a higher social status, and—eventually—the money to give their children a better start in life.

  After the affair at Houghton Magna, Henry Franklin stuck to his trade as a blacksmith. For fifteen years or so, his name drops out of the archives—it seems that he moved away, to the nearby town of Desborough—until in the 1620s he reappears at Ecton doing another property deal in partnership with Jones, whose career as a farmer had flourished in the meantime. In 1628, when King Charles I imposed the notorious Ship Money—in other words, a tax to finance his navy—the authorities made a list of the yeomen affluent enough to have to pay it. At Ecton the wealthiest was Michael Jones. Two years later the villagers chose Henry Franklin as the parish constable. This we know because again he was assaulted, this time by a man he was trying to arrest.9

  And so by the time Henry died in 1631, the Franklins were firmly planted at Ecton with their forge, their plot of land, and their successful in-laws. As yet the Franklins were still a long way from affluence, but they were headed in the right direction. Henry had a son called Thomas, born in 1598; and it was Thomas Franklin, Benjamin Franklin’s grandfather, who made the decisive breakthrough in the family’s affairs.

  In the 1640s, the Franklins began in earnest their ascent toward gentility. Mostly they owed their achievements to their talents, but they also acquired the powerful friends they needed. As their luck would have it, the village of Ecton had come to be controlled by a family of landlords who were unusual, highly intelligent people, less inclined than most of their class to bully their inferiors. In time they became the patrons of the Franklins in religion, in politics, and best of all in ingenuity. Far from being poor, Ecton was a thriving parish close to the highway; and far from being dull and isolated, the village was about to advance to the leading edge of the science of the era.

  THE MATHEMATICAL DIVINE

  In 1758, when he had recently made his home in London, Benjamin Franklin began what would become an American tradition. That summer he went to Northamptonshire in search of his ancestors, taking with him his son William. At Ecton they found the parish register and the family graves. They met the rector and his wife—“a good-natured, chatty old lady,” as Franklin described her—who supplied a brush and a basin of water to scrub the headstones clean of moss. Beyond the churchyard wall, Franklin saw the fine rectory house and the village his forebears had known, with a landscape that had barely altered since the 1300s.10

  Ecton had never been enclosed, and so, like the spokes of a cartwheel, three open fields, each a mile wide, still lay in a circle around the ancient church of St. Mary Magdalene. In medieval fashion, each one was divided into narrow strips, with just enough space for a plow and a team of
horses to turn at each end. To the north, the ground rose to a hilltop with another panoramic view across the valley. To the south, the earth dropped away into meadows where the village boys played bowls, except in those years when the grass was flooded by the Nene.

  The soil was not as rich as Houghton Magna’s, but it was fertile even so and in the town of Northampton they had a ready market for their crops. Because of all this, in the 1600s the minister at Ecton drew a handsome income from the tithes, three times larger than the average for a clergyman at the time. It was also a peaceful village where the farmers rarely quarreled with the lord of the manor. In 1629 they fell out about grazing rights, but the two sides reached a compromise, the fields were left unfenced, and the deal survived for another hundred years.11

  Nor did the residents come to blows about religion. By the 1640s the village had become a bastion of a quiet, unusually tolerant form of Puritan belief. In an age of bigotry, Ecton stood out as a place where people could be holy without being fanatical. Although the Franklins were always Puritan, enemies of anything that smacked of old Catholic ways, they did not have to fight to defend their creed, and from the records that remain it seems that the English Civil War passed them by entirely.

  It had not always been that way. At one time the Franklins had been in danger for their choice of faith. In 1546, soon after Henry VIII broke away from Rome, the authorities in Northamptonshire had begun to find artisans and farmers studying the scriptures for themselves. They described these early Protestants as “meddlers with the Bible.” The Franklins must have been among the meddlers, because Uncle Benjamin told a story dating from the reign of the Catholic queen, Mary Tudor, about a trick the family used to deceive her officials when they came in search of heretics. Although the first Bibles in English had only recently appeared, Henry Franklin’s father* had acquired a copy, which he fastened to the bottom of a stool. To read the word of God, he would flip the stool over and balance it on his knees while he turned the pages. One of his children stood at the door, watching for the clerical police. When they came by the old man would put the stool back on its legs, and the family pretended to be law-abiding.12