by Nick Bunker
And so the Franklins had to be cautious: but not for very long. In the country close to Ecton, many of the landed gentry were going their way and abandoning the old Roman religion. Across the valley to the south there stood the village of Whiston, where by the 1570s the principal landlords, the Catesby family, had become ardent Puritans, picking as their chaplain a preacher who hoped to sweep away all that was left of Popery in the region. In 1574, the Catesbys bought the manor of Ecton, which gave them the right to choose the rector of the parish. With that the village became a Puritan enclave where the Franklins could be as prayerful as they chose; and they were all the safer because the Catesbys had acquired some allies in the world of politics. In 1560, one of the Catesby daughters had married a lawyer, Sir Christopher Yelverton, who stood at the peak of his profession. He was a Puritan too. In time he became one of the highest judges in England, and in Parliament he served as speaker of the House of Commons.13
The Yelverton estate was seven miles from Ecton, and from there Sir Christopher’s web of patronage spread out across the county. His alliance with the Catesbys would endure for many decades, and in time it proved to be very fruitful for the Franklins. As it happened, the Catesbys and the Yelvertons had a taste for science. It led them to promote young men of learning: and these were the people who took Ecton to the forefront of ingenuity.
In the famous words of Sir Isaac Newton, if he saw further than other scientists it was because he stood upon the shoulders of giants. In the generation just before Sir Isaac, the giants of English science included a mathematician, Samuel Foster, whose father was the parish minister at Whiston. After graduating from Cambridge University, Foster became the protégé of the Yelvertons, who did all they could to help his career. In 1636, he took the post of professor of astronomy at Gresham College in London, where he applied the new discoveries, logarithms and the like, to the problems of navigation and the mapping of the stars. Foster had a scientific friend, John Palmer, another Cambridge graduate, and he was the man—“the famous Palmer,” as Benjamin Franklin described him in the 1750s—who became the friend and mentor of the village blacksmith and his family.14
At Ecton in 1641, the post of rector fell vacant. By now the civil war was approaching and in the county of Northampton, where so many of the gentry were Puritans, politically at odds with King Charles, it seemed that the moment had come to complete the English Reformation, by filling the pulpits with clergymen who shared their opinions. To occupy the rectory, the Yelvertons and Catesbys chose Mr. Palmer, who was only twenty-eight. He would be the Ecton pastor for more than thirty years, a fair-minded man who tempered authority with kindness. His prestige was all the greater, not to mention his wealth, because John Palmer married Bridget Catesby.
By way of his theology, Palmer belonged to the Presbyterian wing of the Puritan movement. In other words, he was a moderate, an opponent of King Charles but otherwise conservative, and so although he disliked the authority of bishops he did not intend to turn the world upside down for the sake of being zealous. Next to Bridget and the Bible, the pursuit of science counted as the principal love of Palmer’s life. By the age of twenty, he was already taking daily notes of wind and weather and poring over books by maritime explorers. At Ecton he made the church tower his observatory, while the rectory became his studio for designing instruments for mariners. There with Foster’s help he compiled a catalogue of eclipses, using his equations to forecast the arrival of each one.15
A man abreast of all the latest inventions, John Palmer owned a telescope and a “minute watch,” with which he took down the details of twelve eclipses of the sun and moon. On these occasions he would always have an audience, eager to see if the event occurred just as the rector had predicted. A case in point was the gathering at Ecton on the morning of March 29, 1652, when right on cue, at 9:21, the sun disappeared from view. “I observed the great eclipse,” Palmer wrote, “in the company of half-a-score gentlemen and ministers my neighbours.” To measure the depth of the darkness they went indoors and tried to read a page from a book.16
From the church of St. Mary Magdalene at Ecton, Northamptonshire, the monument to the Franklin family’s friend and mentor, the scientist Archdeacon John Palmer (1612–79). Based on an earlier portrait, it was carved in about 1732 by the Flemish sculptor J. M. Rysbrack: who also created the monument to Sir Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey.
Somewhere in the gaping crowd you would have found the Franklins. Of this we can be sure, because when Palmer needed help with things mechanical, the man to whom he turned was the blacksmith, Thomas Franklin. By the time Palmer took up his post, Thomas was a hefty fellow in his mid-forties: good-looking, suntanned, but “inclined to corpulence,” according to Benjamin Senior. To hide his baldness, Thomas always wore a cap. He was a Presbyterian too, with a list of Bible texts that formed his personal liturgy. His wife, Jane, led her women friends in midweek sessions—two hours, every Thursday—at which they sang hymns and discussed last Sunday’s sermon. While their piety was bound to recommend the Franklins to the rector, Thomas also had the skills to assist him with his scientific work. Two of John Palmer’s account books have survived, to show us how closely he and the blacksmith cooperated. Two pages record Thomas Franklin’s debts to the rector for tithes and rent, but much of the time he settled them by doing jobs for Palmer at the smithy.17
Old Thomas was one of those people we all need at a moment of crisis: the sort of person who can mend anything broken, after years of solving problems in his workshop. In his spare time he practiced surgery—he cured his son Benjamin’s swollen leg with a poultice and ointments he concocted—and he could do carpentry and turn wood on a lathe. Thomas Franklin could read and write, with fine calligraphy. He knew history and he could make guns. He could also build the wonderful clocks that English blacksmiths loved to assemble from iron teeth and cogwheels fashioned in the forge. Best of all, his son remembered, Thomas had “some skill in astronomy and chemistry, which made him acceptable company to Mr Palmer.”
By now the English had a word for clever people such as this. In 1658, Palmer brought out a book, The Catholique Planisphere, in which he described his own invention, a new kind of astrolabe, mounted on a tripod so that the user could carry it about to fix his latitude at any spot on land or sea. It was, Palmer wrote, a device “very useful for mariners, and for all ingenious men, who love the arts mathematical.” That was the word: “ingenious.” When he spoke the language of ingenuity, John Palmer caught the spirit of the decade.
The civil wars were over, King Charles had been beheaded in 1649, and Oliver Cromwell was left to govern the nation with all the discreet charm of a military dictator. Among his supporters there were men and women who felt that with their new republic the English were about to enter a golden age. They were, said one pamphleteer, “an ingenious and industrious people.” Led by Cromwell, his major-generals, and the Puritan clergy, they hoped to guide the rest of the human race along a path of godliness, science, and prosperity.18
In the Midland counties, these ideas found a spokesman in a veteran of Cromwell’s army, Captain Walter Blith. From his home a day’s ride from Ecton, the old soldier beat the drum for progress, calling himself “a lover of ingenuity.” His magnum opus appeared in 1652, dedicated to Cromwell and filled with new ways to plow or plant trees, new species of grass, and new methods for preventing floods. “If we can but bring ingenuity into fashion,” wrote Captain Blith, “this very nation might be made the paradise of the world.”
Far from being empty words, the captain’s bold agenda struck a chord with his neighbors. Cromwell died, a Stuart king returned in 1660, and it became apparent that if England wished to be ingenious, it did not also have to be a Puritan state. A monarchy would do just as well; and under Charles II and his successors the cult of ingenuity grew stronger. In the year of his restoration the Royal Society came into being with a mission to educate the nation
in the ways of science. Few people were more receptive than those who dwelled in Northamptonshire.
In 1712 a local clergyman by the name of John Morton produced a pioneering book, a natural history of the county, in which he catalogued in loving detail its plants, its animals, its landscape, and its geology. He gave examples of local people of ingenuity—clergymen, physicians, and landlords—who had made improvements in the valley of the Nene. Among them Morton mentions craftsmen who took old workshop skills and developed them as far as they would go, partly as a way to make a living but also just for the pleasure of creating something new and magical. For example, only two miles from Ecton the Franklins had a rival, Samuel Warren, “an ingenious blacksmith” who doubled as a hydraulic engineer. The Earl of Northampton used vast quantities of water, to fill his ponds and cascades and to feed his kitchen and his laundry. But the nearest spring was a mile away. So Warren built a chain of aqueducts, pipes, and a water wheel, to ensure that the earl would always have his fountains and clean linen.19
In the work of blacksmiths such as Warren and the Franklins, we can find a foretaste of the scientific movement that the sage of Philadelphia would strive to create in the colonies. Fed by new ideas from London, the English cult of ingenuity put down ever deeper roots in the Midland counties until it underwent another transformation, as scientists and artisans worked closely together with people of business: in other words, the cult of ingenuity gave birth to the Industrial Revolution. It began in the years around 1760, at about the time when Franklin took his summer break at Ecton, where he found the roots of his own ingenious ways among the sort of people who had made that revolution feasible.20
Of all the English Franklins, the cleverest was his uncle, Thomas Franklin Jr., born in 1637, only five years before Newton, whose origins could also be found among the farmers of the Midlands. When Benjamin Franklin came to visit, the rector’s wife had a fund of anecdotes about Thomas Junior that he found enthralling. He and his uncle were two of a kind, eager to use their talents for the public good. In fact, the likeness between them was so uncanny that when William Franklin heard the stories told at Ecton, he fancied that perhaps his father was Thomas Junior reincarnated. He noted the fact that Thomas Junior had passed away precisely three years before his nephew was born. “Had he died on the same day,” William said, “one might have supposed a transmigration.”
Thin and dark haired, Thomas Junior had a hot temper and he could be abrasive but he was also an excellent craftsman. Trained as a blacksmith, like Samuel Warren he became an expert with water, devising a system of sluices to prevent the Nene from wrecking the meadows. He taught school, he dealt in tobacco, and he played the organ. Inheriting his father’s writing skills he also worked as a scrivener, drafting wills and leases. In 1665, when John Palmer became Archdeacon of Northampton, with the job of making sure that the clergy and the laity did as they were told in matters of religion, he chose Thomas Junior as his clerk. Chiefly, however, Thomas made his living as a surveyor, acting on behalf of the Catesbys, the Palmers, and other landowners eager to enhance the value of their estates. A cache of his letters has been preserved, dating from the 1670s and 1680s. They show us Thomas Junior hard at work collecting rents, overseeing the harvest, and shipping coal for kitchen fires around the countryside.21
Later in America his nephew would invent the famous Franklin stove, more correctly described as an iron fireplace, designed on scientific principles to heat a room efficiently. If the Franklin stove had its own genealogy, part of it lay in Thomas Junior’s career as an engineer in rural England. “He was looked upon by some…as something of a conjuror,” the rector’s wife remembered, and his magic included the creation of bells for churches. Not far from Ecton there was a patch of clay and sand ideal for shaping molds in a foundry. And so in the 1680s Thomas Junior became the partner and friend of a bell founder, Henry Bagley, who moved his works to Ecton and took the Franklins into the business of casting bronze.
Archdeacon Palmer’s brother-in-law, the Whig landowner Thomas Catesby (1632–99), who employed Franklin’s uncle Thomas Franklin Jr. as land agent and surveyor on his estates at Ecton and Whiston, Northamptonshire. With Catesby is his wife, Margaret, on their monument at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Whiston.
For the makers of bells, it was a golden age when—after decades of neglect, as churches fell into disrepair during the years of civil strife—suddenly the clergy and their congregations found that they had money to spend. And so the firm of Bagley & Franklin turned out scores of bells, to be hauled up muddy lanes by teams of horses bound for parishes many miles away. When the cathedral at Lichfield installed a new ring of ten bells, the largest of which weighed a ton and a half, they ordered them from Mr. Bagley. By the time Benjamin Franklin arrived in the 1750s, the foundry at Ecton had long since disappeared, but a set of chimes survived, placed in the church tower by Thomas Junior; and before he left the village, the great American heard them play a patriotic tune.22
And so, long before Franklin was born in Boston, his forebears in seventeenth-century England had already been ingenious, as they followed careers that required not only fine craftsmanship but also a talent for business. Like every family with aspirations, the Franklins gazed southwards down the highway to London, where the skills a boy could learn were still more advanced and earnings were much higher than in the countryside. Old Thomas Franklin had six sons, and while Thomas Junior would inherit the forge, the younger boys had to find their own vocations. Beginning in the 1650s, all five of them—including Franklin’s father, Josiah—were sent to the capital to enroll as apprentices. Their timing was perfect, as they arrived in the capital in the age of Cromwell and then of Charles II, ready to catch a rising tide of creativity in the mechanical arts.
Fascinated as he was by chemistry, old Thomas selected a demanding trade where his sons could develop capabilities beyond his own. Four of the boys were to train as dyers of silk, led by Samuel, the second son. It was a shrewd choice of occupation, and one that would have its consequences in America. In the art of coloring, a young man could become still more ingenious, as he acquired not only a host of practical skills with the eye and with the fingers but also what amounted to a scientific education in the curious behavior of alkalis, acids, and the fabrics to which they were applied. Eighty years later, the everyday grind of Josiah and his brothers would come to fruition in Philadelphia, in Franklin’s experiments with electricity.23
* Or perhaps Henry’s grandfather: the dates of the generations are not entirely clear.
Chapter Two
COATS OF MANY COLORS
The decisive turning point in the lives of the Franklins can be given an exact date and almost a precise location. It took place ten years before the Great Fire of London. On July 24, 1656, at the age of fourteen, Samuel Franklin—good-looking and “very ingenious,” it was said—came to the hall of the Dyers’ Company to sign his indentures as an apprentice. The hall stood somewhere close to the River Thames, at the heart of the city, and so it was destroyed by the flames and its site was lost. If its address could be found today it would merit a plaque to commemorate Samuel’s arrival, because this was where the Franklins set off on the journey that would lead to the birth of American science.
To secure an apprenticeship for Samuel counted as a fine achievement in itself. To win his son a place in a sought-after trade,Thomas Franklin Sr. had to find a master craftsman prepared to take on the boy. In return there was always a fee to be paid to the employer, which for a trainee dyer of silk would be at least £10. In England at the time, it would take a skilled artisan six months to earn that kind of money, and so it was a hefty price for a country blacksmith to afford.
Even so Thomas Senior found the cash for the master’s fee: not once but five times, for all his younger sons, hard evidence that he had been a constant worker at the forge. After Samuel, he sent John Franklin to Dyers’ Hall to swear his
own indentures in 1660. Next to come were Joseph and Benjamin, Joseph as a carpenter and Benjamin as yet another colorist. The last of the boys to arrive was Franklin’s father, Josiah. In London in 1671, at the age of fourteen, Josiah Franklin became an apprentice dyer of silk.
Samuel died young and never qualified; but the others—John, Benjamin, and Josiah—all reached the end of their seven years of training. With that they became freemen of the Dyers’ Company. This was just as much a mark of social status as it was a means to earn a living. As members of the company, they were also enrolled as freemen of the City of London, which gave the Franklin boys the right to vote in local elections as well as the prestige that came with the mastery of a difficult vocation.1
The dyeing of silk was a booming business, but only a fit and strong young man could endure the burdens it imposed. In the second half of the century the market for silk in England more than doubled in size, so that in the 1680s it was estimated that more than forty thousand families earned their keep from weaving or handling the fabric. To make dresses, robes, and drapery, the silk had to be colored and this required subtlety and imagination. Hence the high wages the dyers could negotiate. In exchange they suffered a daily ordeal of stink and heat and scummy residue.2
It was a filthy way to make ends meet, so horrid that the dyers were confined to the poorest parts of London, where their pits and vats caused the least offense. The waterfront was the usual location, and this was where the Franklins plied their noxious trade. “My practice was upon raw silk in the skein, both black and colours, for about 30 years,” wrote Benjamin Senior in his family history, “and afterward I dyed garments…and stuffs and cloths for about nineteen years more.”