Young Benjamin Franklin

by Nick Bunker

  In retirement in New England, the old man wrote a manual for dyers, listing the tints he knew, and in combination with other sources from the period it tells us how he and his colleagues spent their days. The colors came to more than a hundred, from amaranth to scarlet, and from celandine to strawberry. Each shade was a mixture of many ingredients: among them antimony, madder, or verdigris, hardwoods from the Amazon, or spices from the Orient. Did the silk need to be yellow? If so, the dyer would turn to “the urine of laboring men, kept till it be stale.” Alternatively, if crimson were required the dyer could make do with a less appalling mixture.

  First he had to boil the raw silk, clean it with Thames river water—because it was oily, and made the soap froth and bubble—dry the fabric, soak it with alum, and smear it with more soap. Then he would make a liquor of cochineal, arsenic, and tartaric acid, boil it up with water, and immerse the silk. After that more drying, beating, a rinsing in hot suds, a soaking with more river water, and more beating and more drying. Add saffron and lime juice and the crimson would turn to Spanish carnation. If wheat bran went in, and Brazilwood as well, the silk would take on the color of blood.3

  Despite the smelly pits and boiling vats, the dyers of silk were proud of their trade and, because they were doing a form of chemistry, they won the respect of people of science, including members of the Royal Society. A dyer of silk had to be inquisitive, always looking for new methods or new sources of color. Careful too, extremely so: because, if he failed to pay attention, he would ruin the expensive stuff he had to beautify. He would have to be tough and determined as well, and capable of working fast. He was paid by the piece and not by the hour.

  In England Josiah spent thirteen years acquiring these habits of ingenuity, and in time he passed them on to his son. Although in Boston he had to find another career, Josiah never lost what Benjamin Franklin called his “mechanical genius.” In his autobiography, he remembered his father as somebody who was “very handy in the use of other tradesmen’s tools.” Along the way Josiah learned carpentry, the craft his brother Joseph had practiced, helping to rebuild the city after the Great Fire. Fifty years later in Boston, Josiah knew the trade so well that in 1722 he signed up a boy as an apprentice in joinery.

  At about the same time, Josiah took the teenage Benjamin to meet craftsmen of all kinds—bricklayers, turners, braziers, and more—in the hope of finding the career for which his son had the most aptitude. “It has ever since been a pleasure to me to see good workmen handle their tools,” Franklin recalled in his memoirs. “It has been useful to me, having learned so much by it…to construct little machines for my experiments.” As everyone knows, he chose not to build houses or to make brass kettles; but even so his father’s mechanical talents were essential for his future.

  As a printer Franklin made his own ink and sized his paper with gum and soap, drying it carefully overnight before it could bear the mark of lead type. These were skills akin to the dyer’s, and they would give Franklin the practical expertise he required as an electrician. For the vocation of science he needed something else as well: a love of books and what they had to teach. Here was another thing that London could supply and that Josiah conveyed to his children.

  It was a city of words that the Franklins were eager to absorb. Under Cromwell, provided they did not insult the regime the printers could publish more or less anything they chose; and even when Charles II came home from exile and more rigid censorship returned, books continued to pour from the presses. Most of the output was religious, but the Franklins were avid readers of sermons, tracts, and sacred poetry. They had all the more reason to study books such as these because—for an old Puritan family like this—the Restoration period gave rise to new dilemmas that they had to try to resolve as best they could.

  The London the Franklins inhabited, from a 1666 map by Wenceslaus Hollar showing the area—all in white—destroyed by the Great Fire. The silk dyers’ workshops were located along the northern bank of the Thames to the west of London Bridge, and also in Southwark. Little Britain, where Benjamin Franklin had his lodgings in 1724–25, was untouched by the flames, and it can be found immediately to the northwest of the gate in the city walls marked “C,” with Smithfield to its left. In 1726 Franklin lived on Duke Street just off Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the open space shown surrounded by buildings on the far left of the map.

  At Ecton before the death of Cromwell, in matters of belief their lives had been pious but uncomplicated, given that the Franklins, the rector, and the local gentry all shared the same Presbyterian creed. With the return of the king and his bishops, Mr. Palmer and his friends had to think again about their faith: but in a new, more troubled atmosphere.

  FOR PEACE AND GOOD ORDER

  In the autumn of 1662 Jane Franklin passed away. She had brought up her offspring with the Hebrew prophets and the psalms, in a cottage with Gospel verses painted on the walls. Her last seven years were full of affliction as she wasted away with tuberculosis. Despite her suffering, she never lost her attachment to the Book of Malachi, with its forecast of the coming of a Messiah. Although when she died Josiah was not yet five, her teachings remained a vivid memory that he shared with his son in Boston.

  In 1739, when Benjamin Franklin was starting to inquire into his origins, Josiah sent him some family anecdotes, telling him that his parents had taken “great care…to breed us up in a religious way.” These are simple words, but there was nothing straightforward about the plight of old Puritans in the 1660s. In every county with a strong Puritan element, the return of Charles II created a messy, ambiguous situation, in which men and women often had to make compromises that they found distasteful or dishonest. John Palmer and the Franklins found themselves in just this situation.4

  In politics and faith, Palmer had never been a radical. Outraged by the execution of Charles I, he never cared for Oliver Cromwell, whose religious policies he disliked, because—as a Presbyterian— Palmer did not favor a free-for-all, where every congregation worshipped independently, which was Cromwell’s way. But neither did Palmer want to see the bishops come back and make the old Anglican Church compulsory. The same thing was true of his landowning friends and kinsmen in their corner of Northamptonshire, the Catesbys and the Yelvertons. In the civil wars, they had stood up for Parliament; but even before Charles I met his end on the scaffold, they had been obliged to retreat into private life. Sir Henry Yelverton, a member of the House of Commons, lost his seat in 1648, bundled out of the chamber by Cromwell’s men in the military coup known as Pride’s Purge.5

  And so when Charles II came back to claim his throne, in theory the people of Ecton had little to fear from the monarchy. Because the rector and his friends had never been followers of Cromwell, John Palmer could stay on as the parish minister; and perhaps that should have been enough for the Franklins. Sadly, there was a complication: Palmer would have to abandon his Presbyterian faith, and so would his parishioners. In time this would lead to an important outcome: the departure of Josiah for the colonies.6

  There was a new Sir Henry Yelverton, son of the old politician, and he threw in his lot with the Royalists. In 1660, as the king prepared to return to England, young Sir Henry had gone hurrying about to rally the county to his side. With his own career to make, Yelverton was eager to be rid of the Cromwellians, whom he blamed for the long years of strife in which, as he put it, the people had been “torn in pieces by deceitful men.” Keen to see an end to conflict, Sir Henry wanted everyone—including Mr. Palmer—to line up in support of King Charles, in the hope that the nation would at last be reunited.

  The catch was simply this: all of them would have to accept the king’s new Book of Common Prayer, hateful though it was to Puritans because of the traces of Catholicism that it still contained. It took a while for matters to come to a head, but at last—in 1662—the moment of decision arrived. On August 24, the feast of St. Bartholomew, every clergyman in England had
to agree to use the new prayer book or face the loss of his position. Under pressure from Sir Henry, John Palmer signed his name, but many of the kingdom’s Puritan clergy refused to do so. They numbered about two thousand.

  On “Black Bartholomew’s Day,” as it came to be known, the Puritan ministers found themselves ejected from their parishes. While for the laity the consequences were less severe, even so it was a painful experience that spelled the end of an era of religious freedom. By now Jane Franklin was close to death—her funeral took place in October—but her husband lived on for twenty more years, obliged to be an Anglican against his conscience. The old blacksmith was sixty-four: a little late to change his ways. “And for Mr Franklin, I wish it were in my power to help him, but I fear he is but a partial conformist,” Sir Henry told John Palmer. In the end, Thomas Franklin swallowed his doubts and carried on going to Sunday service but only grudgingly. He did so “for peace and order’s sake,” Benjamin Senior recalled.7

  The story was all too familiar, in an era when old Puritans deeply resented a state religion that rested on the force of law. Left with bitter feelings of exclusion, many of them gave themselves a new identity, calling themselves “dissenters” and forming their own unofficial assemblies. These “conventicles,” as they were known, met on Sundays in fields or farmyards, and in doing so they committed a crime. New laws came into force, known as the Clarendon Code, which made conventicles illegal and barred the dissenters from holding public office.

  In Northamptonshire, however, where there had always been so many Puritans, the conventicles continued to flourish. Undeterred by the threat of prosecution, they drew their inspiration from some of the ejected ministers who refused to be silenced. As archdeacon, John Palmer had no choice but to enforce the Clarendon Code, with Thomas Franklin Jr. sitting by his side to take down the names of nonconformists. Often in poor health, Palmer would have preferred to be answering the letters he received from the Royal Society seeking his views about mathematics, astronomy, and the state of agriculture in his county. Instead he had to soldier on, trying not to be too severe. All the while he was shoved about by his superior in the church, the pompous old bishop of Peterborough, who issued John Palmer with a series of reprimands, urging him to be more rigorous.8

  Like the enclosure affair at Houghton Magna, this period of oppression lingered on in the Franklin memory long after the family had come to live in Boston. In his autobiography, Franklin tells us that his father and his uncle Benjamin had been among the nonconformists who joined the conventicles. The two boys were dissidents, members of a movement that linked the Ecton area with disobedient preachers in the capital. In his jurisdiction in 1669—when Josiah was twelve—Archdeacon Palmer counted more than thirty conventicles, with at least two thousand participants. Among them there were “far more women than men, many children and servants,” Mr. Palmer wrote. Most likely, Josiah attended the biggest of the assemblies, which met six miles from Ecton at a barn near the town of Wellingborough. The London connection came about because the dissenting clergy often went to live in the city—where it was easier to hide—and then made forays back to the countryside. The conventicles at which they preached included the one at Wellingborough.9

  And so by the time he became an apprentice, Josiah was already a rebel, if a peaceful one. On the waterfront in London, where the Franklins learned their trade with silk, he and his brother continued down the path of nonconformity. Because the rents were low, these were also the districts where the dissenting preachers chose to settle. By the river Thames the Franklin boys entered a religious underground: a twilight world of gatherings held against the law, where a young man could become a radical in politics as well as faith.

  EXCLUSION AND DESPAIR

  At his death in 1727, Franklin’s uncle Benjamin left behind a minor masterpiece. Preserved today as a manuscript in Worcester, Massachusetts, and all too rarely examined by historians, it consists of a cycle of poems charting his spiritual life from youth until old age. Benjamin Senior read an enormous amount and it shows: many of his poems are pastiche, as he imitates the famous writers of his age. Even so there was nothing naive about his writing.

  The longest poem in the cycle, “The Reflection,” an autobiography in verse, runs to nearly five hundred lines, with careful little notes in the margin giving names and dates. While the meter is clumsy and the style roughly hewn, “The Reflection” takes us deeply into the mind of the Franklins. We see the author and his brothers as they were in the seventeenth century, engaging with the public issues of their time and creating their endowment of ideas.10

  By the 1770s, when Franklin composed his own memoirs, the world had changed and his uncle’s kind of piety had become a museum piece. Even so, his account of his life contains many echoes of Benjamin Senior’s adventures in Restoration London. Both men had to live the life of an ambitious artisan, at the mercy of the market, beset by the lure of vice, and always at risk of failure. While the uncle prayed to a Presbyterian God and the nephew believed in Virtue, with a capital V, they both saw life as a journey for self-improvement in which it was all too easy to wander off the path.

  For Benjamin Senior, life in the city begins with a catastrophe. At sixteen he swears his indentures at Dyers’ Hall. Three months later the Great Fire sweeps through the capital. Like most Londoners, he blames the disaster on arson by the Catholics, but soon enough he finds another meaning in the destruction of the town. A book appears, God’s Terrible Voice in the City, written by a Presbyterian minister, Thomas Vincent, who sees the calamity as a punishment for wickedness: alcohol, idleness, and the slighting of the Gospel.11

  Terror grips Benjamin Senior’s heart, as he reads the book and recalls his mother’s warnings of damnation. His quest for salvation begins, but his poems hint at episodes of drink and fornication. Ill-treated by his boss, he is accused of theft. By now, his brother John Franklin is out of his apprenticeship, and he helps Benjamin clear his name, but only after weeks of anguish as they wait for the case to come to court.

  The innocent youth moves to a new master dyer, qualifies, and finds a spiritual mentor, in the shape of another Presbyterian pastor, Nathaniel Vincent, Thomas Vincent’s younger sibling. As the city lies in ruins after the Great Fire, the Vincent brothers bring the word of God to the people who have lost their homes. After that, Nathaniel goes to prison; but by 1672, when temporarily the authorities relax the Clarendon Code, he has his own chapel, down by the river, close to the workshops where the dyers color silk. Benjamin Senior joins his congregation. He remains a member for the next twenty-five years, taking shorthand notes, as Vincent builds a reputation for his sermons that extends as far as Massachusetts.*

  All the while, as he tries to resist temptation, Benjamin Senior feels the force of what he sees as tyranny. The bishops and the king begin another purge of dissenters, seeking once again to put an end to the conventicles. As he studies his Bible, in search of a parallel, Benjamin Senior reads the Book of Esther, the ancient Jewish parable of faith in conflict with the state. There he finds a prophecy of what is taking place in England, where the godly and the pious lie in danger of betrayal by Charles II. In the young man’s mind politics becomes an obsession, as he sees his quest for redemption mirrored in the traumas of his country.

  Across the sea in Europe, the Protestant cause lay in grave danger, as the Dutch lost battle after battle to the armies of Louis XIV of France. At home, there was the prospect of a Papist king of England, who would surely bring about the triumph of the Vatican. Although King Charles remained officially a Protestant, he never produced a legitimate heir and so the crown was likely to pass to his brother, the Catholic James, Duke of York. At Westminster, Parliament stood prorogued; and in the eyes of the king’s opponents, this seemed to prove that the monarch was bent like his father on ruling entirely by royal decree, with the aim of becoming a despot as absolute as King Louis at Versailles.

  Or so
it appeared to Franklin’s uncle. In “The Reflection” and his other poems, Benjamin Senior gives us his version of the crisis that occurred in the England of the late 1670s: the crisis which, as it unfolded, gave the Franklins their political philosophy. As he narrates in poetry the history of his time, Benjamin Senior shows us the emergence of a party—the Whigs—who would become the heroes of the Franklin family. Their leader was a member of the aristocracy, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, who had served his time in the corridors of power. Around him a Whig coalition began to form, embracing not only the dissenters, but also dukes and bankers, and gentry families from the countryside, people like the Catesbys of Ecton, who had felt deceived by the king’s snub to Parliament. From his pulpit in Southwark, Nathaniel Vincent gave sermons full of Whiggery, and the Dyers’ Company became another stronghold of Shaftesbury’s supporters.12

  Civil liberties, the right to jury trial, the Protestant succession, freedom of worship for dissenters, and taxation only with Parliament’s consent: these would be the doctrines of the Whigs. They also came to be the Franklin creed. For the rest of his days Benjamin Senior remained an ardent Whig, keen to lend his pen to the patriotic cause. In the reign of Queen Anne, when the Whigs ruled the nation and their hero the Duke of Marlborough led his armies to defeat the French, old Benjamin would write an ode in honor of his victories. He and Josiah had been Whigs from the beginning, in the late 1670s when the party first began to develop their ideology.