Young Benjamin Franklin

by Nick Bunker

  It would be foolish to suggest that the Franklins had anything directly to do with the Rye House Plot. The point is simply this: that Josiah felt that he had no future in a kingdom where the causes in which he believed were approaching their apocalypse. The Whigs were defeated, so were the dissenters, and that was why he had to leave for the colonies. In the closing days of May, to add to their first two children, Elizabeth and Samuel, his wife had given birth to a girl—another Hannah—but this did not deter the couple from their expedition.

  The weather was foul that summer, with weeks of heavy rain; but down the Franklins came to the capital, arriving in July, the season when cargoes were loaded onto ships bound for America. Those sailing for Virginia that year were filled with frontier supplies—lead shot, saddles, and gunpowder—but the vessels going to New England contained items more relevant to Josiah. The Franklins must have sailed on one of two ships, the Richard or the Endeavour, which made for Boston in August. In their holds, there were goods of the sort a civilized town required: not only spices, pewter, playing cards, and clocks, but also many rolls of silk, some of it raw and undyed.6

  At the age of twenty-six, Josiah was about to begin his new life in the New World. Although his reasons for leaving England were political and religious, he still had to select a destination. And so he chose to go to Boston, where—if the residents had a taste for silk—he might stand a chance of making a living as a dyer. However, in London and Boston alike it was politics, not commerce, that supplied the year’s main talking point. One of the ships that sailed from England that summer took with her a legal document whose arrival caused an uproar in Massachusetts.

  Not content with attacking the freedoms of London, King Charles and his advisers also intended to revoke the charters of companies such as the dyers, and those of Whig boroughs such as Banbury. The American plantations came next upon their list. Each colony had its charter or its patent from the Crown, giving it a constitution and a degree of self-government. A case could be made that by harboring smugglers, pirates, Whigs, and traitors, the colonies abused the liberties they enjoyed. And so, beginning with Bermuda, the Privy Council issued writs of quo warranto against the colonial charters.

  Among the most offensive, from the Crown’s point of view, was the old charter of Massachusetts, a place where Whigs existed in profusion. Dating from 1629, it gave the Bay Colony an array of privileges including the right to choose its governor. In June, as the Rye House Plot obsessed the capital, the judges at Westminster signed the writ against the Massachusetts charter, with a view to imposing far tighter control by the king. Soon the writ was on its way to America, carried by HMS Golden of the Royal Navy.7

  We will never know what the Franklins took with them to America by way of worldly goods; but he and Anne possessed an intangible asset that ought to have spoken more loudly than money. The couple resembled the first generation of Puritan exiles who had left the old country during a similar crisis in the 1630s, and come to Boston looking for a city on a hill. In Massachusetts, the Puritan clergy kept in touch with their brethren in London; they knew about the Rye House Plot; and they were expecting a horde of new arrivals from England. They also knew that the writ of quo warranto was crossing the Atlantic.

  In October, Anne and Josiah came ashore in Boston and HMS Golden sailed in as well, carrying the writ. Here again Josiah and the people of New England had something in common: on both sides of the ocean, liberties were being swept away. In Banbury that autumn, James West and the aldermen had to agree to surrender their borough charter, and soon after that he and his Whig allies lost their seats on the town’s ruling council. In London the dyers suffered a similar fate, forced to give up their old charter and to accept the supervision of the Crown. With their situations apparently so similar, the Franklins could surely expect a friendly welcome from Americans whose freedoms were in danger.8

  Or so it might have seemed; but until the very recent past, Boston has rarely been an easy place in which to be accepted as an immigrant. Dissenters and Whigs though they were, the Franklins were latecomers to a province already fifty years old and set in its ways. By now Massachusetts had acquired its own hierarchies, almost as conceited as those of the mother country. Far from being greeted as a hero in New England, Josiah found himself rejected: like so many immigrants in centuries to come, he and Anne were sent to the bottom of the heap.

  THE WINNING SIDE

  To begin with, the godly folk of Boston would not permit the Franklins to join a place of worship. Only in 1685, two years after his arrival, did Josiah’s name appear on the books of the town’s Third Church, the Old South Meeting House. Even then he and Anne were merely junior members, forbidden to take Communion. By Boston standards, their pastor Samuel Willard was a fair-minded fellow who opposed the pogrom at Salem. Even so, Mr. Willard clung to the old “New England Way,” obliging every worshipper to pass an exacting test of holiness before becoming a full member of a church. It took nine more years for Josiah Franklin to qualify. Although he had left England for the sake of his principles, it was only in 1694 that the Old South allowed Josiah to share the bread and wine.9

  We know all too little about Josiah’s first decade in America, but one thing we can say for certain: on arrival he underwent a humbling downgrade in his status. As a dyer of silk who had finished his apprenticeship, Josiah had ranked as a citizen of London, free to vote and to practice any craft he wished within its walls. In Massachusetts this meant very little; because, as he discovered, despite their imports of raw silk, the citizens of Boston had only the most basic of textile industries. While he and Anne strove to be accepted as Christians, Josiah also had to find a new career. He became a maker of candles, a business as unpleasant as the dyeing of silk but without the high wages he might have earned in the empire’s capital.

  As a tallow chandler, Josiah would have to boil down potash, lime, skin, bones, and animal fat to produce many gallons of jelly, through which to pass the twisted skeins of cotton that formed the wick. In the long Boston winters everyone needed candles, and so Josiah always had customers. They wanted candles made from consistent tallow and a reliable wick, to ensure that the flame would be steady. Quality, in a word; something the ingenious Josiah could supply, taking a measure of pride in his new line of work.

  Even so it was not the same thing as coloring silk in many shades, to be sold to the drapers of Banbury or London. In time Josiah added soap to his product range, and the Franklins perfected a recipe that saw them through the first half of the eighteenth century; but soap and candles could not satisfy the instincts of a craftsman so skillful. Nor would they take the Franklins swiftly up the social ladder. As they built their future in America, they had to endure what amounted to another long apprenticeship.

  Their progress was methodical but slow, and it had its episodes of grief. At about the same time as he and Anne joined the Old South, Josiah signed a lease on a small clapboard house in Milk Street, opposite the church. That summer, Anne gave birth to a fourth child, Josiah Junior, who would grow up to be a seafarer. Soon another daughter arrived, a little Anne. She was born in 1687, the date when Josiah passed another milestone: for the first time he featured on the list of Boston’s taxpayers, having made enough money to do so.

  In 1689 he went a step further and opened a shop on Cornhill, Boston’s leading thoroughfare, just around the corner from his home. That same year, the first Mrs. Franklin died in the heat of the summer. Anne’s age at death is unknown, but she passed away in July soon after the birth of her son Joseph. A few days later, the little boy died as well. With five young children to care for, her husband needed to marry again, and soon he found a second wife: Abiah, the mother of Benjamin Franklin, whose origins were almost a mirror image of Josiah’s.

  Before the wedding she was Abiah Folger, born into a Puritan clan whose roots lay in the English textile city of Norwich, full of weavers and dyers of the kind amo
ng whom Josiah spent his youth. In 1635 or so her grandfather joined the Puritan exodus to America, coming over with his son Peter, Abiah’s father, settling first in the Boston area, then on Martha’s Vineyard, and finally on Nantucket. There, like Thomas Franklin Jr. far away at Ecton, Peter Folger earned his keep as a surveyor and also taught school. Like Josiah with his conventicles, he was an independent who did not care to be told what to believe. In the 1670s he fell afoul of the law, refusing to pay a fine for contempt of court. And so he spent more than a year in a shed built for hogs that served as the Nantucket jail. Like Benjamin Senior in London, Peter Folger was a poet. In his sty he composed a polemic in verse against religious coercion, defending the rights of Baptists and Quakers to worship as they thought they should.10

  By 1688 his daughter was in Boston at the age of twenty-one. There Abiah Folger joined Mr. Willard’s church; in November 1689 she married the widowed Josiah; and she bore him ten more children. They came every two years or so until 1708, while Josiah slowly grew his business. Eighteen months after the marriage, he put up a small shed, eight feet square, behind the Milk Street property: presumably to house his vats and coppers and his store of tallow. That was in the spring of 1691. The seasons flowed by, his candles sold well, until at last—seven years later—there came a moment of public recognition.

  In Boston, the reins of civic power lay in the hands of the town meeting. In 1698, they picked Josiah to serve a yearly term as a tithing man. His duties involved inspecting inns and taverns and keeping good order, like his grandfather Henry so long ago at Ecton. At about the same time, Josiah hoisted a sign—the Blue Ball—above his premises: another symbol that at last he was a man to be reckoned with.

  It had taken fifteen years since his voyage from the Thames; and during his hours of toil with wax and soap, Josiah must often have wondered how much easier his life might have been if he had lingered on in Banbury. His situation had its share of irony: because, as things turned out, the Franklins need never have left the mother country for the sake of conscience. If Josiah had remained at home like his brothers, in time he would have found that they were on the winning side.

  Although the 1680s were a decade of turmoil, they had ended with the triumph of the Whigs. At home Charles II died in 1685 and his brother James II took his place, only to lose his crown to yet another of England’s coups d’état. Over from Europe there came a Dutch prince and a Protestant, William of Orange, married to James’s daughter Mary. He landed his army on the English coast; by the spring of 1689, he was calling himself King William III; and in Parliament his Whig allies engineered what came to be known as the Glorious Revolution. King James had left for Paris and then for Ireland, forming a Jacobite party and an army to wage war against England with the aid of their ally, Louis XIV.11

  Far to the west, Massachusetts greeted the new government with glee. In the interim, since the dark days of 1683, the colonists had lost their old charter and endured a period of coercion from the king’s officials. And so they rejoiced at William’s arrival on the throne. Staging their own revolution, the people of Boston kicked out the men they saw as lackeys of King James, and began to reclaim their heritage of freedom. Whigs for the most part, they knew that the future would be challenging—there would be war with the French fur traders to the north—but it was a war for a Protestant cause to which they adhered.

  In America and in the mother country the Whigs had been victorious, but it was the English members of the Franklin family who stood to benefit the most. In the Northampton area, the landlords were Whigs almost to a man, including the Catesbys to whom Thomas Junior was so close. With their patronage to help him, the 1690s were to be a decade in which he could attain new heights of prosperity. In London the dyers of silk clung equally firmly to the cause of King William; and when Parliament passed a Toleration Act, Benjamin Senior was free to hear as many sermons as he wished from his mentor, Nathaniel Vincent. His chapel now enjoyed the protection of the law.

  In Banbury meanwhile, where the Whigs were firmly back in power, a career in politics seemed to lie in store for John Franklin. By now he had become a man of property, owning his house and some land and a cottage that he let to a tenant. After the Glorious Revolution the Wests and their friends regained control of the borough and packed the corporation with their fellow Whigs. In September 1690, they chose the genial John Franklin as one of Banbury’s constables: the first step on the path that might take a man to the rank of mayor.

  And then disaster struck. While mounting his horse, John suffered a painful injury in his groin. He lanced the swelling with a dirty needle. A few days later, in June of 1691, John Franklin passed away—“much lamented of rich and poor,” said his brother Benjamin—leaving a son, five daughters, and a widow. Thomas Franklin Junior came over from Ecton to wind up his brother’s affairs, and the children were scattered far and wide. While the boy went on to become a dyer in a market town, the girls were sent out to make lace or to be ladies’ maids: and that was the sorrowful end of the Franklins of Banbury. Eighty or so years later, when Benjamin Franklin was living in London, he did his best to help his poor English cousins and their offspring, but some of them had disappeared entirely.12

  Ingenious though the Franklins were, their prospects in England were all too fragile without a much larger endowment of land to guarantee their status, and a much bigger fleet of children to ensure that their name survived. In London, where the death rate was far worse than in Oxfordshire, Benjamin Senior and his wife, Hannah, produced ten babies in the space of twenty years. Only two survived past infancy. Victims of the cruel demographics of their age, the Franklins were doomed to disappear in the mother country. Their fate was all the more poignant because it followed one last period of success.

  In the years after 1689, Thomas Junior enjoyed a degree of esteem from his neighbors that none of his forebears had commanded. At Ecton the bell foundry must have been making a rich return, because in 1698—the year the Blue Ball went up in Boston—his partner Henry Bagley built not a shed but a splendid stone house that still stands in the village. Meanwhile Thomas had also found a new patron, an aristocrat whose influence extended far beyond the confines of Northamptonshire. As Franklin put it in his autobiography, Thomas Junior “was much taken notice of and patronised by the then Lord Halifax.” All too easily overlooked, this is another remarkable detail; because the peer in question was one of the most powerful politicians of the age.

  In the 1690s, Halifax was not yet a nobleman in his own right—he was still merely Charles Montagu—but he had married a Yelverton lady, the widow of an earl. The couple took up residence a few miles from Ecton in the village of Horton, from which Charles would travel back and forth to Westminster. A trusted servant of King William, Montagu belonged to a Whig cabal, the Junto, that led the nation for six years, but his lasting achievements lay in finance. Not only did he help to found the Bank of England. Montagu, or Lord Halifax as he became, also enjoyed the doubtful distinction of inventing the National Debt, by issuing bonds to pay for the king’s long war with France.

  To pay the interest on the loans, the Whigs required new taxes and reliable men to collect them. Here was a task for which Thomas Franklin, land agent and surveyor, had all the necessary skills. When Parliament created a new levy on landed property, His Majesty’s Treasury chose Thomas Franklin as the inspector for Northamptonshire, a role that meant that he could be called a gentleman. The first and the only member of his family who could claim that title in England, he worked hard to justify his status. Riding to and fro, measuring the land, Thomas raised far more money than the Treasury expected, and they paid him a bonus for his pains. At election time he said thank you by voting for the Whigs. Meanwhile his patron Halifax grew ever more powerful. As the war against Louis XIV dragged on and the land tax became a permanent levy, Thomas Franklin did his bit to help, serving as clerk to the county’s tax commissioners.13

 
It was just the kind of quality—a flair for administration—that his nephew would display in America in the years to come, when Franklin ran the postal service for the colonies. The two men also had something else in common: a talent for attracting powerful friends, whom they could impress with their technical expertise, their honesty, and their willingness to undertake long hours of work. But in the England of 1700 or so, these qualities were far from sufficient to guarantee a permanent place among the gentry.

  As the fate of the Banbury Franklins had shown, you needed more than ingenuity; you also needed genteel lineage and real estate, and Thomas had nothing of the former and all too little of the latter. Nor did he produce enough children. He fell out with his family friends, the Palmers, in a legal quarrel about the tithes of Ecton; and then, having lost that battle, Thomas Franklin expired in January 1703. He died without a son and so his dynasty died with him.14

  Eight years later, his widow Eleanor joined him in the churchyard, where Franklin found their headstones beneath the tower where John Palmer had gazed at Orion. Eleanor and Thomas had a daughter, Mary, who married, sold the family acres, and moved away. Living to be eighty-five, she met her famous cousin when he visited Northamptonshire, but by then the graves and the chimes in the belfry were all that was left of her father’s ingenuity. If Eleanor had borne a son, the Franklins might have gone on rising to become a leading voice in the county. As it was the family baton had to pass across the Atlantic, to Boston where Josiah was inching forward year by year.

  He always kept in touch with his English relatives. So Josiah knew what his brothers had achieved. He also knew what he might have accomplished if he had stayed at home, to take the place of John and Thomas when they died. Did Josiah feel resentful or embittered? His American career must have been frustrating, and—as we shall see—in Boston the Franklins had their squabbles. So many children, in a small house, so many candles to make and so much soap to boil: it would be enough to give anyone a fit of temper.