But close as he was to the pro-American members of Pitt’s chaotic ministry (made even more leaderless by the death of Townshend a few months after he passed his disastrous Acts), Franklin was in no position to predict the outcome of the constant jockeying for power among the rival groups and factions in Parliament, and around the throne. Thus, in the first days of the new year (1768) Franklin dolefully reported to William: “Dear Son. . . . Just when I wrote it was thought the ministry would stand their ground. . . Lord Shelburne is stripped of the American business which is given to Lord Hillsborough as Secretary of State for America, a new distinct department.” Franklin told his son that only time would tell how “these changes may affect us,” but he was obviously avoiding the truth to keep up William’s spirits. In a letter written the same day to Joseph Galloway, he was more candid. The change in the ministry was almost certain to be a disaster, for both the western colony and English-American relations. Of Lord Hillsborough he said, “I do not think this nobleman in general an enemy to America; but in the affair of paper money he was last winter strongly against us.” Hillsborough and several other new ministers, such as Lord Sandwich, were attached to the faction revolving around the Duke of Bedford, “a party that has distinguished itself by exclaiming against us on all late occasions,” Franklin gloomily observed.
Boston’s riotous defiance had infuriated Parliament and aroused a new wave of anti-Americanism in England. Franklin tried to combat it with a smooth, beautifully written essay, “Causes of the American Discontents before 1768.” Essentially it was a plea for a return to the old requisition system of raising money for America. He then examined the various hones of contention on which both sides had been gnawing and analyzed them in a spirit of rational good will. He struck hard, however, at the punishment of the New York Assembly for noncompliance with the Quartering Act. To suspend an Assembly because they declined to raise money as Parliament ordered them meant, to Americans, that they must “obey implicitly” every law made by Parliament to raise money without their consent under threat of losing all their rights and privileges. Nevertheless, Franklin maintained that despite all these resentments, the colonists remained attached to the King by “principle and affection . . . but a new kind of loyalty seems to be required of us, a loyalty to Parliament. . ..” Again Franklin touched here the heart of his conception of American rights, the image of a free people who settled America and then freely consented to continue their membership in the British Empire, through their loyalty to the King, while they retained, through their individual Assemblies, the right to legislate for themselves on domestic matters. It was Parliament’s interference in these domestic rights that was at the heart of America’s resentment.
William Franklin proudly told his father that readers in America thought “The Causes more to the purpose than all the Farmers’ letters put together.” But they were scarcely published when the latest news from Massachusetts caused a whole new uproar in Parliament. The radicals had gained control of the Massachusetts Assembly and issued a circular letter calling on all the colonies to boycott every item on which the Townshend Acts laid a duty, and simultaneously to petition the King for their repeal. Resolutions by a Boston town-meeting along similar lines had already aroused “a prodigious clamour” in Parliament, Franklin told William, adding, in an obviously discouraged tone, “I have endeavored to palliate matters for them as well as I can. . ..”
Even before the news of the Massachusetts circular letter reached London, Franklin was discovering that Lord Hillsborough was anything but friendly either to America or to him. On March 13, 1768, he was writing mournfully to William, “The purpose of settling the new colonies seems at present to be dropped.” Instead of backing a surge westward, as Shelburne had done, Lord Hillsborough was more inclined to order a massive withdrawal, leaving Forts Pitt, Oswego, Niagara, and other outposts to the colonies to garrison and keep up. “As to my own sentiments, I am weary of suggesting them to so many different inattentive heads,” Franklin said, “though I must continue to do it while I stay among them.” The only progress he had to report was that Sir William Johnson’s letters about the boundary change, “were at last found and orders were sent over about Christmas for completing the purchase and settlement of it.”
Franklin asked Hillsborough to send duplicates to Johnson and urge a speedy execution, using the weapon that William and his friends had created in their letter-writing campaign, the threat of an Indian war. But in the present state of massive dissatisfaction with America, even this weapon had become a two-edged sword. “I can tell you there are many here to whom the news of such a war would give pleasure,” Franklin told his son, “who speak of it as a thing to be wished; partly as a chastisement to the colonies, and partly to make them feel the want of protection from this country, and pray for it.” Even more ominous was Hillsborough’s personal animosity toward Franklin. “My Lord H. mentioned the Farmers’ letters to me, said he had read them, that they were well-written, and he believed he could guess who was the author, looking in my face at the same time, as if he thought it was me. He censured the doctrines as extremely wild. . ..”
Meanwhile, Franklin’s own thinking on British-American relations was undergoing a gradual change. “I know not what the Boston people mean by the ‘subordination’ they acknowledge in their assembly to Parliament, while they deny it the power to make laws for them, nor what bounds the Farmer sets to the power he acknowledges in Parliament to regulate the trade of the colonies, it being difficult to draw a line between duties for regulation and those for revenue. . ..” The more he thought and read on the subject, Franklin said, the more he began to think “that no middle doctrine can be well maintained.” Something might be made of either extreme, “that Parliament has a power to make all laws for us, or that it has a power to make no laws for us; and I think the arguments for the latter more numerous and weighty.” Franklin’s only solution to this dilemma was a legal union between the colonies and Great Britain, similar to the one which joined England and Scotland. But he gloomily admitted “such union is not likely to take place.”
Along with these possible visions of the future, Franklin lived very much in the present. He was always aware that his enemies might try to strike at him through his son. One day early in March 1768, George Grenville complained in the House of Commons that Governor William Franklin of New Jersey and two other governors had callously ignored an order sent to them, to report on the manufactures carried on in their respective provinces. Franklin immediately rushed to the House of Commons and studied the reports of the other governors, hurried back to Craven Street and wrote a warning letter to William. He told him that all the reports were “much in the same strain, that there are no manufactures of any consequence. . .. These accounts are very satisfactory here and induce the Parliament to despise and take no notice of the Boston Resolutions [calling for nonimportation].” He urged William to send in his account before the meeting of the next Parliament.
Franklin found himself first fascinated and then disgusted by the choosing of this Parliament. He wrote wryly to Joseph Galloway that the first record of bribery in a Parliamentary election was in Queen Elizabeth’s time, when a man paid four pounds to local officials to send him to Parliament. “The price has monstrously risen since that time, for it is now no less than 4000 pounds! It is thought, that near two millions will be spent this election.” To his political lieutenant, Franklin pictured the whole thing as a gigantic raffle. “But those who understand figures say . . . The Crown has two millions a year in places and pensions to dispose of, and it is well worth while to engage in such a seven years lottery, though all that have tickets should not get prizes.” To William he was more harsh and emotional. “This whole venal nation is now at market,” he said, “will be sold for about two millions, and might be bought out of the hands of the present bidders (if you would offer half a million more) by the very devil himself.”
A month later, with the elections over, Franklin wrote to Wil
liam in an even more disgusted tone. “There have been amazing contests all over the kingdom, twenty or thirty thousand pounds of a side spent in several places, and inconceivable mischief done by debauching the people and making them idle, besides the immediate actual mischief done by drunken mad mobs to houses, windows, etc.”
Even more repellent to Franklin was Parliament’s arrogant treatment of John Wilkes, a radical who had been prosecuted for abusing the King in his newspaper, The North Briton, in 1763. Wilkes had fled to France to escape jail, and returned home in 1768 to run for Parliament. He was elected overwhelmingly, and when the government fined him 1000 pounds and sentenced him to jail for twenty-two months, London was engulfed in wild rioting. Troops were needed to restore order. Parliament then nullified Wilkes’ election, but he ran again and was reelected. Twice more, Parliament reenacted the farce and finally, in complete desperation, declared Wilkes’ opponent elected, even though he had lost by a five to one majority. By now “Wilkes and Liberty” was the battle cry of the British lower classes, particularly in London. Some radicals in America took up the cry, and named towns and children after Wilkes. But Franklin was not impressed by the lawless mobs of coal heavers and porters, tailors and Thames watermen who roamed the streets of London, wrecking and looting. Wilkes himself, it should be noted, and Franklin certainly knew this, had no use for these excesses. “I am not a Wilkite,” he insisted. To Franklin the disorder was only further evidence of how badly the English were governing themselves. “Some punishment seems preparing for a people who are . . . intent on nothing but luxury, licentiousness, power, places, pensions and plunder,” he said.
On the heels of Wilkes came the letters of Junius. No one has been able to decide with certainty the identity of this literary mystery man who supported Wilkes, and for the next three years savagely attacked the King and other members of the British establishment in the most searing terms. One thing is certain, Junius was an insider, who knew who was sleeping with whom, and getting what, and he told it all in blisteringly specific detail. “Sir,” he sneered at George III, “it is the misfortune of your life . . . that you should never have been acquainted with the language of truth. . .” The Duke of Grafton, a pro-American politician, was another favorite Junius target, as was Lord Mansfield, the anti-American Chief Justice. From an American point of view, Junius meant little to Franklin. But he could not help absorbing some of the venom Junius spewed on the men with whom Franklin had to deal in his day-to-day London life.
The elections strengthened the hand of the anti-American forces in Parliament. One of their first moves was a threatening gesture toward Franklin. As he told the story to William in a long letter early in July 1768, he had received a warning of what was to come, thanks to his friendship with Grey Cooper, a secretary of the treasury and good friend of Sir John Pringle. Cooper, Franklin said, “desired me by a little note to call upon him. . .. Which I did, when he told me that the Duke of Grafton had mentioned to him some discourse of Lord Sandwich’s. . .” Sandwich was the new Postmaster General, and a close friend of George Grenville. He had told Grafton, who was now acting as First Minister in a reorganized cabinet that the post office in America was suffering, because of Franklin’s long residence in England. “The Duke had wished him [Mr. Cooper] to mention this to me,” Franklin continued, “and to say to me at the same time that though my going to my post might remove the objection, yet if I choose rather to reside in England, my merit was such in his opinion, as to entitle me to something better here, and it should not be his fault if I was not well provided for.”
Franklin could have replied that there was another perfectly content American undersecretary at home on the job, his friend, John Foxcroft of Virginia. But this might have sounded impertinent, so he quietly said that he was thinking of going home but he was also “extremely sensible of the Duke’s goodness” and had lived so long in England and felt “a friendship and affection for many persons here” that he was equally willing to stay “sometime longer, if not for the rest of my life.”
Franklin went on to describe in detail how Cooper had next introduced him to Lord North, the pudgy, sleepy-eyed new Chancellor of the Exchequer, who professed himself to be delighted that Franklin “was not unwilling to stay with us” and hoped that “we shall find some way of making it worth your while.” Then came a long conference with Mr. Todd, the Secretary of the Post Office, which made Franklin suspect that he was the real author of the move to oust him, because he had a friend who wanted the job. Franklin then made several calls on the Duke of Grafton, but neither a new appointment nor a definite decision to oust him from the post office was forthcoming Personally, he told William that he did not “think it fit to decline any favor so great a man expressed an inclination to do me, because at court if one shows an unwillingness to be obliged, it is often construed as a mark of mental hostility, and one makes an enemy.”
Thus Franklin moved through the political jungle. It was exhausting, frustrating, enervating work. He told William of spending another long night with Lord Clare, head of the Board of Trade. “He took me home from court . . . that I might dine with him as he said alone, and talk over American affairs. . .. He gave me a great deal of flummery, saying that though at my examination [in the Stamp Act crisis] I answered some of his questions a little pertly, yet he liked me, from that day, for the spirit I showed in defense of my country; and at parting, after we had drank a bottle and a half of claret each, he hugged and kissed me, protesting he never in his life met with a man he was so much in love with.”
Two days later, Clare was ousted from his job, and Lord Hillsborough took his place, while simultaneously retaining the title and powers of Secretary of State for America. The change, Franklin ruefully told Joseph Galloway, was “very sudden and unexpected.” It was not good news for either the Franklins or America. But there was an even worse possibility in the offing, as Franklin warned William. George Grenville was likely to become First Minister again and this meant that Franklin would definitely refuse “anything that would seem to put me in his power.” Grenville was almost certain to bring about “a breach between the two countries” — England and America. The refusal was more certain to give offense for the reason Franklin had just explained. “So that you see a turn of a die may make a great difference in our affairs. We may be either promoted or discarded; one or the other seems likely soon to be the case, but it is hard to divine which.”
To William Franklin these words could only have been disturbing. He was doing a first-rate job dealing with a ticklish colonial Assembly during a period of serious unrest. He did not want his future decided by the words and actions of his father, who was deeply and personally involved in the complex politics of London 3,000 miles away, especially when Franklin added, “I am myself grown so old as to feel much less than formerly the spur of ambition, and if it were not for the flattering expectation, that by being fixed here I might more effectually serve my country, I should certainly determine for retirement without a moment’s hesitation.” This was a sentiment which William Franklin could hardly share. His life was far from over. On the contrary, he was dreaming a larger dream. In the same summer that he received this letter, he had journeyed to upper New York State and joined Sir William Johnson and other officials in another conference with the Indians, which affirmed the renegotiated boundary lines and opened millions of additional western acres to settlement. In spite of Benjamin’s alertness on behalf of his son in such matters as the missing report on manufacturing in New Jersey, William Franklin could not help wondering if his father was not, in the long run, more of a hindrance than a help to his career. Even the missing report aroused more uneasiness than gratitude. William wrote vehemently that he had indeed submitted a very thorough paper on New Jersey’s manufacturing, such as it was, but it had obviously gone the way of Sir William Johnson’s boundary letters.
When William returned from the Indian conference there was a letter waiting for him on his desk from Lord Hillsborough, iron
ically numbered thirteen, that must have caused his stomach to do several dismayed flips. It was a devastating admonishment, by order (Hillsborough said) of the King. The specific reason for the royal wrath was the failure of the New Jersey Assembly to comply with the exact wording of the Quartering Act when it voted money for supplying troops in the province. On the advice of his council, William had signed the bill, rather than see the troops starve. A wiser man than Hillsborough would not have insisted so pompously on the strict letter of the law, it was a good example of how trivial the British government in general, and Hillsborough in particular, were becoming about Great Britain’s “rights,” but this was not the only club with which Hillsborough belabored William. His Majesty (which meant Hillsborough) was also concerned that the New Jersey Assembly had considered and replied to the Massachusetts circular letter denouncing the Townshend Acts. Hillsborough had earlier sent a dispatch warning all governors to forbid their Assemblies to consider the Massachusetts circular letter. The warning had arrived on William’s desk too late. The New Jersey Assembly had been considering the Bay Colony’s message for three weeks, and had later answered it. But Governor Franklin found no evidence in the answer that New Jersey “had any intentions of uniting farther with . . . Massachusetts Bay than in petitioning His Majesty.” This did not satisfy Hillsborough at all. “Your entire ignorance of what was passing in the Assembly, concerning the letter from Mass. Bay . . . for more than three weeks, betrays a very blameable inattention to your duty; and declaring, when fully apprized of these proceedings, that you had no reason to believe there was a disposition in the people to enter any unwarrantable combination with the Mass. Assembly indicates a disposition that does not correspond with those principles which ought to be the rule of your conduct.”
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