Franklin’s role in publicizing purloined copies gave ammunition to those in Britain who saw him as a troublemaker. In early January, he was summoned to appear before the Privy Council in a famed room known as the Cockpit, because cockfights had been held there during the time of Henry VIII. The ostensible reason was to hear testimony on a petition from the Massachusetts Assembly to remove Hutchinson from the governorship. The questioning, however, quickly focused on whether the letters from Hutchinson, which had been presented as evidence by Franklin, were private and how they were obtained.
Franklin was surprised to find at the hearing the solicitor general, Alexander Wedderburn, a nasty and ambitious prosecutor who had voted against the repeal of the Stamp Act and possessed (in the words of his prime minister Lord North) “an accommodating conscience.” It was clear that the political issue of the petition against Hutchinson was being turned into a legal case against Franklin for making his letters public. The government, Wedderburn said pointedly, had “the right of inquiring how they were obtained.”
“I thought this had been a matter of politics and not of law,” Franklin told the committee, “and I have not brought any counsel.”
“Dr. Franklin may have the assistance of counsel, or go on without it, as he shall choose,” said one of the lords on the council.
“I desire to have counsel,” Franklin replied. Asked how long he needed to prepare his case, Franklin answered, “Three weeks.”
It was not a fun three weeks for Franklin. News of the Boston Tea Party reached England, further undermining sympathy for the American cause. He was called “an incendiary” and, he noted, “the papers were filled with invectives against me.” There were even hints that he might be jailed. His fellow shareholders in the Walpole group expressed fear that his involvement would hurt their case for a land grant, so he wrote them that “I do therefore desire that you will strike my name out of the list of your Associates.” (The letter, it should be noted, was cleverly phrased so that he did not, in fact, actually resign; he remained a secret shareholder without voting rights.)35
When the Privy Council reconvened in the Cockpit on January 29, 1774, the showdown made the original use of that room seem tame. “All the courtiers were invited,” Franklin noted, “as to an entertainment.” The packed crowd of councilors and spectators ranged from the Archbishop of Canterbury to the revenge-hungry Lord Hillsborough, with but a few friends of Franklin—including Edmund Burke, Lord Le Despencer, and Joseph Priestley—there to lend him moral support. Franklin later said it was like a “bull baiting.”
Wedderburn, that man of sharp tongue, was both clever and brutal in his hour-long tirade. He called Franklin the “prime conductor”—an allusion to his electric fame—of the agitation against the British government. Instead of focusing on the merits of the Massachusetts petition, he homed in on the purloined letters. “Private correspondence has hitherto been held sacred,” he raged. “He has forfeited all the respect of societies and of men.” With a zinging wit, he added, “He will henceforth call it a libel to be called a man of letters.” In addition to wit there was ample invective. Burke called Wedderburn’s attack a “furious Phillipic,” and another spectator called it “a torrent of virulent abuse.”
Amid his fury, Wedderburn scored some valid points. Ridiculing Franklin’s argument that Hutchinson’s desire to keep the letters secret was an admission he had something to hide, the solicitor correctly noted that Franklin had kept his own involvement in the affair secret for almost a year. “He kept himself concealed until he nearly occasioned the murder” of an innocent man, he said, referring to the duel in Hyde Park. Pounding the council table until (according to Jeremy Bentham) it “groaned under the assault,” Wedderburn accused Franklin of wanting to be governor himself.
The crowd cheered and jeered, but Franklin betrayed not the slightest emotion as he stood at the edge of the room wearing a plain suit made of blue Manchester velvet. Edward Bancroft, a friend of Franklin’s (who later spied on him in Paris), described his behavior: “The Doctor was dressed in a full suit of spotted Manchester velvet, and stood conspicuously erect, without the smallest movement of any part of his body. The muscles of his face had been previously composed as to afford a placid tranquil expression of countenance, and he did not suffer the slightest alteration of it to appear.”
At the finale of his speech, Wedderburn called Franklin forward as a witness and declared, “I am ready to examine him.” The official records of the proceedings notes, “Dr. Franklin being present remained silent, but declared by his counsel that he did not choose to be examined.” Silence had often been his best weapon, making him seem wise or benign or serene. On this occasion, it made him look stronger than his powerful adversaries, contemptuous rather than contrite, condescending rather than cowed.36
The Privy Council, as expected, rejected the Massachusetts petition against Hutchinson, calling it “groundless, vexatious and scandalous.” The next day, Franklin was informed by letter that his old friend Lord Le Despencer “found it necessary” to remove him from his job as American postmaster. This infuriated him, for he was proud of having made the colonial system efficient and profitable, and he wrote a terse note to William suggesting that he leave his governorship and become a farmer. “It is an honester and more honorable, because a more independent, employment.” To his sister Jane, he was more ruminative: “I am deprived of my office. Don’t let this give you any uneasiness. You and I have almost finished the journey of life; we are now but a little way from home, and have enough in our pocket to pay the post chaises.”37
Fearing that he might be arrested or his papers confiscated, Franklin slipped down to the Thames near Craven Street a few days after the Cockpit hearing. Carrying a trunk of his papers, he took a boat upriver to a friend’s house in Chelsea, where he laid low for a few days. When the danger passed, he returned to Craven Street and resumed receiving guests. “I do not find that I have lost a single friend on the occasion,” he noted. “All have visited me repeatedly with affectionate assurances of unaltered respect.” At their request, he wrote a very long and detailed account of the Hutchinson affair, but then did not publish it, noting that “such censures I have generally passed over in silence.”38
He did, however, continue his torrent of anonymous publications. Indulging an atypical but, given the circumstances, understandable desire to be boastful, he wrote a semianonymous piece (signed Homo Trium Literarum, a “Man of Letters,” the insulting pun Wedderburn had hurled at him) that declared that “the admirers of Dr. Franklin in England are much shocked at Mr. Wedderburn’s calling him a thief.” He noted that the French, in the preface to his scientific papers just published there, also called him a thief: “To steal from the Heaven its sacred fire he taught.” In an unsigned description of the Cockpit hearings, published in a Boston paper, he claimed of himself that “the Doctor came by these letters honorably, his intention in sending them was virtuous: to lessen the breach between Britain and the colonies.”39
His satires and sarcasm became ever more biting. In one essay, written after General Gage had been sent to replace Hutchinson as governor in Massachusetts, he suggested that Britain “without delay introduce into North America a government absolutely and entirely military.” That would “so intimidate the Americans” that they would happily submit to all taxes. “When the colonists are drained of their last shilling,” he added, “they should be sold to the best bidder,” such as Spain or France. In another piece, he proposed a policy for General Gage to assure that more rebels did not arise in America: “all the males there be castrated.” For good measure, the “ringleaders” such as John Hancock and Sam Adams “should be shaved quite close.” Among the side benefits, he added, were that it would be useful to the opera and it would reduce the number of people emigrating from Britain to America.40
Once again, the question arose: Why not finally head home? His wife was near death, he was a political outcast. Once again, he resolved to do so. As soon
as he settled the post office accounts, he told friends; by May, he promised Richard Bache. And once again, he ended up not returning. For the rest of 1774, Franklin stayed in England with little to do, no official business to conduct, no ministers to lobby. Even the king found it curious.
“Where is Dr. Franklin?” His Majesty asked Lord Dartmouth that summer.
“I believe, sir, he is in town. He was going to America, but I fancy he is not gone.”
“I heard,” said the king, “he was going to Switzerland.”
“I think,” Lord Dartmouth replied, “there has been such a report.”
In fact, he had stayed close to Craven Street, venturing out rarely, seeing mainly close friends. As he would write to his sister in September, “I have seen no minister since January, nor had the least communication with them.”41
The Breach with William
The impending clash between Britain and America inevitably foreshadowed a personal one between Franklin and his loyalist son. Tormented about the former prospect, Franklin remained callous about the latter.
William, on the other hand, agonized mightily as he tried to balance his duties as a son with those of being the royal governor of New Jersey. In his letters to his father after the Cockpit fight, he hoped to curry favor by flattering him, reassuring him, and cajoling him to come home. “Your popularity in this country, whatever it may be on the other side, is greatly beyond what it ever was,” William wrote in May. “You may depend when you return here on being received with every mark of regard and affection.” He made clear, however, that he had no intention of resigning his governorship, despite his father’s occasional suggestions that he do so.
Caught in the middle was the printer William Strahan, one of Franklin’s closest friends in England, who had become a confidant of the younger Franklin as well. He urged William to be his own man, to stick to loyalist positions, and to let the ministers know that he would not let his father’s views interfere with his allegiance to the government he served.
William heeded the advice. Shortly after writing the solicitous letter to his father, he wrote one to Lord Dartmouth, the colonial secretary. “His Majesty may be assured that I will omit nothing in my power to keep this province quiet,” he promised. Then he added pointedly, “No attachment or connections shall ever make me swerve from the duty of my station.” Translation: his loyalty to his father would not tug him away from his loyalty to Britain. Lord Dartmouth promptly responded with reassurances: “I should do injustice to my own sentiments of your character and conduct in supposing you could be induced by any consideration whatever to swerve from the duty you owe the King.”
William went further than merely offering professions of fealty. He opened what he called a “secret and confidential” correspondence with Lord Dartmouth that provided information about American sentiments. Support was growing throughout the colonies to aid Massachusetts, he warned, in reaction to the British decision to blockade Boston’s port. A meeting of colonial delegates, which would become known as the First Continental Congress, had been scheduled for Philadelphia in September. William made clear which side he was on. The proposed gathering, he declared, was “absurd if not unconstitutional,” and he doubted that it would lead to a mass boycott of British goods.42
His father disagreed on all counts. He had been recommending a continental congress for more than a year, he felt strongly that it should call for a boycott, and he was confident that it would. In that case, he wrote gleefully to William, “the present ministry will certainly be knocked up.” He also chided William for clinging to his governorship and, typically, cast the issue in pecuniary as well as political terms. By remaining dependent on the salary of a governor, said Franklin, he would never be able to pay off the debts he owed his father. In addition, the changing political climate meant “you will find yourself in no comfortable situation and perhaps wish you had soon disengaged yourself.” It was signed, simply, “B. Franklin.”43
Even though he knew his letters were being opened and read by British authorities, Franklin forcefully urged his American supporters to take a firm stand. The Continental Congress, he wrote, must vote “immediately to stop all commerce with this country, both exports and imports…until you have obtained redress.” At stake was “no less than whether Americans, and their endless generations, shall enjoy the common rights of mankind or be worse than eastern slaves.”
In those days, when it could take up to two months for the mail to be delivered overseas, there were a lot of crossed letters. William continued to try to convince his father that a continental congress was a bad idea. “There is no foreseeing the consequences that may result from such a Congress.” Instead, Bostonians should make restitution for the tea they destroyed, and then “they might get their port opened in a few months.”
Franklin had actually expressed, a few months earlier, similar sentiments about how Bostonians would be prudent to pay restitution for their tea party. “Such a step will remove much of the prejudice now entertained against us,” he had written Cushing in March. It infuriated him, however, to be given such a lecture by his son, and in September he wrote a crushing response rebutting William point by point. Britain had “extorted many thousands of pounds” from the colonies unconstitutionally. “Of this money they ought to make restitution.” The argument ended in insult: “But you, who are a thorough courtier, see everything with government eyes.”
Franklin wrote his son again in October, making many of the same arguments and then turning personal: he pointedly noted that his son was behind in paying back the money he had loaned him over the years and would not likely be able to do so if he remained a royal governor.44
For a while there was no answer. Then, on Christmas eve of 1774, William sent his father a letter of brutal sadness and pain. Deborah had died, with Franklin not there.
“I came here on Thursday last to attend the funeral of my poor old mother, who died Monday,” he began, referring to his stepmother.
Franklin’s dutiful and long-suffering wife had been pining away since her stroke five years earlier. “I find myself growing very feeble very fast,” she had written in 1772. For most of 1774, she had been too weak to write at all. Oblivious, Franklin had continued to send off short notes to her, some paternalistic and others businesslike, that contained breezy references to his own health, greetings from the Stevenson family, and admonitions for not writing him.
“A very respectable number of the inhabitants were at the funeral,” William continued. Clearly wanting his father to feel guilty, he described his last visit with Deborah that October. “She told me that she never expected to see you unless you returned this winter, that she was sure she would not live until next summer. I heartily wish you had happened to have come over in the fall, as I think her disappointment preyed a good deal on her spirits.”
At the end of the letter, William turned plaintive as he beseeched his father to leave England. “You are looked upon with an evil eye in that country, and are in no small danger of being brought into trouble for your political conduct,” William warned. “You had certainly better return while you are able to bear the fatigues of the voyage to a country where the people revere you.” He also ached to see his own son, Temple, now 14, and he begged Franklin to bring him to America. “I hope to see you and him in the spring and that you will spend some time with me.”45
The Howe–Chatham Secret Talks
As his wife was dying that December, Franklin was enjoying a flirtatious series of chess matches with a fashionable woman he had just met in London. But the games were not merely social. They were part of a secret last-ditch effort by some members of Britain’s Whig opposition to stave off a revolution by the colonies.
The process had begun in August, when he received a request to call on Lord Chatham, formerly William Pitt the Elder, who had served two stints as prime minister and been known as “the Great Commoner” until unwisely accepting a peerage as the Earl of Chatham. The great Whig orator wa
s a steadfast supporter of America. By 1774, he was ailing and out of government, but he had decided to reengage in public affairs as an outspoken opponent of Lord North and his policy of colonial repression.
Lord Chatham received Franklin warmly, professed full support for the resistance by the colonies to British taxation, and said he “hoped they would continue firm.” Franklin responded by urging Chatham to join with other Whig “Wise Men” to oust the “present set of bungling ministers” and form a government that would restore the “union and harmony between Britain and her colonies.”
That was not likely, Chatham said. There were too many in England who felt that there could be no further concessions because “America aimed at setting up for itself an independent state.”
“America did not aim at independence,” Franklin claimed. “I assured him that, having more than once traveled almost from one end of the continent to the other, and kept a great variety of company, eating, drinking and conversing with them freely, I never had heard in any conversation, from any person drunk or sober, the least expression of a wish for separation.”
Franklin was not being fully forthright. It had been ten years since he had traveled in America, and he knew full well that a small but growing number of radical colonists, drunk and sober, desired independence. He had even begun entertaining that possibility himself. Josiah Quincy Jr., a zealous Boston patriot and son of an old Franklin friend, visited him that fall and reported that they had discussed “total emancipation” of the colonies as an increasingly likely outcome.46
The next act in the drama began with a curious invitation from a well-connected society matron who let it be known that she wanted to play chess with Franklin. The woman in question was Caroline Howe, the sister of Adm. Richard Howe and Gen. William Howe. They would eventually end up the commanders of England’s naval and land forces during the Revolution, but at the time they were both somewhat sympathetic to the American cause. (Their sister was the widow of a distant cousin, Richard Howe, and thus known as Mrs. Howe.)47
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