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The people still loved him enough three months later to send him away. In January 1757 Franklin’s fellows in the Assembly appointed him their agent to the government in England, to argue the Assembly’s side in the dispute with the proprietors. Isaac Norris was also appointed, and initially Franklin deferred to Norris on grounds of the speaker’s “long experience in our public affairs, and great knowledge and abilities.” But Norris declined the appointment, pleading ill health, and Franklin protested no more. “Look out sharp,” he wrote to William Strahan in London, “and if a fat old fellow should come to your printing house and request a little smouting [piecework], depend upon it, ’tis your affectionate friend and humble servant.”
Franklin’s removal to London in 1757 marked a turn in his life no less important than his move from Boston to Philadelphia thirty-four years earlier. Had he known he would live the rest of his life mostly abroad, he undoubtedly would have weighed his acceptance of the Assembly’s appointment more carefully. The last three and a half decades had been good to him. Philadelphia in 1723 had received the runaway apprentice and given him a chance to make a career. Capitalizing on his chance, the young man achieved a combination of affluence and influence he could not have imagined on that rainy trek across New Jersey to his new home. His business thrived to where it ran itself (with the aid of David Hall), leaving him free to follow other interests. Of these, his scientific experiments had won him world renown and the esteem of the most distinguished natural philosophers of the age. His political accomplishments were less well known in the world at large but more appreciated locally. He was a great man in his adopted city: author of numerous improvements to civic life, facilitator of others. He was a force in his province: leader of the popular party, spokesman of the emerging middle class. He was a presence in America: deputy postmaster general (and, as such, one of a handful of officials with duties that crossed colonial lines), architect of a plan for union that captured the imagination of many of his fellow Americans (even if the provincial assemblies had yet to act on it).
In London, however, Franklin’s reputation and accomplishments would count for little. The philosophers of the Royal Society could be expected to welcome him, but—as scientists often are—they were a circle unto themselves. Franklin’s political achievements would merit him scant consideration, being the work of a mere provincial. And much of that consideration, certainly among the grandees of the realm, would be negative. Thomas Penn understood the situation better than Franklin did. The proprietor assured a worried Richard Peters that there was nothing to fear from “Mr. Franklin’s republican schemes” upon the arrival of their originator. “Mr. Franklin’s popularity is nothing here,” wrote Penn. “He will be looked very coolly upon by great people. There are very few of any consequence that have heard of his electrical experiments, those matters being attended to by a particular set of people, many of whom of the greatest consequence I know well. But it is quite another sort of people who are to determine the dispute between us.” Penn added confidently, “I do not care how soon he comes, and am no ways uneasy at the determination.”
In many respects the London to which Franklin returned in 1757 had not changed much from the London he left in 1726. The whores still haunted the hairdressers’ shops. The ravings at Bedlam, the floggings at Bridewell, and the executions at Newgate attracted the same crowds. Bears and bulls fought as before at Hockley-in-the-Hole. The manners of theatergoers had not noticeably improved, nor the consumption of alcohol measurably diminished.
But in another respect London had changed dramatically, at least for Franklin. Political London—the London of Crown and court and Parliament—had been a world removed from the humble neighborhoods frequented by the stranded journeyman in the 1720s. Three decades later, political London was Franklin’s primary destination, the milieu in which the Pennsylvania Assembly’s agent would operate.
Political London’s central landmark was Westminster, the home of Parliament. Once subordinate to the Crown, Parliament had established its primacy during the seventeenth century, in the Civil War and the Glorious Revolution. Even had there been no civil war or revolution, Parliament probably would have emerged supreme, for the simple reason that by the beginning of the eighteenth century, foreign policy—the sinkhole of British public finance—could no longer be conducted out of the monarch’s own purse. Parliament had always been the provider of tax monies; the interminable conflict with France starting in the 1690s meant that tax monies were chronically necessary. Hence the importance of Parliament.
But Parliament was a legislative body; it had not yet developed an executive arm. The executive power remained with the Crown. In theory this power was simply executive: “the king in Parliament,” in the era’s formulation. Yet as any student of government knows, and any practitioner of government experiences, the line between legislation and execution is often fine and always subject to transgression. An eighteenth-century British monarch could never wield the power the Tudors took for granted in the sixteenth century, but he or she could still make a mark.
The size of the mark depended on the talents of the monarch. George I, king at the time of Franklin’s 1723 arrival in London, was generally thought stupid. Stupidity, however, has rarely been a disqualification from kingship, and it did not disqualify George in the eyes of Parliament, which selected him over several other claimants with better pedigrees, to succeed Queen Anne in 1714. But George had other problems. He was a bad husband and a worse cuckold; after abandoning his wife’s bed for the couches of his courtesans, he responded to her straying by (almost certainly) having her lover murdered and locking her up in a castle for the rest of her unhappy life. He subsequently divided his attentions between the Duchess of Kendal (as she became, after winning his favor), a thin woman of great tenacity, and the Countess of Darlington, whose contrast to the Duchess could hardly have been more striking. Horace Walpole gossiped:
Lady Darlington, whom I saw at my mother’s in my infancy, and whom I remember by being terrified at her enormous figure, was as corpulent and ample as the Duchess was long and emaciated. Two fierce black eyes, large and rolling beneath two lofty arched eyebrows, two acres of cheeks spread with crimson, an ocean of neck that overflowed and was not distinguished from the lower parts of her body, and no part restrained by stays—no wonder that a child dreaded such an ogress, and that the mob of London were highly diverted at the importation of so uncommon a seraglio!
George—a Hanoverian German by birth—never mastered English; during his reign French was the language of the British court. Nor did he master the English, whom he scorned as treacherous—a characterization many of his courtiers merited. So he amused himself with his mistresses and indulged his resentments against his slightly more gifted son.
The most obvious gift of the man who became George II was his wife, Princess Caroline. A beauty of an earthy sort, she entered a room like a ship breasting the waves of the sea. Her husband was infatuated with her charms, as were any number of other men; she used their infatuation against them (her husband called her “Cette diablesse Madame la Princesse”) even as she similarly deployed her considerable intelligence.
The favorite of Caroline was Robert Walpole, the brother of Horace and an unprepossessing man with short arms, short legs, long torso, and buttocks that received rather more airing in the English press of the day than comported with the dignity of one who essentially governed the country for two decades. Walpole is generally considered the first prime minister of England; his buttocks became an issue in cartoons that depicted members of Parliament kissing them in order to secure his favor. He came to power under George I; that he survived the accession of George II, whose feud with his father led at one point to the son’s arrest at the baptism of his son, when monarch and the father of the baptized could not agree on a godfather, owed to Walpole’s astute sense of balance and the good offices of Queen Caroline.
Walpole’s policies embodied two principles: fiscal caution and the avoidance of war. The former reflected his (and England’s) close scrape with disaster in the collapse of the South Sea bubble, but it did not prevent him from being pilloried for corruption. The reign of Sir Robert became known as the “Robinocracy,” and the prime minister inspired a criminal character in John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera: “Robin of Bagshot, alias Gorgon, alias Bluff Bob, alias Carbuncle, alias Bob Booty.” George II had his reservations about Walpole and the prime minister’s associates, especially his brother Horace, the Duke of Newcastle, and Lord Townshend. A court insider described the king’s reaction to the quartet: “He used always to speak of the first as a great rogue, of the second as a dirty buffoon, of the third as an impertinent fool, and of the fourth as a choleric blockhead.”
Walpole’s foreign policy brought England a generation of peace—the generation in which Franklin grew up. Yet peace did not satisfy the prime minister’s increasing number of enemies, and after the death of Caroline in 1737 he could no longer resist the demand for revenge of the injury suffered by Captain Jenkins (of the missing ear). Walpole would have resigned then, but George II, for all his distrust of his prime minister, demanded that he stay on. In 1742 Parliament overruled the king and overthrew Walpole.
Yet his legacy remained. Had George II been a better Briton (he spoke English, but with a heavy German accent, and in other matters appeared to put the interests of his ancestral Hanover above those of his inherited kingdom), or had he simply been a more masterful monarch, he might have regained some of the power Walpole had acquired at Crown expense. But his gifts lay elsewhere—he had an uncanny memory for the minutiae of royal genealogy and military uniformage—and the primary result of his reign was the consolidation of Parliamentary control over the politics of the kingdom and the empire.
George II sat heavily, and after thirty years wearily, on his throne when Franklin arrived from America. Franklin was weary himself, although from a long journey rather than a long reign. After hurrying to New York from Philadelphia to catch the first government packet to England, he and William (who volunteered to accompany his father—and see the world) wound up waiting on Lord Loudoun, and waiting, and waiting. The general insisted that the ship not leave until he had completed his correspondence, but though he appeared to be scribbling industriously each time Franklin called on him, he never finished the letters. A week passed, then another, then a month, then two months. Franklin’s initial positive impression of Loudoun dissolved into an estimate of terminal indecision. Not till June did the travelers get away.
Franklin made typical good use of his time on the voyage east. Besides suggesting experiments to increase the speed of sailing ships, he composed what became his most famous piece of writing. The approaching autumn would see the twenty-fifth edition of Poor Richard’s Almanack;Franklin judged a quarter century sufficient for any philomath and prepared to send Richard Saunders into well-deserved retirement. But Saunders must go out, as he had come in, with a flourish. Franklin created a new character, Father Abraham, who, readers discovered, had been following the almanac faithfully these many years. “A plain clean old man, with white locks,” in Saunders’s description, Father Abraham was asked by passersby at a market what he thought of the present times. He responded with a soliloquy comprising the choicest of Poor Dick’s pearls, drawn from the entire run of the almanacs. “We may make these times better if we bestir ourselves,” he said.
Industry need not wish, as Poor Richard says, and he that lives upon hope will die fasting. There are no gains without pains; then help hands, for I have no lands, or if I have, they are smartly taxed. And as Poor Richard likewise observes, he that hath a trade hath an estate, and he that hath a calling hath an office of profit and honour. … If we are industrious we shall never starve, for, as Poor Richard says, at the working man’s house hunger looks in, but dares not enter. Nor will the bailiff and the constable enter, for industry pays debts, while despair increaseth them, says Poor Richard. What though you have found no treasure, nor has any rich relation left you a legacy, diligence is the mother of good luck, as Poor Richard says, and God gives all things to industry. Then plough deep, while sluggards sleep, and you shall have corn to sell and to keep, says Poor Dick.
The idea was clever enough, and the speech of Father Abraham was reprinted hundreds of times in English and at least fifteen other languages. Yet for all its popularity, the piece was not one of Franklin’s best efforts. The “Poor Richard says” tag, while perhaps an apt marketing device, began to wear on readers’ ears before old Abram stopped speaking. More to the point—again a literary point, rather than a commercial one—the speech missed much of the best of Richard Saunders. Poor Dick’s irreverent wit and sly feistiness is suppressed here in favor of admonitions to industry, frugality, and other virtues attuned to material success. The title under which the piece was often published—The Way to Wealth—reflected this capitalist emphasis, almost certainly increasing sales but equally certainly coloring Franklin historically as a dour grinder. “Snuff-coloured little man!” sneered D. H. Lawrence more than a century and a half later. Recalling how, as a boy, he had been introduced to the wisdom of Poor Richard, Lawrence complained, “I haven’t got over those Poor Richard tags yet. I still rankle with them. They are thorns in young flesh…. It has taken me many years to get out of that barbed wire enclosure Poor Richard rigged up.” Concluded Lawrence of Franklin, “I admire him…. I do not like him.”
At times on the voyage it appeared that Father Abraham might be buried at sea (which surely would have pleased Lawrence). The war with France raged as fiercely as ever, and though Franklin’s vessel traveled in a convoy, its capture or destruction was a constant possibility. (This possibility doubtless inspired Franklin’s experimental design for faster ships.) The enemy grew thicker near England; as the captain of Franklin’s ship tried to evade them off Falmouth under cover of night, he nearly ran onto the rocks. Franklin was as shaken as the rest. “Were I a Roman Catholic,” he wrote Deborah on reaching shore, “perhaps I should on this occasion vow to build a chapel to some saint; but as I am not, if I were to vow at all, it should be to build a lighthouse.”
The Franklin party—consisting of Franklin, William, and two slaves: Peter and King—arrived in London in late July 1757. They took up residence with Mrs. Margaret Stevenson, who lived at 7 Craven Street, Strand. The apartment suited Franklin so well he remained there during his entire London stay. The location could hardly have been better, convenient to the government offices in Whitehall and the houses of Parliament in Westminster.
Nor could the company have been more congenial. Mrs. Stevenson was a widow of about Franklin’s age. She had a bubbly good nature, she appreciated a joke, and, living as she did at the crossroads of English life, she afforded Franklin a street-level perspective on the high and powerful who passed her front door, as well as the low and put-upon who constituted the mass of London society. She also had a daughter, Mary, who quickly became as charmed with Franklin as her mother did. Franklin had left Debbie and Sally behind in Philadelphia; as his correspondence would reveal, he missed them. But Peggy and Polly Stevenson soon became at least partial substitutes.
Franklin received a still-warmer greeting from Peter Collinson, who, having corresponded with Franklin for ten years, was delighted finally to meet the American genius. Collinson hosted Franklin and William at his house outside the city, where he kept a noteworthy botanical collection. He escorted Franklin to the Royal Society and introduced him to various ingenious men about London, including the “Honest Whigs,” a discussion group that soon filled the same social and intellectual niche in Franklin’s life the Junto had filled in Philadelphia.
William Strahan had known Franklin—from a distance—even longer than Collinson had, and his admiration and affection were even greater. “I had for many years conceived a very high, and now find, a very just, opinion of Mr. Franklin,” he wrote to Deborah Franklin. “But though the notion I had formed of him in my own mind, before I had the pleasure of seeing him, was, really as far as it went, just enough, I must confess it was very unequal to what I now know his singular merit deserves…. I never saw a man who was, in every respect, so perfectly agreeable to me. Some are amiable in one view, some in another, he in all.”
Strahan so loved Franklin that from the outset he conspired to keep him in England forever. Strahan’s letter to Debbie was only partly a paean to her husband; it was also a brief on behalf of her crossing the ocean to join him. Strahan described the slow pace of politics in the imperial capital and warned that it might be years before Franklin achieved the aim of his journey. Debbie should really consider coming over—with Sally, of course, who would benefit immensely from London. Franklin had mentioned that Debbie feared sea travel; Strahan reassured her that not a soul had been lost between Philadelphia and London in living memory. (He neglected to say that ships had gone down on other routes) His trump—he hoped—was an argument that must have seemed rather presumptuous from one Debbie had never met. Strahan asked her to ponder what a long separation from her husband might entail. “As I know the ladies here consider him in exactly the same light I do, upon my word I think you should come over with all convenient speed to look after your interest; not but that I think him as faithful to his Joan [he had heard Franklin’s song] as any man breathing, but who knows what repeated and strong temptation may in time, and while he is at so great a distance from you, accomplish.”
Some charming persons appeal to nearly everyone; friend and foe find their personalities irresistible, often to the foes’ confusion and dismay. Franklin’s charm was more selective. It worked upon those who shared his open, inquisitive, generous outlook on life. Strahan fell into this category, which was why he became so enamored of Franklin. Collinson was the same way, if less demonstrative about his affection.
But those who felt threatened by genius could find Franklin hard to abide. Franklin never flaunted his powers, but in middle age, with those powers at their height, he made less effort to disguise them than he had at times past. His fame as a philosopher preceded him, and he did not attempt to prove it unwarranted. He did not demand deference from others, but neither did he defer. The intellectually or emotionally insecure, those who insisted on measuring themselves against Franklin, could easily become jealous of one who mastered nearly everything to which he turned his mind. The politically insecure, those who possessed something Franklin might take away, could find his powers even more sinister.
Thomas Penn’s animus toward Franklin reflected the proprietor’s political insecurity; Lord Granville’s unfriendliness may have manifested intellectual insecurity but more obviously followed from his insistence on deference that Franklin refused to yield. Shortly after reaching London, Franklin asked John Fothergill, a well-connected friend of Collinson’s (and one of the Honest Whigs) for advice. Should he approach the British government with the Pennsylvania Assembly’s dispute with the proprietors, or should he appeal to the proprietors? Fothergill advocated the latter. British politics was a maze; a man might enter and never get out. Better to settle the affair directly with the Penns if at all possible. Franklin prepared to follow Fothergill’s advice, only to receive a summons from Lord Granville, the president of the Privy Council, the body of King George’s closest advisers. Granville also happened to be Thomas Penn’s brother-in-law.
The interview began unpromisingly. Granville delivered a pronunciamento on the misapprehensions of colonials regarding imperial politics. “You Americans have wrong ideas of the nature of your constitution,” he said. “You contend that the King’s instructions to his governors are not laws, and think yourselves at liberty to regard or disregard them at your own discretion. But those instructions are not like the pocket instructions given to a minister going abroad, for regulating his conduct in some trifling point of ceremony. They are first drawn up by judges learned in the laws; they are then considered, debated and perhaps amended in Council, after which they are signed by the King. They are then, so far as relates to you, the law of the land, for the King is the legislator of the colonies.”
This was deeper water than Franklin had expected to encounter so soon, but, strong swimmer that he was, he struck out confidently. He declared that this was “new doctrine” to him. Under their charters, he explained, the colonies made their laws for themselves, in their assemblies. These laws were then presented to the king for his assent or veto. But once the king gave his assent, he could not repeal or alter the laws. And just as the assemblies could not make laws without his assent, neither could the king make laws for the colonies without the assemblies’ assent.
Granville assured Franklin he was totally mistaken. Franklin declined to argue the matter further in this venue but remained convinced he was right. Yet he could not help being troubled by what Granville’s position portended. “His Lordship’s conversation having a little alarmed me as to what might be the sentiments of the Court concerning us, I wrote it down as soon as I returned to my lodgings. I recollected that about twenty years before [thirteen, actually] a clause in a bill brought to Parliament by the ministry had proposed to make the King’s instructions laws in the colonies, but the clause was thrown out by the Commons, for which we adored them as our friends and friends of liberty.” This sentiment would change when Parliament itself began encroaching on colonial liberties, but for now Franklin was happy to look to Parliament as a protector.
A few days after his meeting with Granville, Franklin called upon Thomas Penn. The proprietor was civil but evasive. His brother Richard was out of town; until Richard returned, there was nothing Thomas felt free to discuss. Franklin knew full well that for a decade Richard had left the affairs of Pennsylvania to his brother, but he saw little purpose in protest.
When Richard returned, Franklin visited the now-plural proprietors. As Franklin expected, Thomas spoke for their side. “The conversation at first consisted of mutual declarations of disposition to reasonable accommodation,” Franklin remarked, adding, “But I suppose each party had its own ideas of what should be meant by reasonable.” This conversation indicated as much. Thomas Penn laid out the prerogatives of the proprietors as he interpreted them; Franklin forwarded the counterclaims of the Assembly. “We now appeared very wide, and so far from each other in our opinions as to discourage all hope of agreement,” Franklin recalled later. Whether Penn was discouraged at the evident impasse, Franklin could not read; the proprietor suggested that Franklin put the position of the Assembly in writing and promised to consider the matter further.
Franklin thereupon repaired to his quarters in Craven Street. Forty-eight hours later he handed the Penns a paper entitled “Heads of Complaint,” identifying the most important of the difficulties between the Assembly and the proprietors. The first was the unreasonable restraints placed upon the Penns’ appointee as governor (deputy governor to be precise; Thomas Penn himself was technically governor). Of late, Governor Morris had been replaced by Governor William Denny, a man who seemed reasonable enough but, like his predecessor, was bound by instructions that left no room for his own judgment. The result, in Franklin’s words, was “great injury of His Majesty’s service in time of war, and danger of the loss of the Colony.”
The second complaint followed from the first, to wit, that the restrictions placed upon the governor infringed the right of the Assembly to raise supplies essential for the defense of the country. Indeed, the proprietors extorted assent from the Assembly to unwise and unconstitutional measures, under duress of emergency. “The Assembly, in time of war, are reduced to the necessity of either losing the country to the enemy, or giving up the liberties of the people and receiving law from the Proprietary.”
Franklin’s third and final complaint identified the most onerous of these extortions, specifically the exemption of the vast proprietary estates from taxation. The proprietors expected the people to defend proprietary property but refused to contribute their fair share. “This, to the Assembly and People of Pennsylvania, appears both unjust and cruel.”
Franklin concluded his précis of grievance with a request that the proprietors consider the complaints and redress them in the “most speedy and effectual manner, that harmony may be restored between the several branches of the legislature, and the public service be hereafter readily and fully provided for.”
Almost immediately upon delivering his list to the Penns, Franklin fell sick. What at first seemed a cold ramified into the second noteworthy illness of Franklin’s life, lasting two months. The cold symptoms subsided after several days but were replaced by those of some secondary infection, including a high fever and “great pain in my head, the top of which was very hot, and when the pain went off, very sore and tender.” The bouts of pain persisted for twelve to thirty-six hours at a time, accompanied by occasional delirium. A physician bled Franklin from the back of the head, which relieved the pain temporarily. The doctor also prescribed a medicinal bark, administered both ground and brewed into a tea. “I took so much bark in various ways,” Franklin informed Debbie, “that I began to abhor it.” An emetic was recommended, which Franklin at first resisted from fear it would exacerbate his headache. Eventually he achieved equivalent results on his own. “I was seized one morning with a vomiting and purging, the latter of which continued the greater part of the day, and I believe was a kind of crisis to the distemper, carrying it clear off, for ever since I feel quite lightsome, and am every day gathering strength.”
During his time of suffering the patient took some comfort from the belief that the proprietors were preparing their response to his catalog of complaints. In fact they were doing no such thing. Rather they were commencing a campaign of psychological attrition. They received Franklin’s paper and simply held it, evidently convinced that either the emergency in Pennsylvania would pass or Franklin would weary of delay and go home.
The Penns’ strategy followed the advice of their lawyer, an expert in the art of glacial litigation. Ferdinand John Paris had been counseling the proprietors since before Franklin’s first visit to London; for most of that time he had charge of the Penns’ endless (thus far) border dispute with Lord Baltimore of Maryland (which, after Paris’s death diminished his obstructional abilities, ultimately yielded to the survey of Messrs. Mason and Dixon). Yet Paris was not simply patient; he was also nasty. Thomas Hutchinson considered him a solicitor of the “first rate,” but one who possessed “a peculiar talent at slurring the characters of his antagonists.”
Paris probably did not need any encouragement toward antipathy to Franklin; as the Penns’ agent he considered it part of his job. (For a time Paris had been the Pennsylvania Assembly’s agent, but the Assembly severed the relationship on discovering his preference for the Penns over the Pennsylvanians.) Whether or not he required the encouragement, he received it from Franklin’s Philadelphia foe, former governor Morris. “Mr. Franklin will be in England exhibiting his complaints against the proprietors, as is thought and expected by many that sent him,” Morris warned. “But I imagine his own schemes are very different from those of his employers [that is, the Assembly]. He is a sensible, artful man, very knowing in American affairs, and was his heart as sound as his head, few men would be fitter for public trust. But that is far from being the case. He has nothing in view but to serve himself, and however he may give another turn to what he says and does, yet you may be assured that is at the bottom and in the end will shew itself.”
Franklin knew of Paris, and knew Paris knew of him. “He was a proud angry man, and as I had occasionally in the answers of the Assembly treated his papers with some severity, they being really weak in point of argument and haughty in expression, he had conceived a mortal enmity to me.” Franklin did not improve Paris’s opinion by refusing to meet with him, insisting instead on dealing with the proprietors directly or not at all.
Only gradually did Franklin realize that this attitude played into Paris’s hands. The proprietors found one excuse after another for not being able to meet Franklin, leaving him no one to talk to. The months passed, and Pennsylvania’s problems were no closer to being solved.
Yet Franklin was not without resources. Prevented from making his case to the proprietors, he argued it before the court of public opinion. During the late summer and autumn of 1757 London papers carried letters motivated, if not paid for, by the Penns, criticizing the Pennsylvanians for using their differences with the proprietors as an excuse not to defend themselves. Franklin denied the allegation directly, even as he employed it as an excuse to launch a broader campaign in the press against the proprietors.
In September The Citizen carried a long letter over the signature of William Franklin. William doubtless contributed to the letter; indeed he boasted of his role in the composition, at the same time explaining the logic: “For although it might not be so proper for my father to take notice of these aspersions, while the negotiation was on foot, there could be no reason why I, as an inhabitant of Pennsylvania, now on my travels in England, no ways concerned in conducting the negotiation, should not vindicate the honour and reputation of my country when I saw it so injuriously attacked.” Yet quite clearly the inspiration behind the letter and the language in which it was written were Franklin’s. The disguise almost certainly failed to fool Paris or the Penns, but they were not the audience. Whether or not ordinary readers, who were the audience, were fooled, Franklin preferred this thin disguise to none at all.
The essentials of Franklin’s argument here differed little from those he had made in Pennsylvania and in letters to the governor and recently to the proprietors themselves; yet, appealing to his readers, he emphasized the consonance of interests between the people of Pennsylvania and the people of England. The proprietors had attempted to abrogate “the privileges long enjoyed by the people, and which they think they have a right to, not only as Pennsylvanians, but as Englishmen.” Employing the famous formula of John Locke, Franklin expressed astonishment that during wartime, “when the utmost unanimity and dispatch is necessary to the preservation of life, liberty, and estate,” the Penns should send a governor to America with instructions “as must inevitably produce endless dispute and delay, and prevent the assembly from effectually opposing the French upon any other condition than the giving up their rights as Englishmen.”
Franklin’s letter was reprinted from The Citizen to the London Chronicle, then repeated in The Citizen and picked up by the Gentleman’s Magazine. At Franklin’s urging it was subsequently included as an appendix in a book, An Historical Review of the Constitution and Government of Pennsylvania.
By the evidence of this editorial interest, Franklin’s appeal to the rights of Englishmen touched a sympathetic chord. When The Citizen ran the letter the second time, the editors cited popular demand and asserted that the journal stood ready to defend the people “by exposing the artifices of those who would, in a remote land, overthrow the native rights and liberties of Englishmen.”
Franklin relished a good fight in the press, but no more than he appreciated an ingenious experiment. His growing circle of friends included several whose tastes in science matched his own. John Pringle, a member of the Royal Society and the Honest Whigs, was a Scottish doctor well versed in contagious diseases and the sorts of infirmities encountered by soldiers in the field; he also dabbled in the use of electricity to alleviate paralysis. Franklin, upon hearing Pringle inform the Royal Society of recent discoveries in this last area, shared findings of his own, based on work he had done some years earlier in Pennsylvania. The patients had presented themselves to him, Franklin said, following reports in the papers of electrical cures in Europe. He had wired them to his electrical jars and sent shocks through the palsied limbs.
The first thing observed was an immediate greater sensible warmth in the lame limbs that had received the stroke than in the others; and the next morning the patients usually related that they had in the night felt a pricking sensation in the flesh of the paralytic limbs, and would sometimes shew a number of small red spots which they supposed were occasioned by those prickings. The limbs too were found more capable of voluntary motion, and seemed to receive strength; a man, for instance, who could not, the first day, lift the lame hand from off his knee, would the next day raise it four or five inches; the third day higher, and on the fifth was able, but with a feeble languid motion, to take off his hat.
Needless to say, the patients were ecstatic, and Franklin was most encouraged. Unfortunately, the positive effects wore off.
I do not remember that I ever saw any amendment after the fifth day; which the patients perceiving, and finding the shocks pretty severe, they became discouraged, went home and in a short time relapsed, so that I never knew any advantage from electricity in palsies that was permanent. And how far the apparent temporary advantage might arise from the exercise in the patients’ journey and coming daily to my house, or from the spirits given by the hope of success, enabling them to exert more strength in moving their limbs, I will not pretend to say.
Franklin had long been intrigued by the principle that would underlie refrigeration, namely, the capacity of an evaporating liquid to absorb heat. One hot summer day in 1750, when the thermometer in the shade stood at 100 (of the degrees devised earlier in Franklin’s life by the German instrument-maker Fahrenheit), he had observed how as long as he wore a shirt wetted with his sweat, and sat in the breeze of an open window, he remained relatively cool; but when he changed his wet shirt for a dry one, he grew noticeably warmer.
In the spring of 1758 he traveled from London to Cambridge, where he collaborated with another physician-scientist and fellow of the Royal Society, John Hadley. Franklin and Hadley took turns wetting the ball of a thermometer with ether, which they then evaporated off the ball by means of a bellows. With each round of wetting and evaporating, the mercury dropped. Though the air in the room remained at 65 degrees, the thermometer fell below the freezing point. Hadley and Franklin terminated the experiment when the thermometer read 7 degrees, or 25 degrees below freezing, and the ice on the ball was a quarter inch thick. “From this experiment,” Franklin concluded, “one may see the possibility of freezing a man to death on a warm summer’s day, if he were to stand in a passage through which the wind blew briskly, and to be wet with ether.”
This conclusion prompted other speculations. “May not this be a reason why our reapers in Pennsylvania, working in the open field, in the clear hot sunshine common in our harvest-time, find themselves well able to go through that labour, without being much incommoded by the heat, while they continue to sweat, by drinking of a thin evaporable liquor, water mixed with rum; but if the sweat stops, they drop, and sometimes die suddenly?” It was generally believed of Africans that they bore heat better than whites. “May there not be in negroes a quicker evaporation of the perspirable matter from their skins and lungs, which, by cooling them more, enables them to bear the sun’s heat better than whites do?” Might not evaporation from leaves serve to cool trees, even in the summer sun? Might not evaporation from the earth’s surface tend to mitigate summer temperatures?
Franklin’s interest flattered his hosts at Cambridge, who invited him back for commencement in the summer of 1758. He was flattered in turn. “My vanity was not a little gratified by the particular regard shown me by the chancellor [the Duke of Newcastle] and vice chancellor of the university, and the heads of colleges,” he reported to Deborah.
His vanity was gratified the more several months later when the University of St. Andrews awarded him an honorary doctorate of laws. “The ingenuous and worthy Benj. Franklin has not only been recommended to us for his knowledge of the law, the rectitude of his morals and sweetness of his life and conversation,” the citation read, “but hath also by his ingenious inventions and successful experiments, with which he hath enriched the science of natural philosophy and more especially of electricity which heretofore was little known, acquired so much praise throughout the world as to deserve the greatest honours in the Republic of Letters.” The governing body of the ancient university went on to declare that henceforth said Franklin should be addressed and treated by all as “the most Worthy Doctor.” Neither in that era nor later were the recommendations of educators always followed, but this recommendation took, and Franklin thereafter was generally referred to as “Dr. Franklin.”
With each honor that came his way, Franklin felt farther from home. The feeling evoked ambivalence, for while he missed his wife and daughter and the familiar sights of Philadelphia, the larger circles in which he now moved possessed an undeniable appeal.
Franklin acknowledged his ambivalence to Debbie. “You may think perhaps that I can find many amusements here to pass the time agreeable,” he wrote in January 1758. “’tis true, the regard and friendship I meet with from persons of worth, and the conversation of ingenious men, give me no small pleasure. But at this time of life, domestic comforts afford the most solid satisfaction, and my uneasiness at being absent from my family, and longing desire to be with them, make me often sigh in the midst of cheerful company.”
Certainly the first part of Franklin’s statement—about the pleasure of the company he now kept—was true; undoubtedly the second part was true as well. Yet he could say no less, especially in a letter in which he informed his wife that “I shall hardly be able to return before this time twelve months.” The work was slow, and he was determined to do it properly, which required “both time and patience.”
Franklin appreciated Debbie’s efforts to keep him abreast of events at home. “I thank you for sending me brother Johnny’s journal,” he wrote. “I hope he is well, and sister Read and the children. I am sorry to hear of Mr. Burt’s death…. I am not much surprized at Green’s behaviour. He has not an honest principle, I fear…. I regret the loss of my friend Parsons. Death begins to make breaches in the little Junto of old friends that he had long forborne, and it must be expected he will now soon pick us all off one after another.”
Similarly he sought to include Debbie in his life in London, at least vicariously. She had asked about his accommodations; he responded, “We have four rooms furnished, and every thing about us pretty genteel, but living here is in every respect very expensive. Billy is with me, and very serviceable. Peter has behaved very well. Goodies I now and then get a few; but roasting apples seldom. I wish you had sent me some.” She had urged him to hire a coach to have on hand; he answered that he had done just that, to avoid foul weather and preserve appearances. “The hackney coaches at this end of town, where most people keep their own, are the worst in the whole city, miserable dirty broken shabby things, unfit to go into when dressed clean, and such as one would be ashamed to get out of at any gentleman’s door.” He had lamented the smoke from coal fires; she suggested burning wood. “It would answer no end,” he explained, “unless one could furnish all one’s neighbours and the whole city with the same.” Smoke was London’s bane, and would become Franklin’s while there. “The whole town is one great smoky house, and every street a chimney, the air full of floating sea-coal soot, and you never get a breath of what is pure, without riding some miles for it into the country.”
He sent her presents, that she might enjoy the bounty of the metropolis even if she could not be there. “Bowl remarkable for the neatness of the figures,” he wrote, in a partial inventory. “Four silver salt ladles, newest, but ugliest, fashion … six coarse diaper breakfast cloths: they are to spread on the tea table, for no body here breakfasts on the naked table … a little basket, a present from Mrs. Stevenson to Sally, and a pair of garters for you which were knit by the young lady her daughter, who favoured me with a pair of the same kind, the only ones I have been able to wear, as they need not be bound tight, the ridges in them preventing their slipping.” He sent carpeting for the floor at home, blankets and bed linen, napkins, and “7 yards of printed cotton, blue ground, to make you a gown. I bought it by candlelight, and liked it then, but not so well afterwards; if you do not fancy it, send it as a present from me to Sister Jenny.” Two sets of books and some sheet music were for Sally. A candle-extinguisher was “for spermaceti candles only.” A large jug was for beer. “I fell in love with it at first sight, for I thought it looked like a fat jolly dame, clean and tidy, with a neat blue and white calico gown on, good natured and lovely, and put me in mind of—Somebody.”
Franklin must have thought he knew his Debbie to be able to liken her to a beer jug, even if he declined the explicit reference at the last word. He also knew her well enough to recognize her reluctance to come over to England. William Strahan, with whom Franklin obviously discussed the matter, continued to urge her to join her husband. Writing to David Hall, Strahan said, “Tell her I am sorry she dreads the sea so much…. There are many ladies here that would make no objection to sailing twice as far after him.”
Perhaps it was her dread of the deep that kept Deborah away. But something else was almost certainly involved as well. She had watched her husband grow over the years, from the promising but penniless journeyman she married in 1730 to a public figure honored by many of the greatest men and institutions of the British empire. Debbie was the same simple soul she had been at the start: a thrifty housewife, a good mother (if a sometimes testy stepmother), a competent business partner (who was now handling her husband’s affairs in his absence). Philadelphia was not merely her home; it was her world. Franklin could move in another, larger world, and do so comfortably. Debbie could not, and she knew enough not to try.