14
British pride was in the air that season. Just months after Franklin’s declaration of “I am a Briton,” a new monarch was crowned in London, and in his first speech from the throne declared, “I glory in the name of Briton.”
Or it may have been “Britain” he gloried in the name of; the homonyms were hard for listeners to distinguish. Yet the point was the same: George III, unlike his Hanoverian forebears, considered himself British before anything else— just as Franklin did. Eventually Britain would prove too small for the two of them together, but for now the blessed isle seemed to bless them both.
George III’s path to the throne was not an easy one. His grandfather, George II, ruled for forty years, to the vexation of his son and heir apparent, Frederick. During much of that time Frederick thought his father was clinging to life to spite him—as indeed he was, at least in part. British politics in the eighteenth century almost guaranteed conflict between a monarch and the next-in-line. The eldest son of the sovereign was both Prince of Wales and Duke of Cornwall, and as such commanded income and influence independent of the throne. This income and influence in turn attracted those who had personal or political reasons for opposing the government, and those thus attracted typically made a habit of whispering oppositionist, if not seditious, thoughts in the ear of the impatient heir.
To this institutional conflict George II and Frederick added the bad blood that characterized the house of Hanover. Queen Caroline evinced a hatred toward her son almost inconceivable in a mother. “My dear firstborn,” she was reported to have said, “is the greatest ass, and the greatest liar, and the greatest canaille, and the greatest beast, in the whole world, and I most heartily wish he was out of it.” In her final moments, when Frederick expressed a desire to see his mother, she refused, saying, “I shall have one comfort in having my eyes eternally closed—I shall never see that monster again.” Frederick’s father—whose experience with his own father foreshadowed that with his son—shared his wife’s hatred and disdain for their son. “Bid him go about his business,” George said in response to Frederick’s plea for a last chance at reconciliation, “for his poor mother is not in a condition to see him act his false, whining, cringing tricks now, nor am I in a humour to bear his impertinence.”
If Frederick thought that mourning for Caroline would shorten George’s life, he was mistaken. It was Frederick who died first, nine years before his father, after catching a chill playing tennis in the rain. George’s death, when it came, was in its own unexalted way similarly indicative of the hazards of ruling-class life. The rich diet of the rich in eighteenth-century England led to gout and other maladies, including constipation. On October 25, 1760, George II awakened at Kensington Palace to his usual cup of chocolate, after which he retired to the royal water closet for his morning effort. The effort proved too much for the royal blood vessels; a critical one burst and killed the king.
George III was twenty-two when his grandfather died, and, although he had been training since birth to take the throne, he was woefully unprepared. A princely youth is a sure recipe for arrested development—princes rarely encounter the reverses that constitute essential elements of the maturing process—yet young George’s development was arrested even by royal standards. He was awkward socially, and emotionally dependent on John Stuart, the Earl of Bute. The merest accident had brought Bute to the attention of the royal family. One day in 1747 a downpour suspended a cricket match Frederick was attending (he had bad luck with weather and sports); while waiting for the storm to lift, the prince proposed a card game but discovered that his party was one man short. Bute was pressed into service, made a favorable impression, and was attached to the royal retinue. He became a lord of the bedchamber and later groom of the stole. He also became, upon Frederick’s death, the mentor, father figure, and beau idéal of the new prince.
In George’s eyes Bute was everything the young man could never be: intelligent, cultivated, handsome. Everything, that is, except king, which made the younger man’s deficiencies the more distressing. A mild correction from Bute conjured the specter of rejection—deserved rejection. “If you should now resolve to set me adrift,” the prince said, “I could not upbraid you, but on the contrary look on it as the natural consequence of my faults.” When George fell in love for the first time he submitted that frightening emotion to Bute’s approval. “I surrender my future into your hands,” George wrote, “and will keep my thoughts even from the dear object of my love, grieve in silence, and never trouble you more with this unhappy tale; for if I must either lose my friend or my love, I will give up the latter, for I esteem your friendship above every earthly joy.”
As it turned out, Bute disapproved, and the prince forgot the young lady and put on the stiff upper lip that proved his Britishness. “I am born for the happiness or misery of a great nation,” he said, “and must consequently often act contrary to my passions.” He thereupon asked for a list of those young ladies Bute deemed acceptable—“to save a great deal of trouble,” given that “matrimony must sooner or later come to pass.” When it did, Queen Charlotte dutifully bore her husband fifteen children. (Known, perhaps unfairly, for her lack of physical beauty as a young woman, Charlotte grew in the opinion of her husband’s subjects, at least comparatively. Horace Walpole commented that as the queen aged, “her want of personal charms became, of course, less observable.” Walpole mentioned this to her chamberlain, who agreed. “Yes,” the chamberlain said, “I do think the bloom of her ugliness is going off.”)
As a protégé of Frederick, Bute naturally imbibed the prince’s distrust of George II and his ministers; as the protégé of Bute, George III imbibed the same distrust of the same men. “The conduct of this old K. makes me ashamed to be his grandson,” the grandson said. William Pitt, then at the height of his wartime glory, was described by the young George as “the blackest of hearts” and “a true snake in the grass.”
To some extent the young monarch was simply jealous of Pitt. At almost the moment when George III mounted the throne, the city of London dedicated a new bridge across the Thames as a monument to “the man who by the strength of his genius and steadfastness of his mind and a certain kind of happy contagion of his probity and spirit” had saved the empire. Needless to say, the authors of this encomium were not speaking of the new king, who for just such reasons felt obliged to demonstrate—to Pitt and everyone else—that he, George III, was king. “I am happy to think that I have at present the real love of my subjects,” he wrote Bute, “and lay it down for certain that if I do not show them that I will not permit ministers to trample on me, that my subjects will in time come to esteem me unworthy of the Crown I wear.”
Proving his fitness to rule became a preoccupation with George III, coloring his relations with his ministers and subsequently with his American subjects. Bute, warned by the Duke of Devonshire that as long as the war with France lasted, the new king could not dispense with Pitt, replied, “My Lord, I would not for the world the king should hear such language. He would not bear it for a moment.” “Not bear it!” rejoined the amazed duke. “He must bear it! Every king must make use of human means to attain human ends, or his affairs will go to ruin.”
But George would not bear it. In his first meeting with the ministers he emphasized the need to bring to a conclusion the present “bloody and expensive war”—Pitt’s war, as all present, including Pitt, understood. Pitt resented this slap; he equally resented his eclipse by Bute. Within the year the Great Commoner resigned—so discouraged regarding his future as to risk his reputation as tribune of the people by accepting a peerage for his wife and a pension for himself. “Oh, that foolishest of great men, that sold his inestimable diamond for a paltry peerage and a pension,” lamented one of his disappointed partisans.
Franklin observed the events surrounding the accession of George III with mixed emotions. As a proud Briton himself, he could not help applauding the new king’s embrace of Britain. Yet neither could he help considering ominous the ouster of Pitt, the architect of the war policy that promised finally to secure the borders of Pennsylvania and the other colonies against French and Indian attack.
Franklin had further reason for paying attention to the politics of court and Parliament. Having resolved, upon the breakdown of his relations with the Penns, to seek the protection of the Crown, he had to approach the Crown—or rather the officers of the Crown responsible for the colonies. These included the members of the Board of Trade and the Privy Council.
Bureaucracies being what they are, and Pennsylvania being as far from the minds of most British bureaucrats as it was from British shores, simply scheduling a hearing took many months. Franklin employed the time to probe the weaker points of the proprietors’ defense. He could not expect the Board of Trade to become exercised about who paid what taxes in Pennsylvania; such a provincial matter hardly touched high interests of state. But the board might pay attention to proprietary policies responsible for unrest among the Indians, for it was this unrest that had provoked the current war.
In this tactical maneuvering Franklin had a most unlikely ally. Tedyuscung was a chief of the Delawares, a man who had been a friend of the English, then an enemy (his raiders were responsible for at least some of the attacks Franklin had countered in Northampton County in 1755), then again a friend. Yet even in burying the hatchet, Tedyuscung complained of historic wrongs the English had done his people, beginning with the Walking Purchase of 1737. Franklin and his allies in the Assembly thereupon urged Tedyuscung to address his people’s complaints to King George, who might protect them against the evil proprietors.
Upon arrival in London, Franklin took up Tedyuscung’s petition, and, in an audaciously broad interpretation of representative government, made the Indians’ case the Assembly’s own. As had become his custom, Franklin contrasted the beneficent policy of William Penn with the “deceit and circumvention” of the great man’s heirs. Franklin did not go quite so far as to blame the present Penns for the current war, but he cited, without contradiction, the Indians’ assertion that land fraud had been a principal cause of what Franklin himself described as “the cruelest murders and most horrid devastation” suffered by the people of Pennsylvania. By now Franklin’s letter likening Thomas Penn to a “low jockey” had reached the proprietor’s eyes; Franklin could not resist sticking a finger in one of those eyes by declaring, in his petition presenting Tedyuscung’s case, that the Walking Purchase exhibited “such arts of jockeyship” as to give the Indians the worst possible opinions of the English.
Franklin was not quite cynical in forwarding the Delawares’ grievances, but he was certainly opportunistic. Having witnessed the bloody effects of bad Indian policy, Franklin was all for redressing wrongs. Yet without question he cared less for an old land dispute than for the continuing struggle with the proprietors. (He also realized that while Tedyuscung might be useful as a character witness against the Penns, the chief’s own character could be impeached. Besides having made war against Britain, Tedyuscung shared the weakness for alcohol that afflicted so many of his people. He died when Iroquois enemies caught him comatose and burned his house down around him.)
The Tedyuscung petition was a flanking maneuver; Franklin’s central assault on the proprietors involved several laws passed by the Assembly and accepted by Governor Denny but rejected by the proprietors. The rejection put the Penns in the awkward position of overruling their appointed deputy; they defended this awkwardness by alleging that the Assembly had bribed the governor to ignore his instructions. The substance of the allegation, if not the proprietors’ interpretation of it, was true enough. After years of frustration with governors financially bound to veto measures favored by a majority of Pennsylvanians, the Assembly awakened to the possibility of outbidding the proprietors. The Assembly voted to indemnify Denny against the Penns; in addition it awarded him £3,000 in appreciation of his courage. Predictably, the Penns judged this transaction unethical and unacceptable.
Whether it was unlawful was what they and Franklin spent most of 1760 arguing about. Franklin and his fellow agent, Robert Charles, hired a team of legal professionals to prepare and present their case; the Penns engaged their own lawyers. The Privy Council referred the dispute to the Board of Trade, which put the matter on the docket for late March or early April. But a scandalously exciting murder trial of a prominent member of the House of Lords (who was convicted and hanged) distracted the board and delayed the case. Then Thomas Penn lost a son to illness just before the boy’s fourth birthday; this occasioned further delay. (If Franklin, remembering the death of his own Franky at four, felt sympathy for his foe, he concealed it well.)
When the board finally convened the hearings, the Penns’ lawyer indignantly attacked the Assembly for its “almost rebellious declarations” against royal authority and its “other acts of avowed democracy.” He repeated the charge against the Assembly of bribing the governor, and he chastised that body for taking advantage of the proprietors’ good nature in allowing it to meet on a regular basis. He implied that he need not say—although he certainly did say—that the late measures levying taxes on the proprietors’ holdings were unwarranted and illegal.
Franklin’s legal strategist was Francis Eyre; his courtroom lawyers were William de Grey and Richard Jackson. De Grey denied that any bribery had taken place. The Assembly had indeed voted an allowance for the governor, but this hardly represented a quid pro quo; it was simply a reimbursement for the governor’s expenses. De Grey disputed the charge of incipient democracy; no less authorities than officers of the king’s army testified to the loyalty and meritorious conduct of the Assembly. The proprietors had no business appealing the statutes in question to the Crown, for their own agent—the governor—had signed them, making them, under the terms of the royal charter, the law of the colony.
The hearings lasted four days; the board’s deliberations on what it had heard, three weeks. In late June 1760 the board delivered an opinion that said, at length, that the proprietors were basically right and Franklin wrong. On the critical issue of whether the proprietors were bound to accept a measure simply because their governor had done so, the board declared that this was “not only against the essential nature of all deputed power” but would tend to “establish an uniform system of collusion between the governor and the Assembly.”
Disappointing as this verdict was to Franklin, it was merely advisory. The Privy Council, acting through its Committee for Plantation Affairs, would make the final determination.
Accordingly the arguments were repeated, in the Whitehall hearing room called the Cockpit, in late August. Perhaps Franklin’s attorneys had learned from their earlier setback; perhaps the council committee felt freer to take a broadly political, rather than narrowly legal, view of the dispute. Whatever the cause, the council ruled more or less in favor of Franklin and the Assembly on the most important single measure, the bill that levied a tax on the proprietors’ estates. Some of the most heated rhetoric of the proprietors’ attorneys alleged that the Assembly intended to shift the burden of taxation from its constituents to the proprietors; Franklin’s advocates denied this. While the charges and denials flew across the Cockpit, Franklin received a summons. As he told the story years later:
Lord Mansfield, one of the Council, rose, and beckoning to me, took me into the clerks’ chamber, while the lawyers were pleading, and asked me if I was really of opinion that no injury would be done the proprietary estate in the execution of the act. I said, Certainly. Then says he, You can have little objection to enter into an engagement to assure that point. I answered, None at all. He then called in Paris [actually, Henry Wilmot, Fernando Paris having died the previous winter], and after some discourse his lordship’s proposition was accepted on both sides.
This compromise marked a signal victory for Franklin and the Assembly. The proprietors, after years of resisting, accepted the principle that their holdings might be taxed along with those of every other property holder in Pennsylvania. Whether they had actually believed their lawyers’ arguments about being victimized by runaway democrats in Pennsylvania, only they knew; in any case the assurances Franklin agreed to promised they would not be so victimized. (As it happened, getting the Assembly to accept Franklin’s assurances was another matter.)
On the larger question, however, Franklin lost. The very fact that the Privy Council consented to hear the case meant that it accepted the Penns’ argument that Assembly approval and governor’s signature did not a Pennsylvania law make. The proprietors had been forced to yield on the tax issue, but there was nothing to prevent their contesting any number of other measures in the future.
As Assembly agent, Franklin also found himself investment manager for the people of Pennsylvania. The Assembly authorized him to receive Pennsylvania’s portion of £200,000 allotted by Parliament to reimburse the American colonies for expenses incurred during the war with France, and over Thomas Penn’s objections—principled and personal—the Board of Trade approved.
To this point in his life Franklin’s investments had consisted chiefly of printing partnerships and occasional real-estate purchases. The money involved had been quite modest—certainly nothing like the £30,000 he now commanded. For help in putting that sum to safe use, he turned to John Rice, a stockbroker suggested by Franklin’s friends, and a man whose record revealed a career of care and circumspection. Rice recommended the purchase of a variety of stocks chosen for their stability and long-term promise. By the end of the summer of 1761 Franklin had bought shares worth nearly £27,000.
An unfortunate combination of events soon soured the investment. The Assembly decided it needed the money at once, and in late 1761 directed Franklin to sell the stocks and reclaim the cash. “A more unlucky time could not have been pitched upon to draw money out of the stocks here,” Franklin replied. The peace negotiation with France had broken down, Pitt had been forced from office, and the war had widened to include Spain. Wars are notorious for deranging stock markets; in this case the derangement hammered the issues Rice and Franklin had selected. “All imaginable care and pains was taken to sell our stocks to the best advantage,” Franklin said, “but it could only be done by degrees and with difficulty, there being sometimes no buyers to be found.” The bottom line was abysmal; in the space of months Franklin managed to lose almost £4,000 of the province’s £27,000 investment.
Things could have been worse. As events shortly proved, John Rice was not the sober stock picker he seemed. Not long after Franklin closed Pennsylvania’s accounts with the broker, Rice came up seriously short on some speculative issues. To cover his losses he forged documents granting him power of attorney and embezzled other people’s money. His crimes coming to light, he fled for France. Perhaps he hoped the hostilities between Britain and France would protect him from extradition; perhaps they would have had they persisted. But Rice’s crowning bad luck was the arrival of peace hard upon his landing in France. The French packed him back across the Channel, where the authorities jailed, tried, and hanged him.
The bad end of John Rice reinforced Franklin’s desire to proceed with a project long in the planning—“a little work for the benefit of youth,” he explained to Lord Kames, “to be called The Art of Virtue.” Franklin feared that the title sounded slightly pretentious, so he took some pains to delineate his intent.
Many people lead bad lives that would gladly lead good ones, but know not how to make the change. They have frequently resolved and endeavoured it; but in vain, because their endeavours have not been properly conducted. To exhort people to be good, to be just, to be temperate, &c. without shewing them how they shall become so, seems like the ineffectual charity mentioned by the Apostle, which consisted in saying to the hungry, the cold, and the naked, be ye fed, be ye warmed, be ye clothed, without shewing them how they should get food, fire, or clothing.
Most people naturally had some virtues, but none naturally had all the virtues. To secure those bestowed by nature, and to acquire those wanting, was the subject of an art.
It is as properly an art as painting, navigation, or architecture. If a man would become a painter, navigator, or architect, it is not enough that he is advised to be one, that he is convinced by the arguments of his adviser that it would be for his advantage to be one, and that he resolves to be one; but he must also be taught the principles of the art, be shewn all the methods of working, and how to acquire the habits of using properly all the instruments. And thus regularly and gradually he arrives by practice at some perfection in the art.
Franklin distinguished virtue from religion. Christians were exhorted to have faith in Christ as the means to achieving virtue; having spent his life among Christians, Franklin was by no means inclined to deny the possibility of this path to virtue. But that same life among Christians disinclined him to assert its inevitability. Besides, Christians—either nominal or practicing—were not the whole world.
All men cannot have faith in Christ; and many have it in so weak a degree that it does not produce the effect. Our Art of Virtue may therefore be of great service to those who have not faith, and come in aid of the weak faith of others. Such as are naturally well-disposed, and have been carefully educated, so that good habits have been early established, and bad ones prevented, have less need of this art; but all may be more or less benefited by it. It is, in short, to be adapted for universal use.
Franklin’s Art of Virtue became his unfinished masterpiece. His friends encouraged him to put his project to paper. Kames had been thinking about something similar as applied to thinking; at the beginning of 1761 he published his Introduction to the Art of Thinking. Franklin was impressed. “I never saw more solid useful matter contained in so small a compass,” he told the author. “A writer can hardly conceive the good he may be doing when engaged in works of this kind.” He was speaking as much to himself as to Kames. “With these sentiments you will not doubt my being serious in the intention of finishing my Art of Virtue.” He explained that the work had been under way for thirty years. “I have from time to time made and caused to be made experiments of the method, with success. The materials have been growing ever since; the form only is now to be given.”
Yet the form was never given. Exactly what form Franklin had in mind cannot be known. In his autobiography, which he began writing ten years later, he included the tale of his attempt at moral perfection, with the charts recording his daily progress in each of thirteen virtues. Perhaps this provided the basis for his projected work. But perhaps not, considering the failure of that experiment.
A lifelong writer and a career publisher, Franklin almost never suffered from the perfectionism that prevents many would-be authors from committing themselves to print. Perhaps he suffered so in this case, thinking a work about perfection ought to be perfect. Perhaps perfectionism of a different sort crept into his thinking. He may have recalled that early failure to achieve perfect virtue and deemed presumptuous any attempt to instruct others in what he had not mastered. In the letter to Kames containing the outline of his project, Franklin concluded, “I imagine what I have now been writing will seem to savour of great presumption; I must therefore speedily finish my little piece and communicate the manuscript to you, that you may judge whether it is possible to make good such pretensions.”
Kames never had the opportunity, for Franklin—perhaps judging on his own that it was impossible to make good his pretensions—never finished the work.
Yet if he could not direct the public at large to perfection, he did manage to provide guidance to a particular friend. Polly Stevenson, leaving her mother’s Craven Street house to live with an elderly aunt in Essex, had proposed a correspondence touching matters of moral and natural philosophy. Franklin was happy to oblige. He sent her books to seed the conversation, urging her to write regarding “whatever occurs to you that you do not thoroughly apprehend, or that you clearly conceive and find pleasure in.”
Polly proved an apt pupil, and inquisitive. Why did the tide in rivers rise first at the mouth? she asked. Franklin had remarked that sailors at sea did not catch cold from wet clothes, the way landsmen did; she wondered whether the salt in the water had something to do with it. Spring-water at a particular location seemed warmer after being pumped than it was at the spring itself; could Franklin explain?
On the last question Franklin remarked that he expected the pumping “to warm not so much the water pumped as the person pumping.” He would not impugn Polly’s observation, but, especially as he had never heard of nor encountered this phenomenon, he wished to verify its existence before trying to explain it. “This prudence of not attempting to give reasons before one is sure of facts,” he said, “I learnt from one of your sex, who, as Selden [John Selden, jurist and Orientalist] tells us, being in company with some gentlemen that were viewing and considering something which they called a Chinese shoe, and disputing earnestly about the manner of wearing it, and how it could possibly be put on, put in her word, and said modestly, Gentlemen, are you sure it is a shoe? Should not that be settled first?”
On the other points he endeavored to instruct. He devoted many pages of correspondence and at least one detailed diagram to explain the theory of waves and tides. The causes of colds stumped him. “No one catches cold by bathing, and no clothes can be wetter than water itself. Why damp clothes should then occasion colds is a curious question, the discussion of which I reserve for a future letter, or some future conversation.” (Eventually Franklin would decide that colds had nothing to do with wet clothes, or even wet bodies.)
The correspondence and their now-occasional conversations convinced Franklin that Polly was an unusual young woman. Apparently through her mother, he learned that she did not wish to wed; he jokingly asked, “Why will you, by the cultivation of your mind, make yourself still more amiable, and a more desirable companion for a man of understanding, when you are determined, as I hear, to live single? If we enter, as you propose, into moral as well as natural philosophy, I fancy, when I have fully established my authority as a tutor, I shall take upon me to lecture you a little on that chapter of duty.”
Franklin was teasing Polly here, but his words were not without significance. Recognizing what an intelligent and thoughtful young woman she was, he naturally considered what sort of wife she would make some man. Scarcely a month later he wrote her, “The knowledge of nature may be ornamental, and it may be useful, but if to attain an eminence in that, we neglect the knowledge and practice of essential duties, we deserve reprehension. For there is no rank in natural knowledge of equal dignity and importance with that of being a good parent, a good child, a good husband, or wife, a good neighbour or friend, a good subject or citizen, that is, in short, a good Christian.”
The more Franklin corresponded with Polly, the more he became convinced she would make some lucky man a fine wife. In fancy he might have wished he himself were twenty-five or thirty again and had met such a charmingly intelligent young woman. Polly, like Katy Ray and the numerous women to whom Franklin would become attached in subsequent years, could hardly have contrasted more sharply with Debbie, his old country Joan. He would never leave Debbie—not permanently, at any rate. But he could dream.
Franklin obviously was in no hurry to get home to Debbie. The Privy Council’s decision of September 1760 fairly well concluded the business he had been sent to London to transact. Not till two years later—the end of August 1762—did he cast off from Portsmouth for Philadelphia. In the interim he found a few things to do to earn his keep as the Assembly’s agent, such as overseeing the investment of Pennsylvania’s funds. Yet this might easily have been left to Robert Charles, who could hardly have handled it worse than Franklin did.
For the most part Franklin continued to enjoy the life of the celebrity philosopher. Oxford University awarded him the degree of Doctor of Civil Law, holding a special convocation for the purpose. He met David Hume, the Scottish philosopher and historian who was completing the final volumes of his History of England, the work that would earn him a large income to accompany his already substantial reputation. Franklin and Hume talked philosophy, politics, and etymology; on the last subject Franklin lamented a deficiency of English compared to certain other languages.
I cannot but wish the usage of our tongue permitted making new words when we want them, by composition of old ones whose meanings are already well understood. The German allows of it, and it is a common practice with their writers. Many of our present English words were originally so made; and many of the Latin words. In point of clearness such compound words would have the advantage of any we can borrow from the ancient or from foreign languages. For instance, the word inaccessible, though long in use among us, is not yet, I dare say, so universally understood by our people as the word uncomeatable would immediately be, which we are not allowed to write.
Alexander Dick and Lord Kames consulted Franklin on the matter of internal combustion—to wit, fireplaces in their homes, and how to keep them from smoking. Franklin responded with customized suggestions for their particular circumstances. George Keith, the Earl of Marischal, wanted to know how to protect his house from lightning; Franklin responded with practical advice informed by his electrical theory.
This same Lord Marischal, in his capacity as governor of Neuchâtel, found himself required to adjudicate a theological dispute over the duration of damnation, namely, was time in hell apportioned according to the grievousness of sin, or did all sinners suffer eternally? Franklin, through David Hume, forwarded an anecdote appropriate to the matter:
The Church [of England] people and the Puritans in a country town had once a bitter contention concerning the erecting of a Maypole, which the former desired and the latter opposed. Each party endeavoured to strengthen itself by obtaining the authority of the mayor, directing or forbidding a Maypole. He heard their altercation with great patience, and then gravely determined thus: You that are for having no Maypole shall have no Maypole; and you that are for having a Maypole shall have a Maypole. Get about your business and let me hear no more of this quarrel. So methinks Lord Marischal might say: You that are for no more damnation than is proportioned to your offences have my consent that it may be so; and you that are for being damned eternally, G-d eternally d—n you all, and let me hear no more of your disputes.
With other interlocutors Franklin examined other topics. Why were the oceans salty? Many naturalists said this was because the rivers and streams of the planet dissolved rock salt, such as that found in salt mines, and carried it downstream to the sea. “But this opinion takes it for granted that all water was originally fresh, of which we can have no proof,” Franklin said. “I am inclined to a different opinion, and rather think all the water on this globe was originally salt, and that the fresh water we find in springs and rivers is the produce of distillation. As to the rock-salt found in mines, I conceive that instead of communicating its saltness to the sea, it is itself drawn from the sea, and that of course the sea is now fresher than it was originally.” (On this matter Franklin was partly right and partly wrong. The salt in mines did indeed come from the sea, but the seas were—and are—getting saltier.) On a similar subject Franklin noted the presence of fossil fishes and seashells in highlands far from the sea. “Either the sea has been higher than it now is, and has fallen away from those high lands; or they have been lower than they are, and were lifted up out of the water to their present height, by some internal mighty force such as we still feel some remains of, when whole continents are moved by earthquakes.”
Another force was less mighty but more frequent. Many years earlier Franklin had noted the seeming paradox that northeasterly storms were felt first in the southwest. (The occasion was a strong northeaster that obscured his view in Philadelphia of a lunar eclipse but left observers in Boston—who communicated the fact to him—several hours more of clear sky to see the event.) Although Franklin had since corroborated the phenomenon, he had never been able to explain it. Now he thought he could. He employed two analogies. “Suppose a long canal of water stopped at the end by a gate. The water is quite at rest till the gate is open, then it begins to move out through the gate; the water next the gate is first in motion, and moves towards the gate; the water next to that first water moves next, and so on successively, till the water at the head of the canal is in motion, which is last of all.” In other words, lowered pressure at the end of the canal propagated up the canal to the head, opposite the motion of the water itself. “Again, suppose the air in a chamber at rest, no current through the room till you make a fire in the chimney. Immediately the air in the chimney, being rarefied by the fire, rises; the air next the chimney flows in to supply its place, moving toward the chimney; and, in consequence, the rest of the air successively, quite back to the door.” This latter was the closer analogy to the actual phenomenon. “Thus to produce our North-East storms, I suppose some great heat and rarefaction of the air in or about the Gulf of Mexico; the air thence rising has its place supplied by the next more northern, cooler, and therefore denser and heavier air; that, being in motion, is followed by the next more northern air, &c &c. in a successive current, to which current our coast and inland ridge of mountains give the direction of North-East, as they lie N.E. and S.W.”
Franklin’s meteorological perspicacity—his explanation here was modern and accurate—was not matched in matters geographical. Like nearly all American and European natural philosophers of his era, Franklin was fascinated by the outstanding question of North American geography: Was there a water passage from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific? By all evidence no such passage existed in temperate latitudes. Yet the straits to the north of Canada remained unexplored, and might include the long-sought Northwest Passage. In the early 1750s Franklin himself had joined the search vicariously and financially, helping to sponsor two voyages of the ship Argo from Philadelphia to the vicinity of Hudson Bay.
That the Argo found nothing of note did not discourage Franklin, in part because he had what he took to be independent evidence that a passage did indeed exist. In 1708 a London journal had published a letter ascribed to a Bartholomew de Fonte, said to be an erstwhile admiral of New Spain and Peru and a present prince of Chile. The Fonte letter recounted a journey by water from the Pacific, in the latitude of the 53rd parallel, to Hudson Bay. It was a remarkable journey, and utterly fanciful.
But Franklin did not know it was fanciful; he thought the opposite. And at a moment when the British papers and members of Parliament were pondering whether to retain Canada, the prospect of a Northwest Passage just beyond the territory in question made that territory all the more valuable. Such a passage would enable British merchants and explorers to reach the Pacific without sailing near or through Spanish waters around South America; Britain’s recent victories over France in the East Indies would become doubly valuable.
In the spring of 1762 Franklin was requested to comment on the Fonte account by John Pringle, who had connections to George III’s favorite, Bute. Franklin proceeded to compose a detailed defense of the Fonte account. Perhaps because his own hoaxes were of a much higher literary quality than this one, the very lack of literary sophistication in the Fonte piece seemed evidence of its authenticity. “Entertainment does not appear to be aimed at in it,” Franklin said. “’tis in short a mere dry account of facts, which, though all possible and probable, are none of them wonderful like the incidents of a novel.”
Franklin adduced additional corroboration. The flora and fauna described by Fonte comported with those mentioned by other travelers. The skin-covered boats employed by the natives he said he saw exactly matched the boats Russian traders encountered in the far-northern Pacific. That the Spanish now disavowed the voyage hardly discredited Fonte’s account; Spain had no desire to broadcast knowledge of a northern route to the Pacific—a route that could only imperil Spain’s Pacific possessions. Nor did an evident discrepancy between sea level at the western end of Fonte’s passage and at the eastern end (the eastern end appeared to be downstream from the western) disqualify the account, in Franklin’s judgment; quite the contrary. “One would think no writer of a feigned voyage, who desired to have it received as true, would of choice invent and insert a circumstance so objectionable.”
Though Franklin was fooled in this case, he had company. Other authorities shared his respect for the Fonte account, and not till many more years had passed was it proven to be a fake. His defense of the spurious story is notable not merely for showing that the most astute minds can be mistaken but for including his first mention of the Gulf Stream. Sailors, he said, had christened it thus, and knew whence and whither it flowed—from the Gulf of Mexico to the North Atlantic. But they did not know why. Franklin proposed a mechanism: a differential in height of sea level occasioned by the trade winds. Although this was only partly right, it pointed him in the right direction.
What most amazed his friends about Franklin was his breadth, his competence in a daunting diversity of fields of human knowledge. A true polymath, he was at home with experts in electricity, meteorology, geology, linguistics, mathematics, literature, philosophy, and politics. That he became one of a relative handful of people in history to invent a popular musical instrument simply added to the luster of his reputation.
Franklin’s genius generally consisted in observing commonplace phenomena and applying the principles behind them in a novel or peculiarly productive way. His “armonica” fit the pattern. Like any number of other bored dinner guests, Franklin had occasionally amused himself by rubbing a wetted finger over the rim of a wineglass, thereby evoking a musical tone. At the time of Franklin’s arrival in London, a transplanted Irishman named Pockrich gave concerts playing glasses tuned to different notes by the different amounts of water in them. But his career was cut short by a fire in his room, which killed him and destroyed his apparatus. A friend of Franklin’s and a fellow of the Royal Society, Edward Delaval, extended the experiments of Pockrich, contriving a set of glasses better tuned and easier to play.
“Being charmed with the sweetness of its tones, and the music he produced from it,” Franklin explained, “I wished only to see the glasses disposed in a more convenient form.” This letter was to Giambattista Beccaria, an Italian priest and electrician. Beccaria had inquired about Franklin’s latest electrical work; Franklin responded that his research into electricity had lapsed for the present but that he had devised a curious musical instrument that might interest the good father.
Franklin described in considerable detail the construction of the instrument. His principal improvement was the elimination of the water and the rearrangement of the glasses. Franklin’s glasses were actually hemispheres of increasing diameter, from three inches to nine. Thirty-seven in all, they achieved by their differing size—and careful grinding—three octaves’ worth of tones, including semitones. The glasses were fitted onto an iron spindle, each one nesting partially inside the next; as the spindle turned, all the glasses did too. The spindle was mounted horizontally in a wooden case and attached to a flywheel, which in turn was attached to a foot pedal that powered the mechanism. The player sat in front of the case, spun the spindle with his foot, and drew wetted fingers across the rims of the turning glasses. “The advantages of this instrument,” Franklin told Beccaria, “are that its tones are incomparably sweet beyond those of any other; that they may be swelled and softened at pleasure by stronger or weaker pressures of the finger, and continued to any length; and that the instrument, being once well tuned, never again wants tuning.” Franklin added, “In honour of your musical language, I have borrowed from it the name of this instrument, calling it the Armonica.”
Franklin did not exaggerate when he described the armonica’s tones as “incomparably sweet.” They had a haunting, ethereal quality, much like that which would characterize “New Age” music more than two hundred years later. Franklin quickly became adept at playing, and took to entertaining guests on the instrument. Others followed his lead. Marianne Davies, a singer who played flute and harpsichord—and who was another young woman charmed by Franklin—became proficient enough to offer public performances. For a time the armonica achieved a genuine vogue. Royal wedding vows were exchanged in Vienna to armonica accompaniment; some of the greatest composers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including Mozart and Beethoven, wrote for Franklin’s instrument.
Like most vogues, that for the armonica eventually passed. Certain performers, including Marianne Davies, were afflicted with a melancholia attributed to the plaintive tones of the instrument. More tellingly, the sound-producing mechanism did not generate sufficient power to fill the large halls that became home to modern stringed instruments, brass, woodwinds, and percussion. That it was glass, and subject to easy breakage, did not help either.
In the summer of 1761 Franklin visited continental Europe for the first time. France would have been the obvious destination, but the war was still on; consequently Franklin and William, accompanied by Richard Jackson, contented themselves with Holland and Flanders. “We saw all the principal cities and towns,” William explained to his sister, Sally. The Roman Catholic cathedrals at Ghent, Bruges, and Antwerp impressed the travelers; less impressive but more curious were the convents. “We went and saw the nuns,” William said, “but they being at their devotions we could have no conversation with them. Indeed they did not look very inviting but on the contrary appeared like cross old maids who had forsaken the world because the world had first forsaken them.”
Franklin was treated with as much respect as on his triumphal tours of England and Scotland. At Leyden they were greeted by the pioneer electrician Pieter van Musschenbroek, the inventor of the Leyden electrical jar. The British ambassador at The Hague hosted a dinner for the Franklins with the diplomatic corps. At Amsterdam, Thomas Hope, one of the most powerful merchants in Europe, put a coach and driver at their disposal. At Brussels the brother-in-law of Austrian Empress Maria Theresa entertained them.
The Dutch were a cleanly people, fastidiously so—which made a certain national habit almost shocking in its incongruity. William was especially offended. “I don’t recollect that I saw more than one Dutch man without a pipe in his mouth, and that was a fellow who had hung in chains so long that his head had dropped off,” William wrote. “Their very children are taught smoking from the moment they leave sucking, and the method they take to teach them is to give them when they are cutting their teeth an old tobacco pipe which is smoked black and smooth to rub their gums with instead of coral. But what surprised me most of all was the seeing at one of the houses a man of ninety drag out his partner and dance a minuet smoking most solemnly a long pipe the whole time.”
Franklin preferred to comment on another national practice, encountered in Flanders. Writing to Jared Ingersoll of Connecticut, where a rigid observance of the Sabbath was a matter of law, Franklin explained:
When I travelled in Flanders I thought of your excessively strict observation of Sunday, and that a man could hardly travel on that day among you upon his lawful occasions, without hazard of punishment; while where I was, every one travelled, if he pleased, or diverted himself any other way. And in the afternoon both high and low went to the play or the opera, where there was plenty of singing, fiddling and dancing.
I looked round for God’s judgments, but saw no signs of them. The cities were well built and full of inhabitants; the markets were filled with plenty; the people well favoured and well clothed; the fields well tilled; the cattle fat and strong; the fences, houses and windows all in repair; and no Old Tenor [paper currency] anywhere in the country; which would almost make one suspect that the Deity is not so angry at that offence as a New England justice.
They arrived back in London just in time to see the coronation of George III. Franklin had made arrangements for himself and William to watch the procession of the great and good of the empire, the first such event in forty years. As it happened, however, William did not sit with his father but walked in the procession himself.
Precisely how he rated this honor is unclear; hardly more transparent is how William suddenly became one of the king’s favorite, or at least most favored, Americans. In August 1762 the Crown announced the appointment of William Franklin as royal governor of New Jersey.
Deliberate secrecy cloaked the consideration leading to the appointment. One contemporary remarked that the affair was “transacted in so private a manner that not a tittle of it escaped until it was seen in the public papers.” Part of the secrecy reflected the desire of William’s supporters to keep the Penns in the dark lest they mobilize opposition. The last thing Pennsylvania’s proprietors wanted was the proliferation of Franklins in positions of influence; at a minimum, the bestowal of such an honor on such a young and inexperienced person would be read as approbation of his father. Doubtless more important to the king and his close advisers was the turmoil through which the government was going during this period. The accession of George III, the ascendancy of Bute, the eclipse and resignation of Pitt—all left little room and less stomach for a fight over the governorship of New Jersey.
Not that New Jersey was worth much of a fight. As plums went, it was small and not especially sweet. The job paid little and included few nonsalary emoluments; George’s first choice turned the offer down flat.
But William Franklin was looking for work. He had applied for a post as deputy secretary of Carolina and would have been happy with anything respectable in the Admiralty court or the customs service. He definitely would not say no to a provincial governorship.
Promising as the young man might be, he almost certainly received his appointment because of his connection to his famous father. Through John Pringle, Bute had become acquainted with Franklin. Bute required little insight to recognize Franklin’s gifts, nor to determine that Franklin would make a better friend than an enemy. New Jersey was an inexpensive down payment on Franklin’s goodwill.
William’s appointment inspired him to pursue another goal: matrimony. Some while earlier his eye had fallen on Elizabeth Downes, the daughter of a Barbados planter whose family possessed money but lacked station. William now had station but scant money; the match seemed ideal.
Franklin endorsed both his son’s appointment to governor and his marriage to Betsy Downes. “The lady is of so amiable a character that the latter gives me more pleasure than the former,” he told Jane Mecom, “though I have no doubt but that he will make as good a governor as husband, for he has good principles and good dispositions, and I think is not deficient in good understanding.”
Yet perhaps he was not quite so delighted as he let on. Franklin did not attend William’s wedding, having departed for America some weeks before. Considering that he had put off and put off again going back to Pennsylvania, one might have expected he could wait a little longer to see his only son married. But he did not. Nor did he subsequently explain why not.
He may have decided, by the summer of 1762, that if he was ever to go home, he had to go now. Until the moment Franklin’s ship weighed anchor, William Strahan tried to get him to stay—and nearly succeeded. Franklin told Strahan that it required his most resolute efforts to depart, “in opposition to your almost irresistible eloquence, secretly supported by my own treacherous inclinations.” To Lord Kames he wrote from Portsmouth:
I am now waiting here only for a wind to waft me to America, but cannot leave this happy island and my friends in it without extreme regret, though I am going to a country and a people that I love. I am going from the Old World to the new, and I fancy I feel like those who are leaving this world for the next: grief at the parting, fear of the passage, hope of the future.
If Franklin regretted going, still more did his friends and admirers regret his leaving. “I am very sorry that you intend soon to leave our hemisphere,” said David Hume. “America has sent us many good things: gold, silver, sugar, tobacco, indigo &c. But you are the first philosopher, and indeed the first great man of letters for whom we are beholden to her. It is our own fault that we have not kept him; whence it appears that we do not agree with Solomon, that wisdom is above gold, for we take care never to send back an ounce of the latter which we once lay our fingers on.”
William Strahan was still more regretful. He sent a letter to David Hall via Franklin, remarking, “This will be brought you by our worthy friend Dr. Franklin, whose face you should never again have seen on your side the water had I been able to prevail upon him to stay, or had my powerbeen in any measure equal to my inclination.” Strahan’s letter to Hall afforded a glimpse at the man Strahan and many others in England, including Kames and Hume, considered one of the most remarkable personalities of their day.
Though his talents and abilities in almost every branch of human science are singularly great and uncommon, and have added to the pleasure and knowledge of the greatest geniuses of this country, who all admire and love him, and lament his departure, yet he knows as well how to condescend to those of inferior capacity, how to level himself for the time to the understandings of his company, and to enter without affectation into their amusements and chit-chat, that his whole acquaintance here are his affectionate friends.
As for myself, I never found a person in my whole life more thoroughly to my mind. As far as my knowledge or experience or sentiments of every kind could reach his more enlarged sagacity and conceptions, they exactly corresponded with his; or if I accidentally differed from him in any particular, he quickly and with great facility and good nature poured in such light upon the subject as immediately convinced me I was wrong.
Strahan mourned Franklin’s departure as akin to an untimely death and cherished the hope that his friend would soon return to Britain. Yet if fate decreed otherwise, Strahan knew that Franklin would always be “an honour to his country and an ornament to human nature.”