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The wolves were after more than sheep. They wanted Franklin. And they got him. In the spring of 1773, while Thomas Cushing and Sam Adams were considering how to make most effective use of the Hutchinson letters, Parliament revised the last remnant of the Townshend duties. At one time Franklin had hoped for repeal of the duty on tea, but the abandonment of nonimportation removed what pressure Parliament felt on the subject, and Americans settled back into their routine of an afternoon cup of tea, sometimes smuggled from Holland but often brought from Britain, with the three pence duty legally and openly paid.
Yet Parliament, with the clumsiness that had become characteristic of its American policy, managed to revive the rebellious spirit. In May 1773 it passed a Tea Act that, while leaving the American duty on tea unchanged, rebated other duties paid by the East India Company and allowed that company to market its tea directly to the American colonies, rather than through middlemen. Little effort was made to cloak the fact that this constituted a favor to the well-connected but abysmally run East India Company, nor to disguise the great advantage it gave the company over the American merchants who hitherto had bought tea at auction in England. Those merchants, who had little quarrel with Parliament once the bulk of the Townshend duties had been lifted, now confronted the looming specter of monopoly crushing them beneath its greedy heel.
Patriots in Philadelphia and New York were quicker than those in Boston to respond to the new threat, partly because of Boston’s distraction with the Hutchinson letters. But once Boston mobilized, it soon seized the lead against what the Bostonians accounted this latest manifestation of a British conspiracy upon American liberty. Sam Adams and allies insisted that the agents, or consignees, of the East India Company abandon their positions; when the consignees hesitated, the Sons of Liberty attacked the warehouse and home of one of them.
The controversy came to a head with the arrival in late November 1773 of the Dartmouth, the first of the ships bearing the East India Company’s tea. A standoff ensued between the Sons and the consignees. Adams whipped up enthusiasm for the former by calling a series of mass meetings; several thousand persons from the city and suburbs attended, shouting defiance at the East India Company, at Parliament, and at Governor Hutchinson, who was attempting to have the tea landed and who happened to be the father of two of the consignees.
On the evening of December 16 the largest meeting yet brought perhaps eight thousand people to Boston’s Old South Church. At a signal from Adams a group of about fifty men thinly disguised as Indians stormed the wharf where the Dartmouth lay, moored next to its recently arrived sister ships, the Eleanor and the Beaver, which also carried tea. Quite evidently the band of raiders included some longshoremen, for they knew the business of unloading a ship. They brought the casks of tea from hold to deck, opened them, and dumped the leaves out upon the bay. It was a long night’s work, for by morning some 90,000 pounds of tea, worth £10,000, had been consigned to the waves. For weeks leaves washed ashore all about the area. Nothing else aboard the ships was damaged; a single padlock, broken by mistake, was replaced.
The Boston Tea Party could hardly have happened at a more awkward time for Franklin. While the news of this most recent outburst was crossing the Atlantic, Franklin became linked to Massachusetts in the minds of ministers and others in England as never before, and the linkage did him no credit.
Upon the printing in Boston of the Hutchinson letters, Franklin initially hoped to keep clear of the affair. “I am glad my name has not been heard on the occasion,” he told Thomas Cushing. “And as I do not see it could be of any use to the public, I now wish it may continue unknown.” Yet he added, realistically, “I hardly expect it.”
To his surprise his secret held for several months. As in all good scandals, secrecy inflamed public interest; the London papers verily quivered with intimations, accusations, rejoinders, and denials regarding who had lifted the papers. Matters grew serious in early December when William Whately, the brother of the now-deceased original recipient of the letters, Thomas Whately, essentially charged John Temple, a minor government official born in America and known to sympathize with the Americans, with having stolen the letters. Temple challenged Whately to a duel; in Hyde Park they slashed at each other ineptly with swords till Whately’s wounds caused him to retire.
Franklin might have kept quiet even after this, but Whately’s partisans circulated stories that John Temple had not fought fair—which caused Temple to declare the feud still open. A second duel impended.
Franklin thereupon spoke up. In late December he wrote a signed letter to the London Chronicle declaring Whately and Temple at once “totally ignorant and innocent” of the events over which they fought, and asserting forthrightly, “I alone am the person who obtained and transmitted to Boston the letters in question.” He was equally forthright in justifying his action. “They were not in the nature of private letters between friends”—as had been stated by those condemning the dissemination. “They were written by public officers to persons in public station, on public affairs, and intended to procure public measures; they were therefore handed to other public persons who might be influenced by them to produce those measures. Their tendency was to incense the Mother Country against her colonies, and by the steps recommended, to widen the breach, which they effected.” The principal caution expressed by the letters’ authors with regard to privacy was to keep their contents from the agents of the colonies, who might try to return the letters, or copies thereof, to America. “That apprehension was, it seems, well founded; for the first agent who laid his hands on them thought it his duty to transmit them to his constituents.”
Franklin’s statement was as much polemic as explanation. He was not alone responsible for lifting the letters; someone, whom he still and henceforth declined to name, handed the letters to him. Nor were the letters quite the public communications he indicated. To be sure, the individuals involved held public office, but these were not official reports or correspondence drafted under public compulsion. By Franklin’s argument all his letters to and from William should have been open to general perusal. (In fact some of those letters apparently were being opened, but Franklin hardly approved the practice.)
If any in England expected repentance, they certainly did not get it. Franklin’s assertiveness condemned him the more in the eyes of those who considered Boston a nest of sedition and judged all who spoke for Boston abettors of rebellion. Until now Franklin—the famous Franklin, scientist and philosopher feted throughout the civilized world—had been above effective reproach. His admission of responsibility for transmitting the purloined letters afforded his foes the opening they had long sought.
The initial skirmish took place on January 11, 1774. The Privy Council summoned Franklin to a hearing on the petition of the Massachusetts House to remove Hutchinson from office. No one, least of all Franklin, expected that the council was seriously considering dismissing Hutchinson; the question involved the manner of the council’s rejecting the petition—and its treatment of the agent delivering the petition. Franklin had reason to suspect trouble, if not a trap, for not until the late afternoon prior to the hearing did he learn that the opposition would be bringing legal counsel. Nor was the opposition counsel just any London lawyer, but Alexander Wedderburn, the solicitor general and a man with a reputation for putting courtroom invective to the service of personal and political ambition. He held his current position not from any philosophical affinity with the North administration but because North determined that it was better to have Wedderburn on the side of the government spewing out, than on the side of the opposition spewing in.
Franklin had hoped to argue for Hutchinson’s dismissal on political grounds; the appearance of Wedderburn indicated that the government intended to mount a legal—and personal—counteroffensive. Moreover, the target of the counteroffensive would not be Massachusetts but Franklin. Wedderburn’s opening statement in response to the petition—“address”—of the Massachusetts House set the tone: “The address mentions certain papers. I would wish to be informed what are those papers.”
Wedderburn, and everyone else at the hearing, knew what the papers were, but he wanted to hear the admission from Franklin’s mouth.
“They are the letters of Mr. Hutchinson and Mr. Oliver,” Franklin replied.
The Lord President of the Privy Council, Earl Gower, inquired if Franklin had brought the letters.
Franklin answered that he had not. He did not say that the originals were in America, where he had sent them; that too was common knowledge. “But here are attested copies.”
“Do you not mean to found a charge upon them?” the Lord President insisted. “If you do, you must produce the letters.”
Franklin now implicitly conceded the present location of the letters. “These copies are attested by several gentlemen at Boston, and a notary public.”
Wedderburn interposed himself, with a show of magnanimity. “My Lords, we shall not take advantage of any imperfection in the proof. We admit that the letters are Mr. Hutchinson’s and Mr. Oliver’s handwriting.” He appended a hook, however, saying that the government’s side was “reserving to ourselves the right of inquiring how they were obtained.”
That side clearly had Franklin outmanned at this hearing, having informed him too late for him to secure legal counsel of his own. He objected that lawyers were really unnecessary. The case for removing Hutchinson and Oliver rested on the undeniable fact that they had forfeited the confidence of the people of the province they were charged with governing. Did the Crown desire to retain such men in office? And was this not a matter their lordships were perfectly capable of deciding on their own, without the intrusion of attorneys?
The government rejoined that attorneys were indeed necessary. The agent for Hutchinson and Oliver, Israel Mauduit, said he lacked personal knowledge of Massachusetts politics. Moreover, he lacked Franklin’s gifts. “I well know Dr. Franklin’s great abilities, and wish to put the defense of my friends more upon a parity with the attack. He will not therefore wonder that I choose to appear before your Lordships with the assistance of counsel.”
The court—that is, the Privy Council—agreed to allow the lawyers. Franklin could employ them or dispense with them, as he chose.
Franklin strongly considered waiving the right to counsel. He said he had intended simply to lay the pertinent documents before their lordships; these spoke for themselves. But wishing to give the Massachusetts House every possible chance to make its case, he decided to summon legal reinforcements. “I shall desire to have counsel,” he said.
The Lord President asked how long he would require to engage counsel and prepare.
“Three weeks,” Franklin replied.
Had Franklin waived counsel, or had he asked for one week rather than three, what happened next might have gone differently. As it was, the interim between the first and second Privy Council hearings brought news of the Boston Tea Party. For years Franklin had been urging Thomas Cushing, and through Cushing the rest of Massachusetts, to refrain from violence and the destruction of property. Just possibly public opinion in London might come round to America’s view of liberty and English rights—if that view were pressed peacefully and through legitimate channels. If Americans resorted to violence, however, their enemies in England would be able to say they were rebels one and all. Put otherwise, Thomas Hutchinson would be seen not as a betrayer of liberty but as a defender of the order on which liberty must be based.
And Franklin would be perceived not as a defender of liberty but as a betrayer of confidences. The campaign to cast him so began before the second hearing. Anonymous correspondents to the London journals hurled insults at the American agent, implying that if he were not directly culpable in this latest assault on property and order, his mark was figuratively all over the floating tea. That his days as deputy postmaster were numbered was taken as foregone. He even heard rumors that the authorities were on their way to arrest him, seize his papers, and throw him into Newgate prison.
By the time he arrived at the Cockpit on January 29, the ostensible reason for the hearing had almost been forgotten. Meetings of the Privy Council often evoked indifferent attendance, even from the lords themselves; but on this day the council chairs were filled. The Lord President of the council, Earl Gower, presided; thirty-four other eminences sat on either side of him. These included Lord North, the prime minister; Lord Dartmouth, the American secretary; Lord Hillsborough, Franklin’s foe of long standing; the Archbishop of Canterbury; the Bishop of London; the Lord Chief Justice of Common Pleas; the Duke of Queensberry; the Earls of Sandwich, Suffolk, and Rochford; Viscount Townshend (brother of the deceased author of the Townshend duties); Sir Jeffrey Amherst; and a score more. None present could recall a fuller meeting of the council. Nearly all were eager—the other few were anxious—to see what Solicitor General Wedderburn did with the estimable Dr. Franklin. The sole friendly visage among the group belonged to Lord Le Despencer.
On the rest of the main floor of the large hall, and in the gallery that ran around the room above the floor, scores of men and women crowded close to witness the highlight of the political season. Edmund Burke was there; also Jeremy Bentham and General Thomas Gage. Joseph Priestley managed to shadow Burke into the hall. Edward Bancroft, whom Franklin did not yet know, slipped in with that mysterious ease that characterized all his actions.
As the crowd waited for the hearing to begin, the air of expectancy intensified. It was like no other hearing most in attendance had ever witnessed; it seemed closer to a trial of a notorious murderer or one of the blood sports that so delighted the English masses. Franklin himself compared it to a “bull-baiting,” with him as the bull, chained to a post at the center of the arena.
The hearing began with a reading of the Massachusetts petition and supporting documents, including the Hutchinson-Oliver letters. Then John Dunning, a barrister Franklin had engaged on behalf of the Massachusetts House, reiterated Franklin’s previous point that the matter at hand was political, not legal, and that a judicial proceeding was hardly called for. Unfortunately for Franklin and Massachusetts, Dunning suffered from an illness of the lungs, which weakened his voice considerably, rendering it nearly inaudible and therefore unintelligible to the audience and most of the lords.
Before Dunning had a chance to finish his argument, Solicitor General Wedderburn leaped to his feet and seized the floor. He summarized the history of the Massachusetts colony from the Stamp Act riots to the present, paying special attention to the depredations of the Boston mob upon the current governor, Mr. Hutchinson. Listeners presumably expected him to connect this review to the issue at hand—or perhaps they expected otherwise, in light of the roasting said to be readied for Franklin.
If the latter, they were not disappointed, for the solicitor general suddenly launched into a tirade against Franklin that filled nearly an hour. Precisely what he said is difficult to reconstruct in all particulars; his language was too foul or libelous for even the scandalmongers of Grub Street. One person present called Wedderburn an “unmannered railer” who employed the “coarsest language,” unleashed “all the licenced scurrility of the Bar,” and decorated his diatribe with “the choicest flowers of Billingsgate.” Another auditor, friendly to Franklin, recorded, “I had the grievous mortification to hear Mr. Wedderburn wandering from the proper question before their Lordships, pour forth such a torrent of virulent abuse on Dr. Franklin as never before took place within the compass of my knowledge of judicial proceedings, his reproaches appearing to me incompatible with the principles of law, truth, justice, propriety, and humanity.” Edmund Burke characterized Wedderburn’s “furious Philippic” as transcending “all bounds and measures.”
Those words of Wedderburn that did see print were indeed furious. Franklin was called “the first mover and prime conductor” of the conspiracy by the Massachusetts House against the honor and integrity of two fine servants of the king. “Having by the help of his own special confidants and party leaders first made the Assembly his agents in carrying on his own secret designs, he now appears before your Lordships to give the finishing stroke to the work of his own hands.”
The correspondence adduced by Franklin and his cabal to defame the governor and lieutenant governor in fact condemned Franklin himself, Wedderburn declared.
The letters could not have come to Dr. Franklin by fair means. The writers did not give them to him; nor yet did the deceased correspondent, who from our intimacy would otherwise have told me of it. Nothing then will acquit Dr. Franklin of the charge of obtaining them by fraudulent or corrupt means, for the most malignant of purposes, unless he stole them, from the person who stole them. This argument is irrefragable.
I hope, my Lords, you will mark and brand the man, for the honour of this country, or Europe, and of mankind. Private correspondence has hitherto been held sacred, in times of the greatest party rage, not only in politics but religion. He has forfeited all the respect of societies and of men. Into what companies will he hereafter go with an unembarrassed face, or the honest intrepidity of virtue? Men will watch him with a jealous eye; they will hide their papers from him, and lock up their escritoires. He will henceforth esteem it a libel to be called a man of letters: homo trium litterarum.
This last line brought roars of laughter from the lords and many of the gallery. All could appreciate the play on the English phrase; those who recalled their classics understood the reference to Plautus: “Tun, trium litterarum homo me vituperas? fur.” (“Do you find fault with me? You, a man of three letters—thief!”)
From wit Wedderburn returned to invective.
He not only took away the letters from one brother, but he kept himself concealed till he nearly occasioned the murder of the other. It is impossible to read his account [the one in which Franklin had owned up to his role in the publication of the letters], expressive of the coolest and most deliberate malice, without horror. Amidst these tragical events, of one person nearly murdered, of another answerable for the issue, of a worthy governor hurt in his dearest interests, the fate of America in suspense—here is a man who with the utmost insensibility of remorse, stands up and avows himself the author of all. I can compare it only to Zanga in Dr. Young’s Revenge:
Know then ’twas —I.
I forged the letter, I disposed the picture;
I hated, I despised, and I destroy.
I ask, my Lords, whether the revengeful temper attributed, by poetic fiction only, to the bloody African, is not surpassed by the coolness and apathy [that is, lack of emotion] of the wily American.
Wedderburn dissected and held up to gory scorn Franklin’s published argument that the letters somehow belonged in the public domain because they were written from public men to another public man on public issues. No, these were private missives, “as sacred and as precious to gentlemen of integrity as their family plate or jewels are.” Franklin had added the argument that the letters were intended to influence public policy. “Is this crime of so heinous a nature as to put Mr. Whately’s friends out of the common protection? And to give Dr. Franklin a right to hang them up to party rage, and to expose them, for what he knew, to the danger of having their houses a second time pulled down by popular fury?” Franklin had cited the fact that Hutchinson and Oliver desired to keep their letters secret as evidence that they had much to hide. “But if the desiring of secrecy be the proof, and the measure of guilt, what then are we to think of Dr. Franklin’s case, whose whole conduct in this affair has been secret and mysterious, and who through the whole course of it has discovered the utmost solicitude to keep it so?”
Wedderburn reiterated the argument made by the government (and by Hutchinson and Oliver) that the unrest in America was not the work of ordinary people—“these innocent, well-meaning farmers, which compose the bulk of the Assembly,” Wedderburn said—but of self-serving conspirators, of whom Franklin was the “first mover and prime conductor” (Wedderburn liked this phrase enough to repeat it), the “actor and secret spring,” and the “inventor and first planner.”
My Lords, we are perpetually told of men’s incensing the mother country against the colonies, of which I have never known a single instance. But we hear nothing of the vast variety of arts which have been made use of to incense the colonies against the mother country. And in all these arts no one I fear has been a more successful proficient than the very man who now stands forth as Mr. Hutchinson’s accuser. My Lords, as he has been pleased in his own letter to avow this accusation, I shall now return the charge, and shew to your Lordships who it is that is the true incendiary, and who is the great abettor of that faction at Boston which, in the form of a Committee of Correspondence, have been inflaming the whole province against his Majesty’s government.
Wedderburn linked Franklin to Sam Adams, and Adams to the effort to forge a united front against Parliament by the circulation of “an inflammatory letter sounding an alarm of a plan of despotism, with which the Administration and the Parliament intended to enslave them, and threatened them with certain and inevitable destruction.” This letter was accompanied by a pamphlet designed to incite the ordinary people still further. “It told them a hundred rights of which they never had heard before, and a hundred grievances which they never before had felt.” Franklin and Adams did their work well; the townships of Massachusetts responded as if on cue, with resolves like none ever seen. “They are full of the most extravagant absurdities, such as the most enthusiastic rants of the wildest of my countrymen in Charles the Second’s days cannot equal.” Not least of the absurdities was the treasonous assertion of desire to call in foreign powers to rectify imagined injuries perpetrated by Parliament against the people of New England. “These are the lessons taught in Dr. Franklin’s school of politics.”
What was the purpose of the conspirators in attacking Governor Hutchinson? “To establish their power, and make all future governors bow to their authority. They wish to erect themselves into a tyranny greater than the Roman; to be able, sitting in their own secret cabal, to dictate for the Assembly, and send away their verbosa et grandis epístola, and get even a virtuous Governor dragged from his seat, and made the sport of a Boston mob.” The destructive capacities of Boston mobs were most lately revealed in the destruction of the tea cargoes of the three British vessels lying peacefully in Boston’s harbor.
For Franklin the prize was more specific: the governorship for himself. Wedderburn conceded that their lordships might find this hard to believe. “But nothing, surely, but a too eager attention to an ambition of this sort could have betrayed a wise man into such a conduct as we have now seen.” Wedderburn offered no real evidence on this point; their lordships would have to judge for themselves. But they should surely keep the possibility in mind in weighing the issue at hand. “I hope that Mr. Hutchinson will not meet with the less countenance from your Lordships for his rival’s being his accuser. Nor will your Lordships, I trust, from what you have heard, advise the having Mr. Hutchinson replaced, in order to make room for Dr. Franklin as a successor.”
Through all of this Franklin remained silent. The audience, including many of the lords, laughed and cheered at the solicitor’s slashing assault on Franklin’s behavior and character, but the object of the day’s entertainment stood before his accuser betraying not the slightest emotion. “The Doctor was dressed in a full dress suit of spotted Manchester velvet,” Edward Bancroft recalled, “and stood conspicuously erect, without the smallest movement of any part of his body. The muscles of his face had been previously composed, so as to afford a placid tranquil expression of countenance, and he did not suffer the slightest alteration of it to appear during the continuance of the speech in which he was so harshly and improperly treated.” He appeared, Bancroft said, “as if his features had been made of wood.”
Franklin maintained his stoic silence after Wedderburn ended his tirade. Understanding the nature of the proceeding, he refused to rebut the solicitor or to answer his questions. John Dunning, his counsel, started to reply to Wedderburn but, unable to speak above a croaking whisper, had to stop. Franklin made no effort to speak for him—that is, for himself. He preferred not to dignify Wedderburn’s diatribe with a response, confident that honest men would appreciate the unfairness of the situation into which he had been thrust. At present honest men seemed in short supply; the Privy Council sneeringly rejected the Massachusetts petition as baseless and intended only “for the seditious purpose of keeping up a spirit of clamour and discontent.” The Lord President thereupon adjourned the session.
The government shortly added the expected sanction. Within forty-eight hours of his session in the Cockpit, Franklin received notice of his dismissal as deputy postmaster. Although anticipated, this move struck Franklin as both unfair to one who had built the American post from nothing to an efficient and profitable operation, and symptomatic of the wicked folly of a government that would cut off its nose to spite its face.
The entire business outraged Franklin. He normally made it a point of pride to keep his emotions clear of his pen; he almost always composed himself before composing. But more than two weeks after his encounter with Wedderburn and the Privy Council, he told Thomas Cushing bluntly, “I am very angry.” His anger was both personal and political. Of the former he declined to speak, even to Cushing, lest his remarks “should be thought the effects of resentment and a desire of exasperating.” But he went on, “What I feel on my own account is half lost”—but only half lost—“in what I feel for the public. When I see that all petitions and complaints of grievances are so odious to government that even the mere pipe which conveys them becomes obnoxious, I am at a loss to know how peace and union is to be maintained or restored between the different parts of the empire. Grievances cannot be redressed unless they are known; and they cannot be known but through complaints and petitions. If these are deemed affronts, and the messengers punished as offenders, who will henceforth send petitions? And who will deliver them?” Wise governments encouraged the airing of grievances, even those that were lightly founded. Foolish governments did the opposite—to their peril. “Where complaining is a crime, hope becomes despair.”
And Franklin, treated as a criminal for complaining, had reached the point of despair. There was nothing for honest Americans in the empire but illegitimate insult and unwarranted condemnation. Franklin wrote William with information and advice:
This line is just to acquaint you that I am well, and that my office of Deputy-Postmaster is taken from me.
As there is no prospect of your being ever promoted to a better government [that is, a more lucrative governorship], and that you hold has never defrayed its expenses, I wish you were settled in your farm. ’tis an honester and a more honourable because a more independent employment.
You will hear from others the treatment I have received. I leave you to your own reflections and determinations upon it.
William might well have read this as encouragement to resign his post; Franklin might well have intended it so. Two weeks later Franklin wrote to Richard Bache, who evidently had hoped to use his father-in-law’s connections to gain employment for himself. Franklin said that those connections now no longer existed, and hence no possibility of a post-office job. He added, “As things are, I would not wish to see you concerned in it. For I conceive that the dismissing me merely for not being corrupted by the office to betray the interests of my country will make it some disgrace among us to hold such an office.”
Yet if resigning had been his message to William, he soon amended it. Not that he considered service under the Crown any more honorable than in the immediate aftermath of his Cockpit ordeal; he simply reverted to his previous philosophy of never resigning. William had been weighing a move from Burlington to Perth Amboy; Franklin told him to go slow incurring the expense of such a move, as the future of his governorship was in jeopardy. Some reports suggested that William would simply be dismissed, while others hinted at a more indirect approach by their mutual foes. “They may expect that your resentment of their treatment of me may induce you to resign, and save them the shame of depriving you whom they ought to promote.” Franklin went on, “But this I would not advise you to do. Let them take your place if they want it, though in truth I think it scarce worth your keeping…. One may make something of an injury, nothing of a resignation.”
For himself, he thought he had already made something of his injury. He wrote to Jane Mecom, whose own money problems disposed her to worry about her brother in his loss of income, telling her not to be troubled. “You and I have almost finished the journey of life. We are now but a little way from home, and have enough in our pockets to pay the post chaises.” As for the principle involved, it was plainer than ever, to honest men if not to his enemies. “Intending to disgrace me, they have rather done me honour. No failure of duty in my office is alleged against me; such a fault I should have been ashamed of. But I am too much attached to the interests of America, and an opposer of the measures of Administration. The displacing me is therefore a testimony of my being uncorrupted.”
The more he reflected on his situation, the more he understood the heart of the matter. To his partner in the American post office, John Foxcroft, he explained his dismissal in a sentence: “I am too much of an American.”
As philosophical as he could be with relatives and friends, Franklin remained irate at those who were forcing this choice between America and Britain. They displayed their folly by word and deed, and though, as he told Cushing, he might have suffered their folly for his own sake, that folly was rending the empire. No man of public feeling could keep silent.
In the London papers he struck back with scorn. “The admirers of Dr. Franklin in England are much shocked at Mr. Wedderburn’s calling him a thief,” he wrote in the Public Advertiser, over a signature no one present at the Cockpit hearing, or familiar with Wedderburn’s by-now-famous assault, could mistake: Homo Trium Litterarum. “But perhaps they will be less surprised at this circumstance when they are informed that his greatest admirers on the Continent agree in entertaining the same idea of him.” As evidence Franklin enclosed a poetical epigraph from Dubourg’s recently published Oeuvres de M. Franklin. “It will even be seen that foreigners represent him as much more impudent and audacious in his thefts than the English orator (though he was under no restraint from a regard to truth).” Franklin reproduced the stanza in French, then helpfully supplied a translation:
To steal from Heaven its sacred fire he taught,
The Arts to thrive in savage climes he brought
In the New World the first of men esteemed;
Among the Greeks a god he had been deemed.
It was unlike Franklin to boast of his fame, particularly in such transparent manner, but after the abuse he had received from the Privy Council, he allowed himself this riposte. Who did these people think they were dealing with? What had Wedderburn, of these cribbed classical allusions, ever done besides extort office from his betters—or men who would have been his betters had they not lowered themselves to his level?
In American papers he spoke at greater length. The Boston Gazette carried his unsigned account of the proceedings at the Cockpit. He explained how the counsel for the Massachusetts House had begun its presentation with propriety and decency, whereupon the solicitor general “totally departed from the question and was permitted to wander into a new case, the accusation of the person who merely delivered the petition.” The lords of the Privy Council disgraced themselves by their toleration of—indeed their conniving in—this astonishing performance. “Not a single lord checked and recalled this orator to the business before them; but on the contrary (a very few excepted) they seemed to enjoy highly the entertainment and frequently burst out into loud applause.”
To what purpose this ad hominem attack? To wound Dr. Franklin’s character, and to distract attention from the issue at hand. As to the former design, the shaft missed its mark. “His character is not so vulnerable as they imagined.” As to the latter:
Even supposing he had infamously obtained the letters, would that have altered the nature of them, their tendency and design? Would that have made them innocent? How weak and ridiculous is this?
The truth is, the Doctor came by the letters honourably; his intention in sending them was virtuous: to lessen the breach between Britain and the colonies, by showing that the injuries complained of by one of them did not proceed from the other, but from traitors among themselves. The treason thus discovered, the conspirators were complained of. The agent is suffered to be abused by a solicitor; the complaint called—I had like to have said judged—false, vexatious, scandalous; and the complainers factious and seditious.
The pain we feel on Dr. Franklin’s account is lost in what we feel for America and for Britain.
The government had followed this shameful affair by dismissing Dr. Franklin from his position with the post office. Such action was discreditable in itself; it was even more pernicious in its prospect. Appointments to the post office—a service essential to all who lived in the colonies—were being held hostage to adherence to the policies of whatever ministry happened to hold power. Moreover, at a time when committees of correspondence in the several colonies were attempting to coordinate opposition to oppression, the very mails communicating those attempts were subject to surveillance by government placemen. “Behold Americans where matters are driving!”
Where they were driving was hard against Boston and the liberty of Massachusetts. The Boston Tea Party had excited great wrath in England, a substantial portion of which had broken upon the head of Franklin. But more remained. King George, heretofore in the background on colonial issues, took a direct interest in the insurrectionary activity across the water. He called in General Gage—fresh from seeing Franklin being pilloried—for advice. The British commander-in-chief for America was esteemed an expert on the colonies; he urged vigorous measures. “He says they will be lions whilst we are lambs,” George recorded. “But if we take the resolute part, they will be very meek.” Lord North, hardly a truculent sort, concurred. “We are not entering into a dispute between internal and external taxes,” the prime minister declared, “not between taxes laid for the purpose of revenues and taxes laid for the regulation of trade, not between representation and taxation, or legislation and taxation; but we are now to dispute the question whether we have, or have not, any authority in that country.” He added, “If they deny authority in one instance, it goes to all; we must control them or submit to them.”
Parliament agreed. It immediately passed the Boston Port Act, which closed the port of Boston to overseas trade (with tightly controlled exceptions for food and fuel). The closure would remain in force until the king decided to lift it, a decision that could not come before the East India Company had been compensated for its tea. Although the act threatened Massachusetts with economic strangulation—as Franklin, who had grown up in sight and sound of all those ships in Boston’s harbor, appreciated full well—it might have been worse, given the mood in London. Even Isaac Barré, who had opposed the Stamp Act and was generally thought a friend of America, offered his “hearty affirmative” for the port closure. Likening the protesters to wayward children, he told Parliament, “Boston ought to be punished.”
Whether the acts that followed were more or less moderate depended on one’s point of view. The Massachusetts Government Act suspended the charter of the colony and granted the Crown much greater control over its affairs. The Administration of Justice Act allowed royal officials charged with certain crimes to be tried in England. The Quartering Act required private householders to take in troops upon the order of the British commanding officer. The Quebec Act—not a direct response to the Boston Tea Party but passed in the same atmosphere of disregard for American sensibilities—established a London-dominated civil government for Canada and extended the boundaries of Canada to the Ohio River, effectively vetoing claims of several of the existing colonies to the region.
The five measures together were called the “Intolerable Acts” in America, for after everything else of the previous decade, they seemed more than the Americans could bear. Even before the last of the laws was enacted, committees of correspondence in the colonies were writing furiously, dispatching messages up and down the Atlantic Coast, calling on the assemblies and people of the separate provinces to join forces against this latest usurpation. The Intolerable Acts fell most heavily on Massachusetts, of course, but what Parliament and the Crown could do to Massachusetts, they could do to the other colonies.
Virginia thought so; the House of Burgesses there, led by Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, and Thomas Jefferson, declared that Boston was suffering a “hostile invasion.” In a touch doubtless appreciated in Puritan Boston, the Virginia assembly denominated June 1, 1774, as a “day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer, devoutly to implore the divine interposition for averting the heavy calamity which threatens the destruction to our civil rights, and the evils of civil war.”
During the weeks that followed, one colony after another selected delegates to a continental convention. In some cases the regular assemblies did the choosing; where royal governors attempted to derail the process by dissolving the assemblies, extraordinary bodies supplied the names. Pennsylvania offered to host the convention; September was set for the time, and Philadelphia for the place.
Franklin half expected to be home in time for the gathering. His two hours in the Cockpit erased what thoughts remained of retiring to England. He still had friends in Britain; he hoped he always would. But that part of imperial politics he had been able to put aside as superficial—the place-mongering, partisanship, sheer personal nastiness—he now saw as the central theme of London life. What had appealed about England was its intellectual openness, the opportunities it afforded to share ideas with men (and the occasional woman, such as Polly Stevenson) of curiosity, ingenuity, and a willingness to challenge received wisdom. But there was nothing open about a system determined to stifle the most fundamental liberties of a large portion of its people simply because they lived across the ocean.
Franklin was no stranger to political abuse; the proprietary party in Pennsylvania had circulated slanders petty and grand against him for years. But until now—and this had been one aspect of England’s appeal—those kinds of criticisms had gained little currency in London. The Penns muttered against him, of course, and Lord Hillsborough. But for the most part the British were courteous and respectful, even admiring.
No longer. In the London papers he was assailed as “this old snake” and “the old veteran of mischief.” He was called a “traitor,” “old Doubleface,” a “grand incendiary,” the “living emblem of iniquity in grey hairs.” His living quarters became “Judas’s office in Craven Street”; in that place were conceived and hatched his “vindictive subtlety, watchfulness, and politician tricks.” To his face—Franklin was in the gallery—Lord Sandwich castigated him before the House of Lords as “one of the bitterest and most mischievous enemies” Britain had ever known.
Franklin took the slanders for what they were worth. “You know that in England there is every day in almost every paper some abuse on public persons of all parties,” he wrote an Austrian acquaintance. “The King himself does not always escape; and the populace, who are used to it, love to have a good character cut up now and then for their entertainment.” He comforted himself that his friends were able to pierce the propaganda against him. “I do not find that I have lost a single friend on the occasion. All have visited me repeatedly with affectionate assurances of their unalterable respect and affection.”
In fact things were not so simple. Franklin’s friends were indeed willing to give him the benefit of the doubt—but they did have their doubts. Joseph Priestley’s were fewer than most others’; he stood by Franklin, literally, in his hour of distress. Priestley described the denouement of the Cockpit scene:
Dr. Franklin, in going out, took me by the hand, in a manner that indicated some feeling. I soon followed him, and going through the anteroom, saw Mr. Wedderburn there, surrounded with a circle of his friends and admirers. Being known to him, he stepped forwards as if to speak to me; but I turned aside, and made what haste I could out of the place.
The next morning Priestley ate breakfast with Franklin and heard his friend’s reaction to events of the previous day. “He said he had never been so sensible of the power of a good conscience; for that if he had not considered the thing for which he had been so much insulted, as one of the best actions of his life, and what he should certainly do again in the same circumstances, he could not have supported it.”
David Hume was not present for Wedderburn’s performance, but he heard all about the Hutchinson affair. He wanted to believe the best of Franklin yet found it difficult. He wrote William Strahan:
I hope you can tell me something in justification, at least in alleviation, of Dr. Franklin’s conduct. The factious part he has all along acted must be given up by his best friends. But I flatter myself there is nothing treacherous or unfair in his conduct; though his silence with regard to the method by which he came by these letters leaves room for all sorts of malignant surmizes. What a pity, that a man of his merit should have fallen into such unhappy circumstances!
Hume added an anecdote he thought applicable to the case of Franklin and America. Hume had been visiting the Earl of Bathurst, whose son was currently Lord Chancellor. Discussion turned to America, and the authority formerly exercised over the colonies.
I observed to them that nations, as well as individuals, had their different ages, which challenged a different treatment. For instance, My Lord, I said to the old Peer, you have sometimes, no doubt, given your son a whipping; and I doubt not but it was well merited and did him much good. Yet you will not think it proper at present to employ the birch. The colonies are no longer in their infancy. But yet I say to you, they are still in their nonage, and Dr. Franklin wishes to emancipate them too soon from their mother country.
John Pringle defended Franklin against Hume’s aspersions. “I think your notion of his being naturally of a factious disposition unjust,” he wrote Hume. Yet the physician did not defend everything his erstwhile traveling partner had done. “I do not dispute his being carried by zeal for his country, and for the better serving those who employed him, to do things which cannot be easily justified.” Pringle considered himself one of Franklin’s closer friends; he was struck that during the whole Hutchinson affair Franklin had not uttered a single word to him on the subject. Pringle thought this confidentiality a fault, one that had led to the current imbroglio. “He could have advised with no mortal of common sense and common delicacy but who must have dissuaded him from availing himself in that manner of a private correspondence between two friends, much less transmitting of those letters.”
Having said this, Pringle again defended Franklin’s motives. “I must do him the justice to say that as long as there was any prospect (at least in his eyes) of accommodation, he laboured to bring it about; and that if his advice had been taken, all this mischief would have been prevented, and England and her colonies had been again on the best terms possible.” Hume had registered a belief that the Americans had been searching for a pretext for rebellion against the mother country; Pringle disputed this, especially as it applied to Franklin. “I can witness for our friend that, for the first seven years he was amongst us, I never heard a word intimating any thing else than a perfect satisfaction in the happiness the colonies enjoyed in the state they were in. And this sentiment continued with him and them until the unlucky act of Mr. Grenville [that is, the Stamp Act].”
Horace Walpole, a rather more distant observer, concurred that Franklin had been badly treated. Describing Wedderburn’s speech as “most bitter and abusive,” yet “much admired” by those present, Walpole continued, “The Ministry determined to turn Franklin out of his place of postmaster of America, which could but incense him and drive him (a man of vast abilities) on farther hostilities, and recommend him as a martyr to the Bostonians.” (The editor of Walpole’s journal subsequently appended his own comment on the Cockpit scene, calling it “a capital one in giving date to the American war.”)
Edmund Burke shook his head at the fatuity of the entire affair. And as it became clear that the mind-set of Wedderburn characterized that of the government, Burke observed, “A great empire and little minds go ill together.”
“Your popularity in this country, whatever it may be on the other side, is greatly beyond whatever it was,” William wrote his father from America. Popular evidence certainly indicated as much. Indignant crowds carried effigies of Wedderburn and Hutchinson through the streets of Philadelphia; the tag on the Wedderburn figure read, “Such horrid monsters are a disgrace to human nature, and justly merit our utmost detestation and the gallows, to which they are assigned, and then burnt by ELECTRIC FIRE.”
Franklin was gratified at the support, but he was more interested in what it was leading to. “I rejoice to find that the whole Continent have so justly, wisely, and unanimously taken up our cause as their own,” he told Thomas Cushing as the Continental Congress gathered in Philadelphia. Even now Franklin hoped history might be rescued from those who would foolishly wreck the empire. “I have been taking pains among them to show the mischief that must arise to the whole from a dismembering of the empire, which all the measures of the present mad Administration have a tendency to accomplish.” The Philadelphia meeting was what kept him in London. “Much depends on the proceedings of the Congress. All sides are enquiring when an account of them may be expected. And I am advised by no means to leave England till they arrive.” Those advising him not to leave gave him cause for optimism, which he passed along to Cushing. Referring to the resolutions expected from the Congress, he predicted, “Their unanimity and firmness will have great weight here, and probably unhorse the present wild riders.”
If he allowed himself some small hope, it came not at the expense of his determination. Indeed, his views hardened with the passing months. In the immediate aftermath of the Boston Tea Party he had argued for compensation to the East India Company as a magnanimous gesture, but now that the British government was insisting, he changed his mind and counseled withholding that satisfaction. To a Boston merchant (who happened to be married to Franklin’s niece) he urged steadfastness: “If you should ever tamely submit to the yoke prepared for you, you cannot conceive how much you will be despised here, even by those who are endeavouring to impose it on you. Your very children and grandchildren will curse your memories for entailing disgrace upon them and theirs, and making them ashamed to own their country.”
He suffered no illusions as to the stakes of the game. If the British government failed to respond to reason, war was a real possibility, if not indeed a likelihood. General Gage had replaced Thomas Hutchinson as governor of Massachusetts; the military grip was tightening. “I am in perpetual anxiety lest the mad measure of mixing soldiers among a people whose minds are in such a state of irritation may be attended with some sudden mischief,” Franklin told Cushing. “For an accidental quarrel, a personal insult, an imprudent order, an insolent execution of even a prudent one, or 20 other things, may produce a tumult, unforeseen, and therefore impossible to be prevented, in which such a carnage may ensue as to make a breach that can never afterwards be healed.”
His own personal welfare was in jeopardy. “My situation here is thought by many to be a little hazardous,” he said, “for that if by some accident the troops and people of N[ew] E[ngland] should come to blows I should probably be taken up, the ministerial people here affecting every where to represent me as the cause of all the misunderstanding.” Friends advised his departure. But he would accept the risk, and stay till the outcome of the Continental Congress was known.
In fact he stayed longer. There was nothing new in Franklin’s lingering in London; he had been doing that for nearly two decades. But this time he really wanted to leave. He would have, but for an unusual chess match with an unexpected outcome.
In November 1774 Franklin heard from one of his fellows in the Royal Society that a certain distinguished lady, the sister of Lord Howe, had taken a fancy to the notion of playing chess with the famous Dr. Franklin. Though the good doctor was celebrated throughout Europe for his keen mind and quick imagination, she believed she could beat him. Would he accept the challenge?
Franklin replied that he was far out of practice, not having played the game regularly for many years. But in light of the honor the lady did him in issuing the challenge, he would accept.
Splendid, said the go-between. Dr. Franklin should call on the lady at earliest convenience. No further introduction was required.
Franklin made plans to visit Mrs. Howe (who had married a cousin, also named Howe, thus keeping the name in the family). But feeling rather awkward about presenting himself on her doorstep, he put off the match. Only after the mutual acquaintance reiterated the invitation and escorted Franklin to her door did the contest take place.
It proved a very agreeable affair. They played a few games; from modesty or otherwise, Franklin did not record who won. He enjoyed himself; she, herself. They arranged to meet again.
At the second session they played again, with as much pleasure as before. Then Mrs. Howe directed the conversation to a mathematical problem she had been considering. Franklin, impressed, pursued the matter.
The lady changed the subject once more. “What is to be done with this dispute between Britain and the colonies?” she asked (in Franklin’s reconstruction of the conversation). “I hope we are not to have civil war. They should kiss and be friends.” She said she had long believed the government ought to employ the distinguished doctor to settle the quarrel. “I am sure nobody could do it so well. Don’t you think the thing is practicable?”
“Undoubtedly, madam,” Franklin responded, “if the parties are disposed to reconciliation. For the two countries have really no clashing interest to differ about. It is rather a matter of punctilio, which two or three reasonable people might settle in half an hour. I thank you for the good opinion you are pleased to express of me; but the ministers will never think of employing me in that good work. They choose rather to abuse me.”
Mrs. Howe agreed with this last comment. “They have behaved shamefully to you. And indeed some of them are now ashamed of it themselves.”
At the time, Franklin considered these remarks simply accidental conversation and thought no more of it. On his next visit, however, the relationship acquired a new wrinkle. The day happened to be Christmas; Mrs. Howe happened to be joined by her brother, who was most interested in making Dr. Franklin’s acquaintance. Lord Howe followed his sister in regretting the disgraceful treatment Franklin had suffered at the hands of the government. Yet in light of the alarming situation with regard to America, Howe hoped personal resentments might be put aside in the interest of attempting reconciliation.
Franklin responded that, whatever the injuries he personally had suffered, those done his country were so much greater as to put the other in shadow. “Besides,” he said, “it is a fixed rule with me not to mix my private affairs with those of the public. I could join with my personal enemy in serving the public, or, when it was for its interest, with the public in serving that enemy.” He would be happy to explore the prospect of reconciliation, but the prospect appeared quite slim. The government seemed as set as ever on the course that had led to all the troubles. Until that changed, there was little to discuss.
Franklin expected this to dampen his lordship’s interest, but it did not. Howe hinted at discontent in the government; some of the ministers were in fact quite favorably disposed to any reasonable settlement that would allow saving the government’s dignity. He requested Franklin to prepare a document delineating terms to which the colonies might be disposed to agree. He added that under other circumstances he would be delighted to call on the doctor at his home in Craven Street or to have the doctor come to his house, but such open meetings might inspire speculation, which could be only detrimental to discussion. They probably ought to continue to meet at Mrs. Howe’s, where the chess matches could provide cover.
Agreeing, Franklin determined to test the waters of conciliation himself. Some months earlier he had spoken with Lord Chatham, who as William Pitt had been more responsible than any other man for creating the current empire. Not surprisingly, the earl was distressed to see his successors bent on frittering it away. The Continental Congress was about to meet; Chatham requested Franklin apprise him as soon as he learned what the Congress accomplished.
The news had arrived just before Franklin’s surprise meeting with Lord Howe. The Americans were as steadfast and united as Franklin had hoped. The Congress condemned the Intolerable Acts and the assorted other encroachments by Parliament on the rights of Americans, reasserted the exclusive authority of the colonial legislatures to make laws for the colonies, and revived nonimportation. At the same time, however, the Congress reiterated American allegiance to the Crown.
Franklin took the news to Chatham the day after Christmas. “He received me with an affectionate kind of respect that from so great a man was extremely engaging. But the opinion he expressed of the Congress was still more so. They had acted, he said, with so much temper, moderation and wisdom that he thought it the most honourable assembly of statesmen since those of the ancient Greeks and Romans in the most virtuous times.” Chatham inquired of Franklin whether the colonies would support the resolutions of the Congress. Franklin said they would—which answer increased the earl’s respect for America even further. “He expressed a great regard and warm affection for that country, with hearty wishes for their prosperity; and that Government here might soon come to see its mistakes and rectify them.”
Franklin could not help being encouraged. Chatham’s opposition to government policies was no secret, but after a season of merely grumbling in his den, the old lion indicated he might roar once more. And so he did, after making a point of honoring Franklin by escorting him on his arm into the House of Lords. This created a stir, for none had known of the communications between the American and the earl. On that day Chatham moved that General Gage withdraw his troops from Boston as a gesture of goodwill and a first step toward reconciliation. “I was quite charmed with Lord Chatham’s speech in support of his motion,” Franklin recorded. “He impressed me with the highest idea of him as a great and most able statesman.” Others joined Chatham, speaking ably on behalf of reason and moderation.
Unfortunately, however, the lords as a group were unreceptive. “All availed no more than the whistling of the winds,” Franklin observed. The motion was defeated.
Yet Chatham did not give up, nor did Lord Howe. During January and February of 1775 Franklin met regularly with them, and with a number of other peers. He advised them in word and writing what America required to feel secure in its rights and how far America would defend those rights against continued usurpation. His interlocutors had somehow gained the impression he was in a position to bargain for the colonies, that if he could be persuaded to make a concession on this point or that, a deal might be struck. Howe in particular hinted that the Crown would be most grateful of any help Franklin could provide, and could be counted on to render material proof of its gratitude.
Diplomatically but firmly Franklin rejected the very idea. “My Lord,” he said, “I shall deem it a great honour to be in any shape joined with your lordship in so good a work. But if you hope service from any influence I may be supposed to have, drop all thoughts of procuring me any previous favour from ministers. My accepting them would destroy the very influence you propose to make use of; they would be considered as so many bribes to betray the interest of my country.”
Gradually Franklin realized that the men he was talking to, for all their distinction, lacked the power to pull the British government back from the brink. A telling moment occurred in a subsequent session of the House of Lords. Chatham, after extended discussion with Franklin—including one meeting at Franklin’s Craven Street residence, which caught the eye of the neighbors and the attention of political London—presented a comprehensive plan for settling the troubles. Dartmouth, representing the government, treated the proposal courteously, saying it deserved serious consideration. Franklin, again in the gallery, described what happened next.
Lord Sandwich arose, and in a petulant vehement speech opposed its being received at all, and gave his opinion that it ought to be immediately rejected with the contempt it deserved. That he could never believe it the production of any British peer. That it appeared to him rather the work of some American; and turning his face towards me, who was leaning on the bar, said he fancied he had in his eye the person who drew it up, one of the bitterest and most mischievous enemies this country had ever known.
Chatham came to Franklin’s defense, and his own. He said he resented the insinuation that any bill he presented was another man’s work, but if he were prime minister he would deem it no disgrace—indeed quite the opposite—to rely on one so distinguished in the eyes of all Europe as Dr. Franklin.
Chatham’s motion failed miserably, even Dartmouth changing his initial neutrality to opposition. Franklin concluded that no hope remained. A final visit to the House of Lords sealed the verdict. Lord Camden, one of those with whom he had discussed a possible settlement, spoke favorably of the Americans. As with Chatham, he was hooted down. Franklin recorded:
I was much disgusted from the ministerial side by many base reflections on American courage, religion, understanding, &c., in which we were treated with the utmost contempt, as the lowest of mankind, and almost of a different species from the English of Britain; but particularly the American honesty was abused by some of the Lords, who asserted that we were all knaves and wanted only by this dispute to avoid paying our debts; that if we had any sense of equity or justice we should offer payment of the tea &c.
Franklin by this time had already made plans to leave for America. As a parting gesture he gave vent to his anger in a memorial he drafted to Dartmouth. Far from owing Britain anything for the tea, he declared, Massachusetts was owed by Britain for the damage incurred as a result of the British blockade. “I, the underwritten, do therefore, as their agent, in behalf of my Country and the said town of Boston, protest against the continuance of the said blockade. And I do hereby solemnly demand satisfaction for the accumulated injury done them beyond the value of the India Company’s tea destroyed.”
Aside from the fact that he had no instructions from Massachusetts to make this demand, Franklin realized on second thought that such a piece of impertinence might simply confirm the ministers in their collective misjudgment. He decided to consult his friend (and land-seeking ally) Thomas Walpole. “He looked at it and me several times alternately,” Franklin recorded, “as if he apprehended me a little out of my senses.” Franklin asked Walpole to take the letter to Lord Camden and see what he thought. Camden agreed that Franklin must not deliver it. Walpole returned to Franklin’s lodgings to warn him in writing and in person that delivery would be interpreted as a “national affront” that might produce “dangerous consequences to your person.” Franklin reluctantly acceded, and dropped the matter.