The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (54 page)

Franklin appreciated the possibility of self-delusion in such matters. He regularly examined his motives. For the present at least, regarding the struggle with the proprietors, he was satisfied. “I am persuaded that I do not oppose their views from pique, disappointment, or personal resentment, but, as I think, from a regard to the public good. I may be mistaken in what is that public good; but at least I mean well.” The proprietors quite clearly did not. “I am sometimes ashamed for them, when I see them differing with their people for trifles, and instead of being adored, as they might be, like demi-gods, become the object of universal hatred and contempt.”

Franklin never lost the conviction that virtue conferred right and ought to confer power. Yet neither did he lose the ability to question whether his view of virtue was the only accurate one. “Forgive your friend a little vanity,” he asked Collinson, “as it’s only between ourselves.” The people loved him today, and concurred in his view of virtue, but they might change their minds tomorrow. “You are ready now to tell me that popular favour is a most uncertain thing. You are right. I blush at having valued myself so much upon it.”

12
A Larger Stage
1757–58

The people still loved him enough three months later to send him away. In January 1757 Franklin’s fellows in the Assembly appointed him their agent to the government in England, to argue the Assembly’s side in the dispute with the proprietors. Isaac Norris was also appointed, and initially Franklin deferred to Norris on grounds of the speaker’s “long experience in our public affairs, and great knowledge and abilities.” But Norris declined the appointment, pleading ill health, and Franklin protested no more. “Look out sharp,” he wrote to William Strahan in London, “and if a fat old fellow should come to your printing house and request a little smouting [piecework], depend upon it, ’tis your affectionate friend and humble servant.”

Franklin’s removal to London in 1757 marked a turn in his life no less important than his move from Boston to Philadelphia thirty-four years earlier. Had he known he would live the rest of his life mostly abroad, he undoubtedly would have weighed his acceptance of the Assembly’s appointment more carefully. The last three and a half decades had been good to him. Philadelphia in 1723 had received the runaway apprentice and given him a chance to make a career. Capitalizing on his chance, the young man achieved a combination of affluence and influence he could not have imagined on that rainy trek across New Jersey to his new home. His business thrived to where it ran itself (with the aid of David Hall), leaving him free to follow other interests. Of these, his scientific experiments had won him world renown and the esteem of the most distinguished natural philosophers of the age. His political accomplishments were less well known in the world at large but more appreciated locally. He was a great man in his adopted city: author of numerous improvements to civic life, facilitator of others. He was a force in his province: leader of the popular party, spokesman of the emerging middle class. He was a presence in America: deputy postmaster general (and, as such, one of a handful of officials with duties that crossed colonial lines), architect of a plan for union that captured the imagination of many of his fellow Americans (even if the provincial assemblies had yet to act on it).

In London, however, Franklin’s reputation and accomplishments would count for little. The philosophers of the Royal Society could be expected to welcome him, but—as scientists often are—they were a circle unto themselves. Franklin’s political achievements would merit him scant consideration, being the work of a mere provincial. And much of that consideration, certainly among the grandees of the realm, would be negative. Thomas Penn understood the situation better than Franklin did. The proprietor assured a worried Richard Peters that there was nothing to fear from “Mr. Franklin’s republican schemes” upon the arrival of their originator. “Mr. Franklin’s popularity is nothing here,” wrote Penn. “He will be looked very coolly upon by great people. There are very few of any consequence that have heard of his electrical experiments, those matters being attended to by a particular set of people, many of whom of the greatest consequence I know well. But it is quite another sort of people who are to determine the dispute between us.” Penn added confidently, “I do not care how soon he comes, and am no ways uneasy at the determination.”

In many
respects the London to which Franklin returned in 1757 had not changed much from the London he left in 1726. The whores still haunted the hairdressers’ shops. The ravings at Bedlam, the floggings at Bridewell, and the executions at Newgate attracted the same crowds. Bears and bulls fought as before at Hockley-in-the-Hole. The manners of theatergoers had not noticeably improved, nor the consumption of alcohol measurably diminished.

But in another respect London had changed dramatically, at least for Franklin. Political London—the London of Crown and court and Parliament—had been a world removed from the humble neighborhoods frequented by the stranded journeyman in the 1720s. Three decades later, political London was Franklin’s primary destination, the milieu in which the Pennsylvania Assembly’s agent would operate.

Political London’s central landmark was Westminster, the home of Parliament. Once subordinate to the Crown, Parliament had established its primacy during the seventeenth century, in the Civil War and the Glorious Revolution. Even had there been no civil war or revolution, Parliament probably would have emerged supreme, for the simple reason that by the beginning of the eighteenth century, foreign policy—the sinkhole of British public finance—could no longer be conducted out of the monarch’s own purse. Parliament had always been the provider of tax monies; the interminable conflict with France starting in the 1690s meant that tax monies were chronically necessary. Hence the importance of Parliament.

But Parliament was a legislative body; it had not yet developed an executive arm. The executive power remained with the Crown. In theory this power was
simply
executive: “the king in Parliament,” in the era’s formulation. Yet as any student of government knows, and any practitioner of government experiences, the line between legislation and execution is often fine and always subject to transgression. An eighteenth-century British monarch could never wield the power the Tudors took for granted in the sixteenth century, but he or she could still make a mark.

The size of the mark depended on the talents of the monarch. George I, king at the time of Franklin’s 1723 arrival in London, was generally thought stupid. Stupidity, however, has rarely been a disqualification from kingship, and it did not disqualify George in the eyes of Parliament, which selected him over several other claimants with better pedigrees, to succeed Queen Anne in 1714. But George had other problems. He was a bad husband and a worse cuckold; after abandoning his wife’s bed for the couches of his courtesans, he responded to
her
straying
by (almost certainly) having her lover murdered and locking her up in a castle for the rest of her unhappy life. He subsequently divided his attentions between the Duchess of Kendal (as she became, after winning his favor), a thin woman of great tenacity, and the Countess of Darlington, whose contrast to the Duchess could hardly have been more striking. Horace Walpole gossiped:

Lady Darlington, whom I saw at my mother’s in my infancy, and whom I remember by being terrified at her enormous figure, was as corpulent and ample as the Duchess was long and emaciated. Two fierce black eyes, large and rolling beneath two lofty arched eyebrows, two acres of cheeks spread with crimson, an ocean of neck that overflowed and was not distinguished from the lower parts of her body, and no part restrained by stays—no wonder that a child dreaded such an ogress, and that the mob of London were highly diverted at the importation of so uncommon a seraglio!

George—a Hanoverian German by birth—never mastered English; during his reign French was the language of the British court. Nor did he master
the
English, whom he scorned as treacherous—a characterization many of his courtiers merited. So he amused himself with his mistresses and indulged his resentments against his slightly more gifted son.

The most obvious gift of the man who became George II was his wife, Princess Caroline. A beauty of an earthy sort, she entered a room like a ship breasting the waves of the sea. Her husband was infatuated with her charms, as were any number of other men; she used their infatuation against them (her husband called her
“Cette diablesse Madame la Princesse”
) even as she similarly deployed her considerable intelligence.

The favorite of Caroline was Robert Walpole, the brother of Horace and an unprepossessing man with short arms, short legs, long torso, and buttocks that received rather more airing in the English press of the day than comported with the dignity of one who essentially governed the country for two decades. Walpole is generally considered the first prime minister of England; his buttocks became an issue in cartoons that depicted members of Parliament kissing them in order to secure his favor. He came to power under George I; that he survived the accession of George II, whose feud with his father led at one point to the son’s arrest at the baptism of
his
son, when monarch and the father of the baptized could not agree on a godfather, owed to Walpole’s astute sense of balance and the good offices of Queen Caroline.

Walpole’s policies embodied two principles: fiscal caution and the avoidance of war. The former reflected his (and England’s) close scrape with disaster in the collapse of the South Sea bubble, but it did not prevent him from being pilloried for corruption. The reign of Sir Robert became known as the “Robinocracy,” and the prime minister inspired a criminal character in John Gay’s
Beggar’s Opera
: “
Robin of Bagshot,
alias
Gorgon,
alias
Bluff Bob,
alias
Carbuncle,
alias
Bob Booty.”
George II had his reservations about Walpole and the prime minister’s associates, especially his brother Horace, the Duke of Newcastle, and Lord Townshend. A court insider described the king’s reaction to the quartet: “He used always to speak of the first as a great rogue, of the second as a dirty buffoon, of the third as an impertinent fool, and of the fourth as a choleric blockhead.”

Walpole’s foreign policy brought England a generation of peace—the generation in which Franklin grew up. Yet peace did not satisfy the prime minister’s increasing number of enemies, and after the death of Caroline in 1737 he could no longer resist the demand for revenge of the injury suffered by Captain Jenkins (of the missing ear). Walpole would have resigned then, but George II, for all his distrust of his prime minister, demanded that he stay on. In 1742 Parliament overruled the king and overthrew Walpole.

Yet his legacy remained. Had George II been a better Briton (he spoke English, but with a heavy German accent, and in other matters appeared to put the interests of his ancestral Hanover above those of his inherited kingdom), or had he simply been a more masterful monarch, he might have regained some of the power Walpole had acquired at Crown expense. But his gifts lay elsewhere—he had an uncanny memory for the minutiae of royal genealogy and military uniformage—and the primary result of his reign was the consolidation of Parliamentary control over the politics of the kingdom and the empire.