The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (80 page)

Two years earlier Franklin had parried a hostile question in Parliament suggesting that Americans’ denial of Parliament’s right to tax would logically lead to a denial of Parliament’s right to legislate; he had asserted that they did not so reason then but might be convinced if Parliament got pushy. He had spoken half humorously, in an effort to turn aside an uncomfortable query. But events were proving him right, against his own wishes. He had no desire to break up the British empire, but logic was leading in that direction. And emotion—the emotion of others, not yet himself—was encouraging logic.

Emotions
were running high in England during the spring of 1768 on subjects besides the colonies. John Wilkes was back from France, and back in the thick of popular and Parliamentary politics. Defying his outlawry, Wilkes stood for Parliament from the City of London. He lost badly, finishing last in a field of seven, but blamed it on his late arrival. Unabashed, he hied off to Middlesex, where a seat was open and a cooperative opponent of the government gave him land enough to qualify to stand. Middlesex, like much of England during this season, was in a ferment from rising prices and falling wages. Silk weavers were striking; sailors refused to set sail; coal heavers dropped their shovels and raised their fists. Wilkes became an instrument of the popular distress, and disgruntled individuals discovered that the old cry of “Wilkes and liberty!” transmuted easily to “Wilkes and the coal heavers forever!” and the like.

Wilkes won handily, and on election night mobs of his supporters marched howling on London. King George called out the troops but himself stayed indoors; the troops proved sadly insufficient to their assignment. The Wilkites smashed windows at the house of London’s Lord Mayor, a known foe of their hero, and at houses of such other notables as Bute and Lord Egmont. The Duke of Northumberland was cowed into drinking Wilkes’s health; the Austrian ambassador, whose entire offense consisted of being caught in a coach on a street the rowdies made
their own, was hauled out, thrown to his knees, and had “45” scrawled across the soles of his shoes.

Wilkes let the entertainment run its course before declaring, the following evening, that as the authorities were obviously incapable of keeping the peace, he and his friends would do so. A committee was appointed to patrol the streets; the group had special instructions to steer unruly persons—themselves included—away from St. James’s Palace, “that no insult or indecency might be offered to the King.”

Wilkes’s libel conviction still hung over his head, but the government was too terrified to arrest him. The ministers were certain this would simply loose the mob again. Although Wilkes offered to surrender peacefully, he was rebuffed by the Lord Chief Justice, who wanted nothing to do with him; Wilkes finally had to insist on his right as an Englishman to be arrested. With great reluctance, the sheriff accepted him into custody—only to see his reluctance corroborated when Wilkes’s followers hijacked the vehicle carrying him, cut free the horses, and then, to the amazement of all, put themselves in the shafts and traces and pulled the vehicle forward. Coach and team rumbled along the Strand and past Temple Bar before halting for refreshments at the Three Tuns Tavern, where Wilkes thanked his friends for their support but excused himself to proceed to prison afoot.

Conditions grew only more unruly with Wilkes behind bars. Actually, the bars on his room at the prison in St. George’s Fields were more notional than real: the prisoner entertained guests of both sexes, including a seemingly endless train of young women who found Wilkes even more fascinating as a convicted criminal than he had been as a mere rake. Admirers sent cases of wine, butts of ale, countless hams, pheasants, turtles; from Maryland (the cause of Wilkesian liberty resonated across the Atlantic) arrived forty-five hogsheads of tobacco, which contributed their share to the further fouling of London’s atmosphere.

Outside the prison thousands demonstrated against Wilkes’s confinement. On May 10 the crowd swelled to perhaps twenty thousand, shouting, gesticulating, threatening authorities and passersby alike. The nervous authorities attempted to disperse the mob, but as the justice was reading the Riot Act, a hurled stone struck him. He summoned the troops that had been standing nearby and set them upon the crowd. In the melee that followed, some half dozen civilians were killed and many more wounded. The “St. George’s Fields Massacre,” as it was immediately labeled, triggered additional violence across London and environs. Wilkes was one theme of the window-smashing and house-wrecking but
not the only one. Unemployed artisans shouted for work; sailors swung staves for cheaper bread; coalers demanded better beer. The defiance of authority revealed a common opinion, expressed variously, that hanging was better than starving. The upper classes held their breath. “We are glad if we can keep our windows whole, or pass and repass unmolested,” wrote Horace Walpole. “I call it reading history as one goes along the street…. I do not love to think what the second volume must be of a flourishing nation running riot.”

Franklin
watched with astonishment. “The scenes have been horrible,” he wrote William in April.

London was illuminated two nights running at the command of the mob for the success of Wilkes in the Middlesex election; the second night exceeded any thing of the kind ever seen here on the greatest occasions of rejoicing, as even the small cross streets, lanes, courts, and other out-of-the-way places were all in a blaze with lights, and the principal streets all night long, as the mobs went round again after two o’clock, and obliged people who had extinguished their candles to light them again. Those who refused had all their windows destroyed.

The damage done to property (and the cost of the candles) had been computed at £50,000; the cost to the morale of the law-abiding citizenry was still higher. “’tis really an extraordinary event,” Franklin said, “to see an outlaw and exile, of bad personal character, not worth a farthing, come over from France, set himself up as candidate for the capital of the kingdom, miss his election only by being too late in his application, and immediately carrying it for the principal county.” Wilkes’s hoodlums had terrorized not only London but far out into the countryside. Franklin had been to Winchester, more than sixty miles from London, and seen their scrawled “45” and other evidence of their passage the entire way.

As the anarchy persisted, so did Franklin’s astonishment. “This capital, the residence of the King, is now a daily scene of lawless riot and confusion,” Franklin wrote in May.

Mobs are patrolling the street at noon day, some knocking all down that will not roar for Wilkes and liberty; courts of justice afraid to give judgment against him; coalheavers and porters pulling down the houses of coal merchants that refuse to give them more wages; sawyers destroying the new sawmills; sailors unrigging all the outbound ships, and suffering none to sail till merchants agree to raise their pay; watermen destroying private boats and threatening bridges; weavers entering houses by force, and destroying the work in the looms; soldiers firing among the mobs and killing men, women and children; which seems only to have produced an universal sullenness that looks like a great black cloud coming on, ready to burst in a general tempest.

Nothing remained to hold the chaos at bay. “All respect to law and government seems to be lost among the common people, who are moreover continually enflamed by seditious scribblers to trample on authority and every thing that used to keep them in order.”

Wilkes symbolized a system beset by cynicism and corruption. Electioneering had become little but bribery and boozing. “There have been amazing contests all over the kingdom,” Franklin recorded, “£20 or 30,000 of a side spent in several places, and inconceivable mischief done by debauching the people and making them idle, besides the immediate actual mischief done by drunken mad mobs to houses, windows, &c.” No less discouraging than the fact of the corruption was the insouciance that informed it. “’tis thought that near two millions will be spent in this election. But those who understand figures and act upon computation say the Crown has two millions a year in places and pensions to dispose of, and ’tis well worth while to engage in such a seven years lottery though all that have tickets should not get prizes.”

The entire spectacle appalled Franklin, and it called into question an objective toward which he had been working his whole political life. From the 1740s until now he had opposed Pennsylvania’s proprietary government, contending that Pennsylvanians would be better off under direct Crown rule. But England was under the rule of the Crown, and this was the sorry state to which it had fallen. He wrote one of his allies in the fight for royal rule, “I have urged over and over the necessity of the change we desire; but this country itself being at present in a situation very little better, weakens our argument that a royal government would be better managed and safer to live under than that of a proprietary.”

If not proprietary rule, and not royal rule, then what? Logic—the same logic that was pushing Franklin to deny Parliament’s right to
legislate for the colonies—indicated an answer. But it was an answer he was not ready to accept.

As bad
as things were in Britain, Franklin feared they could get worse. Rumors swirled of the replacement of Shelburne as secretary of state by Grenville. Franklin had jousted personally with Grenville and felt the man’s animosity toward Americans; and he knew that Americans wasted no love on the author of the Stamp Act. The prospect of Grenville’s return chilled him. “If this should take place,” Franklin wrote Joseph Galloway, “or if in any other shape he comes again into power, I fear his sentiments of the Americans and theirs of him, will occasion such clashings as may be attended with fatal consequences.”

Franklin had hoped that the Parliamentary elections would render the future clear enough for him to return to Pennsylvania; during the spring of 1768 he repeatedly anticipated embarking in a few weeks. But this new possibility pulled him back from wharfside and left him ensconced in Craven Street. With the fate of America in the balance, it would be irresponsible to leave.

There was something else. Franklin was clever at playing the politics of the imperial capital, with his artful phrasing in Parliament and his veiled authorship of articles in the London journals; but the politicians he was playing against included some who were clever in their own right, and were not entirely inept at playing
him.
Upon the appointment of Hillsborough as secretary of state for America, rumors began swirling of a possible appointment for Franklin as Hillsborough’s undersecretary. Franklin initially discounted the rumors. “It is a settled point here that I am too much of an American,” he told William. But apparently the point was not as settled as Franklin suggested, for the rumors persisted for many months. Significantly, he did nothing to stifle them—as by a declaration that he did not want the job.

From the perspective of the ministry, a Franklin appointment made obvious sense. Franklin was clearly the most capable of the colonial agents, and governments are always on the lookout for capable people. More to the immediate point, Franklin aboard would be less dangerous than Franklin adrift. As a member of the government rather than an antagonist, he would be unable—because unwilling—to frustrate the government’s designs, which would be
his
designs. It was one of the oldest practices of politics, because it was one of the most effective.