<h2><SPAN name="c7"></SPAN><span>7</span> <br/><span>THE BATTLE WITH THE PENNS</span></h2>
<p>During the voyage to England, Franklin wrote a preface
for his 1758 <i>Almanack</i>. In the form of a letter from “Poor
Richard” to his “Courteous Reader,” it told of a sermon on
frugality and industry, which Poor Richard had heard in the
market place by “a plain clean old man with white locks”
called Father Abraham. He was most flattered to find that
Father Abraham was quoting him, Poor Richard, at every
other breath.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>As Poor Richard says: Many words won’t fill a bushel....
God helps them that help themselves.... The sleeping fox
catches no poultry.... Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man
healthy, wealthy, and wise.... For want of a nail the shoe
was lost; for want of a shoe the horse was lost; and for want
of a horse the rider was lost....</p>
<p>As Poor Richard says: Many a little makes a mickle....
Fools make feasts, and wise men eat them.... Pride that dines
on vanity, sups on contempt.... ’Tis hard for an empty bag
to stand upright.... If you will not hear reason, she’ll surely
rap your knuckles...</p>
</blockquote>
<p>All the nuggets of wise counsel which he had dropped in
his <i>Almanack</i> in the twenty-five years of its existence, Franklin
gathered for Father Abraham’s speech. Omitted were the
racy ballads, verses, broad humor and jokes which had made
the <i>Almanack</i> a potpourri where every man could find something
to his taste. Only at the end was a touch of Franklin’s
sly wit. Following Father Abraham’s sermon, Poor Richard
watched disconsolately as the village folk dispersed to spend
their hard-earned money as foolishly as ever on the marketplace
wares. The only one to take the sermon to heart was
Poor Richard himself who had come to buy material for a
new coat but left, “resolved to wear my old one a little
longer.”</p>
<p>Father Abraham’s speech was later published under the title
of “The Way to Wealth.” It was reprinted in many editions
and translated in many languages, and it won the author almost
as much fame as his discoveries in electricity.</p>
<p>Peter Collinson met Franklin and his son in London, where
they arrived on July 26, 1757, taking them to his home. No
doubt he and Franklin discussed electricity until very late,
with William only half listening and more or less bored. The
next day, a printer named William Strahan, with whom
Franklin had corresponded some fourteen years but never met,
called on him.</p>
<p>“I never saw a man who was, in every respect, so perfectly
agreeable to me,” Strahan wrote Deborah Franklin of this
meeting, adding that William was “one of the prettiest young
gentlemen I ever knew from America.”</p>
<p>Deborah likely scowled. It was just like that artful lad to
ingratiate himself so quickly.</p>
<p>A few days later father and son rented four rooms from a
widow, Mrs. Margaret Stevenson, who lived with her young
daughter Polly in a substantial mansion on 7 Craven Street,
Strand. This was to be Franklin’s English home, which over
the years became almost as dear to him as his Philadelphia one.</p>
<p>He had brought two servants with him. One of them, Peter,
served him faithfully, though the other, a slave, ran away
shortly after their arrival. Franklin’s post as Massachusetts agent
required a bit of pomp. He wore a wig in the latest fashion,
silver shoe and knee buckles and purchased linen for new
shirts. Later he rented a coach.</p>
<p>Barely was he settled when he was invited to visit Lord
George Grenville, president of the Privy Council and one of
England’s most important statesmen. This was Franklin’s first
test in holding his own with persons more steeped than he in
political intrigue.</p>
<p>Lord Grenville received him with great civility, questioned
him at length about American affairs, and then announced that
the colonists had some erroneous notions he felt duty bound
to correct:</p>
<p>“You Americans have wrong ideas of the nature of your
constitution; you contend that the King’s instructions to his
governors are not laws, and think yourselves at liberty to regard
or disregard them at your own discretion. You must be
made to understand that the King’s instruction are <i>The Law
of the Land</i>.”</p>
<p>This was simply not true. The King’s instructions were laws
in the colonies only if they received the approval of the local
Assembly. In the same way, laws passed by a colonial Assembly
had to be submitted to the King before they became final.
That was why Franklin was in England, to get the King’s approval
of the Assembly decision on the Penns.</p>
<p>Sure as he was of his facts, he voiced his opinion in the manner
he had learned from Socrates: “It is my understanding
that ...”</p>
<p>“You are totally mistaken,” Lord Grenville stated patronizingly,
when he had finished.</p>
<p>It was Franklin’s first experience with the contemptuous attitude
which certain of the British took in regard to the
colonists. He would later observe that “every man in England
seems to jostle himself into the throne with the King, and
talks of <i>our subjects</i> in the colonies.”</p>
<p>Around the middle of August he called on the Penn family,
at their stately mansion in Spring Garden. It had seemed courteous
to meet with them personally before approaching higher
authority. William Penn’s son Thomas was there and probably
Richard Penn and his son, John. They received him with glacial
politeness, listened haughtily as he told them the Assembly’s
grievances, and just as haughtily denied that the grievances
were in any way justified.</p>
<p>Franklin pointed out that the Assembly was asking no more
than what William Penn had promised citizens under his 1701
Charter of Privileges.</p>
<p>“My father granted privileges he had no right to grant, according
to the Royal Charter,” Thomas Penn announced.</p>
<p>“Then all those who came to settle in the province, expecting
to enjoy the privileges contained in the grant were deceived,
cheated and betrayed?” With the greatest difficulty,
Franklin kept his voice calm.</p>
<p>Thomas Penn laughed insolently. “If the people were
cheated, it was their own fault. They should have gone to the
trouble of reading the Royal Charter.”</p>
<p>His tone reminded Franklin of a horse trader of low character,
jeering at the purchaser he had victimized. “Poor people
are not lawyers,” he said steadily. “They trusted your father
and did not think it necessary to consult a lawyer.”</p>
<p>Unabashed, Thomas Penn rose to dismiss him. “If you care
to put your complaints in writing, Mr. Franklin, we will then
consider them.”</p>
<p>Those arrogant Penns! How it would have grieved their
noble father to see into what selfish hands he had left his beloved
Pennsylvania! Franklin had yet to find out through
personal experience that nobility of character is not always
inherited.</p>
<p>Five days later he returned with the Assembly’s grievances
in written form. On the advice of their lawyer, a “proud and
angry man,” Ferdinand John Paris, the Penns sent Franklin’s
paper to the Royal lawyers, the Attorney-General Charles
Pratt, and Solicitor-General Charles Yorke. These gentlemen
were out of town. There was nothing to do but wait.</p>
<p>Franklin fell sick with a cold and fever that September and
was bedridden nearly eight weeks. Dr. Fothergill, the man
who had written the preface for his pamphlet on electricity,
tended him regularly. Mrs. Stevenson, his landlady, nursed
him like a son. Even William was unusually obliging, did his
errands and helped him to prepare a letter to the <i>Citizen</i> to
counteract slanders about Pennsylvania which Franklin suspected
emanated from the Penns. William was enrolling in law
school in London; he had bought himself elegant clothes that
rivaled those of any young English peer.</p>
<p>As soon as he was well enough, Franklin went on a shopping
spree himself. For Debby, who still liked bright colors,
he purchased a crimson satin cloak and for Sally a black silk
one, with a scarlet feather and muff which William selected.
There were other luxuries for their home not found in America:
English china, silver salt ladles, an apple corer and a
gadget “to make little turnips out of great ones,” a carpet,
tablecloths, napkins, silk blankets from France, and a “large
fine jug for beer,” which he had fallen in love with at first
sight.</p>
<p>“I thought it looked like a fat jolly dame,” he explained the
gift to Debby, “clean and tidy, with a neat blue and white
calico gown on, good-natured and lovely, and put me in mind
of—somebody.”</p>
<p>His most extravagant present followed later—a harpsichord
for Sally which cost the huge sum of forty-two guineas.</p>
<p>If some Englishmen were snobs, there were plenty of others
who were just the opposite. Franklin’s fellow members of the
august Royal Society welcomed him warmly. He made many
new scientific friends, among them the stout and amiable John
Pringle, an authority on military medicine and sanitation, and
John Canton, the first Englishman to draw lightning from
the sky. At Cambridge, in May 1758, he performed experiments
in evaporation with John Hadley, professor of chemistry.
He made a trip to Northampton, the ancestral home of
the Franklins, and met some distant relatives. When he found
the Franklin graves in the cemetery so moss covered that their
inscriptions were effaced, he had his servant Peter scour them
clean.</p>
<p>The Scottish University of St. Andrews gave him a degree
as doctor of law. Henceforth he had the right to call himself
Dr. Franklin. Later he visited Scotland where he was made an
honorary burgess and guildbrother at Edinburgh; met the
economist Adam Smith; and the philosopher David Hume,
who said of him: “America has sent us many good things,
gold, silver, sugar, tobacco, indigo, etc., but you are the first
philosopher, and indeed the first great man of letters, for
whom we are beholden to her.”</p>
<p>He stayed with the congenial Scottish judge Lord Henry
Home Kames, to whom he wrote in his note of thanks that
the time spent in Scotland “was six weeks of the <i>densest</i> happiness
I have met with in any part of my life.”</p>
<p>A bitter fellow American arrived in London, William
Smith, provost of the Pennsylvania Academy, one of those
who had opposed him on the Penn issue. The Pennsylvania
Assembly had tried him on the charge of libel and he had spent
three months in jail. Now he was seeking redress from the
Crown, and blaming not only the Quakers for his arrest but
Franklin, who had not even been in Pennsylvania. Smith was
saying that Franklin was not really a scientist, that he had
stolen his ideas from others.</p>
<p>Franklin took the slander philosophically: “’Tis convenient
to have at least one enemy, who by his readiness to revile one
on all occasions may make one careful of one’s conduct. I
shall keep him an enemy for that purpose.”</p>
<p>While the proprietors were stalling, Franklin set out to meet
such high-placed persons as might help his cause. He tried to
see the Prime Minister William Pitt, who was said to be sympathetic
to the colonies, but Pitt was too occupied with his
enormous war in India to give him a hearing. Eventually he
met the two royal lawyers, Charles Yorke and Charles Pratt,
to whom the Penns had submitted the Assembly’s grievances.
To his surprise he found they had already given their verdict,
a negative one, which the Penns had forwarded directly to
the Assembly, bypassing Franklin. The Penns were claiming
he had insulted them. He had not addressed them as the “True
and Absolute Proprietaries of the Province of Pennsylvania.”</p>
<p>Back in Pennsylvania, the Assembly had finally persuaded
Governor Denny to pass its act taxing the proprietary
estate. Franklin brought the matter before the British Committee
for Plantation Affairs in August 1759, when he had
been two years in England. The decision was a compromise:
unsurveyed lands of the proprietors should not be taxed but
their surveyed lands must be taxed at a rate no higher than
other similar lands. The Pennsylvania Assembly held Franklin
solely responsible for the victory, and congratulations flowed
to him.</p>
<p>He could have gone home now but he stayed on. There
was a tremendous propaganda job to be done and he was the
only one capable. He wanted to set the English straight on
the role of the American colonies in the British Empire. He
wrote articles for the press. He expressed his ideas at the
Whig Club, in coffeehouses where philosophers and literary
men congregated, and to guests whom he invited to dine at
Craven Street. His refreshing candor and quiet wit brought
him attention everywhere.</p>
<p>At odd moments he tinkered with various inventions. For
the Stevensons, he devised an iron frame with a sliding plate
to serve as a draught in their fireplace, so it would give more
heat and take less fuel. He made a clock with only three
wheels and one hand, which showed hours, minutes, and seconds.
Later others improved his model and sold it commercially.</p>
<p>He spent long hours constructing a musical instrument,
based on the principle of musical glasses. The “armonica” he
named it, remarking that it was “peculiarly adapted to Italian
music, especially that of the soft and plaintive kind.” Subsequently,
an English musician, Marianne Davies, toured the
Continent giving armonica recitals; Marie Antoinette took
lessons from her. Mozart and Beethoven composed selections
for the armonica. Its vogue lasted some fifty years, and then,
no one knows just why, it lost its popularity.</p>
<p>In August 1761, he took William on a trip to Belgium and
Holland. In Brussels, the Prince of Lorraine welcomed him
and showed him his physics laboratory. At Leyden, he met
Musschenbroek, inventor of the Leyden jar. They were back
in time for the coronation of George III, whom Franklin
judged “a virtuous and generous young man.”</p>
<p>In February 1762, Oxford University gave the honorary degree
of doctor of civil laws to “the illustrious Benjamin Franklin,
Esquire, Agent of the Province of Pennsylvania, Postmaster-General
of North America, and Fellow of the Royal
Society.” Less ostentatiously, William was presented a degree
of master of arts.</p>
<p>William had been basking in the sunlight of his father’s
reputation, and Franklin had more than a little reason to worry
about him. Unlike his father, the youth was proud and haughty
and disdainful of those of humble birth.</p>
<p>One day Franklin told him a story. When he was a child
of seven, Franklin said, some friends on a holiday filled his
pocket with coppers. He went directly to a toy shop, and being
charmed with the sound of a whistle in the hands of another
boy, he gave all his money for one like it. He came
home and went whistling all over the house, much pleased with
his purchase, until his brothers, sisters, and cousins told him
he had given four times as much as it was worth, laughing
at him for his folly. Put in mind of the good things he might
have bought with the rest of the money, he cried with vexation.
“The reflection gave me more chagrin than the whistle
gave me pleasure.”</p>
<p>“As I grew older,” he continued, “I have found a number
of men who have given too much for their whistle—popularity-seekers,
misers, and men of pleasure. Don’t give too much
for the whistle, William. Why not become a joiner or wheelwright,
if the estate I leave you is not enough? The man who
lives by his labor is at least free.”</p>
<p>Did little Benjamin really spend all his pennies for a whistle,
or was this a fable which Franklin invented to clothe a moral
lesson? There is no way of knowing for sure and it is not important.
It should be emphasized that the story, or fable, was
not intended merely to show the folly of wasting money. It
had a far more subtle meaning.</p>
<p>Much as Franklin had come to love England, his heart was
heavy with yearning for his family and his own country after
his five year absence. Since England and France were still at
war, he had to wait for a safe convoy. It was August 1762
when he set sail from Portsmouth. William did not come with
him. The Crown had appointed him to the high post of governor
of New Jersey. He would take a later ship, after his
papers were in order.</p>
<p>“Don’t give too much for the whistle,” Franklin may have
warned him once more before he left.</p>
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