The Story of How British Aristocrats Turned Benjamin Franklin into an American Patriot—In Less Than an Hour

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, a show where America is the star and the American people. On January twenty-ninth, seventeen seventy-four, Benjamin Franklin was called to appear in Britain before a select group of the King’s advisors in an octagonal-shaped room in a palace known as the Cockpit. Though Franklin entered the room as a dutiful servant of the British Crown, he left as a budding American revolutionary, and it was this event that ultimately pitted Franklin against his own son, suggesting that the Revolution was in no small part a civil war. Here to tell the story is renowned Franklin historian Sheila Skemp, author of The Making of a Patriot: Benjamin Franklin at the Cockpit. Let’s take a listen.

Benjamin Franklin was not a provincial man. As a young boy, he had lived in England for eighteen mostly pleasurable months when he was still trying to figure out what he wanted to do with his life. He returned in seventeen fifty-seven, remained in London five more years. This time he came not as a bewildered boy trying to find his way in the big city, but as a man whose intellectual credentials had dazzled men of letters throughout Western Europe. He’d already conducted his famous kite experiment, becoming known everywhere as the man who tamed the lightning. He’d been admitted to London’s prestigious Royal Society, an honor a few Englishmen and even fewer Americans were ever able to attain. And once in England, he was wined and dined, and feted and celebrated everywhere he went. It’s not surprising that when he finally left for home in seventeen sixty-two, he wasn’t very happy about it. He might have missed his wife and daughter, but he promised one London friend. He said, “I will return, and this time I will settle here forever.” He got back home, and he still missed London. He told more than one person, “Pennsylvania, even Philadelphia, is a provincial backwater. It just doesn’t compare to the big city.” And so he was delighted when, less than two years after he got back to Philadelphia for the second time, he returned to England once more. He went there ironically to try to get the King to turn Pennsylvania into a royal colony. This at the very time when the Stamp Act was just going into effect. So the irony there, to my mind, is rather amazing. Franklin loved England not just because of the friends he had, not just because of the honors he received, not just because of the stimulating conversations he enjoyed there, but because he had devoted most of his adult life to the service of King and country. Just a few examples: he’d helped raise money for the King’s army during the French and Indian War. He’d used his influence to secure a job as Royal Governor of New Jersey for his son William. He’d worked long and hard, and ultimately fruitlessly, to make Pennsylvania a royal colony. He had made excuses over and over and over again for King and Parliament when the government enacted the Stamp Act, the Townshend Acts, earning himself enemies in Pennsylvania. As a result, he steadily sought to become a member of the King’s government to get a more important position than that Post Office job. He did all this and more, not just because he was an ambitious man (though I think he was a very ambitious man), but because he really and truly believed that Englishmen on both sides of the water would benefit from seeing themselves, as he put it, not as belonging to different communities with different interests, but as one community with one interest. He wanted an Anglo-American alliance based upon equality that would be, as he put it, “the awe of the world.” And so he was a real English patriot up until almost the end. As late as seventeen seventy, the year of the Boston Massacre, he was urging the colonists to maintain a steady loyalty to the King and claimed that George had the best disposition toward us and has a family interest in our prosperity. And not surprisingly, he moved in really, really august circles. He knew personally many of the men whom political leaders at home were saying, “We’re trying to destroy American liberty,” and he would say, “Yeah, a few of them.” Maybe there were some of them that he did despise, no doubt about that. But he also knew, because he was there, and he knew these people personally and didn’t just know about them from rumors spread across the Atlantic Ocean. He knew that there were many, many friends of America in England, and he knew that most others were not out to destroy colonial liberty. They might have been misguided, they might have been stubborn. Some of them, he admitted, were not very bright, but they were not evil. Thus, even when he was frustrated by government policy, Franklin was always hopeful. “The popular inclination here,” he would say confidently, “is to wish us well and that we may preserve our liberties.” Benjamin Franklin changed his tune after seventeen seventy-four. His humiliation at the Cockpit was a critical encounter for Benjamin Franklin. He was never again the same.

And you’ve been listening to Sheila Skemp, and she’s a renowned Franklin historian. The book is The Making of a Patriot: Benjamin Franklin at the Cockpit.

You’re learning a lot about Franklin here that we were not taught in school.

I didn’t know any of this until much later in life, having read quite a number of books. We have a terrific one about Franklin and the battle that he and his son had, called Loyal Son, and it’s about the war inside Ben Franklin’s own family. So when anyone tells you Americans have never been more divided, one need only look at Ben Franklin’s own to get the answer to that. When we come back, we’ll find out why with Sheila Skemp here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here. As we approach our nation’s two-hundred-fiftieth anniversary, I’d like to remind you that all the history stories you hear on this show are brought to you by the great folks at Hillsdale College, and Hillsdale isn’t just a great school for your kids or grandkids to attend, but for you as well. Go to Hillsdale.edu to find out about their terrific free online courses. Their series on Communism is one of the finest I’ve ever seen. Again, go to Hillsdale.edu and sign up for their free and terrific online courses. And we continue with Our American Stories and the story of how Ben Franklin went from being an Anglophile in the end to what we might call an American-phile. Let’s pick up where we last left off with historian Sheila Skemp.

Skemp. Franklin entered a tiny room in Whitehall Palace that was known as the Cockpit on January twenty-ninth, seventeen seventy-four. The room was built by Henry the Eighth; he used it to stage cockfights, which is why it became known as the Cockpit. Long since, that was no longer the case; the government used it to conduct normal official business, but the old name stuck. Franklin’s appearance, physical appearance, that day was not designed to impress. He had a very old fact wig on and wore a simple blue coat of Manchester velvet. He entered the room; he looked around; and he realized that all the seats were taken. And so the sixty-eight-year-old man was forced to stand as a man young enough to be his son harangued and berated him to the delight of an overflow crowd. For about an hour, everybody who was anybody was there to watch Franklin be humiliated. Lord North was there; General Thomas Gage also managed to make it. Even the stray scientist or philosopher was squeezed into the room. Most members of the prestigious Privy Council were also there. Significantly, I think crucially, Franklin knew most of these people personally. He had hoped to be one of them. He counted them among his friends, and so from the beginning, this was personal for him as well as political. “Why was he there?” Ostensibly, he came to defend a petition from the Massachusetts Legislature asking for the removal of two men from office: Governor Thomas Hutchinson and Lieutenant Governor Andrew Oliver. Franklin was there as an agent (which is kind of like a lobbyist for Massachusetts), and he knew when he walked in that this petition was going to be rejected. In fact, he was surprised that he even had to show up, but it was his job to go through the motions, defend it if he could, and so he was there in that capacity. Two things made what under any other circumstances would have been a mere formality into a spec that captured the attention of everybody in London. First, the timing could not have been worse. Franklin had been originally prepared to defend the petition on January eleventh, but when he found out on January eleventh that Governor Hutchinson had hired a lawyer to defend him, he thought, “Well, maybe I should get a lawyer to defend me, too,” and so he asked for a postponement. Unfortunately for him, he got it. And so instead of defending the petition on January eleventh, he defended it on January twenty-ninth—eighteen days. Eighteen days meant, in this case, a lot, because it turned out that on January twentieth, just nine days before he appeared at the Cockpit, London received word about what we now know as the Boston Tea Party. Had he gone on the original date, January eleventh, he would have gotten there before news of the Boston Tea Party arrived. Rightly or wrongly, English leaders were furious at the Boston Tea Party. To them, this was the last straw. They had done, from their standpoint, everything that they could to be conciliatory towards the colonists for ten years, and this was the thanks that they got. A bunch of Boston ruffians had thrown private property into the ocean and had shown that they had no respect for England, its laws, or its lawmakers. They were hurt; they were angry; they were frustrated; they were out for blood. They were looking for someone, anyone, to blame for the ills that beset the English Empire, and Benjamin Franklin was a convenient target. But why Franklin? He clearly had no control over the men who destroyed the tea. In fact, when he first heard about it, he was furious and said, “Why did they do this?” He was not pleased at all. So, why Franklin? Franklin himself was partly to blame, which brings us to our second reason for what happened in that room. To understand this, you have to go back a little bit and look at some background. Between seventeen sixty-eight and seventeen sixty-nine, Thomas Hutchinson and Andrew Oliver had written occasional letters to a man by the name of Thomas Whately. Whately was a member of Parliament. He was a supporter of the Stamp Act. Both Oliver and Hutchinson had been victims of mob violence during the Stamp Act riots. Their houses had been destroyed; their most prized possessions had been ground into the dust. They had barely escaped with their lives. Three years later, for some reason, they were still angry, and so in letter after letter to Whately, they talked about the mob violence that characterized Boston, and they insisted over and over again, “England must clamp down on the colonies before it was too late, otherwise independence would be inevitable.” Thomas Whately died in seventeen seventy-two, but the Hutchinson-Oliver letters survived. And in the winter of seventeen seventy-two, someone—Franklin never told anybody who; historians still don’t know who it was—somebody got possession of those letters, gave them to Franklin, and said, “Do with them what you will.” And Franklin forwarded the letters to Thomas Cushing, who was Speaker of the House in Massachusetts. Franklin’s explanation for his decision to send the letters back to Massachusetts has been: “People just still shake their heads at it.” “This is supposed to be a smart guy. What was he thinking?” he said, and he never stopped saying this. He thought that when people saw these letters, that they would feel the same way that he had. He said, “When he saw them, light dawned; everything suddenly made sense.” Now he knew why King and Parliament were so determined to destroy colonial liberties (which he just couldn’t figure out). Before Parliament’s efforts to tax the colonies, the government’s decision to send redcoats to Boston in seventeen sixty-eight, which led to the Boston Massacre, came because people like Hutchinson and Oliver had intentionally misled London officials, lying to them. He thought sending these letters would bring England and America closer together. It was about as wrong a prognostication as anybody has ever made. Immediately, the Massachusetts Legislature drew up a petition asking the King to remove the Governor and Lieutenant Governor from their offices. It was an audacious demand. I mean, these people served at the discretion of the King. This was not a democracy. It wasn’t going to happen. But they nevertheless sent this petition to London. And it was this petition that Franklin was trying to defend at the Cockpit.