Book of Ages (2 page)

L
ady Jane Grey, a red-haired, freckle-faced grandniece of Henry the Eighth, read, while still a girl, the Old Testament in Hebrew and Plato in Greek. She was remarkable; she was untoward. A royal tutor once found her shut in her room reading an account of Socrates’s execution for heresy, “with as moch delite, as som jentleman wold read a merie tale.” She was thirteen. The tutor confessed himself astonished. Why, he asked, did she closet herself in her chamber to study the philosophy of death when she might instead hunt in the park with the duke and duchess?

She looked up from her book. “They never felt, what trewe pleasure ment,” she said.

This scarcely slaked him.

“And howe came you,” inquired he, “to this déepe knowledge of pleasure”?

“I will tell you,” she obliged: when she was in the company of other than books, she said, “that I thinke my selfe in hell.”
¹

Lady Jane was a cousin of the king’s son, Edward. From the age of twelve, he kept a journal, uncommonly canny, an account at once of himself and of the state; he called it his “Chronicle.” He began with his birth: “The yere of our Lord 1537 was a prince born to king Harry th’eight.”
²

The chronicle of a king is a history of the world. The royal weddings alone could have filled a folio. The
Church of England had separated from the Church of Rome when Edward’s father divorced his wife to marry
Anne Boleyn. He would have four wives more. Born, married, buried. Born, married, beheaded.

Then there were the heretics, the readers of banned books. Born, married, burned. “The secrets mysteries of the faith ought not to be explained
to all men in all places,” the church had decreed in 1215. “For such is the depth of divine Scripture that, not only the simple and illiterate but even the prudent and learned are not fully sufficient to try to understand it.”
³
But in the 1450s, after a German
blacksmith named
Johannes Gutenberg cast letters of lead and antimony in his forge and, with a machine hewn of wood, pressed ink onto a page, the secret mysteries began to seep out. If a book could be made so well and copied so cheaply, might there not, one day, be mountains of books? And then, might not every man, and even every woman, down to the merest girl, read the word of God?
William Tyndale, a scholar, began translating the
Bible into English. “If God spare my life,” he warned a clergyman, “I wvyl cause a boye that dryveth the plough shall know more of the scripture than thou doest.”
⁴

Tyndale went to the gallows.
⁵
The next year, Edward was born:

Thus begins the chronicle of a king.

But what of the king’s humble subjects, the merchants and gentle ladies, the busy tradesmen and the surly apprentices, the frugal housewives and their virtuous daughters, the thieves and the rogues, the beggars and the whores? What of the plain?

Thomas Cromwell, the king’s minister, ordered every parish to “kepe one boke or registre wherin ye shall write the day and yere of every weddyng christenyng and buryeng”: a record of births, marriages, and deaths—a chronicle of everyone. Each book was to be kept in a coffer, fastened with two locks. Not every vicar complied.
⁶
Impertinent parsons kept no books at all. They could think of no purpose for which a king might make a count except to tax.

In 1547, Henry died and Edward, nine, was crowned. The boy king, he was called. A council ruling in his name strove to have every last vestige of idolatry destroyed. Vestries were ransacked, stained glass shattered, statues smashed. In their stead, on altars and in pews, went print: psalters, catechisms, books of common prayer. To read was to be saved.

Lady Jane kept reading. Her piety was daunting; her learning was said to be “almost past belief.”
⁷
Edward fell ill; there were rumors that he had been poisoned. On his deathbed, he named as his successor Lady Jane.

When Edward died, Jane became queen. She was sixteen. Then Edward’s half sister Mary, with an army behind her, seized the crown. Jane’s reign lasted only nine days. She was locked in the Tower of London, and sentenced to death. Before she was executed, she sent one of her sisters a Bible. “It wil teache you to live,” she told her, “and learne you to die.”
⁸

Far from the Tower of London, in the tiny village of
Ecton, in Northampshire, in the very middle of England, there lived a blacksmith named
Thomas Francklyne, a clever man, a tinkerer. When, during Mary’s reign, she restored the Church of Rome, Thomas Francklyne contrived an ingenious device: with cloth tape, he fastened a Bible to the underside of a stool with a hinged seat so that he could turn it up and read his book when he would, but when anyone came to the door, he could tuck it under.
⁹
When Mary died in 1558, and her sister Elizabeth, a Protestant, succeeded her, Thomas Francklyne took his Bible out from under his stool and kept it out.
It wil teache you to live, and learne you to die
.

Only then did the recalcitrant rector of the village of Ecton begin, at last, to keep a parish register.
¹⁰
In it, in the year of the Lord fifteen hundred sixty-five, he recorded a baptism:

It sounds so plain. But, at the time, Jane wasn’t just any name.

CHAPTER II

I
n the spring of 1758, Benjamin Franklin made a pilgrimage to Ecton to uncover his ancestors.
Thomas Francklyne, who hid his Bible under a stool, was Jane and Benjamin Franklin’s great-great-grandfather.

In Ecton, Franklin walked through a maze of stone. He sought out the villagers, the crooked and the haggard, leaning upon their canes. He stopped at the rectory to inquire after the parish register. “By which I find,” he wrote, “that our poor honest Family were Inhabitants of that Village near 200 Years, as early as the Register begins.”
¹
Jane, the daughter of Thomas ffrancklyne.

In the churchyard, he trudged along narrow, grassy paths, squinting at stones, looking for the family name. “The short and simple Annals of the Poor,” Thomas Gray had called
gravestones, in “An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard,” in 1751, thinking about how “Some mute inglorious
Milton
here may rest.”
²

Jane Francklyne, born in 1565, had lived for less than a month. She left very little behind. She was buried in the Ecton churchyard, but her father would hardly have paid a carver to engrave so small a stone.
³
If not for the parish register, there would be no record that this Jane Francklyne had ever lived at all.
History is what is written and can be found; what isn’t saved is lost, sunken and rotted, eaten by earth.

Thomas Francklyne had four sons who lived longer than their unfortunate sister. The youngest, Henry, grew to be a pigheaded, contrary man. A
blacksmith like his father, he once spent a year and a day in prison, “on suspicion of his being the author of some poetry that touched the character of some great man.”
⁴
Silence was not
Henry Francklyne’s handmaiden. He named his youngest son Thomas. By now, the spelling of the family name
had begun to change. Thomas Francklin minded the forge in Ecton. He forged pots and hinges and rasps and fetters, like the blacksmith in Isaiah 54:16: “Behold, I have created the smith that bloweth the coales in the fire, and that bringeth foorth an instrument for his worke.”
⁵
He “had very little hair and used to wear a cap,” one of his sons remembered. Not only a blacksmith, “he alsoe practised for diversion the trade of a Turner, a Gun-Smith, a surgeion, a scrivener, and wrote as prety a hand as ever I saw. He was a historian.”
⁶

Behold the historian. His hand holds a pen. His eye lingers on the past.

Thomas Francklin’s wife, Jane White, loved to sing and to recite to her children the last verses of the third chapter of
Malachi: “they that feared the Lord, spake often to one another, and the Lord hearkened and heard it, & a booke of remembrance was written before him, for them that feared the Lord, & that thought upon his name.”
⁷

The word, the name, the book: reckoning and remembrance. A history.

Thomas and
Jane White Francklin didn’t fasten their Bible under a stool. They inked it on plaster. On the very walls of their house, they wrote their favorite verses: “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotton Sonne: that whosoever beleeveth in him should not perish but have everlasting life. For God sent not his sonne into the world to condemne the world: but that the world through him might be saved” (John 3:16–17).
⁸
This, their word of gods, father and son, snaked around the walls, a foot above the floor.

Their youngest son, Josiah, was born in 1657. He became not a blacksmith but a dyer of silk and a maker of ink, and not in the sleepy village of Ecton but in the bustling town of
Banbury, a
Puritan town.
⁹
He and brother Benjamin wrote down the family recipes. How to whiten linen: “Lay it two dayes in soure Milk, closs coverd.” How to dye leather blue: “Boyle in Water, Walwort berries, and Elderberries.” How to make black printer’s ink: “Burn Rozin in an Iron pan, hold a bag with ye Mouth downward to catch the smoak, When it is cold shake yor bag on a paper, Mix the soot Exceeding well with Linseed oyle, and then boyle it over a gentle fire, until you find it thick.”
¹⁰

And then, in 1683, Josiah Franklin left Ecton and Banbury behind to cross an ocean in search of a more bookish faith.

·    ·    ·

In 1758, when Jane Franklin’s brother Benjamin walked through the Ecton churchyard, squinting at stones, he wasn’t looking for Janes. He was looking for Franklins. At last he found one:

Here lyeth
the Body of
Thos. Franklin
¹¹

This Thomas Franklin was their uncle, another of Josiah’s brothers. Bred a
blacksmith, “being ingenious, and encourag’d in Learning,” he “became a considerable Man in the County Affairs.” He was wise.
¹²

In Ecton,
Benjamin Franklin found the very ancestors he was looking for: they were poor; they were obscure; they were honest; they were ingenious. They were franklins.

He turned this story over in his mind, round and round, like wood on a lathe, year after year. And then, on folio sheets folded into quarters, he put it down on paper, in the form of a letter to his son. It is the most famous thing ever written by the most famous American who had ever lived. It begins,

He had gone to Ecton to learn about the lives of his forefathers. “Now, imagining it may be equally agreeable to you to know the Circumstances of
my
Life,” he explained, “I sit down to write them for you.”
¹³

He never called what he was writing an “autobiography”; that word had not yet been coined. Sometimes he called it a history, sometimes a memoir, sometimes a relation, and sometimes an account. He wasn’t quite sure what it was. It certainly wasn’t the chronicle of a king.
The yere of our Lord 1537 was a prince born to king Harry th’eight
. It was, instead, the story of a poor boy who learns to read and comes to know as much of politics as a prince. This story was new.

He labored over it; he was a quick writer with a ready wit and tart opinions, but it took Benjamin Franklin eighteen years to write what he did of the story of his life, and he never finished it. It ends in 1758, on the eve of his visit to Ecton.

He never explained why he didn’t finish, but he did explain why he started: “Having emerg’d from the Poverty and Obscurity in which I was born and bred, to a State of Affluence and some Degree of Reputation in the World, and having gone so far thro’ Life with a considerable Share of Felicity, the conducing Means I made use of, which, with the Blessing of God, so well succeeded, my Posterity may like to know, as they may find some of them suitable to their own Situations, and therefore fit to be imitated.”
¹⁴
My story will tell you how I got here, that you might follow me.
It wil teache you to live, and learne you to die
.