The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (61 page)

I have long been of opinion that the foundations of the future grandeur and stability of the British Empire lie in America; and though, like other foundations, they are low and little seen, they are nevertheless broad and strong enough to support the greatest political structure human wisdom ever yet erected.

For this reason Canada must be retained.

If we keep it, all the country from the St. Lawrence to Mississippi will in another century be filled with British people. Britain itself will become vastly more populous by the immense increase of its commerce; the Atlantic Sea will be covered with your trading ships; and your naval power thence continually increasing, will extend your influence round the whole globe, and awe the world!

Evidently Kames had not shared all of Franklin’s grand vision, for Franklin terminated this part of his letter: “But I refrain, for I see you begin to think my notions extravagant, and look upon them as the ravings of a mad prophet.”

Yet the prophet was not without honor in his own country—that country being the one he shared with Kames and Collinson and the dons of Cambridge and the guild-brothers of Edinburgh. The honors he had received and the friends he had made since arriving in Britain were enough to win any man; this recent trip to the north of the United Kingdom added further friendships to still more honors. Franklin wrote Kames, “The time we spent there was six weeks of the
densest
happiness I have met with in any part of my life. And the agreeable and instructive society we found there in such plenty has left so pleasing an impression on my memory that, did not strong connections draw me elsewhere, I believe Scotland would be the country I should choose to spend the remainder of my days in.”

14
Briton
1760–62

British pride was in the air that season. Just months after Franklin’s declaration of “I am a Briton,” a new monarch was crowned in London, and in his first speech from the throne declared, “I glory in the name of Briton.”

Or it may have been “Britain” he gloried in the name of; the homonyms were hard for listeners to distinguish. Yet the point was the same: George III, unlike his Hanoverian forebears, considered himself British before anything else— just as Franklin did. Eventually Britain would prove too small for the two of them together, but for now the blessed isle seemed to bless them both.

George III’s path to the throne was not an easy one. His grandfather, George II, ruled for forty years, to the vexation of his son and heir apparent, Frederick. During much of that time Frederick thought his father was clinging to life to spite him—as indeed he was, at least in part. British politics in the eighteenth century almost guaranteed conflict between a monarch and the next-in-line. The eldest son of the sovereign was both Prince of Wales and Duke of Cornwall, and as such commanded income and influence independent of the throne. This income and influence in turn attracted those who had personal or political reasons for opposing the government, and those thus attracted typically made a habit of whispering oppositionist, if not seditious, thoughts in the ear of the impatient heir.

To this institutional conflict George II and Frederick added the bad blood that characterized the house of Hanover. Queen Caroline evinced a hatred toward her son almost inconceivable in a mother. “My dear firstborn,” she was reported to have said, “is the greatest ass, and the greatest liar, and the greatest canaille, and the greatest beast, in the whole world, and I most heartily wish he was out of it.” In her final moments, when Frederick expressed a desire to see his mother, she refused, saying, “I shall have one comfort in having my eyes eternally closed—I shall never see that monster again.” Frederick’s father—whose experience with his own father foreshadowed that with his son—shared his wife’s hatred and disdain for their son. “Bid him go about his business,” George said in response to Frederick’s plea for a last chance at reconciliation, “for his poor mother is not in a condition to see him act his false, whining, cringing tricks now, nor am I in a humour to bear his impertinence.”

If Frederick thought that mourning for Caroline would shorten George’s life, he was mistaken. It was Frederick who died first, nine years before his father, after catching a chill playing tennis in the rain. George’s death, when it came, was in its own unexalted way similarly indicative of the hazards of ruling-class life. The rich diet of the rich in eighteenth-century England led to gout and other maladies, including constipation. On October 25, 1760, George II awakened at Kensington Palace to his usual cup of chocolate, after which he retired to the royal water closet for his morning effort. The effort proved too much for the royal blood vessels; a critical one burst and killed the king.

George III was twenty-two when his grandfather died, and, although he had been training since birth to take the throne, he was woefully unprepared. A princely youth is a sure recipe for arrested development—princes rarely encounter the reverses that constitute essential elements of
the maturing process—yet young George’s development was arrested even by royal standards. He was awkward socially, and emotionally dependent on John Stuart, the Earl of Bute. The merest accident had brought Bute to the attention of the royal family. One day in 1747 a downpour suspended a cricket match Frederick was attending (he had bad luck with weather and sports); while waiting for the storm to lift, the prince proposed a card game but discovered that his party was one man short. Bute was pressed into service, made a favorable impression, and was attached to the royal retinue. He became a lord of the bedchamber and later groom of the stole. He also became, upon Frederick’s death, the mentor, father figure, and
beau idéal
of the new prince.

In George’s eyes Bute was everything the young man could never be: intelligent, cultivated, handsome. Everything, that is, except king, which made the younger man’s deficiencies the more distressing. A mild correction from Bute conjured the specter of rejection—deserved rejection. “If you should now resolve to set me adrift,” the prince said, “I could not upbraid you, but on the contrary look on it as the natural consequence of my faults.” When George fell in love for the first time he submitted that frightening emotion to Bute’s approval. “I surrender my future into your hands,” George wrote, “and will keep my thoughts even from the dear object of my love, grieve in silence, and never trouble you more with this unhappy tale; for if I must either lose my friend or my love, I will give up the latter, for I esteem your friendship above every earthly joy.”

As it turned out, Bute disapproved, and the prince forgot the young lady and put on the stiff upper lip that proved his Britishness. “I am born for the happiness or misery of a great nation,” he said, “and must consequently often act contrary to my passions.” He thereupon asked for a list of those young ladies Bute deemed acceptable—“to save a great deal of trouble,” given that “matrimony must sooner or later come to pass.” When it did, Queen Charlotte dutifully bore her husband fifteen children. (Known, perhaps unfairly, for her lack of physical beauty as a young woman, Charlotte grew in the opinion of her husband’s subjects, at least comparatively. Horace Walpole commented that as the queen aged, “her want of personal charms became, of course, less observable.” Walpole mentioned this to her chamberlain, who agreed. “Yes,” the chamberlain said, “I do think the
bloom
of her ugliness is going off.”)

As a protégé of Frederick, Bute naturally imbibed the prince’s distrust of George II and his ministers; as the protégé of Bute, George III
imbibed the same distrust of the same men. “The conduct of this old K. makes me ashamed to be his grandson,” the grandson said. William Pitt, then at the height of his wartime glory, was described by the young George as “the blackest of hearts” and “a true snake in the grass.”

To some extent the young monarch was simply jealous of Pitt. At almost the moment when George III mounted the throne, the city of London dedicated a new bridge across the Thames as a monument to “the man who by the strength of his genius and steadfastness of his mind and a certain kind of happy contagion of his probity and spirit” had saved the empire. Needless to say, the authors of this encomium were not speaking of the new king, who for just such reasons felt obliged to demonstrate—to Pitt and everyone else—that he, George III, was king. “I am happy to think that I have at present the real love of my subjects,” he wrote Bute, “and lay it down for certain that if I do not show them that I will not permit ministers to trample on me, that my subjects will in time come to esteem me unworthy of the Crown I wear.”

Proving his fitness to rule became a preoccupation with George III, coloring his relations with his ministers and subsequently with his American subjects. Bute, warned by the Duke of Devonshire that as long as the war with France lasted, the new king could not dispense with Pitt, replied, “My Lord, I would not for the world the king should hear such language. He would not bear it for a moment.” “Not bear it!” rejoined the amazed duke. “He must bear it! Every king must make use of human means to attain human ends, or his affairs will go to ruin.”

But George would
not
bear it. In his first meeting with the ministers he emphasized the need to bring to a conclusion the present “bloody and expensive war”—Pitt’s war, as all present, including Pitt, understood. Pitt resented this slap; he equally resented his eclipse by Bute. Within the year the Great Commoner resigned—so discouraged regarding his future as to risk his reputation as tribune of the people by accepting a peerage for his wife and a pension for himself. “Oh, that foolishest of great men, that sold his inestimable diamond for a paltry peerage and a pension,” lamented one of his disappointed partisans.

Franklin
observed the events surrounding the accession of George III with mixed emotions. As a proud Briton himself, he could not help applauding the new king’s embrace of Britain. Yet neither could
he help considering ominous the ouster of Pitt, the architect of the war policy that promised finally to secure the borders of Pennsylvania and the other colonies against French and Indian attack.

Franklin had further reason for paying attention to the politics of court and Parliament. Having resolved, upon the breakdown of his relations with the Penns, to seek the protection of the Crown, he had to approach the Crown—or rather the officers of the Crown responsible for the colonies. These included the members of the Board of Trade and the Privy Council.

Bureaucracies being what they are, and Pennsylvania being as far from the minds of most British bureaucrats as it was from British shores, simply scheduling a hearing took many months. Franklin employed the time to probe the weaker points of the proprietors’ defense. He could not expect the Board of Trade to become exercised about who paid what taxes in Pennsylvania; such a provincial matter hardly touched high interests of state. But the board
might
pay attention to proprietary policies responsible for unrest among the Indians, for it was this unrest that had provoked the current war.