155. The Founding Fathers: Benjamin Franklin (Ep 5)
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Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon. And me, William Durimple.

And this is the last of our mini-series on the Founding Fathers. And we come to the one who is definitely my favourite, though I know that Anita still has a soft spot for John Adams. I have a soft spot for John Adams, but I adore Benjamin Franklin. Don't get me wrong. I have room in my heart for two men. It's all right. Yeah. Carry on. Very good to hear, Anita. So the Ben Franklin series.

A different generation to all the others we've discussed. He's already a man well past middle age when the American Revolution begins to loom into the horizon. And he's led enough lives in his different incarnations to do an entire mini-series on Benjamin Franklin alone. He is an extraordinary scientist, all that stuff with the lightning and

in many ways the man who realizes what the common cold is a man who invents a musical instrument he's the first person to get onto lead poisoning are you giving away your entire episode no no i'm just going through all this that i will continue he is also of course a diplomat an

an extraordinary inventor. The most interesting thing about him to me is the way that having come as the founding father that best knew Britain and who really genuinely loved London, he's the one who decides in the end that America cannot continue as the colony of Britain.

And he does it with a heavy heart. And he does it knowing Britain as a place that he's lived for 18 years or something and had British lovers, many British friends, known many of the most extraordinary men of the day, the fathers of the Scottish Enlightenment like David Hume. He's visited by Boswell. He's one of the most extraordinary men of his age.

And yet in late middle age, he turns into a revolutionary, which is something that would surprise him, I think. Of all the founding fathers, he is the one who figures in rap music the most. You know, where you'll hear that phrase, all about the Benjamins. It's all about the Benjamins because he is the face of the $100 bill. So there we are. That's what that's about. So today we're all about Benjamins. Very good. For some reason, we've been obsessing about the height of these American founding fathers. I don't think we should stop with Benjamin Franklin. They were all tall.

None of them were shorties, were they? I mean, how tall was Ben Franklin? I think Ben Franklin was not a giant. He was five foot nine. How tall was your John Adams? He's five foot seven. So just slightly shorter than that, I think. The one who sort of struck people by his sort of masculine physicality was Washington. Washington was a person that when he walked into a room, you noticed.

Although I keep saying Jefferson was taller. His feet were pointing out when he was measured on Washington. Yeah, but he was looking down a bit shyly. Okay, okay, okay. No, no. All right. We've established that. Anyway, look, tell me about 5'9 Benjamin Franklin. Tell me, as a young man, let's do the origin story of Benjamin Franklin. What was he like? First of all, the thing to be said about Benjamin Franklin is of all of them, he is definitely the man you would want to take to the pub for a drink. He

He is affable. He's humorous. He has this lovely homespun wisdom that he liberally gives out, not least in his almanac, which is one of the things that he produces and how he makes his name.

And unlike the founding fathers who were slave-owning plantation men, Franklin is very specifically middle class. He is an urban figure. He calls himself Ben Franklin Printer for most of his life. He's a sort of nerdy inventor. He's always coming up with better ways of doing things, of inventing appliances and improving things and studying the world around him.

He is very much a man of Boston. He is born in Boston, in Massachusetts, on January 17th, 1706, and into a professional family. Do you have the details of his parents there? I do. So he's basically of Northampton stock, if you want to go back to his father. His father, Josiah, emigrated from Northamptonshire in 1682, but his mother,

Abiah? Abiah? I'm not sure how you say his name. A-B-I-A-H. Was from Nantucket in Massachusetts. So, you know, his mother's family go back. I love that name. Nantucket. Did you ever, as a child, have those Joe Nakin books, The Nightbirds of Nantucket? No, but I know a really rude limerick with that in it. But just not to be shared. You can tell me afterwards. Tell you afterwards. Okay.

I'm trying to think of rude things that rhyme with that, Tuckett, but I can't come up with any. Oh my God. People, their thumbs are whirring away, sending you the answer to that. But anyhow, tell me what his parents wanted for their son. So they thought he should join the church, but he never showed the slightest interest in church going. And he's a noted rationalist from early on in his life. And he is, one of his most famous things is

scoring out the passages that look to God in the Declaration of Independence and changing it to an Enlightenment declaration for reason. The word self-evident

about these truths changed from sacred. That's right. He objected to the sacred. And Jefferson says that, you know, when Ben Franklin does do that, says, I did think about all of these words very carefully before I wrote them down. And Ben Franklin, who is charm personified, you know, sort of mollifies and saying, yes, I know you did, but I just think this is better.

You know, it's gorgeous, yeah. And self-evident is exactly right. It's a wonderful usage. And he does have this fantastic ability to write with wisdom, with wit, and very movingly. I understand those parents weren't well off, though. They couldn't afford to send him to school for very long. I mean, he's just a couple of years he went to school. And his brilliance shows itself brilliantly.

very early on in sort of practical inventions. When he's 11, he invents swimming fins, rather like divers use now. He later writes, when I was a boy, I made two oval pallets about 10 inches long and six broad with a hole for a thumb in order to retain it fast in the palm of my hand.

And they resembled a painter's palettes. And swimming, I pushed the edges of these forwards. I struck the water with their flat surfaces as I drew them back. I remember swimming faster by means of these palettes, but they fatigued my wrists.

So he has this very observant, but also very sort of practical mind. He's a man who finds himself very much at home when he apprentices himself to his elder brother, James, as a printer. And this is very much what his calling is for much of his life. You had a great giggle at John Adams' Nom de Plume when he was writing his funny sort of dog-roll things in their pivot. Humphrey Plowjogger. Yeah, but Silence Doggood is not bad, is it? Tell us about Silence Doggood. They had a very good version.

Of this. And yes, his brother founds the first independent newspaper in Boston, the New England Courant, or Current? Maybe Current would be more New England than Courant. Current, I would have thought, yeah. So Benjamin wants to write his brother's paper, his elder brother, rather like my older brothers. Don't think he'd be any good at it. Stay in your lane, bro. Stay in your lane, little brother. Yeah, yeah.

So he writes after the pseudonym Silence Do-Good. Not Dogwood. I think it's Do-Good, isn't it? As in do-gooder. Oh, Do-Good. Oh, God, I thought it was Dogwood. Okay, Silence Do-Good. Oh, well, that's less funny, but also very good. Okay, so he does do that, does he? And who is Silence Do-Good meant to be? Well, she's rather like kind of Lady Whistledown in Bridgerton. She's this sort of elderly widow who is sort of witty, satirical, and the readers of Boston fall in love with her so much that they even get –

Letters into the paper proposing marriage. Is his brother thrilled at this? They have a tricky relationship, don't they, Ben Franklin and his brother? Well, you know what elder brothers are like. Benjamin describes that his brother treated him harshly, writing that it might be a means of impressing me with that aversion to arbitrary powers that has stuck to me through my whole life. So it's his brother's bullying him that makes him upset.

with authority. I mean, is it so bad that he just decides he can't be with him anymore? Because he does have a huge change of circumstance at the age of 17, doesn't he? That's right. Like many younger brothers before him, I choose my words carefully. Did you run away to join the circus? Why do you think I'm in India? India's quite far. He finds that he can only be his own man when he's far away from being the younger brother. So he goes off to Philadelphia.

But he takes his skills with him. So he starts off as a printer and a writer and a newspaper man. But now, age 17, he's in Philadelphia, away from Boston. I completely adore him. You're right. He's an interesting fella because, again, 17, this point in life when...

most people can't get their children out of bed, he's sort of thinking, okay, I'm going to make my life in a new place and I'm going to make it even better. So he has his first trip to London not long after uprooting himself and moving to Philadelphia. Why does he go to London? That's right. And the excuse is to buy printing equipment for his Philadelphia newspaper. And on arrival, the man who has...

promised to back him and buy the printing equipment, which of course is very expensive. And he was certainly not from a family that could have financed this itself. He finds himself in London that his patron has disappeared or reneged on all the promises. And so he goes to work in a print shop using his skills.

He completely falls in love with London. And I think this is very interesting because he's the only one of the founding fathers that really knew Britain. Yeah. And who doesn't have this sort of image of a distant place. He lives there for great chunks of his life. And what he loves best of all is the Samuel Johnson coffeehouse culture. This is the age of Johnson and Boswell. Boswell is his friend.

And England is very much the England of Hogarth, Prince and Rawlinson and all that sort of world. He loves the coffee houses. He loves the intellectual discussion, but he's also very inspired by these Enlightenment ideas. This pursuit of reason is something which very much appeals to him. And he is not an educated man at this stage. He's someone who's entirely self-taught and

has not had the sort of classical education that even Alexander Hamilton gets in New York, although Hamilton came from an even more disadvantaged background.

But he learns on the hoof. He's a reader. There are these wonderful pictures of the young Franklin already with spectacles, spent over books, studying away in his digs. The other thing he loves doing is swimming. We wouldn't advise him to do it at the moment, given the state of British rivers, thanks to our government, but he is keen on swimming in the Thames. Do you know he used to swim in the Thames every day for years and years and years before I knew him? But Bamberg Ascoyne

Day in, day out. My friend who does the Wallace Collection, Xavier Bray, is a great temsler and comes down to Chiswick with sort of floaties, not to keep him afloat, but signal himself. So look, he's swimming, he's living his best life. He's learning lots of things. And one of the things he realises at the time, the Thames is even colder than it is now. This is the period of just coming out of the little ice age of the 17th century. And there are very, very hard frosts and sometimes the Thames freezes over.

And people are under the impression that you catch a cold from swimming. But he, one of his very first scientific discoveries is the idea that it's spread by contagion. At this point, there are no ideas of germs or viruses, but he understands that it's something that's passed from person to person.

And he said, travelling in our severe winters, I've often suffered cold, sometimes to the extremity, only short of freezing. But this did not make me catch a cold. This he writes to the physician Benjamin Rush in 1773. Isn't it interesting? Because it's all about cold water plunges these days, about hardening yourself. I mean, that is the thing, you know, getting into an ice bath. But he says very clearly in this letter, people often catch cold from one another when shut up together in a close room. Hmm.

And that seems like a small advance to us, but he's one of the first to actually articulate this. And what he says is the defense against this is fresh air and exercise. And he argues that the best way to avoid a cold, even in the midst of winter, is a measure of exercise. And he says by degree of warmth it produces in the body, it gives you a protection against getting a cold. Yeah. Anyway, that's my little medical bulletin from Ben Franklin. No, no, I think it's really interesting.

This could be something that would be in a self-help book today, Two Full Living with Two Little Exercises. That's one of his pieces of work. That's very him. I mean, it is this sort of simple homespun wisdom that he comes up with. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But he not only sort of talks the talk, he walks the walk, he spins the swim, because he will be a swimming instructor late into his 70s. He'll keep teaching people how to swim because he believes so fervently in the benefits of it. So he loved Britain.

How many times did he sort of go this way and that way between the two countries? So he has three phases in London. He's always sailing backwards and forwards. And he has this first short run, I think 1723 to 1726. He's back in the late 1750s, 1757 to 62. And then there's the very formative and important phase.

10 years between 1765 and 1775 when he is humiliated and turns against Britain with very important results. With ferocity. Yeah. So that's the first trip done. And Franklin then returns to Philadelphia in 1726. And by now, he is only 21 years of age. The aged Benjamin Franklin is 21. He sets up a

debate club because I mean he's loved that coffeehouse experience so much he wants something of the same what does he call it he has an identity for this new way is it the junto or the hunter I don't know how you pronounce it I don't know let's say hunter and sound cleverer than we are and then someone can correct us it's the same word as a hunter hunter yeah well then hunter as in a south american power if it's helpful it's also called the leather apron club that might help

And leather aprons is exactly what Ben Franklin is all about. He's very much in his print shop with his leather apron, with the other printers making things. And what distinguishes him is he's not just making things, he's chatting and questioning and looking and examining things.

tried to understand the whole time natural philosophy, which we would call physics today. Right. Okay. So, I mean, he's really set up a salon culture, but of men who are good with their hands as well as with their brains. I mean, that's the thing. That's the company that he most adores is people who are thinky, but also makey. He says, you know, the group can be formed of ingenious men, a physician, a mathematician, a geographer, a natural philosopher, a botanist, a chemist,

and a mathematician. That's his dream sort of combination of people. Brilliant. And that they first must sort of dedicate themselves that they are all interested in mutual improvement endeavors. That's the whole edifice of this Hunter Club or the Leather Apron Club is based on that. And they also help create the first lending library in Pennsylvania.

and the creation of the country's first volunteer fire brigade. I love the variety of different things he's involved in.

I love that the two go together, a library and a fire brigade, of course. There is already, of course, a library in Boston by this stage where I have twice had the privilege of giving lectures. The Boston Library is attached. Is it the Philosophical Society on Boston Green? Maybe, maybe. And it's in a building which would have been there at this time. Can I just ask, and we would not mention, but Philadelphia was a magnet for Quakers. It was a really Quaker place.

area. And was Ben Franklin a Quaker or this kind of getting people together to try and improve the lot of everybody is a very Quakerish idea? So no, I don't think he is a Quaker. He is an ally of the Quakers and he admires the Quakers for their civic sense. But he is not a believer, I think. He's very much a man of reason. And I don't think he has any public expressions of religious faith. But there is a point when, for example, he pushes

through a bill to create a force that is purely voluntary. There's no compulsory joining of the militia, which secures the support of the Quakers and their important political allies of his later in life.

Well, they will be hugely important when we get to the American Revolution episodes, because for a long time, they are the ones digging their heels and saying, we do not want to go to war with England. And Franklin is sort of caught in between those. But look, let's take a break here. And after the break, we'll talk about sort of the young man, Franklin, coming into his own. Travel is all about choosing your own adventure. With your Chase Sapphire Reserve card, sometimes that means a ski trip at a luxury lodge in the Swiss Alps.

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That's survey.empirepoduk.com, survey.empirepoduk.com. Welcome back. So just before the break, we were having sort of the young Franklin, again, one of these unfathomably bright and capable teenage boys who's forging his way in the world, despite his brother sort of telling him he's not really worth that much. Despite the fact that he has only very basic education at this stage.

Yeah, but a brain the size of a planet who wants to learn things, wants to keep filling it up. We haven't talked about family and marriage because that is a huge imperative, especially in colonial America where everything is about the family and continuity. Estranged from his brother and his roots, what does he do? Does he get married? Does he fall in love?

He marries Deborah Reed, who in the picture of her in Walter Isaacson's biography is a formidable looking character. And it has to be said that it's not a great marriage. He is away from her for years. When he goes to London for whole decades, she stays behind.

And Franklin, who is no looker and has this sort of bald head and straggly hair, is nonetheless such an engaging character that he is a surprising ladies' man. I mean, he is what we would call these days a shagger. He is a prolific shagger. He is. We would indeed call him that. There are pictures. There's one wonderful sketch in the biography.

by someone called Charles Wilson Peale, who makes a sketch after walking in on Franklin kissing a girl, possibly Polly Stevenson in Craven Street. There are other pictures in the biography of him being surrounded by women in Enlightenment Paris. And he's this single, plump, not very well-dressed boy

balding man that's surrounded by sort of Marie Antoinette-ish ladies in wigs and sort of ballooning dresses. And he's looking as if he's the only man in a room full of women in this picture. And he looks as if he's both enjoying it and encouraging it.

Of course he is. Of course he is, because he does love the society of women. But, you know, he may not love his wife very much, but he does have one first love, does he not? I mean, it's Paul Richard's almanac, arguably, is his first great love, isn't it? And there's another wonderful picture of this in Walter Isaacson's biography, which I have to say is, again, one of the great biographies. Do you mean this here biography here? It's amazing. That is the very one that you've got there. That is the biography. Yes, indeed. And

And Walter Isaacson, everyone knows, is the man who sold sort of a million copies of his biography of Steve Jobs and therefore made every other biographer in the world hugely jealous. But he wrote other great biographies of Kissinger, of Einstein, and more improbably, Leonardo da Vinci. He likes these scientists. But anyway, back to poor Richard's almanac.

And Paul Richard's almanac is, as it says, it's sort of an almanac which has, among other things, in the title page of the very first edition, wherein is contained the lunations, eclipses, and judgment of the weather, spring tides, planet motions, aspects of the sun and moon's rising and setting, length of days, time of high water, fairs, courts, and observable days.

And then the front of it, it says an almanac for the year of Christ 1733 being the first after the leap year, which is the year 7241 by the account of the Eastern Greeks, the year 6932 according to the Latin Church.

And the 5-6-H-2 by Roman chronology and the year 5-4-9-4 according to the Jewish rabbis. Blimey. As well as having sort of all these calendars, poems, astronomy, all of that kind of thing. We owe him so many aphorisms, maxims they're called, aren't they? The maxims of Ben Franklin.

He not only liked to sort of create his own maxims, but he liked to adapt maxims from other people. So fasten your seatbelt. I'm going to rattle you through things attributed to Ben Franklin. Go for it. Eat to live, not live to eat.

He that lies down with dogs shall rise up with fleas. Where there's a marriage without love, there will be love without marriage. Necessity never made a good bargain. There seem more old drunkards than old doctors. Okay, that's not so well known. What are the other ones? Oh, fish and visitors stink in three days. He that lives on hope dies farting. What?

It's very 18th century. Yes, I know, but it's sort of changed it afterwards. I think people said it's beneath you. He said, all right, he that lives on hope dies fasting, but he meant farting. Diligence is the mother of good luck. Haste makes waste. Make haste slowly. So more haste, less speed. I mean, all of these things. No gains without pains. That's him as well. Vice knows she's ugly, so she puts on a mask. That's another one. Love your enemies, for they will tell you your faults.

There is a time to wink as well as to see, which is playful old Franklin. And God helps those who help themselves. Is that him? That's him as well. Goodness. Isn't that great? I love it. In a sense, possibly the thing that we most often use, which is a Franklin coining, is

is the terms positive and negative for electricity. Right. Well, that's dead science-y. That's not a maxim. That's a thing. But it is a coinage of this same man who leaves school at 16. I think they used to call it vitreous and resinous. And he said, no, no, no. Let's just make it positive and negative, plus and minus. That would make more sense. Electricity, which is one of the very first things which makes his name as a scientist. He's fascinated by lightning. And there's that famous saying,

of himself with his key and kite experiment. He wants to capture the electricity of lightning and he invents his own lightning rod that is eight or 10 feet long and has a sharpened point at the end.

believing that it would attract an electrical charge if struck by lightning. And there's this fabulous picture again. Oh, I love this portrait of him. It's very Prometheus, actually. Isn't it Prometheus holding up fire kind of thing? That's, I think, the reference. Oh, right. But he's sitting there and there's a sort of what would in other contexts be a sort of Baroque transfiguration of a sky behind him. Dark clouds, lightning, jagged, and...

Franklin with his bald pate and cravat is sitting in the middle of this tempest with his lightning rod and his key which is to pick up the electricity which you would have thought was a risky experiment but anyway he seems to have lived to tell the tale and to have proved the point yeah well I mean yeah henceforth people put lightning rods on top of buildings to attract the charge away from people who might be electrocuted this pic

is by our old friend Benjamin West, who sort of comes in and out of our pod every few months, because he also did the picture of Shah Alam gifting, in inverted commas, the Diwani to Robert Clive, which is the central East India Company picture, which is often used to illustrate anything you ever see about the East India Company. And he also, something we'll probably be coming to eventually, which is he also painted the picture of the death of Wolf on the heights of Abraham. So he's a fascinating person.

painter. The thing is, you know, he's got a lot on his plate. He's got his almanac, he's got, you know, saving buildings from electrocution. But that's not enough, because in 1753, he's appointed Joint Postmaster General of North America. So what does that mean? And what does he do? That is so interesting. It has two sort of effects on him. First of all, being Franklin, of course, he reforms the whole system. Prior to him, it's difficult to imagine this being true, but apparently it is.

If you were sending a letter from Charlestown to New York, it would go via London. It would go all the way back to London, change ships and then go out to New York. That's bloody stupid, isn't it? It's obviously not very sensitive. You can see why if that was the sort of standard of administration, you can see why the colonists in North America were beginning to chafe under that sort of system.

But anyway, Franklin instantly reforms that and gets a much more sensible system whereby ships going up and down the coast delivering letters, as you would imagine it had been anyway, but apparently it wasn't. At a deeper level, what this does is it puts Franklin...

up and down the American coast himself. He has to go and visit all 13 colonies, which as that postal system indicated, were often very disconnected from each other. We think of this now as one landmass. They must have all been in each other's pockets going backwards and forwards, but that simply wasn't the case. Many of the southern colonies with their plantation economies were much more closely connected with places like Barbados and the Caribbean than they were with each other. And

And this is the moment that in Franklin's head, the conception of 13 colonies all linked with each other, all together, all forming one unit, becomes something that he has personal experience of and understands. This is also the period when he comes up with his famous cartoon of a snake or a serpent chopped up.

In May 1754, having read George Washington's article about the military loss to the French, Franklin publishes his famous political cartoon in the Pennsylvania Gazette. It has this image with each section of the snake, which is chopped up, labeled with the colony's initials above the simple words, join or die, addressing the lack of unity between the colonies. Something much, much bigger than I think any of us imagine it today.

And this is an image which will come back later in Franklin's life and become a major slogan for the revolution. I mean, another part of the Albany and why it's important, the Albany plan is apart from, you know, saying, look, we have to stick together or, you know, like a chopped up snake, we'll just die in the dirt.

is that he wants to get some kind of combined response to the combined threat of the French and Native Americans with instructions to ensure friendly relations with the Iroquois in particular. How does that go down? So the Iroquois come up with a confederacy and Frankton, rather than sort of looking at them as savages, thinks, you know, this is a brilliant idea. Why haven't we done it too? So he comes up with this idea of a grand council.

council made up of representatives of each colony's assembly. Again, something which you would assume already existed. We are so inured to the idea of America being a unit, albeit a federal one, that we assume that they must have had some sort of joint representation. But of course, they hadn't. They were all founded separately, in some ways in competition with each other, with sometimes very different interests. And this council did not exist until Franklin dreamt it up and people began to think

in those terms and began sort of putting the motion begins towards founding something like this. Yeah, but initially, Pennsylvania or the Pennsylvania Assembly, and that's where all the seat of power lies and where representatives from the colonies can meet together and debate these things and what they want to sign up to. They don't like this plan and they kind of bat it away. They kind of sort of send him off with his

tail between his legs? How does he respond to that? Well, again, I mean, this image that we have that this should have been something that must have been there was a natural order of things. But I don't think anyone saw it like that at the time. And certainly the Pennsylvania Assembly didn't. Philadelphia, you've got to remember, was one of the largest towns. This colony regarded itself as one of the most sophisticated. They saw no particular reason why they should be connected with, say, Georgia, which is

which was a part of a new colony, a new establishment. This is 20 years before the revolution, but Franklin is already coming up with this sort of idea. He's talking about unity, but he's not talking about independence. In fact, I mean, it's fair to say, isn't it, William? Nobody's talking about independence at this time. You know, you can join the snake up, but you're not asking the snake to bite it. It's master, if you like. No, I mean, one of the surprises is that even when you've got the Boston Massacre and then the Boston Tea Party, it doesn't immediately...

cause people to think for independence the first reaction is to try and reform the system that's already there to try and appeal to the king to try and reform the way that the colonists are treated rather than the natural immediate knee-jerk reaction that we want independence we'll deal with this in a later episode but it takes a whole series of events and paul revere to change that so that would be for next week

I've got the horse right here. His name is Paul Revere. I mean, yes, Paul Revere. You know, the British are coming, the British are coming. You'll hear more about that a bit later on in this series. All that, exactly. But Franklin travels to London in 1757 and he spends quite a lot of time in London because what he thinks is, okay, you know what, if I can't get everybody to join together and they don't like my idea of this sort of

proto-federalism that I'm proposing, at least we can get a better deal from England. And he wants to petition the King to say, look,

treat Pennsylvanians, Virginians, New Englanders as equal to Englishmen? Because that's what we thought we were. And suddenly we're finding that we're not and you're treating us differently. He has two completely separate periods in London. The first one is 1757 to 1762. Then again, 1765 to 1775. So, I mean, there are two long periods, one of which is 10 years.

And he sets up with a girlfriend in London, probably. He's certainly having relationships. And he loves London. This is the important point. He's thrilled by the Enlightenment. He's going off to visit some of the main characters in Scotland, Lord Kames. He's hanging out with people like Boswell. He's at the center of things. And in a sense...

That sensation that Brits get today when they go to New York and suddenly they arrive at a party and everyone is there. This is what he gets when he comes to London in the 18th century. London is big lights, big city for him, isn't it? Yeah. London is the big city. Absolutely. And all the famous people, all the writers who've written all the articles he's read in journals, all the philosophical tracks that he's studying, the ideas of enlightenment. These people are living in London and in Scotland and he's visiting them.

And he's very thrilled. But it's in London that this crucial event takes place that changes his attitudes.

And he is connected with his job as the postmaster. There's a long and complicated story, which I don't think we need to go into about why this happens. But he takes some letters and publishes them and initially doesn't let on that it's he that's done it. But when someone who is accused of the leak has to fight a duel, Franklin honorably comes forward and claims responsibility for this leak.

And he's called before the Privy Council in a room called the cockpit. Now, it's called the cockpit. It's not a metaphorical usage. It's a very literal usage in that it was the room in which Cox fought during the reign of Henry VIII. But it's not a bad...

But it's not actually a bad usage because in the Privy Council, he's summoned for the leak and he is accused of a dereliction of duty as Postmaster General. And he gets a particularly nasty treatment at the hands of an ambitious young prosecutor, the Solicitor General, a Scotsman called Alexander Wedderburn, who accuses him of a whole variety of horrors. And there is a public gallery here and he is jeered at him.

The people cheer the prosecutor who's having great fun advancing his career at the expense of Franklin. And according to his biographers, he goes in a Brit and comes out an American. He's so badly treated, he's so humiliated by what happens to him that it changes his whole attitudes to the colonies. And by the time he leaves London in 1775, his attitudes about being an American are

His feeling of being treated like a provincial, like someone who is a second class citizen has been enormously enhanced and embittered, actually, by this experience with the Privy Council. And he really genuinely is a changed man from this point on.

He still loves his friends in London. He still regards it as a place which is a place where you have most fun in the world. But as far as its political system is concerned, his attitudes now have become very, very dark and privately doesn't do anything publicly at this point, but publicly.

Privately also, he has a very, very dim view of George III, which is something which will grow in his letters and in his rhetoric, but only become public many years later. I mean, you're setting this up beautifully for the man who will be one of the founding fathers. If not, he doesn't ever become president of the United States, unlike the other founding fathers that we're talking about. Yeah.

I think only because he's so old. Unlike the others we've been discussing, he's in his 70s by now. He's born in 1706. So by the time that he leaves London in 1775, he is 69 years old. Tell me, his whole family doesn't follow his...

of heart, though, do they? I mean, he has a son who believes something very different to him and that's going to become a real wedge in a family, in a Franklin family. Correct. His son, William Franklin, who he has never got on with and in truth there's already a rift between them. I mean, I don't think, you know, he's by any sense an ideal family man. He's a philanderer. Oh, he's a philanderer.

I mean, he's charming and he's lovely, but he is a philanderer, yeah. He's a great philanderer. And pictures, even by the 18th century, was a period of notably flexible moral systems. And even by those standards, he is regarded as a bit of a ladies' man, which is a strange thing because he's not a looker by any stretch of the imagination. No, but he's charming. He's charming and clever. He is charming. And he's a scientist. Yeah.

Not everybody, Anita, goes for men who have collections of Enigma machines. Oh, I thought every girl liked scientists. All right, that's just me then. All right, but his son doesn't like the way he's putting it about because it is, I mean, every time he does it, it's an insult to his wife who hasn't traveled to London with him and who is just at home, is it? Well, I'm not sure how much his family cares.

No, but certainly he and his son already do not get on and they get on worse as the political divide grows. As he becomes more estranged from his ties with London and with Britain, his rift with his son William grows at the same time. Mm-hmm.

And so it's a difficult time for him, but it changes in many ways the history of America. It does indeed. And a rift in a family is the bedrock of what becomes the American Revolution, because you will see families split apart, not on the issue of the conduct of their families.

very, very charming scientist fathers. But on the issue of who do you owe your loyalty to? Do you owe it to the king or your colony? It leaves us in a brilliant position. Till the next time we meet, it is goodbye from me, Anita Arnon. And goodbye from me, William Drimple.

And there you have it. Dr Al Bamawe is not responsible for the death of Lord Harmsen. British Podcast Award nominee for Best New Podcast. We simply must ask ourselves who planted the idea in Lord Harmsen's head that he was stung by a bee? Who was in the hospital garden that very morning to do so? And who was sleeping with his wife? British Podcast Award nominee for Best Fiction. Dr Sir Michael Wynne Stanley.

British Podcast Award nominee for the Listener's Choice Award. Officers, take Dr Sir Michael away. Show him to his cell. He can do with a lie down. He's been a busy little bee.

Oh, please. Okay. Oh my god. Oh my god. What? It wasn't recording. Oh, what? Stupid, stupid mic. Everything okay? No. Why not? The adventure didn't record. We only have the end. But that was the best adventure yet. Yeah, I know that.

From Goalhanger. The breakneck series Gen Z is hooked on, says the Times. Oh, OK. Got it. Let me hold your weight. OK, I'm going to do No Cub November, so I might be a little heavier than usual. Shut up and get on with it. Very funny, mildly sweary and hugely popular, says the Guardian. OK, OK. I'm on. Excellent. All right. Not that bad. Not at all.

The adventure of the Red Circle begins Tuesday the 20th of August. Catch up with the show now wherever you get your podcasts.