His most extravagant present followed later—a harpsichord for Sally which cost the huge sum of forty-two guineas.
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.
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.”
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 densest happiness I have met with in any part of my life.”
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.
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.”
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.”
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.
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.
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.