Franklin foresaw grave danger ahead. The Americans would not accept these harsh measures. “Every act of oppression will sour their tempers,” he wrote Lord Kames, “lessen greatly—if not annihilate ... the profits of your commerce with them, and hasten their final revolt; for the seeds of liberty are universally found there, and nothing can eradicate them.” He felt that the colonists’ affection for Britain was such that “if cultivated prudently” they might be easily governed “without force or any considerable expense.” But he did not see “a sufficient quantity of the wisdom that is necessary to produce such a conduct.”
The lack of “a sufficient quantity of the wisdom” on the part of Parliament and the ministry was almost daily becoming more obvious to him. Still he continued his course of education and propaganda and persuasion, and of meeting with men in the government whom he hoped to influence. Many listened to him. The young and wealthy Earl of Shelburne, Secretary of State for the Colonies, became his close friend. In recognition of his usefulness to his country, in 1768 he was chosen agent for Georgia; in 1769, for New Jersey; and in 1770, for Massachusetts.
Nearly every year he took a trip from London for his health and to refresh his mind. In the fall of 1767, he made his first visit to France, again in the company of his “steady, good friend,” Sir John Pringle. As a loyal subject of an England frequently at war with France, he was prejudiced in advance against “that intriguing nation,” as he called it. Even this first short visit led him to reverse his opinion.
“It seems to be a point settled here universally that strangers are to be treated with respect,” he wrote Polly Stevenson. “Why don’t we practise this urbanity to Frenchmen? Why should they be allowed to outdo us in anything?” Already he was adopting French fashions. “I had not been here six days before my tailor and peruquier [wig maker] had transformed me into a Frenchman. Only think what a figure I make in a little bag-wig and naked ears! They told me I was become twenty years younger, and looked very galant.”
In French scientific circles, his name was legendary. Scientists bragged that they were Franklinistes, a word they had coined. Thomas d’Alibard, the first to draw electricity from the skies, entertained him royally. At Versailles, he and Sir John were presented to Louis XV, whose praise of his electrical experiments Franklin could hardly have forgotten, and whom he found “a handsome man, has a very lively look, and appears younger than he is.”
The King “talked a good deal to Sir John,” he wrote Polly, “asking many questions about our royal family; and did me too the honour of taking some notice of me. That’s saying enough, for I would not have you think me so much pleased with this king and queen as to have a whit less regard than I used to have for ours.” “Our king” to him was still George III.
He thought Versailles badly kept up in spite of its splendor but was impressed with the way drinking water was kept pure by filtering it through cisterns filled with sand.
It seemed as though every time he turned his back to London there were changes in the ministry. Townshend, who had done more than any man before him to turn the Americans into revolutionists, died in September 1767. He was succeeded by the Tory, Lord North, a pompous thick-lipped personage, who had neither the will nor the desire to improve colonial relations. William Pitt’s health was still poor. He collapsed in 1768 in the House of Lords, in the midst of a fiery attack on his government’s American policies. In the same year, the pleasant Lord Shelburne was succeeded by the Earl of Hillsborough, a master of hypocrisy in Franklin’s estimation, as Secretary of State for the Colonies.
In America, the Massachusetts Assembly sent a letter to other colony assemblies, proposing united opposition to the Townshend Acts. Hillsborough demanded that they rescind their action or dissolve. The Assembly refused, and was backed by the other colonies. In October 1768, the British sent eight ships of war to try to compel Boston to pay the import taxes. Other ships followed. By one estimate the extra military expenses that year were five thousand times the amount which the Townshend Acts produced in revenue. Franklin had judged their stupidity rightly.
In the midst of the American protests against these acts, he was entertained by the Lord Chancellor Lord Bathurst and Lady Bathurst. He brought them a gift of American nuts and apples. With an irony that his lordship could not have missed, he prayed them to accept his present “as a tribute from the country, small indeed but voluntary.” The nuts and apples had come from Debby, who also sent him such American products as corn meal, buckwheat flour, cranberries and dried peaches.