How many high-placed persons in England were waiting to get something on this imperturbable Philadelphian! How many resented the way, like Socrates’ gadfly, he forced them to admit what they did not want to admit, and pestered them eternally with his troublesome colonies. Now they would have their revenge. Franklin knew his admission would bring wrath on his head. He had not long to wait.
On January 29, 1774, he was summoned to the Cockpit Tavern, to a meeting of the King’s Privy Council for Plantation Affairs. The subject given was the petition of the Massachusetts Assembly for the removal from office of Andrew Oliver and Governor Hutchinson. Franklin’s friends had informed him already that the petition was to be denied. There were even rumors that his papers might be seized and himself thrown in prison. He was prepared for the worst.
He arrived on time, dressed in a suit of figured Manchester velvet, wearing an old-fashioned curled wig, and carrying the same cane with which he had once quieted the ripples on the stream at Lord Shelburne’s estate.
Thirty-six members of the Privy Council were seated around a large table. Among them were the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of London, the Duke of Queensberry, Lord Dartmouth, whom he had found sympathetic; Lord Hillsborough, who hated and feared him; and the Earl of Sandwich (from whom the word “sandwich” was derived); the London head of the post office, a conceited individual who disliked everything that Franklin stood for. Among them, Franklin could be positive of only one friend—Lord Le Despencer.
A few spectators had been admitted, including Joseph Priestley, the scientist, and Edmund Burke, the Irish peer. They stood behind the table since there were no extra chairs. No one offered Franklin a chair either. For the entire hearing he stood by the fireplace, facing the councilors.
It opened with a reading of the Massachusetts petition and of the Hutchinson and Oliver letters. Franklin’s lawyer, John Dunning, appealed to the King’s “wisdom and goodness” to favor the petition and remove the two men from their posts, as a gesture to quiet colonial unrest. Then Alexander Wedderburn, lawyer for Hutchinson, took over.
His speech, which lasted an hour, was from beginning to end a tirade against Franklin. Franklin could have got hold of the controversial letters only by fraudulent or corrupt means, he said. His own letter, clearing Whately and Temple of blame, was “impossible to read without horror.” Franklin was “a receiver of goods dishonorably come by.” He had duped the “innocent, well-meaning farmers” of the Massachusetts Assembly.
Wedderburn’s accusations grew wilder as he warmed to his subject. Franklin wanted to become governor himself, he stated categorically. That was why he had taken on himself “to furnish materials for dissensions; to set at variance the different branches of the legislature; and to irritate and incense the minds of the King’s subjects against the King’s governor.”
While Wedderburn continued to spew forth his poisonous invective, Franklin stood stoically, his face impassive, seemingly unaware either of the triumphal smirks of his enemies or the compassionate glances of his friends. People agreed later that his silence, in face of the screams of his adversary, showed him the stronger man. When the hearing was over, he went quietly home alone.
He made no answer to Wedderburn, nor even to those closest to him did he indicate that the attack rankled. To Thomas Cushing he wrote, “Splashes of dirt thrown upon my character I suffered while fresh to remain. I did not choose to spread by endeavouring to remove them, but relied on the vulgar adage that they would all rub off when they were dry.”