To a very different type of character in every respect belonged James Hutton, another dear friend of Franklin. He was a bookseller at the sign of the Bible and Sun, west of Temple Bar, and for fifty-five years a zealous member of the Moravian Church. His interest in the missionary labors of that Church, his benevolence, which knew no sectarian limitations, his sense and simplicity of manners won for him an honorable standing even in Court Circles. We are told by William Temple Franklin that he was highly esteemed by George III. and his consort, and was well known to many of the English nobility and men of letters; not being refused admittance to the highest ranks even at Buckingham House, though his ardent benevolence inclined him greatly to neglect his own dress that he might better feed the hungry and cover the naked. A man of that kind always had easy access to the heart of Franklin, open though its hospitable portals were to other friends of a very different description. In a letter to David Hartley from Passy, Franklin speaks of Hutton in these terms: "An old Friend of mine, Mr. Hutton, a Chief of the Moravians, who is often at the Queen's Palace, and is sometimes spoken to by the King, was over here lately." In a letter to Hutton himself from Passy, Franklin applies to him the term, "My dear old friend," which with its different variations meant with him the high-water mark of intimacy. Hutton is also brought to our sight, though in a droll way, in the Craven Street Gazette, the mock Chronicle, in which Franklin, with a delicacy and richness of humor all his own, pictures No. 7 Craven Street as a Court, Mrs. Stevenson as a Queen, with lords and ladies in her train, and Hutton and himself as rivals for the good graces of Dolly Blount, Polly's friend.
This Morning [the Gazette notes, under date of Tuesday, Sept. 25], my good Lord Hutton call'd at Craven-Street House and enquir'd very respectfully & affectionately concerning the Welfare of the Queen. He then imparted to the big Man (Franklin himself) a Piece of Intelligence important to them both, and but just communicated by Lady Hawkesworth, viz. that the amiable and delectable Companion, Miss D (orothea) B (lount), had made a Vow to marry absolutely him of the two whose Wife should first depart this Life. It is impossible to express the various Agitations of Mind appearing in both their Faces on this Occasion. Vanity at the Preference given them over the rest of Mankind; Affection to their present Wives, Fear of losing them, Hope, if they must lose them, to obtain the proposed Comfort; Jealousy of each other in case both Wives should die together, &c. &c. &c.,—all working at the same time jumbled their Features into inexplicable Confusion. They parted at length with Professions & outward Appearances indeed of ever-enduring Friendship, but it was shrewdly suspected that each of them sincerely wished Health & long Life to the other's Wife; & that however long either of these Friends might like to live himself, the other would be very well pleas'd to survive him.
Hutton was one of the simple and warm-hearted friends of Franklin who endeavored by their individual exertions to accelerate the restoration of peace between Great Britain and America, and, like all of Franklin's English friends, who kept up a correspondence with him, while the war was going on, he had to read some scathing fulminations against England.
You have lost by this mad War [Franklin said in one letter to Hutton], and the Barbarity with which it has been carried on, not only the Government and Commerce of America, and the public Revenues and private Wealth arising from that Commerce, but what is more, you have lost the Esteem, Respect, Friendship, and Affection of all that great and growing People, who consider you at present, and whose Posterity will consider you, as the worst and wickedest Nation upon Earth.
Twelve days later, Franklin annexed a postscript to this letter which must have been an even severer trial to Hutton's equanimity than the letter itself.
I abominate with you [he said], all Murder, and I may add, that the Slaughter of Men in an unjust Cause is nothing less than Murder; I therefore never think of your present Ministers and their Abettors, but with the Image strongly painted in my View, of their Hands, red, wet, and dropping with the Blood of my Countrymen, Friends, and Relations.
Franklin's opinion of the King was imparted to Hutton in terms fully as indignant. The letter, in which this was done, was prompted by a letter from Hutton to a third person giving an account of some abominable murders inflicted by American frontiersmen upon the poor Moravian Indians. This time it was not English, but American hands that were red with blood, but Franklin was resourceful enough all the same to fix the responsibility for the murders by a train of indirect reasoning on the King. Why, he asked, had a single man in England, who happened to love blood and to hate Americans, been permitted to gratify that bad temper by hiring German murderers, and joining them with his own to destroy, in a continued course of bloody years, near 100,000 human creatures, many of them possessed of useful talents, virtues and abilities to which he had no pretension! It was he who had furnished the savages with hatchets and scalping knives, and engaged them to fall upon defenceless American farmers, and murder them with their wives and children, paying for their scalps, of which the account kept in America already amounted, he had heard, to near two thousand. Perhaps, the people of the frontiers, he declared, exasperated by the cruelties of the Indians, had been induced to kill all Indians that fell into their hands without distinction; so that even these horrid murders of the poor Moravians might be laid to the King's charge.
And yet [said Franklin] this Man lives, enjoys all the good Things this World can afford, and is surrounded by Flatterers, who keep even his Conscience quiet by telling him he is the best of Princes! I wonder at this, but I can not therefore part with the comfortable Belief of a Divine Providence; and the more I see the Impossibility, from the number & extent of his Crimes, of giving equivalent Punishment to a wicked Man in this Life, the more I am convinc'd of a future State, in which all that here appears to be wrong shall be set right, all that is crooked made straight. In this Faith let you & I, my dear Friend, comfort ourselves; it is the only Comfort, in the present dark Scene of Things, that is allowed us.
The friendship between Franklin and David Hartley had to endure the concussion of some knocks even harder than these. Hartley was the son of David Hartley, the philosopher, from whom Hartley Coleridge, the poet, derived his name. He was a B. A. of Corpus Christi, Oxford, and a fellow of Merton College, and represented Hull in Parliament from 1774 to 1780 and from 1782 to 1784. An adherent of Lord Rockingham, and a warm friend of Franklin, he was naturally enough selected as the British plenipotentiary to assist in drawing up the treaty of peace between Great Britain and America. Before this time, however, he had been engaged in a protracted correspondence with Franklin, marked by a degree of liberality and humane feeling on his part which did him great honor. To alleviate the condition of American prisoners in England, to promote the exchange of these prisoners and British prisoners in America, to bring about a reunion between Great Britain and her colonies, and, that failing, a separation attended by as little mutual animosity as possible, were the generous objects to which his efforts were addressed. In pursuing these objects, he must have found it difficult at times to submit meekly to some of the ireful invective against his King, Parliament and People, which punctuates Franklin's solicitation of his mediatory offices, in behalf of American prisoners, and pleas for a peace between Great Britain and America, attended by really generous concessions upon the part of Great Britain. The year after his arrival in France as our minister, Franklin wrote to Hartley:
As to our submitting to the government of Great Britain, it is vain to think of it. She has given us, by her numberless barbarities in the prosecution of the war, and in the treatment of prisoners, by her malice in bribing slaves to murder their masters, and savages to massacre the families of farmers, with her baseness in rewarding the unfaithfulness of servants, and debauching the virtue of honest seamen, intrusted with our property, so deep an impression of her depravity, that we never again can trust her in the management of our affairs and interests.