“Whimsical and Puzzling”

Yesterday I quoted from books published in the late 1900s by Donald McCormick and Richard Deacon linking Benjamin Franklin to Baron le Despencer’s “Monks of Medmenham Abbey” and even to wartime espionage.

Those books pointed to five separate pieces of evidence:

• a letter from Franklin praising Despencer’s “exquisite sense of classical design.”
• an anecdote from the town of Marlow about Franklin being called “Brother Benjamin of Cookham.”
• The “wine book” detailing purchases for the Medmenham group.
• a story told by Despencer’s illegitimate daughter Rachael Frances Antonia Lee to the author Thomas de Quincey.
• a 3 June 1778 entry in the diary of John Norris of Hughenden.

That may look like an impressive chain of evidence, but there are problems with it.

First, Donald McCormick and Richard Deacon were actually the same person. McCormick used the Deacon pseudonym for books he wrote on military and espionage matters.

Thus, these books don’t show us one author confirming and building on the work of another. Instead, the same man was repeating his own earlier claims—in fact, contradicting one of those claims.

Second, no author besides McCormick/Deacon has reported seeing that “wine book” of the Medmenham Monks. No other source describes the “Brother Benjamin of Cookham” anecdote from Marlow. No one else claimed to have seen the papers of John Norris who allegedly passed on Franklin’s intelligence by heliograph on a particular date in 1778.

Third, the words about “Brother Benjamin” Franklin as a British intelligence source that McCormick/Deacon quoted as coming from Despencer to Lee to De Quincey don’t appear in any of De Quincey’s writings. Or anywhere else but McCormick/Deacon’s books and subsequent books citing them.

Fourth, the Franklin letter praising Despencer’s “exquisite sense of classical design” and “whimsical and puzzling…imagery” doesn’t show up in Benjamin Franklin’s writings. And those writings have been meticulously collected in more than forty volumes and are now available for anyone to search at Founders Online.

It’s worth noting that McCormick/Deacon never provided a date for that “letter from Benjamin Franklin to a Mr. Acourt, of Philadelphia.” No correspondent with that name appears in Franklin’s papers. In a 1987 book, a Despencer descendant changed “Arcourt” to “D’Arcourt” and pegged the letter to 1772, but the Franklin experts still don’t have it.

And fifth, Donald McCormick/Richard Deacon was a notorious liar.

TOMORROW: A “fraudulent career.”