“Franklin was no friend of Wilkes…”

Last month the History of Parliament blog shared Dr. Robin Eagles’s review of Benjamin Franklin’s dislike and distrust of John Wilkes, based on his correspondence in Founders Online.

Eagles writes:

Franklin was no friend of Wilkes, who was ejected from his seat in the Commons following the infamous affair of North Briton number 45 and the printing of the scandalous Essay on Woman. They had much in common – both running newspapers and having voracious appetites for knowledge. They may also have coincided at the so-called ‘Hellfire Club’. Yet Franklin was repelled by Wilkes’s excesses.

I wrote about Franklin and the Baron le Despencer’s club a year ago. My conclusion was that those two men didn’t become friends until years after the baron had let the club lapse, in large part because Wilkes was blabbing about it. Some books do point to evidence for a connection between Franklin and the club; however, that evidence was made up by a British author who was a habitual liar.

Back to actual documented history.

After Wilkes had fled overseas in December 1763 leaving his case to be tried by the Commons in absentia, Franklin followed his case closely, satisfied to see Parliament resolved to rid itself of someone he considered unsuitable. On 11 February 1764 Franklin, briefly back in America, responded to his friend, Richard Jackson, MP for Weymouth and Melcombe Regis, that he was ‘pleas’d to find a just Resentment so general in your House against Mr. W.’s seditious Conduct, and to hear that the present Administration is like to continue’.

Franklin’s perspective may have altered somewhat when he became friendly with Wilkes’s brother, Israel. He was even invited to ‘eat his Christmas dinner’ with the Wilkeses at the family house in Red Lyon Square in 1766. [Mr and Mrs Israel Wilkes to Franklin, 23 December 1768] He remained, though, appalled by the disorder prompted by John Wilkes’s actions and recorded in detail the riots and destruction in London and beyond during the chaotic election year of 1768.

Nonetheless, reports of those same disturbances and Parliament’s expulsions convinced the Whigs in faraway Boston that Wilkes would be a good ally in their fight to reform the British administration.