“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. 

“The best Company in the World”

In October 1772, Baron le Despencer hosted Benjamin Franklin at his estate at West Wycombe, Buckinghamshire (shown here). At the time, Franklin’s London landlady was moving house, so he got to stay away from that “troublesome Affair.”

Franklin wrote to his son William, “I spent 16 Days at Lord Le Despencer’s most agreably, and return’d in good Health and Spirits.” To John Foxcroft, his fellow deputy postmaster general for the colonies, Franklin reported: “I spent a Fortnight lately at West Wyecomb, with our good Master Lord Le Despencer, and left him well.”

Although Franklin referred to the postmaster general as “our good Master,” the light-hearted tone of that reference seems very different from the way Foxcroft had written about “the Displeasure of our Honored Masters” when he worried his job was in jeopardy.

Either then or soon afterward, Despencer invited Franklin to work with him on editing down the Anglican Church’s Book of Common Prayer. The baron wrote on his manuscript: “Doctor Franklyn is desired to add, alter, or diminish as he shall think proper anything herein contained. L[ord] L[e] D[espencer] is by no means tenacious.”

Early in the summer of 1773, the baron invited Franklin to visit his home again and accompany him to see Lord North installed as the new chancellor at Oxford. The two men stayed in adjoining chambers at Queen’s College. The American told his son, “Lord Le Despencer…is on all occasions very good to me, and seems of late very desirous of my Company.”

Franklin closed that letter by saying he would “allow my self no more Country Pleasure this Summer.” But in August he visited West Wycombe again—“quite a Paradise,” as he called the estate. And he was back again in late September.

By that time Franklin clearly returned the baron’s admiration, writing:

I am in this House as much at my Ease as if it was my own, and the Gardens are a Paradise. But a pleasanter Thing is the kind Countenance, the facetious and very Intelligent Conversation of mine Host, who having been for many Years engaged in publick Affairs, seen all Parts of Europe, and kept the best Company in the World is himself the best existing.

All those remarks show that by 1773 Franklin and Despencer had developed a real friendship; they were no longer just a noble supervisor and his colonial deputy.

That change is also evident in the way Franklin wrote to the baron. Yesterday I quoted a letter from 1770. By April 1774, Franklin started another letter “My dear Lord” instead of “My Lord,” and closed with “With unalterable Attachment” instead of “with the greatest Respect.” (In return, Despencer addressed his sole surviving letter to Franklin “Dear Doctor.”)

In early 1774 Lord North’s government stripped Franklin of his postal service appointment and income, but that didn’t end Despencer’s affection. The two men even attended a public event in London together.

After Franklin sailed for Pennsylvania, now at war with the British government, the baron told Foxcroft, “Whenever you write to Dr. Franklin assure him of my Sincere good will and Esteem. I fear much I shall not see him here so soon as he assured me I should.” Meanwhile, the doctor had sent his own friendly letter with good wishes for Despencer—and his mistress and their children.

That takes me back to the question I started this month with: What evidence is there linking Franklin with the “Monks of Medmenham Abbey” club that Baron le Despencer had started in the 1750s when he was Sir Francis Dashwood, baronet?

As I view the surviving documentary record, there are no recorded links between Franklin and Dashwood in the 1750s and early 1760s, when that club was active. The baron became the American’s superior in the postal service in 1767, but the two men remained on formal terms until 1770. I can’t see Dashwood/Despencer inviting Franklin into his secret activities during those years.

By 1773, however, that situation had changed. Franklin and Despencer admired each other, enjoyed each other’s company, exchanged potentially sensitive ideas about imperial politics and religion, and remained friends despite being separated by politics and war until the baron died in 1781.

“A grateful Sense of your Lordship’s Good-will”

Only a few pieces of correspondence between Baron le Despencer and Benjamin Franklin survive in the Franklin Papers, but they show a developing relationship between the lord appointed to be a postmaster general and one of his deputies for North America.

By June 1770, Franklin could report on details of the baron’s home remodeling: “I am told by Lord Despencer, who has covered a long Piazza or Gallery with Copper, that the Expence is charged in this Account too high; for his cost but 1/10 per foot, all Charges included.”

The first surviving direct letter between the men dates from the next month. In that document Franklin both responded to a political memo from Despencer (now lost) and argued that he should keep his job.

At that time, Franklin was representing the refractory legislatures of multiple North American colonies before Parliament, so he was a voice of opposition to the Townshend Acts. (That after telling London in 1766 and 1767 that Americans would accept such tariffs as an “external tax.”)

On 18 March, Franklin had written to Charles Thomson, encouraging American merchants to keep up their non-importation agreements against the Townshend duties even though Lord North’s government was moving to repeal all but the tax on tea. Critics started to say that an official receiving a salary from the Crown shouldn’t behave that way.

It looked like time for Franklin to shore up support from Despencer, one of his two bosses. On 26 July he wrote with somewhat stiff, genteel formality:

My Lord,

I heartily wish your Lordship would urge the Plan of Reconciliation between the two Countries, which you did me the Honour to mention to me this Morning. I am persuaded that so far as the Consent of America is requisite, it must succeed. I am sure I should do everything in my Power there to promote it. . . .

I have Enemies, as every public Man always has. They would be glad to see me depriv’d of my Office; and there are others who would like to have it. I do not pretend to slight it. Three Hundred Pounds less would make a very serious Difference in my annual Income. But as I rose to that Office gradually thro’ a long Service of now almost Forty Years, have by my Industry and Management greatly improv’d it, and have ever acted in it with Fidelity to the Satisfaction of all my Superiors, I hope my political Opinions, or my Dislike of the late Measures with America (which I own I think very injudicious) exprest in my Letters to that Country; or the Advice I gave to adhere to their Resolutions till the whole Act was repealed, without extending their Demands any farther, will not be thought a good Reason for turning me out.

I shall, however, always retain a grateful Sense of your Lordship’s Good-will and many Civilities towards me, and remain as ever, with the greatest Respect, Your Lordship’s most obedient and most humble Servant

Franklin’s letter combined arguments for fairness and the greater good with some personal flattery—as the British patronage system of the time encouraged.

I don’t see any similar letters from Franklin to the other postmaster general at this time, the Earl of Sandwich. In fact, I don’t see any letters from Franklin to Sandwich at all, nor from Franklin to the previous office-holder, the Earl of Hillsborough.

That might hint that Franklin saw Despencer as his main protector within the British bureaucracy. At the same time, this letter doesn’t suggest a relationship closer than colleagues in government, one man clearly superior to the other.

Franklin did keep his postal service job. In a letter to his sister, Jane Mecom, he stated, “I had some Friends…who unrequested by me advis’d the” government to keep him on; “my Enemies were forc’d to content themselves with abusing me plentifully in the Newspapers, and endeavouring to provoke me to resign.” Was Despencer one of those friends? If so, was Franklin’s letter to the baron truly not a request to stay on? In any event, it worked.

TOMORROW: Warming up.

“The Displeasure of our Honoured Masters”

Sir Francis Dashwood, baronet, served as chancellor of the exchequer in the government of the Earl of Bute. That went poorly for both of them, and Dashwood’s tenure lasted less than a year.

After leaving government, Dashwood made his case for inheriting the Despencer barony, the oldest in Britain not held by a peer with a higher title. That peerage gave him a guaranteed seat in the House of Lords.

Toward the end of 1766 the new Baron le Despencer was appointed one of the two postmasters general of the British Empire. This was a sinecure granted to various aristocrats, who in British society of the time usually failed upward.

In that year the other postmaster general was the Earl of Hillsborough, who was soon made Secretary of State for the colonies. The next appointee was the fourth Earl of Sandwich, who had previously been First Lord of the Admiralty and Secretary of State for the Northern Department (i.e., northern Europe) and would hold both those posts again.

Despencer, in contrast, kept the job of postmaster general until his death in 1781. He may not have totally ignored the job, though the real work was done by department secretaries Henry Potts (d. 1768) and Anthony Todd (1717–1798, shown above). That situation made Despencer a boss of the two deputy postmasters general for the colonies: John Foxcroft of New York and Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania.

Franklin had held that appointment since 1753. He had been quite successful, even making the American postal service profitable for the first time. By the mid-1760s Franklin was living full-time in London, focusing on representing Pennsylvania and other colonies to Parliament, but he continued to manage the postal system with Foxcroft. It brought him a valuable income.

Within the British government’s system of patronage appointments, that meant Franklin had a strong incentive to keep the Baron le Despencer happy. Sucking up to your bosses never hurt. Neither did sucking up to lords. And when those lords were your bosses, you went all out.

As a taste of how this worked, in February 1769 Foxcroft wrote to Franklin from Virginia, reporting that he and Gen. Thomas Gage had disagreed about when a packet ship should sail. Even though the regulations gave Foxcroft the authority to make that decision, Hillsborough took Gage’s side. “I have fallen under the Displeasure of our Honoured Masters,” Foxcroft lamented. “I hope my Dear Friend that you will be able to prevent any disagreable consequences taking place from this unfortunate mistake.”

We don’t know what happened next, but Foxcroft kept his appointment—probably because Hillsborough had moved on to the Colonial Office. Sandwich was a navy man, after all, and might not have gone out of his way for army concerns. When the system ran on personal favors and connections, a change of person could mean a lot.

As part of keeping the bosses in good humor, Franklin appears to have helped with Despencer’s agricultural experiments. He got favors in return, such as an invitation to dine on a buck from one of the postmasters’ estates. But those interactions were arranged through the secretaries, not directly.

TOMORROW: Forging a more personal connection.

Returning to Franklin and Dashwood

I’m returning to the question I started the month with, on the relationship between Benjamin Franklin and Sir Francis Dashwood, known after 1763 as the Baron le Despencer (shown here).

More specifically, did Franklin participate in activities of Dashwood’s “Monks of Medmenham Abbey,” dubbed by nineteenth-century chroniclers as a “Hellfire Club”?

In 1926 Phillips Russell wrote wishfully about their relationship in The True Benjamin Franklin:

In Lord le Despencer Franklin found the kind of man which he most looked up to. His lordship was elegantly wicked, and so was possessed of a quality which Franklin admired with his whole heart. There can be little doubt that membership in the Hell Fire Club, though perhaps not accepted, would have enticed him irresistibly. We already know how he loved clubs and good company.

But there was no actual evidence Russell could point to.

It’s striking that in 1974 the British author Geoffrey Ashe wrote of Franklin:

He sounds a surprising person to meet in this setting, but he was more anti-clerical, heavier in his drinking, and laxer in his sexual habits and outlook than American hagiography cares to admit.

Ashe appears to have been reacting to an older public memory of Franklin as the embodiment of his “Way to Wealth” essay—sober, self-regulated, and above all diligent. But by that time, as the earlier quotation shows, the American image of Franklin was already shifting to the sly, womanizing wit we admire today. The admiration stayed the same; what we as a culture were looking for in a Founder changed.

That meant it became easier to imagine Franklin among the Medmenham Monks, enjoying wine, women, and song in a highly decorated cave. But did that happen?

Into the vacuum of evidence stepped the British journalist Donald McCormick, bearing quotations about “Brother Benjamin of Cookham” and Franklin writing of the “classical design, charmingly reproduced by the Lord le Despencer at West Wycombe, whimsical and puzzling…as evident below the earth as above it.”

McCormick cleverly avoided saying he’d found direct evidence Franklin participated in Despencer’s revels, such as a Hellfire Club membership list. Instead, he laid down indirect pointers for readers to piece together with him. But, as was his pattern over many books, McCormick made all that up.

Where does that leave us when it comes to Franklin and Despencer? We know there are many holes in the historic record. We know some of those holes were created by people destroying documents about illicit or simply unsavory behavior. We know in-person interactions don’t necessarily leave a paper trail.

Must we therefore say that though there’s no documentary evidence that Franklin participated in the activities of the Monks of Medmenham Abbey when he came to Britain in 1757, or even knew Sir Francis Dashwood until years later, we just can’t be sure, so it’s an open question?

I think we can come closer to an answer with the documentation that does survive.

TOMORROW: The beginnings of a beautiful friendship.

“He had faked all the seemingly new information”

As I’ve been discussing, Donald McCormick was the first author to present certain claims about Sir Francis Dashwood’s “Monks of Medmenham Abbey” and Benjamin Franklin, both under his own name in The Hell-Fire Club (1958) and under the pseudonym Richard Deacon.

McCormick/Deacon wrote about a very wide range of topics, from medieval poetry to Mossad. His Wikipedia page explains: “In his prolific output as a historian, McCormick was attracted to controversial topics on which verifiable evidence was scarce.” He built his books around what he described as newly discovered sources: diaries, long-missing documents, private interviews, and so on.

As McCormick or Deacon, he surrounded extracts from that unseen material with quotations and facts from standard sources. However, when experts sought the new documents, they were nowhere to be found. Instead, in many cases experts found those mysterious new sources were full of contradictions and impossibilities.

I’m reminded of how in the last few months people have been discovering that the A.I. experiment ChatGPT can imitate the form of scholarly or legal writing so well as to produce authentic-seeming citations and quotations out of thin air. McCormick did the same thing half a century ago.

In 1959 he published The Mystery of Lord Kitchener’s Death. In the late 1990s Melvin Harris wrote this essay about analyzing the claims of that book. Harris “ultimately reached this firm conclusion: the only new evidence (telling first-person 'revelations') was simply manufactured.”

Harris later turned to McCormick’s other book from 1959, The Identity of Jack the Ripper, finding its claims to be chronologically impossible.

…by 1987 the case against McCormick was overwhelming. He had faked all the seemingly new information that he had used in writing his book. When I put that to him he was truly staggered. No one had ever seen through the give-away bogus chronology before. He himself was blind to the fact that he had made a damning and fundamental blunder. Faced with the truth he could only wriggle and, first of all, try to blame [his source] Dutton. But his own false testimony about the AGE of the entries told against him. . . .

I wanted to set the record straight in a new book. I asked him if he now wished to publicly name the faker of the poem, but he said he was not ready. He was still happy, though, for me to use the old formula, that it was faked by "A very clever man who enjoys his quiet fun", and he winked as he said it! Yes, he was a likeable rogue. But he was trapped by his very likeability. Over the years he had kept up the bluff with so many people that he found it hard to disentangle himself, as I found out when I later wrote to him. He was, by then, unwilling to commit himself in writing, instead he wrote letters full of teasing, enigmatic clues.

Other researchers have found the same pattern in McCormick’s other work. Blogging as “Dr. Beachcombing,” the folklore researcher Dr. Simon Young addressed one of the pseudonymous books:

Richard Deacon in his Madoc and the Discovery of America (1966) made an exciting claim. A French scholar Duvivier had been in touch and had told Deacon that a précis of the [long-lost Welsh] poem survived in a French manuscript. This fourteenth-century manuscript supposedly told how Madog with his sea-nymph wife searched for the fountain of youth in the ocean. They found the fountain and then brought others there in a colony where all lived according to the precepts of love.

However, after the celebration, the problem. Richard Deacon’s book has three desperately important sources that not a single other Madog scholar has ever seen. And they are described in such a way that the author could deny the source: e.g. Deacon was relying on the French scholar Duvivier (who Beachcombing has found no trace of).

In 1976 McCormick as Deacon wrote Matthew Hopkins: Witchfinder General. Here’s the author Willow Winsham on one of its crucial new sources:

According to Deacon, [The Tendring Witchcraft Revelations] was an unpublished manuscript, dated 1725 and authored by C. S. Perryman. It consisted of information that had been “compiled by divers informers” between 1645 and 1650, and covered a wealth of information about Hopkins and the witch hunts of Essex and Suffolk. Throughout the book, much of which is based on the information contained in these “Revelations”, Deacon spins a tale of intrigue and espionage, magic and mystery. . . .

While still referenced by the unwary writer today, it is generally accepted that the "document" was in fact a product of the author's imagination. It has never been seen, and it is safe to say that it never existed outside of the fabricated quotes scattered through his book on Hopkins.

In 1993 McCormick wrote a short biography of Ian Fleming, whom he actually knew. The author Jeremy Duns’s response includes these remarks:

McCormick’s biography contained several elaborate hoaxes about the life and work of Ian Fleming, all of which have been reported in creditable newspapers and books, and continue to be to this day. . . .

McCormick footnoted his quotes from Delmer and Peter Fleming to issues of The Times from September 1969. I looked them up, and found that McCormick had omitted a rather salient fact: both Delmer and Peter Fleming had written about this incident in terms of dismissing an earlier telling of it. By none other than Donald McCormick. . . .

McCormick provided a footnote for this, citing Madeleine Masson’s 1975 biography Christine: A Search for Christine Granville, but he didn’t provide the corresponding page number. There was a very good reason for that: that particular piece of information didn’t in fact appear anywhere in Masson’s book.

In 1979 McCormack as Deacon published The British Connection, which among other claims accused the Cambridge economist A. C. Pigou of being a Soviet spy. That book was withdrawn by the publisher under legal threat. (Not the last time that happened to McCormick’s books.) The rival economist Friedrich Hayek embraced the accusation, however, which led scholars in 2014 to devote a whole volume of their Hayek: A Collaborative Biography journal to essays on McCormick’s frauds.

I’m sure you see the pattern here.

The reason no other researchers have studied the crucial documents and sources McCormick/Deacon quoted about Benjamin Franklin and Baron le Despencer is that those things never existed. The man made them up to create dramatic revelations. Later authors were suckered into quoting his books as if they were reliable. The quotations thus got laundered into wider use. 

We can’t rely on any “source” that McCormick/Deacon introduced to the world. Fortunately, Google Books and other resources make it possible to trace published quotations back through time. If a trail of citations leads back to a McCormick/Deacon book and stops, then we should throw that claim away.

COMING UP: So where does that leave Franklin and the “Monks of Medmenham Abbey”?

“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.”

“Brother Benjamin of Cookham” Surfaces

In 1958 a British journalist named Donald McCormick published a book titled The Hell-Fire Club: The Story of the Amorous Knights of Wycombe. (It’s been reprinted in various forms since, including the eye-catching paperback edition shown here.)

McCormick described documents which, he said, hinted at how Benjamin Franklin was intimately acquainted with the activity of the notorious “Monks of Medmenham Abbey,” founded by his friend Baron le Despencer (formerly Sir Francis Dashwood, baronet).

For example, McCormick wrote:

A letter from Benjamin Franklin to a Mr. Acourt, of Philadelphia, mentioned “the exquisite sense of classical design, charmingly reproduced by the Lord le Despencer at West Wycombe, whimsical and puzzling as it may sometimes be in its imagery, is as evident below the earth as above it.”

That looked like a clear allusion to the caves that Despencer had decorated for his club.

And here was another hint:

It is also claimed that Franklin was a visitor to Borgnis’ caves at Marlow—apparently he was a keen speleologist—and on a visit to an inn at Marlow that landlord once asked: ‘Is not that Master Franklin?’ ‘No,’ he was told, ‘it is Brother Benjamin of Cookham.’ There was much mirth at this reply.

In the wine books of the [Medmenham] society there are references to “Brother Francis of Cookham” and “Brother Thomas of Cookham,” but none to “Brother Benjamin”. It would almost seem that “Brothers of Cookham” was used as an alias in certain circumstances…

McCormick’s book became a source for Daniel P. Mannix’s similar The Hellfire Club, published in the U.S. of A. a year later. [Incidentally, I met Mannix when I was a boy, brought together by mutual interests.] Many subsequent authors have quoted one book or the other rather than the original sources McCormick described.

More revelations were offered in two books by Richard Deacon, A History of the British Secret Service (1969) and The Silent War: A History of Western Naval Intelligence (1978), both reprinted over the years.

I’ll quote from a 1970 Argosy magazine article based on the first book:

An entry in the [Medmenham] society’s wine books reads: “On the 7th of July, 1773, Brother Benjamin of Cookham: 1 bottle of claret, 1 of port and 1 of calcavello.”

So, on closer examination, “Brother Benjamin” appeared in that source after all?

In that article Deacon provided another story about “Brother Benjamin,” with implications about Franklin’s activities during the war:

Toward the middle of the nineteenth century Lord le Despencer’s illegitimate daughter, Rachel Antonina Lee, told historian Thomas deQuincey that her father, in his last years, would often raise a toast to “Brother Benjamin of Cookham, who remained our friend and secret ally all the time he was in the enemy camp.”

She stated flatly that “Brother Benjamin” was Franklin, and that he “sent intelligence to London by devious routes, through Ireland, by courier from France and through a number of noble personages in various country houses.”

But wait! Deacon had another revelation:

John Norris, of Hughenden Manor,…had built a hundred-foot tower on a hill at Camberley, in Surrey, from the top of which he used to signal with a heliograph’s flashing mirror to Lord le Despencer at West Wycombe, to place bets. In those papers, this enigmatic note appears: “3 June, 1778. Did this day Heliograph Intelligence from Dr. Franklin in Paris to Wycombe.”

All that looks like a chain of evidence linking Franklin to Despencer’s club—and Despencer to Franklin’s wartime espionage.

We can find the quotations printed the McCormick and Deacon books repeated in other titles over the years since, and of course on the internet.

But the chain isn’t as strong as it might seem.

TOMORROW: The weakest links.

Franklin and the Monks of Medmenham

Over forty years ago I bought a paperback copy of Murder in the Hellfire Club by Donald Zochert. It was a historical murder mystery written in 1978 that featured Benjamin Franklin as the detective.

I never finished that book, but I suspect I’ve still got it. Somewhere.

I recalled that book after recent reading about the mid-1700s “Monks of Medmenham Abbey”—a group which, as discussed here, was dubbed a “Hellfire Club” by authors only in the next century. Franklin’s alleged connection to that organization struck me as a good case study of what we actually know.

Several books about this “Hellfire Club” claim that Franklin joined the group in 1757 or shortly afterward. He came to Britain that year and stayed until 1762. The Medmenham group had not yet fallen apart over political offices. Franklin knew lots of people, so a connection was at least possible.

But as for evidence of a link between Franklin and the Medmenham Monks? Well, there really isn’t any. One author, Geoffrey Ashe, acknowledged this in a backhanded way in his 1974 book, The Hell-Fire Clubs: A History of Anti-Morality:

By the later 1750s a change had set in. Some of the senior brethren were losing interest, and were being replaced by a fresh intake. To this phase, if to any, belongs the reputed membership of Benjamin Franklin. He sounds a surprising person to meet in this setting, but he was more anti-clerical, heavier in his drinking, and laxer in his sexual habits and outlook than American hagiography cares to admit. Dodington’s pamphleteer James Ralph was a former comrade of his and accompanied him on his first trip to England. Later in the life of Dashwood we encounter Franklin on close and admiring terms with him, and staying as his guest at West Wycombe. It was in 1757, however, that Franklin made his second visit to England, which lasted five years; the Dashwood connection could have begun then, and the story of his admission to Medmenham has not been refuted.

Look at all the hedging: “To this phase, if to any”; “reputed membership”; “could have begun”; and the crowning “has not been refuted.”

Of course, accurate history doesn’t rest on repeating statements that haven’t been refuted. It depends on citing evidence for the statements one makes.

I searched Franklin biographies for such evidence. His close friendship with Baron le Despencer, formerly the baronet Sir Francis Dashwood, in the 1770s is well documented by letters, Franklin’s autobiography, even a book they wrote together. Twenty years earlier Dashwood had been a founder of the Medmenham group. But did he make Franklin a member, or invite him to meetings?

The most that Phillips Russell could say in The True Benjamin Franklin (1926) is:

In Lord le Despencer Franklin found the kind of man which he most looked up to. His lordship was elegantly wicked, and so was possessed of a quality which Franklin admired with his whole heart. There can be little doubt that membership in the Hell Fire Club, though perhaps not accepted, would have enticed him irresistibly. We already know how he loved clubs and good company.

In sum, Russell had no evidence Despencer invited Franklin to his Medmenham club and no evidence that Franklin accepted, but wasn’t it fun to imagine?

And then in 1958 an author published a book about the Medmenham Monks with tantalizing hints that Franklin was indeed involved.

TOMORROW: The crucial breakthrough?

Meeting the Medmenham Monks

This month’s research topics took me to this page at the History of Parliament site about the fabled “Monks of Medmenham Abbey.”

John Wilkes played a big part in this story, as in many other British events of the 1760s and 1770s. Regardless of what one might think of his politics, Wilkes appears to have spread chaos almost everywhere he went. And on 15 June 1762 he was writing to one of his allies, Charles Churchill, “next Monday we meet at Medmenham.”

That article explains that Medmenham Abbey was “the headquarters of the co-called ‘Order of St Francis of Medmenham’, also known (erroneously) as the Hellfire Club.” (Another club name was the “Knights of St. Francis of Wycombe.”)

The first Duke of Wharton had founded what he called the Hellfire Club back in 1718, and in the nineteenth century an author with a penchant for the lurid applied the same label to the Medmenham group and others. But those gentlemen never used the term “Hellfire Club” for themselves.

The blog reports:

Quite what went on at Medmenham has long been the subject of occasionally lurid speculation and as one historian has suggested, it is a topic that ‘attracts cranks and repels scholars’ [N.A.M. Rodger, The Insatiable Earl, p.80]. At its most extreme some have suggested, almost certainly without foundation, that devil worship took place there, while at the other end it has been proposed that it was a somewhat eccentric antiquarian-cum-erotic meeting place of senior politicians, who assembled to indulge in boating parties, cavort with sex workers brought in from London for the purpose, share their interest in classical authors and plot. . . .

The founder of the fraternity was Sir Francis Dashwood [shown above], chancellor of the exchequer during the premiership of the earl of Bute, and later a member of the Lords as Baron le Despencer. Dashwood had leased Medmenham, close to his own seat at West Wycombe, in 1751, and proceeded to renovate the dilapidated abbey buildings, turning the site into a summer pleasure ground, where he could invite friends for parties on the Thames and picnicking among the ruins.

It was an important juncture. That year the heir to the throne, and focal point of the main opposition alliance, Frederick Prince of Wales, had died unexpectedly, leaving the opposition without an obvious rallying point.

The Medmenham gathering appears to have flourished in the 1750s. But then it foundered on its members’ own success after George II died. Frederick’s son, George III, came to the throne and installed a favorite, the Earl of Bute, as prime minister.

Bute made Dashwood his chancellor of the exchequer and found appointments for other men in the Medmenham circle, or just outside it. But he didn’t find a job for Wilkes.

This essay suggests that disappointment was enough for Wilkes to go into opposition in the worst way. However, Wilkes was already a champion of William Pitt, which would have made him a bad fit for Bute’s policies.

Wilkes and Churchill founded The North-Briton weekly in 1762 as a vehicle for attacking Bute. He also started to tell stories about the Medmenham club’s salacious activity. Other members objected, called Wilkes a liar or a cad.

One might think the fact that Wilkes was one of the group’s most licentious members would have undercut his own credibility. However, as the History of Parliament blog has said about Wilkes’s later career, lots of people already knew about his habits. Being a libertine was baked into his public image, so further revelations didn’t change his standing. If anything, Wilkes’s stories seemed more reputable because he was known for being disreputable.

Whatever the impetus for his break with the established political structure, Wilkes’s legal and political struggles over the next decade and a half created important forums for Britons to debate such issues as free speech, fair elections, government use of lethal force, and more. The Boston Whigs reached out to him for mutual support even though they would have detested his personal habits.

As for the Medmenham gatherings, Dashwood seems to have calmed down after becoming Baron le Despencer in 1763 and later postmaster general. In that decade he also became a close friend of Benjamin Franklin. Some authors link Franklin to the Medmenham monks, but by the time he was close to Despencer the club had really fallen apart.