| 18 January 2006 Craven Street It is January, and there are thunderstorms and rain coming this long dark day. The harbingers of Spring are inserted into Winter, which has a long way to go. Or at least it did when the calendar made sense. “The World Turned Upside Down,” is the tune that the British military band played as they marched out of the lines at Yorktown , and into internment at the hands of George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette. It was as appropriate a response to an improbable outcome as the poor confused buds poised on the tress. What is one to make of it all? The two most macho contenders to be the next President are both women, and that is only the start of it. Iran is cutting the seals of the International Atomic Energy Agency before the media, defying the Great Powers. It is a long way to go from the ability to create a nuclear device to making a useful weapon, so what is it the Iranians think they are doing? Are they inviting an air-strike by the Israelis or Americans to derail the West's triangulation of the Sunni and Shia schism? Does success lie in defeat, like the Tet Offensive in Vietnam ? Or is it vice versa? Vice President Cheney says that in ten years we will all look back and say that what has been achieved in Afghanistan and Iraq was well worth it. He wears his mantle of certainty with ease, and I agree with him, with one small proviso. It is all about who gets to write the history. I stayed awake last night as the rain began to tap on the window. There was a long exploration of the life of Ben Franklin, our favorite founding father, the one who winks at us from beyond his tomb. The others are so severe, like General Washington, or dreamy, like Mr. Jefferson. Ben had a positive lust for life, and an ingratiating self-promotion that presaged the long morning of optimism in America . His invention of the lightning rod would have been sufficient to enshrine him in the pantheon of history, an invention that permitted the modern building trade. But there is so much more, beyond the bifocal glasses and the lending library and the tongue-in-cheek almanac. The current biographies are fairly gentle with him. At the distance of two centuries he is permitted to have his flaws. The worst of these are depicted as a penchant for womanizing, and a coldness for his common-law wife, who he left behind in Philadelphia when he was Pennsylvania 's envoy to the Court of St. James. These are small potatoes, and far outweighed by his enormous contributions to the human race. Summoned to the cockpit of the House of Commons at the time of the Stamp Act, it is said that he arrived it Parliament a loyal Briton, and departed as a proud American. It is a wonderful and stirring story, but history is a curious thing. Mr. Jefferson could tell you that maintaining your reputation while being dead is no easy thing. Once departed, the words and papers and even the genetic material of others can be used to determine the trajectory of your social standing. Jefferson is a problem, these days, as the current agenda of race and imperialism are played out on a stage set on his tomb. I like going to his memorial by the Potomac . Despite his brilliance, I doubt that it would be built today. It is a hard thing to have your history under constant revision. Ben is lucky in that regard. His flaws, if that is what they were, are at least understandable. I had been waiting for the matter of the bones found in the basement of his London house to be discussed. I was ready with my facts. Franklin lived near Trafalgar Square for nearly fifteen years, at 36 Craven Street . In the course of a multi-million pound restoration of the residence, the remains of four adults and six children were discovered buried in the basement. The authorities reported that the bones were contemporary to the time that Franklin lived in the house, and most showed signs of having been dissected. One of the skulls had several holes drilled in it. Thankfully, the London Coroner was nice enough to put things in context, though at the time he contemplated a formal inquest. Regular visitors to 36 Craven Street during Franklin 's residency included Pitt the Elder, Edmund Burke, James Boswell, Adam Smith and Thomas Paine, famed author of “The Rights of Man.” We will never know with any certainty why the bones were interred in the basement, but they are likely associated with the work of William Hewson, husband of Polly, the daughter of Franklin 's landlady, Mary Stevenson. There may have been a romantic relationship there; Franklin moved up the street for a time to live in her primary residence. But as to the matter of the bones, there is a possible explanation: Hewson was one of the fathers of British surgery, and may have run a school of anatomy at the house. The subjects of that school likely are those who wound up deep in the basement. At the time, the practice of grave-robbing to acquire human anatomical subjects was common, because though illegal, the demand was great. Penalties were severe. Long after American Independence, the duo of Burke and Hare became renowned for the freshness of the dozens of corpses they provided to the surgical schools of Edinburgh . Their practice was to use a pillow on the faces of sleeping guests at a down-scale lodging house, and they were executed for it in the end. I do not know if they were dissected themselves. It certainly would have been appropriate. I was pleased that the Hewson scandal, with which Ben likely had no direct association, was not mentioned. Certainly he would have supported Hewson's work, however it skirted the law. They were both members of the Royal Society, after all, and sometimes the law lags behind the works of Science. Even as it does today. Hewson died young, a victim of sepsis incurred during the dissection of a putrid corpse. Franklin 's relation with Mary Stevenson certainly survived the Doctor. He invited her to be his neighbor back in Philadelphia , and provided a pension for Hewson's widow, Polly. The family did well in America, and her sons were pioneers in the field of medicine in the new nation. The biography moved on from Franklin 's time in England to his great embassy to France , where he wore fur hats and played the frontiersman to great acclaim. The women there loved him, and there was long speculation about how he conducted his intimate life. I turned off the television as he returned to America to be the sage counsel to the Constitutional Convention. Ben is my favorite Founding Father. I was just pleased that history is treating him with a modicum of respect. I was equally pleased that they had not gotten into the matter of the Hell-Fire Club, which had been raised when Ben's star had dimmed a bit. The depiction of Franklin as a member of a cult that worshiped the black arts has been around before, but it was not like that, not really. It is almost certain he attended a meeting or two of the “Monks of Medmenham,” and the members may have enjoyed a glass or two of cheer. There might have been certain secret ceremonies, and they might have been ribald in nature. Or they might have been Freemasons. I suppose it all depends on who writes the history. Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra www.vicsocotra.com |