Episode Details

On January 29th, 1774, Benjamin Franklin, the most famous American in the world, stood in a Whitehall hearing room once used for cockfights and was torn apart. For more than an hour, the King’s Solicitor General, Alexander Wedderburn, called him a thief to his face before a laughing room of England’s great and good, while Franklin, in a suit of spotted Manchester velvet, stood without moving a muscle and said not one word.

This is the story of the Hutchinson letters, the packet of stolen correspondence that Franklin had sent to Boston hoping to heal the breach with Britain, and of the public trial it earned him instead. It runs through Wedderburn’s hour of invective, through the silence with which Franklin met it, and through the verdict that broke the empire’s most valuable friend in America for sport. And it ends years later, at a signing table in France, with an old man, a velvet coat, and a few words of revenge.