Greetings friends! Writing here from beautiful and chilly St Andrews, Scotland, where we are spending the semester. I have just begun to write a new book on Ben Franklin and religion, and am discovering more and more what a thoroughly Calvinist background Franklin had. I have written before about his beloved Calvinist sister Jane. Today I will consider his father Josiah, a candle-maker and devoted member of Bostonâ??s Old South Church.
We normally associate Puritan immigrants to New England with John Winthrop and his charter generation of the 1630s, but Josiah Franklin was one of the late arrivals, arriving after the English Civil War. In England, Josiah and his brother Benjamin (Benâ??s namesake) fell in with the â??nonconformistsâ? who held illegal private meetings in the Franklinsâ?? Northamptonshire. In the late 1670s a wave of intense persecution came against nonconformists across England, as many church and government officials regarded them as dangerous incendiaries who might once again threaten the stability of the nation, as they had during the Civil War. University of Oxford officials sanctioned the public burning of writings by non-Anglican luminaries such as John Milton. Even pacifist Quakers, who would soon found Franklinâ??s longtime home of Pennsylvania, were jailed under brutal conditions and died by the hundreds during the 1680s. Northamptonshire was a hotbed of nonconformity, and in one episode in the mid-1680s more than fifty members of landowning gentry were arrested on suspicion of seditious religious activity.
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