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“Temple Franklin, the grandson, is with me, and continues to serve me as a private secretary, taking care of my books and papers.”
—Benjamin Franklin
William Temple Franklin (c. 1760–1823) was Benjamin Franklin’s illegitimate grandson, his private secretary through nine years of Revolutionary diplomacy in Paris, and the secretary to the American commission that negotiated the Treaty of Paris. He was also a three-generation family scandal made flesh, the man who sat on his grandfather’s papers for 27 years, and a charming failure at nearly everything else. He died in Paris—broke, newly married, and largely forgotten.
If you found Temple through the Apple TV+ series “Franklin”—where Noah Jupe played him opposite Michael Douglas—the real story is stranger than the show.
ORIGINS
Temple was born in London around 1760, the illegitimate son of William Franklin—who was himself Benjamin Franklin’s illegitimate son. Temple’s mother’s identity was never recorded. The infant was placed with a foster family in England while his father paid for his upkeep from across the ocean, and the boy spent his first fifteen years not knowing who his real family was.
Benjamin discovered the boy during his own years in London, took charge of his schooling, and brought him to America in 1775. Like father, like son, like grandson: three consecutive generations of Franklin men produced an illegitimate boy, and each raised the next one anyway.
This is where the story gets interesting. William and Benjamin were actually on different sides. William, being the governor of New Jersey at the time, was a staunch loyalist, whereas Benjamin was a rebel and loyal to the American cause.
In June 1776, the revolutionaries arrested Governor William Franklin at his mansion in Perth Amboy and marched him off to prison in Connecticut. Sixteen-year-old Temple spent that summer with his stepmother in the occupied house—then his grandfather claimed him for good.
That October, Benjamin Franklin sailed for France aboard the warship Reprisal as America’s first diplomat abroad, taking Temple and his other grandson, Benjamin Franklin Bache, with him. Temple would not see his father again for nine years.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN’S SECRETARY
During Benjamin Franklin’s diplomatic mission in France, he made his grandson his private secretary. Temple was his scribe, courier, and confidant for the entire posting at Passy, from 1776 to 1785—eight and a half years at the elbow of the most famous American alive.
They’d be key figures in Franco-American diplomacy during the American Revolution.
Temple sided with his grandfather’s revolution, not his father’s king—which made the Franklin family dinner-table politics as fraught as any in America. Benjamin vouched for him to Congress in writing, praising “a Sagacity and Judgment above his Years, great Diligence and Activity, exact Probity; a genteel Address.”
HE HELPED SEAL AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE
Temple’s résumé peak came in October 1782, when Franklin and John Jay appointed him secretary to the American commission negotiating peace with Britain—without asking John Adams first. Adams was livid, writing that he “considered myself as directly affronted in this Affair.” Adams and the elder Franklin were already barely on speaking terms; the nepotism did not help.
Snub or not, Temple did the job. When the Treaty of Paris was executed in 1783, it was Temple who certified the American commissioners’ credentials as authentic alongside his British counterpart, and one of the original copies of the treaty text is in his handwriting. He even appears in Benjamin West’s famous painting of the American peace delegation—the one that remains half-finished because the British commissioners refused to sit for it.
LIFE ABROAD
Temple loved France.
He sailed home to Philadelphia with his grandfather in 1785 and gave America a genuine try—but the new republic had no use for him. He lobbied for a diplomatic post under the new government, writing directly to George Washington in 1789 and enclosing his grandfather’s old letter of recommendation. Nothing came of it. Even Thomas Jefferson, writing in code, judged that Temple’s “understanding is good enough for common uses but not great enough for uncommon ones.”
So after Benjamin’s death in 1790, Temple went back across the Atlantic for good—first London, then Paris. The charms, the intellectual circles, and the women were all part of the equation.
Being the grandson of the most famous American in France had its perks. In the end, Temple became more European than American in persona.
THE 27-YEAR MEMOIRS SCANDAL
Benjamin Franklin’s will made Temple his literary heir, and from 1790 Temple promised the world a definitive edition of his grandfather’s writings—while legally blocking anyone else from publishing them.
Then he sat on the papers for twenty-seven years.
The delay grew so scandalous that a theory took hold on both sides of the Atlantic: the British government had bribed Temple to suppress his grandfather’s papers. When his Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Benjamin Franklin finally appeared in London between 1817 and 1819, critics attacked his polished, selectively edited text—though his edition remained the fullest available for decades.
Whatever it earned him, it wasn’t security: Temple died nearly penniless a few years later, with a friend reportedly covering his burial costs.
SOCIALITE OF PARIS
Temple is most famous for his rendezvous in the social scenes of Paris. Because his grandfather was so famous, he was invited to the best intellectual and social circles the city could offer.
Temple famously brought American ideals into French drawing rooms, helping turn many of his friends in favor of the American Revolution.
This was a great time to be young in Paris. The salons were hotbeds of Enlightenment ideas—and of scandal. Think women, alcohol, and gambling, with a grandfather whose own reputation with French women set anything but a restrained example.
LOVERS, A FAILED PROPOSAL, AND TWO CHILDREN
In 1781, Benjamin tried to marry Temple into the family of his beloved neighbor Madame Brillon, proposing a match with her daughter Cunégonde. The Brillons declined—the Franklins were Protestants—and with them went Benjamin’s dream of a French branch of the family.
Temple consoled himself with Blanchette Caillot, a married neighbor at Passy, who bore him a son, Théodore. The boy died in France before his fifth birthday. Years later in London, Temple fathered a daughter, Ellen, with Ellen Johnson d’Evelin—the sister-in-law of his own father’s second wife. In a final twist of the Franklin pattern, it was his father William who raised the girl, and she inherited most of William’s estate.
Three generations of illegitimate children, each raised by the generation above: it was the most reliable Franklin family tradition of all.
FINANCIAL FOLLIES
Temple Franklin wasn’t very good with his personal finances. His grandfather had to bail him out all the time for a variety of reasons.
He never absorbed the thrift and prudence his grandfather was famous for. Benjamin’s will even forgave a £3,500 debt Temple owed him—but only “on the day of his marriage,” a financial nudge toward respectability that Temple ignored for thirty-three years.
His one big score came in 1792, as London agent for financier Robert Morris: Temple sold 12 million acres of American land to a British syndicate in one of the largest land deals of the era. Somehow, even that didn’t stick. He would get in trouble with his finances his entire life.
THE WILL AND THE LOST PAPERS
Benjamin Franklin’s will drew the family battle lines one last time. To his Loyalist son William, he left almost nothing, with an unforgettable explanation: “The part he acted against me in the late war, which is of public notoriety, will account for my leaving him no more of an estate he endeavoured to deprive me of.”
To Temple went the crown jewels: “the residue and remainder of all my books, manuscripts, and papers”—the greatest documentary treasure in early American history.
Temple treated it like luggage. He hauled part of the archive to London and left the rest with friends in Philadelphia. The Philadelphia portion—some 13,000-plus items—reached the American Philosophical Society in 1840. The London portion surfaced around the same time, tied in bundles in the shop of the tailor who had been Temple’s landlord; the tailor had been cutting up Franklin’s letters for clothing patterns. What survived was bought by a dealer, purchased by the U.S. government in 1882, and now rests in the Library of Congress.
WILLIAM TEMPLE FRANKLIN’S DEATH & LEGACY
William Temple Franklin lived a life spanning two continents. He will be remembered for being Benjamin Franklin’s loyal secretary.
In his final years in Paris he lived quietly with an Englishwoman named Hannah Collyer—and in a last flourish of Franklin timing, he finally married her in 1823, about a month before he died. The marriage came thirty-three years too late to collect his grandfather’s £3,500 wedding incentive.
Temple died in Paris on May 25, 1823, at about 63—even his birth year is uncertain: records say 1760, his tombstone insists 1762. He was buried at Père Lachaise cemetery, where Hannah joined him twenty-three years later.
WILLIAM TEMPLE FRANKLIN FAQ
What happened to William Temple Franklin?
After Benjamin Franklin died in 1790, Temple moved to London and then Paris, brokered a massive American land sale, delayed publishing his grandfather’s papers for 27 years, and died in Paris on May 25, 1823, nearly penniless. He is buried at Père Lachaise cemetery.
Did Temple Franklin ever marry?
Once, barely. He married his longtime companion Hannah Collyer in 1823, about a month before his death. She outlived him by 23 years and is buried beside him.
Did Temple Franklin have children?
Two known, both illegitimate—continuing a three-generation Franklin pattern. His son Théodore, born to Blanchette Caillot in France, died before age five. His daughter Ellen, born in London in 1798, was raised by Temple’s father William Franklin and lived until 1875.
Was Temple Franklin at the Treaty of Paris?
Yes. As secretary to the American peace commission he certified the commissioners’ credentials, and one original copy of the 1783 treaty is in his handwriting—though the signatures belong to Adams, Franklin, Jay, and Hartley.
Who was William Temple Franklin’s mother?
Nobody knows. Temple was born in London around 1760 while his father William was a law student there, and the mother’s identity was never recorded—the same mystery that surrounds Temple’s own grandmother, the mother of William Franklin.
