Lady Franklin's Revenge by Ken McGoogan

Author:Ken McGoogan [Ken McGoogan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781554689200
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2017-07-22T04:00:00+00:00

Having reinstated Dr. John Coverdale under duress, the colonial secretary launched what today would be called a work-to-rule campaign. Instead of attaching notes or recommendations to the scores of letters he forwarded, Montagu passed these along without comment, so compelling Franklin to take incidental matters before the whole executive council. This reduced government business to a crawl. When inaction affected the town water supply, even newspapers began complaining: “It is difficult, we say, to understand how such an interruption to the public business could be occasioned by any officer of the government … we refer to the Colonial Secretary, Captain Montagu.”

Franklin and Montagu could scarcely exchange a civil word. Their mutual antipathy, exacerbated by proximity, became a ticking bomb with a short fuse—and the spark came on January 7, 1842, when Franklin confronted Montagu over a newspaper article in the Van Diemen’s Land Chronicle. The previous June, before that newspaper began appearing, Montagu had requested and obtained government patronage for the publication. This included access through the office of the colonial secretary to what Franklin later called “information of an official nature.”1

Initially friendly, the Chronicle had printed several exclusive government dispatches. Gradually, as bad feeling escalated between Montagu and the Franklins, the newspaper had changed its tone. In December 1841, it suggested that Sir John had originally been appointed as “a good sitter” while the government rudder had secretly been entrusted to Alexander Maconochie, his “cool, calculating and clever private secretary.” Then, claiming long tolerance for Franklin’s “evident incapacity, his demonstrated feebleness,” the newspaper charged that Sir John was an indolent timeserver who had “long outlived respect,” and that immense sums had been “wantonly and disgracefully lavished upon ridiculous journeys and fantastical deviations from the beaten paths of men.”

On January 7, the Chronicle argued that since Franklin’s arrival, the government had ceased functioning according to fixed principles and begun relying “upon caprice and intrigue, and the undermining of every public officer who had not a taste for ‘carousels’ of tea, muffins and lectures.” The thrust of the articles, Franklin would later write, “was to excite hatred and contempt” for himself and his government, and to show that Lady Franklin had a “malign influence over me” as demonstrated in her alleged interference in the Coverdale case.

Jane later wrote to explorer James Clark Ross that Montagu sincerely believed she had manipulated Franklin in that instance and so had set out to make Sir John repent of his obstinacy, and also of trusting her. “The whole was a chimera of his own imagination,” she insisted, “though had it been true that I had tried to save Sir John from persisting in an act which his own conscience told him was harsh if not unjust, I do not think I should have committed the blackest act which a wife, even a Governor’s wife, ever was guilty of.”

On January 7, having reviewed the recent newspaper articles, Franklin called Montagu into his office and demanded that he publicly repudiate his association with the Van Diemen’s Land Chronicle.

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