‘Days of conversation, centuries of consequence’: Benjamin Franklin at Hillsborough Castle
by Allan LEONARD
16 September 2026

The Linen Hall Library in Belfast hosted the final event in its five-part series marking the 250th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence. The talk, introduced by Patsy Horton, the library’s cultural programmer, was delivered by David Orr, Castle and Collections Manager at Hillsborough Castle and Gardens. His subject was Benjamin Franklin’s 1771 visit to Ireland and his stay at Hillsborough Castle — a meeting whose consequences, Orr argued, reverberate through three centuries of diplomacy. The series was supported by the Department for Communities.

Two men on a collision course

To understand what happened at Hillsborough Castle in October 1771, Orr began with the collision course that brought two of the 18th century’s most formidable figures into the same dining room. Wills Hill (Lord Hillsborough) was born in 1718, later became the first Marquis of Downshire. In 1768, Lord Hillsborough was appointed as the first Secretary of State for the Colonies, a new office created specifically to manage the growing crisis with America. He was, by reputation, a hardliner: responsible for conveying laws, taxes, and military orders to the 13 colonies, and unwilling to make concessions on any of them. Horace Walpole described him as a young man of great honour and merit, “one of the finest speakers in the House”, but his tenure as colonial secretary told a different story.

The background to the 1771 meeting was a decade of escalating confrontation. The Seven Years’ War had left Britain deeply in debt, and successive governments had decided that the American colonies should help cover the cost of their own defence. The Stamp Act of 1765, the Townshend Acts of 1767–68, and the Royal Proclamation restricting westward expansion had each inflamed colonial opinion. Hillsborough’s personal contribution was to ask the Governor of Massachusetts to seek evidence of treason in Boston. No evidence was found, but the rumour alone provoked outrage. Regardless, Hillsborough dispatched troops to the city, some directly from Ireland. On 5 March 1770, a confrontation between those troops and a Boston crowd left five colonists dead. John Adams, Orr noted, later wrote, “The foundation of American independence was laid on the fifth of March.” Annual commemorations of the Boston Massacre became a fixture of colonial political life.

Into this charged atmosphere stepped Benjamin Franklin, born in Boston in 1706, resident in London through the 1750s, 1760s, and early 1770s as the principal spokesman for colonial interests before the British government and Parliament. He was, Orr said, “a mover and a shaker” at dinners, at meetings with ministers, at the centre of London’s Enlightenment social world. He was also an Anglophile who wanted not independence but a negotiated settlement: an America still governed by Britain but granted greater freedom. The difficulty was that the British regarded him as too American, and many Americans regarded him as too British. It was a line he could not hold indefinitely.

His relationship with Hillsborough was openly hostile from the start. Franklin wrote essays attacking him in London newspapers and, in early 1771, informed Hillsborough directly that he was collecting material to impeach him. The previous year had produced a particularly bitter encounter: Franklin called at Hillsborough’s London home to inform him that he was to represent Massachusetts, only to be told flatly that he was wrong. “Despite standing in Lord Hillsborough’s house saying ‘I’ve got the letters directly from the latest ship to come in from Boston,’ Lord Hillsborough tells him he’s wrong,” Orr recounted. Franklin documented the exchange word for word and circulated it. Hillsborough retaliated by attacking Franklin’s character and, according to some evidence, by attempting to persuade cabinet colleagues to have him arrested as “an enemy to the King’s service”. He also intercepted Franklin’s correspondence; though Franklin was aware of this and navigated around it.

The meeting at Hillsborough Castle

It was against this backdrop that Franklin travelled to Ireland in the autumn of 1771, sailing on a ship named the Hillsborough (what Orr called a possible omen). Franklin was shaken by the poverty he witnessed across Ireland, which hardened his conviction that American life was superior. In Dublin he spoke at the Irish Parliament and was invited by the Viceroy to a dinner party at Dublin Castle. There, to his considerable surprise, he encountered Lord Hillsborough, who was “extremely civil” and drank to his health. Hillsborough pressed Franklin and his travelling companion, Richard Jackson, (who worked for the Board of Trade, of which Hillsborough was also a member) to stop at Hillsborough Castle when travelling north.

Franklin had no intention of complying. He planned to visit the Dean of Armagh instead, and the two men agreed to part ways at a coaching inn. Circumstance intervened: no second carriage could be found, and they travelled on to Hillsborough together. Upon arriving at the coaching inn in the village, Lord Hillsborough immediately sent word summoning them both to the castle.

What followed confounded Franklin’s expectations entirely. Hillsborough was famous for his table and his conversation, and he deployed both to full effect. Franklin later wrote that he was “detained by a thousand civilities”. In one of the letters now on display in the castle’s Franklin Dining Room, Franklin recorded: “He was attentive to everything that might make my stay in his house agreeable, putting on his cloak about my shoulders when I went out.” Hillsborough arranged for his son Arthur — later the second Marquis of Downshire — to take Franklin by open carriage to see the local manufacturing sites. And in conversation on American affairs, the two men found, for once, something to agree on: “America ought not to be restrained in manufacturing.” They parted on good terms, with Hillsborough urging Franklin to call on him often when back in London.

Franklin’s letters reveal his ambivalence about all of this. He could not quite believe that the civility was genuine. His suspicion, Orr explained, was that Hillsborough meant “only by patting and stroking the horse to make him more patient when the reins are drawn tighter and the spurs set deeper into his sides.” He left hopeful, but wary.

The aftermath and the road to independence

His wariness proved well founded. Back in London, Franklin called at Hillsborough’s house once, twice, three, four times — and was turned away on each occasion, servants telling him their master was not at home. Franklin was fairly certain he was. He had intended to petition Hillsborough on the Ohio Land Grant, a question of colonial westward expansion that Hillsborough had been delaying for four years and on which he had no intention of yielding. Hillsborough, in fact, threatened to resign if his demands were not met. His colleagues refused, and he resigned.

Having exhausted colleagues as well as opponents, Hillsborough publicly blamed Franklin for his downfall, calling him “one of the most mischievous men in England”. Franklin’s response, in a letter to his son, was cheerful: “We have got rid of Hillsborough.” Orr allowed himself a smile at this. “Maybe there was a plot all along.”

The consequences for the colonial relationship were significant. Franklin had spent years trying to broker a settlement that would keep America within the British orbit while granting meaningful autonomy. The accumulated experience of those years — Hillsborough’s intransigence, the interception of his letters, the repeated snubs, the hardline response to every colonial petition — gradually exhausted that ambition. By 1773 he had returned to America. “Franklin left with realising that the relationship with Hillsborough paved the way for the relationship with Britain,” Orr said, “that there was no further way forward for Britain.” He became a Founding Father and a signatory of the Declaration of Independence he had once hoped to make unnecessary.

Questions and the Franklin Dining Room

The Q&A session drew in broadcaster Seamus McKee, who asked Orr directly what he made of the two men as human beings, having stood in the Franklin Dining Room among letters and objects they had handled. Orr confessed a “fondness” for Franklin — “a character I would definitely have at a dinner table” — and was more cautious about Hillsborough: “a statesman that has not had the credibility given to where he deserves it”, particularly in light of his family’s impact on the landscape and politics of County Down. An audience member who had lived for 20 years near Hillsborough, North Carolina, said that she had studied American history extensively and “never heard of this guy — he’s been completely erased.” Orr agreed that an opportunity now exists to restore his profile, noting that two weeks earlier the North Carolina Chamber of Commerce had visited Hillsborough Castle and been fascinated by the connections.

Franklin’s chess set (on display in the Franklin Dining Room alongside handwritten letters and a portrait by Jean-Baptiste Greuze) provided Orr with his governing metaphor for the Franklin-Hillsborough relationship: two players “trying to outwit, trying to manoeuvre one another, trying to think about what the next tactic is going to be”.

Also on loan, for another month or so, is one of the earliest printed publications of the Declaration of Independence itself, produced in New York on 10 July 1776 — six days after it was read in Philadelphia, and predating the Library of Congress version. Orr encouraged the audience to see it before it departs, noting it would move to the Public Record Office in Belfast’s harbour district thereafter.

He closed with the line that has become something of a motto for the room’s curatorial ambition: not only were the seeds of American independence arguably sown in the large dining room at Hillsborough Castle, it is “a room where days of conversation have led to centuries of consequence”. The Anglo-Irish Agreement was signed there in 1985; the Good Friday Agreement was discussed there with Tony Blair and Mo Mowlam; 20 European foreign ministers met there last October for the Berlin Process on peace in the Balkans. The next milestone on the horizon is 2028 and the 30th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement.

Feature image: Hillsborough Castle by David Stanley CC-BY