Wedderburn assailed Franklin in a speech whose ability was only surpassed by its ferocity. In the presence of an illustrious audience, that numbered among its members some of the most famous men of that time or of any time, Wedderburn directed against Franklin a fluency of invective, a fury of reproach that was almost splendid in its unbridled savagery. The Privy Councillors, with one exception, rocked with laughter and revelled in applause as the Solicitor-General pilloried the agent from the colony of Massachusetts Bay as a thief, well-nigh a murderer, a man lost to all honor, all decency. The one grave exception to the grinning faces of the Privy Councillors was the face of Lord North. He sat fixed in rigidity, too well aware of all that depended upon the glittering slanders of Wedderburn to find any matter of mirth in them. Only one other man in all that assembly of genius and rank and fame and wit carried a countenance as composed as that of Lord North, and that was the face of the man whom Wedderburn was bespattering with his ready venom. Benjamin Franklin, dressed in a gala suit, unlike the sober habit that was familiar with him, stood at the bar of the House and listened with an unconquerable calm to all that Wedderburn had to say. If it was the hour of Wedderburn's triumph, it was not the hour of Franklin's humiliation. He held his head high and suffered no emotion to betray itself while Wedderburn piled insult upon insult, {157} and the majority of his hearers reeled in a rapture of approval. But if Franklin listened with an unmoved countenance, the words of Wedderburn were not without their effect upon him. He was human and the slanders stung him, but we may well believe that they stung him most as the representative of the fair and flourishing colony whose petition was treated with the same insolence that exhausted itself in attacking his honor and his name.