Their number included the cream of society: among the members listed on a plaque in the caves were a dozen MPs, the First Lord of the Admiralty, the son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and a certain Benjamin Franklin, who spent many years from the 1750s–1770s in London, originally as a representative of the Pennsylvania Assembly. Dashwood himself, the group’s leader, was the Chancellor of the Exchequer–the second most powerful political figure in Britain.