Born in Philadelphia in 1760, Rebecca Franks was the fifth of eight children born to David and Margaret Evans Franks. David, son of Jacob and Bilhah Franks of New York, was a merchant, who provisioned the British Army during the French and Indian War and served as a member of the Pennsylvania Assembly in 1748. The Franks family was prominent in Philadelphia society, and Rebecca came of age in that social milieu of heightened manners and dress.

Many of members of the Franks family were Loyalists during the Revolutionary War, including Rebecca’s aunt Phila, who married General Oliver De Lancey, and her father, who again provisioned the British. Rebecca attended the Meschianza, a grand Loyalist ball of Philadelphia elites and British officers just before they were to depart the city. She was called one of the “Queens of Beauty,” and wore a polonaise dress of white silk lace, her hair adorned with shimmering jewels.

In 1780 David Franks was ordered to leave Pennsylvania, and the family resettled in New York. There she observed that although women in Philadelphia have a “sweet countenance and an agreeable smile,” in New York they are smarter and better conversationalists. In 1782 she married Sir Henry Johnson, a British officer, and soon after the couple left for England — her father and some of her of her siblings soon following.

The couple had two children, and Johnson was elevated to a baronetcy for his military service. Later in life Rebecca apparently had some regrets about her political commitments. “I have gloried in my rebel countrymen,” she wrote. “Would to God I, too, had been a patriot.”