You will permit me to believe that you never knew any more of me, than
I have the honour of knowing of you: and if in your letter of the 12th
of August you had not made a wrong use of my name, I should not now find
myself obliged to enter into a correspondence with you.
You pretend that “in the summer of the year 1764, overtures were made in
my name to several members of parliament, importing that I was ready to
impeach three persons, two of whom were peers and members of the privy
council, of having sold the peace to the French:” and you seem to found
thereupon the evidence of a charge, which you say you carried yourself to
Lord Halifax.
I declare, therefore, here, Sir, that I never made, nor caused to be
made any such overture, either in the winter or summer of the year 1764,
nor at any other time: I am, on one side, too faithful to the office I
filled, and on the other too zealous a friend to truth.
I confess you do not say it was I that made these overtures; but only
that they were made in my name, particularly to Sir George Yonge and Mr.
Fitzherbert.
I assure you I do not know either of these gentlemen, and never
authorised any person whatever to make in my name such overtures, which
the abhorrence alone I have for calumny, would make me detest.
I call upon you, therefore, Sir, to lay before the public the name of the
audacious person who has made use of mine to cover his own odious offers.
The gentlemen whom you have given as your witnesses, cannot deny you this
justification of their own veracity and your’s.
Though I cannot but commend your integrity in citing your authors,
yet it appears to me an act of the last imprudence, in an affair of
so much weight, to build upon report, for naming publickly a person
of my character, without having previously consulted him. If you had
recollected the contradiction I gave in the St. James’s Chronicle of
Oct. 25, 1766, No. 881, to an advertisement in the same paper, No.
875, importing in substance what you alledge in your last letter, you
had saved me the trouble of replying to you at this time. What must be
the result? The public will have read greedily your letter; will have
believed it’s contents, because you appeal therein to my testimony: but
what will they think now when your own interest, my honour and truth
oblige me to deny all that you have advanced thereon with respect to me.
It is the same with your pretence that “about the 17th of May, 1765, Mr.
Fitzherbert told you, he knew that overtures had been made to me to sell
for a sum of money the papers that were in my hands.”
I have always flattered myself with being possessed of the esteem and
friendship of the English with whom I have lived. Who of them then in
these sentiments would have presumed to have shewn sufficient contempt
for me to have made me such an overture? The injury would have been
the more sensibly felt by me, as the character of the person was more
respectable.
I shall not follow you, Sir, either in all the steps you have thought it
your duty to take, or in the arguments you made use of to support them:
these shew the orator, and those, if they be well founded, prove the
patriot.
But I here certify to you, on my word of honour, and in the face of the
public, that I cannot be of any sort of use to you; that I never entered
into any treaty for the sale of my papers, and never either by myself or
any agent authorised on my part, offered to make appear, that the peace
had been sold to France.
If Lord Halifax, or the Speaker, to whom you say you addressed yourself
in order to call upon me as evidence, with respect to the validity of
your charge, had caused me to be cited, he might have known by my answers
what my thoughts were, that England rather gave money to France than
France to England, to conclude the last peace; and that the happiness
I had in concurring to the great work of peace has inspired me with
sentiments of the justest veneration for the English commissioners who
had been employed in it, and with the most lively esteem and sincerest
admiration for the late Count de Viry, who in his attachment to the
welfare of the two nations then at war, and thanks to his indefatigable
zeal! had the glory of bringing that peace to a happy conclusion.
Judge now, Sir, with what solidity you can depend upon me to make your
charge clear.
I am too well known in England to have been under any necessity of this
reply, if the frankness of your letter had not appeared to me to merit my
preventing you from taking any further steps, which could not but turn
to your prejudice, in as much as they would be founded solely on false
reports of _my_ proceedings.
In order to enable you to be as prudent as patriotic, I sign this letter,
and therein give you my address, that for the maintenance of your own
veracity you may furnish me with the means of convicting publickly those
slanderers who have dared to make use of my name, in a manner still
more repugnant to real facts, than the dignity with which I have ever
supported my character.