Your connections, Sir, are at length discovered, and the plan of your operations, so secretly concerted by Bute’s three deputies, Jenkinson, Dyson, and Target Martin, at a house in Pall Mall, which governs this kingdom, shall be given to the public. You will experience, that although English generosity makes us always ready to give refuge and protection to a distressed foreigner, even from the country of our inveterate enemies, we will not suffer among us a French traitor and a spy, in the pay of an administration odious to this whole nation. I shall only at present add, that one of your friends will soon prove to you that your own poet Corneille says very truly,
Et meme avec justice on peut trahir un traitre.
I am, Sir,
An ENGLISHMAN.
Sept. 11, 1769.
[1] The Chevalier D’Eon began in this manner the affidavit he made Dec. 28, 1764, although his public character had been superseded by the French King, and declared at an end by the King of England, above a year before.
LETTER II.
To the Chevalier D’Eon.
SIR,
The warm applause you give to the peace of Paris, and the negociators of it, both English and French, did not in the least surprise me. You were well paid for it at the time, and the private advantages derived to you from it did not cease with its ratification. The peace itself was in its own nature so infamous, and so peculiarly felonious to this country, which it robbed of almost all its noble conquests, that no Englishman was judged proper to be sent with the authentic ratification of such a French bargain. It was given to you contre toute regle & contre toute usage, as the Duke de Praslin says in your Memoires; and the Duke of Nivernois observes in a letter to the Duke of Bedford, that it was une galanterie de votre ministere, & une bonte du Roi votre maitre, qui se sert avec plaisir d’un Francois pour cette tournure. Besides, at the very time of the negociation you held the Ambassador’s pen; and altho’ you were never entrusted with the most important secrets between the two courts, you were employed in the revisal of that fatal instrument which tore from our bleeding warriors the fruits of all their victories, the greatest acquisitions your rival nation had ever made. You are allowed to have much chicanery; and the tricking article about the Canada Bills was the effect of your duping the Duke of Bedford, and the good-humoured Mr. Neville. You may therefore with reason speak of the peace of Paris in terms of rapture, as a Frenchman, and as the Duke of Nivernois’s secretary. I will ever mention it with indignation; for I am an Englishman, and have not that load of guilt to expiate to my country, the advising, making, or approving so ruinous a measure. You are, however, Sir, by no means singular in your opinion of the late peace even in this nation. We too have many traitors among us. A set of gentlemen at Westminster gave an entire approbation of the preliminary articles, even with the very extraordinary original clause about the East-India Company among them. Their bankers best know how that approbation was obtained; but their successors, altho’ careless about the national debt, have had the prudence as well as foresight for themselves, to pay off all debts contracted on that account.
You speak with some degree of modesty concerning yourself when you mention the peace of Paris, as if conscious that you had only been employed to toll the bell for the funeral of England’s departed glory and fame. When you mention Count Viry, you are quite lavish in his praises, knowing how much he had been a principal in that accursed treaty. I respect the dead; but only the departed virtuous and good. I distinguish characters, notwithstanding the trite maxim of de mortuis nil nisi bonum. I will never confound a Cato and a Cataline, but will give to each their due. I execrate the memory of Count Viry, as the enemy of my country, as having been a principal in robbing England of the Havannah, Porto Rico, Martinique, Guadelupe, Desiderade, Mariegalante, St. Peter, Miquelon, Goree, Belleisle, St. Lucia, &c. and negociating a treaty which has proved the salvation of France. I believe you have, besides the general cause of the peace, which saved France, two particular reasons for the regard you testify to the memory of Count Viry. The first is the very dexterous management he used to get the claim of a sugar island from France waved, in which you knew she was ready to have acquiesced. The other is, the protest he signed in favour of the House of Savoy, which he procured to be legally attested and given in at the time of the last coronation, in the name of his master, the present King of Sardinia. He too in your time had printed the Genealogie de la Famille Royale d’Angleterre, by which he hoped at a future day that the ridiculous claims of his master’s family, as being, although Papists, immediately descended from Henrietta Maria, the daughter of Charles I. would have prevailed over those of the House of Brunswick, who are descended from Elizabeth, Electress Palatine, one degree more remote from the Crown, as being the daughter of James I. You both expected at least a general confusion speedily among us; but neither you, nor he, born under arbitrary governments, could have any idea of the only lawful right to the crown of these realms, a parliamentary right. The contrary doctrine was in Queen Anne’s time expresly declared to be high treason, by a particular statute, the “Act for the better securing her Majesty’s person and government, and the succession to the crown of England in the protestant line;” That if any person or persons, from and after the 25th day of March 1706, shall maliciously, advisedly and directly, by writing or printing, declare, maintain, or affirm that the Kings or Queens of England, with and by the authority of the parliament of England, are not able to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to limit and bind the crown of this realm, and the descent, limitation, inheritance, and government thereof, every such person or persons shall be guilty of High Treason, and being thereof convicted and attainted, &c. &c. Count Viri acted by the express orders of his Court, in conjunction with your’s. In the same manner the two Courts acted in concert at the beginning of this century, in the last year of our glorious Deliverer, King William III. Count Maffei, the Ambassador from Savoy, delivered in the first famous protestation, in the name of the Duchess of Savoy, against the Hanover succession, at the time the Duke himself commanded the French army in Italy, with Marshal Catinat and the Prince of Vaudemont under him, and every action of his life was dictated by France. I believe you therefore unusually sincere, when you express, “la plus vive estime & la plus sincere admiration pour feu Monsieur le Comte de Viry, qui par son attachement pour le bien des deux nations belligerantes & graces a son zele infatiguable, eut la gloire d’amener cette paix necessaire aux deux nations a une heureuse conclusion.” What this happy conclusion for England was, we have already seen. From that fatal moment France, like a tall bully, began again to lift the head, and insult all its neighbours.