“The instructions to Sir Danvers Osborn, a new governor of New York, seemed better calculated for the latitude of Mexico and for a Spanish tribunal than for a free, rich British settlement, and in such opulence and of such haughtiness that suspicions had long been conceived of their meditating to throw off their dependence on their mother country.”[348]
This stands in the “Memoires” under the date of 1754, and the editor in a note observes, “If, as the author asserts, this was written at the time, it is a very remarkable passage.” By direction of the author the book was “to be kept unopened and unsealed” until a certain person named should attain the age of twenty-five years. It was published in 1822. Perhaps the honesty of this entry will be better appreciated, when it is noted, that, only a few pages later, Washington, whom the author afterwards admired, is spoken of as “this brave braggart” who “learned to blush for his rodomontade.”[349]
As the difficulties with the Colonies increased, he became more sympathetic and prophetic. In a letter to Sir Horace Mann, 2d February, 1774, he wrote:—
“We have no news, public or private; but there is an ostrich-egg laid in America, where the Bostonians have canted three hundred chests of tea into the ocean; for they will not drink tea with our Parliament.… Lord Chatham talked of conquering America in Germany. I believe England will be conquered some day or other in New England or Bengal.”[350]
In May, 1774, his sympathies again appear:—
“Nothing was more shocking than the King’s laughing and saying at his levee that he had as lief fight the Bostonians as the French. It was only to be paralleled by James the Second sporting on Jeffreys’s ‘campaign in the West.’”[351]
And under date of 28th May, 1775, we have his record of the encounter at Lexington, with the reflection:—
“Thus was the civil war begun, and a victory the first fruits of it on the side of the Americans, whom Lord Sandwich had had the folly and rashness to proclaim cowards.”[352]
His letters to the Countess of Ossory, written during the war, show his irrepressible sentiments. Thus, under date of 9th November, 1775:—
“I think this country undone almost beyond redemption. Victory in any war but a civil one fascinates mankind with a vision of glory. What should we gain by triumph itself? Would America laid waste, deluged with blood, plundered, enslaved, replace America flourishing, rich, and free? Do we want to reign over it, as the Spaniards over Peru, depopulated? Are desolate regions preferable to commercial cities?”[353]