“But for those higher motives I feel infinitely obliged to you for having so generously undertaken to vindicate my prudence, and my plain but honest character. May be that this, your chivalry, will entirely release me from the necessity of any further public steps in that respect. That I shall see, and leave in the meantime my ready disavowal where it is.
“However, as following the generous impulse of your heart, you may, perhaps, feel inclined to fight on the battle, if required, in which you so nobly engaged, I thought it would perhaps be as well to state to you some particulars.
“I think any intelligent reader of that purported proclamation may have at once become aware of its not being genuine on reading it. Because, to say in one and the same, document something to this effect: ‘I send the bearer to you that he may inform me who amongst you are faithful and true, and inform me how you should organise;’ and to say in the same document, as it were with the same breath: ‘Rise! Strike! The moment is at hand,’ which, is as much as to say, ‘Don’t organise’—this is, indeed, too absurd a blunder in logic to be believed.
“Do I then disavow the sentiments contained in that document? No, sir; all my life is, and will be, summed up in this idea: my country’s freedom—my country’s rights; and consistently with this, I am, and will remain, an irreconcilable enemy to Francis Joseph of Austria, who stole by perjury from my country sacred rights, freedom, constitution, laws, and national existence; and beaten back in his criminal attack, robbed it by treason and by foreign force—and now murders it. Yes, sir, I avow openly these my sentiments, and trust in God that the day of justice and retribution will soon come. And why should I not avow them? I am not bound to any allegiance to Francis Joseph of Austria. Not I; not my exiled countrymen; not our dear Hungary. He is no lawful sovereign of Hungary. Justice is at home in England, sir; and, therefore, I defy any man to get up a jury, or to point out a court in all England which would find a verdict for Francis Joseph being a lawful sovereign of Hungary—or I and my country owing him allegiance.
“Nor do I desire to be understood that I have never written anything like the contents of that apocryphal document. I, indeed, sir, never thought to have any claim to the reputation of a classical authorship. Bad as it is, sir, I have written worse things in my life. I may have written every sentence of it; some of them at one time, some at another on different occasions—probably when I was a prisoner at Kutayah, for different exigencies, all past, long past, years ago, out of which writings the present document might have been patched up without my knowledge, and used on the present occasion without my consent.
“All this is not the question. The question, sir, is—have I addressed this (or whatsoever else) proclamation from English soil for the purpose of engaging the Hungarian soldiers, or whomsoever else, in the late insurrection at Milan, or wherever else, in Italy?
“That is the question. Answering to this question, you disavowed the document as such, and pronounced it to be a forgery—and you are perfectly right. I neither invited, nor gave any authority to any one to invite, the Hungarian soldiers to join in any insurrection in Italy now. Nay, whenever I heard anything said about the Lombard patriots being incapable of enduring longer their oppression, and that perhaps they might feel inclined to break forth at any risk, I condemned the very idea of thinking now upon an insurrection in Italy, declaring that, for the present, no revolutionary movement would succeed in Lombardy, but ‘would turn out to be but a deplorable émeute;’ and I, for one, declared every émeute, however valiantly fought, would but render impure the well-founded, legitimate prospects of the cause of liberty.
“All this, sir, you have known, when you gave your chivalric démenti to that purported proclamation of mine. You have known more yet; you have seen a letter from one of the most renowned Italian patriots, dated on the 10th of February, from the field of action, in which he categorically confesses that ‘I in my views was perfectly right, and they have been wrong;’ and in which he further, giving me the first notice of my name having been used ‘clandestinely’ at Milan, gives me himself full evidence that it was done without my knowledge, without my consent.
“You have known all this, sir; but one thing you may not yet know, and that is:
“I came to England about the end of June, 1852. Since that time I have been always on English soil; and since I have been on English soil, I never addressed any proclamation to the Hungarian soldiers in Italy.