It has been my very great misfortune to be apparently implicated in the guilt of others with whom I never had any connexion, except in transactions, so far as I was apprised of them, entirely blameless. I had met Mr. De Berenger in public company, but was on no terms of intimacy with him. With Mr. Cochrane Johnstone I had the intercourse natural between such near relatives. Mr. Butt had voluntarily offered, without any reward, to carry on stock transactions, in which thousands, as well as myself were engaged, in the face of day without the smallest imputation of any thing incorrect. The other four defendants were wholly unknown to me, nor have I ever, directly or indirectly, held any communication with them. Of Mr. De Berenger's concern in the fraud, I have no information, except such as arises out of the late trial. With regard to Mr. Johnstone and Mr. Butt, I am willing to hope that they are guiltless. They repeatedly protested to me their innocence. They did not dare to communicate any such plan to me, if such was projected by them, or either of them. Be they guilty, then, or be they, one or both, erroneously convicted, I have only to lament, that, without the most remote suspicion of their proceedings, if they, or either of them, were concerned in the fraud, I have, through my blameless intercourse with them, been subject to imputations which might, with equal justice, have been cast upon any man who now hears me. Circumstanced as I am, I must keep myself wholly unconnected with those whose innocence cannot be so clear to me as my own. Well had it been for me if I had made this distinction sooner.
I do not stand here to commend myself—unhappily, I must seek only for exculpation; but I cannot exist under the load of dishonour which even an unjust judgment has flung upon me. My life has been too often in jeopardy to make me think much about it; but my honour was never yet breathed upon; and I now hold my existence only in the determination to remove an imputation, as groundless, as it is intolerable.
The evidence which I now tender to your Lordship, will aid me in performing this duty towards myself, my rank, and my profession. I first offer the affidavit, which I have repeated at a risk which I formerly had no opportunity of encountering. I have been told, that I then incurred the moral guilt of perjury, without exposing myself to the legal penalties. I know nothing of such distinctions. I have repeated the statement upon oath—and I am now answerable to the laws if I have falsely sworn. The affidavits of three persons who saw De Berenger at my house on the 21st of February, fully confirm my statement, and I have only been prevented from bringing forward a fourth, by his sailing to a distant situation, before I could possibly stop him for this purpose.
The grounds upon which I have been convicted are these:—That notes were found in De Berenger's possession which had been changed for others, that had once been in mine. That De Berenger came to my house after returning from his expedition; and that my account of what passed at this visit is contradicted by evidence.
The first ground has been clearly explained away; it amounts to nothing more than that which may happen to any man who has money transactions. Mr. Butt voluntarily made purchases and sales of stock for me, and having received a small loan of money from him, I repaid him with bank notes which he used for his own purposes. He says that he exchanged these notes, and that a part of the notes which he received in exchange he paid to Mr. Cochrane Johnstone, who states, that he gave them to De Berenger in payment of some drawings; but with this story, whether true or false, I have no manner of concern, and consequently no wish to discuss it. In what way soever the notes which were received in exchange for mine reached De Berenger, I can only say, that mine were given to Mr. Butt in discharge of a bonâ fide debt; and I have no knowledge whatever of the uses to which he applied them.
De Berenger's coming to my house, I before accounted for upon the supposition of his being unconcerned in the fraud; but is it not obvious that he might have come there to facilitate his escape, by going immediately on board of my ship, with the additional prospect of obtaining employment in America? It has been said that there was a suspicious degree of familiarity in his treatment of me and my house. I can only observe, that over his conduct I had no controul. But he knew, it seems, of my change of abode, which had occurred within a few days. I trust it will be recollected, that he is proved to have left town three days after such change, and that though not intimate with me, he had the means of knowing where I resided, even if he should not have enquired at my former lodgings, where my address was left. Indeed, if taking refuge in my ship, in order to facilitate his escape, was part of his scheme, it was very likely that he would have ascertained the precise place of my abode, previous to his quitting London. Again, I am said to have left the tinman's, (where I think I should hardly have gone had I expected such a messenger) as soon as I heard of the officer's arrival. I was in apprehensions of fatal news respecting my brother then in France, from whom I had received a letter but three days before, with the intelligence of his being dangerously ill; and I now tender you his affidavit, with the surgeon's certificate, dated the 12th of February, which he brought home with him. And therefore, on receiving the note from De Berenger, whose name I was unable to decypher, and as that note announced that the writer, whom I learnt from my servant had the appearance of an officer in the army, who was desirous of seeing me, I hastened to learn intelligence so anxiously expected; nor had I the least doubt that it related to my brother. When, however, I found that the person was De Berenger, and that he had only to speak of his own private affairs, the apparent distress he was in, and the relief it gave my mind to know that he was not the bearer of the news I dreaded, prevented me from feeling that displeasure which I might otherwise have felt at the liberty he had taken or the interruption it had occasioned. Comments have been made on my saying so little to the servant who brought that note; but the fact is, I did ask him several questions, as appears by his affidavit. That I did not learn the name of the writer from the note itself, I have truly accounted for, by its being written so close to the bottom of the paper that I could not read it. This assertion is said to be contradicted by the circumstance of the writer having found room to add a postscript, as if there was only one side to the paper. Of the postscript I have no recollection, but it might have been written even opposite the signature. That I did not collect from the hand-writing, that it was addressed to me by De Berenger, is nothing extraordinary; my acquaintance with that person was extremely slight; and till that day I had never received more than one or two notes from him, which related to a drawing of a lamp. I was too deeply impressed with the idea that the note was addressed to me by an officer who had come with intelligence of my brother, to apprehend that it was written by De Berenger, from whom I expected no communication, and with whose hand-writing I was not familiar. All that I could afterwards recollect of the note, more than what is stated in my affidavit is, that he had something to communicate which would affect my feeling mind, or words to that effect, which confirmed my apprehensions that the writer was the messenger of fatal news of my brother.
If De Berenger had really been my agent in this nefarious transaction, how I should have acted or where I should have chosen to receive him, it is impossible for me to say: but I humbly apprehend that my own house was not the place I should have selected for that purpose. The pretended Du Bourg, if I had chosen him for my instrument, instead of his making me his convenience, should have terminated his expedition and have found a change of dress elsewhere. He should not have come immediately and in open day to my house. I should not so rashly have invited detection and its concomitant ruin.
But this is not the only extravagance of which I am accused. What supposition short of my absolute insanity will account for my having voluntarily made the affidavit which has been so much canvassed, if I really knew the plot in which De Berenger appears to have been engaged? Let me entreat your Lordships consideration of the situation in which I stood at the moment in which that affidavit was made; I was suspected of being connected with the pretended Du Bourg; if I had known that De Berenger was the person who had assumed that name, could I possibly have betrayed him, and consequently myself, more completely than by publishing such a detail to the world? The name of De Berenger was never mentioned till brought forward in my affidavit; which affidavit was made, as sworn by Mr. Wright, a witness on the trial, with the circumstance present to me, and remarked by me at the time I delivered it to him to be printed, that if De Berenger should happen to be Du Bourg, I had furnished a clue to his detection. The circumstance of his obtaining a change of dress at my house, never could have been known if I had not voluntarily discovered it; and thus I am represented as having brought him publicly to my own house, of being the first to disclose his name, and of mentioning a circumstance, which, of all others, it was the most easy to conceal, and, if divulged, the most certain to excite suspicion! Is it not next to impossible, that a man, conscious of guilt, should have been so careless of his most imminent danger?
My adversaries dwell upon some particulars of this affidavit, which they pretend to find contradicted in the evidence. The principle one is my assertion that Berenger wore a green coat. I have repeated this assertion upon oath, under all the risks of the law; and I also solemnly affirm, upon my honour, which I regard as an obligation no less sacred, that I only saw him in that dress. The witnesses on the part of the prosecution have asserted, that he wore a red coat when he arrived in town. Granted. But may he not have changed it in the coach, on his way to Green-street? Where was the difficulty, and for what purpose was the portmanteau? My own fixed opinion is, that he changed his dress in the coach, because I believe that he dared not run the risk of appearing in my presence till he had so changed it. I tender affidavits of those who saw him, as I did, in his green coat, at my house. That he should have changed his dress before I saw him is most natural, upon the supposition of his wishing to conceal from me the work he had been about; but it is like many other confirmations of my innocence, fated to excite no attention in the minds of those who only seek food for their suspicions. Much is said of the star and other ornaments, as if any proof had been given of his wearing them in my presence. He took especial care, I doubt not, to lay them aside on his way, when he had divested himself of his official capacity, long before I saw him. The small portmanteau before-mentioned, which it is admitted he brought with him, in all probability furnished him with the green coat, and received the red coat and its ornaments, and very possibly for this reason no remark has been made upon it. A good deal of observation has been bestowed upon De Berenger's unwillingness to appear before Lord Yarmouth in uniform, and the inference was, that this uniform could not have been the green dress of his corps, otherwise he must have felt the reverse of uneasy at being seen in it by his Colonel. Does any volunteer officer go out of a morning to make calls in his regimentals? Could so unusual a circumstance have failed to excite remark from Lord Yarmouth? To me, indeed, he had explained himself—he had of necessity told me his nearly desperate state, in asking me to receive him on board my ship; but is there any thing so very incredible in the statement that he was unwilling to tell his whole case to every body? It may now doubtless be perceived, that he might have had other reasons for disliking to go out in a green dress.
Let it, however, be recollected, that my statement was, that he only asked me for a hat in lieu of his military cap, and that the black coat was my own voluntary offer. The idea of his applying to Lord Yarmouth, or to any other of his friends, originated with me, and I proposed it in consequence of his calling to my recollection the certificates he had received from them. I then had no suspicion awake, and I believed what he told me. In what manner the disguise was ultimately disposed of I can only conjecture, as any one else might, from the evidence given on the trial. He presented himself to me in a grey great coat, and a green under coat; and if the persons whose affidavits I now tender had been examined on the trial, and they did attend for that purpose, I do feel persuaded that a very different impression would have been made on the jury and the world at large, than that which they appear to entertain; and that your Lordships might have been disposed to take an opposite view of the case as it affected me. Those witnesses would have corroborated the particulars of my affidavit relative to De Berenger's dress, when I first saw him at my house, namely, a grey great coat, and a green under coat and jacket. Unfortunately, through some mistake or misconception, not on my part, they were left unnoticed, and, of course, were not examined. I have now to offer their several affidavits to your Lordships.