A long correspondence directed towards securing an exchange of Englishmen captured by American vessels and confined in France for Americans confined in England was conducted by Franklin with his friend Hartley in England. Hartley was a noble-minded and humane Englishman, who was, at the time, a member of the House of Commons. The first letters on the exchanging of prisoners were written, however, by the American Commissioners, to Lord Stormont, the British Ambassador at Paris. The Commissioners stated that Captain Wickes, of the Continental cruiser “Reprisal,” had in his possession one hundred captured British seamen, and they wished to exchange them for an equal number of American seamen, prisoners in England. The first letter of the Commissioners Lord Stormont ignored. To the second letter, or possibly to the third, he replied in those well-known words: “The King’s Ambassador receives no applications from rebels, unless they come to implore His Majesty’s mercy.” The reply of the Commissioners was equally spirited: “In answer to a letter which concerns some of the most material interests of humanity, and of the two nations, Great Britain and the United States of America, now at war, we received the enclosed indecent paper, as coming from your Lordship, which we return for your Lordship’s more mature consideration.”[333] Until after the treaties of February, 1778, between the United States and France, Great Britain resisted the exchange of naval prisoners, confined in England, on three grounds: that it involved the recognition of belligerent rights in the insurgents; that France being neutral, the Colonists would be compelled either to free captured British seamen taken in European waters, or else to take them to America; and that since British seamen were far more numerous than American, an exchange would tell more favorably for the Americans than for the British.[334] Not until France had entered into the war, did Britain take a broader and more generous position, and begin to listen to Franklin’s overtures for an exchange of prisoners. During 1778 the negotiations proceeded slowly and vexatiously, and it was not until March, 1779, that the first exchange was made. One hundred American prisoners from the Mill prison at Plymouth were then sent to France by the British government in the Milford cartel-ship; and in August one hundred more were exchanged.