‘Sir,—You will permit me to believe that you never knew any more of me than I have the honour of knowing of you, and if in your letter of August 12 you had not made a wrong use of my name, I should not now find myself obliged to enter into a correspondence with you. You pretend that in the summer of 1764, overtures were made in my name to several members of Parliament, importing that I was ready to impeach three persons, two of whom were Peers and members of the Privy Council, of having sold the Peace to the French, and you seem to found thereupon the evidence of a charge which you say you carried yourself to Lord Halifax. I declare, therefore, here, that I never made or caused to be made, any such overture, either in the winter or the summer of 1764, nor at any other time. I am on one side too faithful to the office I filled, and on the other too zealous a friend to truth.... I assure you I do not know either Sir George Younge or Mr. Fitzherbert, and never authorised any person whatever to make in my name such overtures, which the abhorrence alone I have for calumny would make me detest. I call upon you, therefore, to lay before the public the name of the audacious person who has made use of mine to discover his own odious offers. The gentlemen whom you have given as your witnesses cannot deny you this justification of their own veracity and yours.... It appears to me an act of the last imprudence, in an affair of so much weight, to build upon report for naming publicly a person of my character, without having previously consulted him. If you had recollected the contradictions I gave in ‘St. James’ Chronicle’ of October 25, 1760, No. 881, to an advertisement in the same paper, No. 875, you had saved me the trouble of replying to you at this time. What must be the result? The public will have read greedily your letter; will have believed its contents because you appeal therein to my testimony. But what will they think now, when your own interest, my honour and truth oblige me to deny all that you have advanced therein with respect to me. It is the same with your pretence that about May 17, 1765, Mr. Fitzherbert told you he knew that overtures had been made to me, to sell for a sum of money the papers that were in my hands.... I here certify to you, on my word of honour, and in the face of the public, that I cannot be of any sort of use to you, that I never entered into any treaty for the sale of papers, and never either by myself, or any agent authorised on my part, offered to make appear that the Peace had been sold to France. If Lord Halifax or the Speaker had caused me to be cited, he might have known by my answers what my thoughts were, that England rather gave money to France than France to England, to conclude the last Peace, and that the happiness