Translation of the Chevalier D’Eon’s Answer to Dr. Musgrave’s Address.

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 the 12th of August 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 the year 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, Sir, that I never made, nor caused to be made any such overture, either in the winter or summer of the year 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 confess you do not say it was I that made these overtures; but only that they were made in my name, particularly to Sir George Yonge and Mr. Fitzherbert.

I assure you I do not know either of these gentlemen, 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, Sir, to lay before the public the name of the audacious person who has made use of mine to cover his own odious offers. The gentlemen whom you have given as your witnesses, cannot deny you this justification of their own veracity and your’s.

Though I cannot but commend your integrity in citing your authors, yet it appears to me an act of the last imprudence, in an affair of so much weight, to build upon report, for naming publickly a person of my character, without having previously consulted him. If you had recollected the contradiction I gave in the St. James’s Chronicle of Oct. 25, 1766, No. 881, to an advertisement in the same paper, No. 875, importing in substance what you alledge in your last letter, 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 it’s 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 thereon with respect to me.

It is the same with your pretence that “about the 17th of May, 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 have always flattered myself with being possessed of the esteem and friendship of the English with whom I have lived. Who of them then in these sentiments would have presumed to have shewn sufficient contempt for me to have made me such an overture? The injury would have been the more sensibly felt by me, as the character of the person was more respectable.

I shall not follow you, Sir, either in all the steps you have thought it your duty to take, or in the arguments you made use of to support them: these shew the orator, and those, if they be well founded, prove the patriot.

But 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 my 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, to whom you say you addressed yourself in order to call upon me as evidence, with respect to the validity of your charge, 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 I had in concurring to the great work of peace has inspired me with sentiments of the justest veneration for the English commissioners who had been employed in it, and with the most lively esteem and sincerest admiration for the late Count de Viry, who in his attachment to the welfare of the two nations then at war, and thanks to his indefatigable zeal! had the glory of bringing that peace to a happy conclusion.

Judge now, Sir, with what solidity you can depend upon me to make your charge clear.

I am too well known in England to have been under any necessity of this reply, if the frankness of your letter had not appeared to me to merit my preventing you from taking any further steps, which could not but turn to your prejudice, in as much as they would be founded solely on false reports of my proceedings.

In order to enable you to be as prudent as patriotic, I sign this letter, and therein give you my address, that for the maintenance of your own veracity you may furnish me with the means of convicting publickly those slanderers who have dared to make use of my name, in a manner still more repugnant to real facts, than the dignity with which I have ever supported my character.

I have the honour of being your most humble servant,

The Chevalier D’Eon.

In Petty France, Westminster.