country. He called on me some days later and produced to me those very letters from Lieutenant-Governor Hutchinson, Secretary Oliver, and others.

Franklin proceeds to say that he at once thought it his duty, as Agent for the Colony, to transmit the Letters to Boston, but to this their holder objected, he would not even permit copies to be taken for the purpose. Eventually he consented to let Franklin have the originals on the express conditions "that they should not be printed, that no copies should be taken of them, that they should be shewn only to half a dozen of the leading people of the Government, and that they should be carefully returned." In accepting them on those terms Franklin declares that he felt no scruple, for, as he expressed it,

they had been handed about here (in England) to injure that people, why not use them for their advantage? The writers, too, had taken the same liberty with the letters of others, transmitting those of Rosne and Auchmuty in confirmation of their own calumnies against the Americans. Copies of some of mine had been returned by officers of the Government. Why then should theirs be exempt from the same treatment?

Franklin was not alone in knowing his letters were opened and used by the Government, who treated those of Thomas Whately and Hans Stanley to Mr. Grenville in the same way. Stanley was specially hurt on "observing that all my correspondence is opened in a very awkward and bungling manner." The Duke of Bedford had a high official of the Post Office dismissed for meddling with his letters.' Edmund Burke in England and Judge Winthrop in America, made similar complaints, of which Pownall's letters to Dr. Cooper are full. Mention of one of them has already been made.

2

Taking a leaf out of the Government book Franklin sent these Hutchinson letters to Thomas Cushing, Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, with strict injunctions that they were to be seen only by halfa-dozen men, who were named, and that the above conditions must be observed. Cushing weakly let them out of his possession, and could not get them back till their contents made so much stir that he was summoned to

1 Grenville Correspondence, 1853, iii. pp. 312; 99, 311.

2 Works of Edmund Burke, 1818, ix. p. 148; Works of Franklin, 1840, iv. p. 425.

produce them to the Assembly and did so. On June 16, 1773, the House of Representatives passed a vote of censure on Hutchinson and Oliver, declaring that their letters were really public, that they "tended to destroy harmony, excite resentment, and introduce force from England." It was complained that the writers of these letters, while professing affection to their neighbours, had been secretly instigating coercion; and their dismissal from the posts of Governor and Lieutenant-Governor was therefore demanded.1

On August 21 Franklin received this resolution, he was angry at the publicity given in America despite his stipulations; but when he passed on the official document to Lord Dartmouth he observed that the resentment of the colonists towards England was much abated by finding that their grievances were due to some of their own people. That was the turn he had tried to give to affairs, but he found, on the contrary, that "the very action upon which I valued myself, as it appeared to be a means of lessening our differences, I was unlucky enough to find charged upon me as a wicked attempt to increase them."" Through the spring and summer he had kept the secret very close; he said that only two men in England besides himself knew of it, but in the autumn it came out. unsigned paragraph in the Public Advertiser of September 4 threw suspicion of having got the letters from William Whately on John Temple, formerly Commissioner of Customs in Boston. He was said to have called at Whately's bank and asked permission to see some of his own letters to Thomas Whately, the late Secretary, and to have been left alone with the file as no one else had been, after which the letters disappeared. Theft was imputed. In reply to this paragraph there appeared in the same paper on October 25 a letter signed "A Member of Parliament" which taxed Messrs. Bernard,3 Knox, and Mauduit with having been its authors. It charged them

5

An

1 Copy of Letters sent to Great Britain by Hutchinson and Oliver and others, British Museum Catalogue, 8175, a.a. 54.

2 Works of Franklin, Jared Sparks, 1840, iv. p. 433.

3 Ex-Governor of Massachusetts.

Captain John Knox published in 1769 a journal of the American Campaigns 1757-60.

5 Mauduit is mentioned on p. 263 of the 1810 edition of Almon's Anecdotes of the Earl of Chatham, as engaged by the Tories, like Smollett and Dr. Francis, to write down that statesman in 1761.

with having falsely used the name of Mr. Whately the banker to damage Mr. Temple. It declared that the writer, though not the immediate instrument of bringing the Hutchinson letters to light, was in a position to affirm that those sent to Boston had not been in the possession of the banker since the death of his brother to whom they were addressed. But the opinion was expressed that the disclosure had done good, for now the Americans would see whom they had to thank for their troubles and could be left to deal with Hutchinson and Oliver. Then the three men charged with having written the paragraph are thus addressed

These are the consequences of the detection of these letters, consequences which you who have laboured equally with their wicked authors to arm the parent hand against the child must cordially lament. The natural union will now be restored. England will return to her old good humour, America to her former reverence and affection. Commerce will again flourish and we shall stand together, the bulwark of religion and liberty against the world in arms.1

More

This fierce denunciation is quite in Pownall's style when he was angry. There was hardly another member of Parliament sufficiently acquainted with men connected with American affairs to point to unimportant individuals like Knox and Mauduit without contradiction. over, it exactly expresses his views about the supreme necessity of removing friction between England and the colonies. The next step taken was an action brought by William Whately against Franklin to recover the letters. Nothing came of it, but Franklin regarded Whately as the instrument of the Court in bringing it. He

1 This and other correspondence on the subject will be found in Anecdotes of Eminent Persons, J. Almon, 1797, iii. p. 236.

2 Works of Franklin, 1840, iv. pp. 437, 439. On p. 436 Franklin says he thought Whately, whom he hardly knew, had been prompted to attack him. He mentions that Whately had wanted to trace some property in America, bought by his grandfather Major Thompson, to which the clue had been lost; he applied to Franklin for help in this matter and got it. As Franklin had thus done Whately a service he thought Whately would not of his own accord have brought the action. In the Record Office (book W.O. 1. 679) is a Treasury letter of December 1, 1763, signed by Thomas Whately. It may have been through his influence that his brother's bank got the Treasury account.

1

had ascertained that the Treasury account was kept at Whately's bank from seeing a Treasury warrant payable there for £150, the half-year's pension of no less a person than Dr. Samuel Johnson. Whately had also written to the Public Advertiser confirming the statement anonymously made therein that Temple had about October 1772 seen the file of American letters, and that those of Hutchinson and Oliver were afterwards missing. Temple then called him out. They fought in the Ring in Hyde Park on December 11 at four in the afternoon, when it must have been almost dark. They had no seconds. Whately had no pistols, he borrowed one of Temple's and each man missed the other; then they drew their swords and fell to. Whately wrote afterwards that he knew nothing of the use of weapons, but he stood up to his adversary till in the scuffle he slipped and fell. Some bystanders who ran up accused Temple of thrusting at him when he was down; he received four or five slight wounds, but Temple was the more hurt of the two, for he was left with a charge of foul play against him. While William Whately was disabled Temple wrote to his brother Joseph, and afterwards to William himself, asking to be exonerated from this. Neither of the brothers would clear him, and it looked as if the duel would be renewed. It had attracted a great deal of attention, partly because it was due to a leakage of public documents, partly because, even when such encounters were frequent, it was unusual to find a Lombard Street banker fighting gallantly in Hyde Park. Franklin was as much surprised as any one. "I never thought the gentlemen would fight," he wrote afterwards. To prevent the matter going further he addressed a letter on December 25 to the Public Advertiser to say that he, and he alone, was responsible for sending Hutchinson's letters to Boston. He maintained that—

2

they were not private letters between friends, they were written by public officers to persons in public stations on public affairs and intended to produce public measures. They were therefore handed to other public persons who might be influenced by them to produce

1 This "Ring" was about 300 yards in diameter, and lay on the north of the Serpentine close to the plot now enclosed in the Ranger's private gardens.

Of Nonsuch Park, Surrey, father of Richard Whately, Archbishop of Dublin, great-grandfather of the present writer.