George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 10

[188] and misled; Grantham, the British ambassador at

Chap. VIII.} 1779.

Madrid, hoodwinked by the stupendous dissimulation of Florida Blanca, wrote home in January, 1779: ‘I really believe this court is sincere in wishing to bring about a pacification;’¹ and, at the end of March, the king of England still confided in the neutrality of the court of Spain.² In London there was a rumor of peace through Spanish mediation; Lord Weymouth, the ablest statesman in the cabinet, steadily repelled that mediation, unless France would cease to support the insurgent colonies. Acting independently and from the consideration of her own interests alone, Spain evaded the question of American independence, and proposed her mediation to England on the basis of a truce of twenty-five or thirty years, to be granted by the king of England with the concurrence of Spain and France.³ This offer, made without consultation with Vergennes, called forth his most earnest expostulations; for, had it been accepted by the British ministry, he must have set himself at variance with Spain, or been false to his engagements with the United States. But Lord Weymouth was superior to intrigue and chicane; and with equal resolution and frankness he put aside the modified proposal ‘as an absolute, if not a distinct, concession of all the rights of the British crown in the thirteen colonies, under the additional disadvantage of making it to the French, rather than to the Americans themselves.’⁴ If independence