36                                Richard B. Morris

to Necker that "some one province," say New England, be de¬
clared independent, "and the others obliged to return to their
former allegiance." Necker was sympathetic.

Anxious to gain the limelight as a peacemaker, Mountstuart
rushed off a report of his personal conversations to the British
Secretary of State, Lord Hillsborough. There followed a long
and detailed correspondence between Mountstuart in Turin and
iMaUet in Geneva, and Mountstuart thought that he was making
progress. Then the blow fell. On November 21, 1780, Hillsborough
wrote iMountstuart that he had laid his communications before
the King, but that George III had expressed the view that any
negotiations with France were out of the question so long as "she
continues to abett and support the Rebellion now raging in His
Majesty's North American colonies," and certainly no attention
could be paid to "proposals made or suggested" in the "unavowed
and private manner" of Momitstuart's "Genevan friend." He was
bluntly told not to pursue the matter further by a personal trip
to Paris, nor to receive any proposals whatsoever from the French
"if the Rebell Colonies are in any manner included."

Crushed by the response to his well-meaning efforts and further
disheartened by the dismissal of Necker from office in the spring
of 17 81, Af ountstuart licked his wounds and bided his time, trying
in the spring of 1782, to insinuate himself once more in the role
of mediator now that the Lord North ministry had been over¬
thrown, but without success. Granted leave to return home, he
reached Paris on December 16, 1782, after the Americans had
signed a preliminary peace but before France and Spain had com¬
pleted their own preliminary negotiations. On December 22nd
he dined with Oswald. That same evening John Jay made a social
call on the British commissioner. Oswald, as Jay recorded in his
diary, told him about Mountstuart's letterbooks and the portion
the ambassador had read him regarding his Franco-Genevan
negotiations.

In short. Jay was right, Edmond Genet wrong. Genet confused
the time of the iMountstuart negotiations with 1782, when Necker