To diplomatic historians JJ’s entry for this date is the most revealing portion of his diary of the peacemaking, and its authenticity was long contested. The principal involved was John Stuart, viscount Mountstuart (1744–1814), the oldest son of the third earl of Bute, George III’s erstwhile intimate friend and the First Lord of the Treasury in the early years of his reign. While serving as the British envoy to Sardinia during the war years, Mountstuart received permission from his government in the spring of 1780 to go to Geneva, pleading the “immense heats” of Turin and their effect on the health of Lady Mountstuart and his children. Since he had to travel through France, technically enemy country, in order to reach Geneva from Turin, he applied for a passport from the French minister at Turin. Although he granted the application, Vergennes expressed the hope that the Scotsman would not get involved in the factional quarrels that were tearing Geneva apart at this time.1

Had Vergennes known the purpose of Mountstuart’s trip he never would have issued the passport. On arriving in Geneva, Mountstuart spent a good deal of time with his former tutor, a historian named Paul-Henri Mallet. Prior to Mountstuart’s arrival Mallet had gone to Paris and held extensive conversations with a fellow Gênevoise, Jacques Necker, the prestigious director general of finances in France, who headed a peace party and sought, behind Vergennes’s back, to get France out of the war in order to facilitate balancing his budget. Mallet proposed to Necker that “some one province,” say New England, be declared independent, “and the others obliged to return to their former allegiance.” Necker was sympathetic.

Anxious to gain the limelight as a peacemaker, Mountstuart dashed off a dispatch reporting his personal conversations to the British secretary of state for the Southern Department, Wills Hill, the earl of Hillsborough. There followed a long and detailed correspondence between Mountstuart in Turin and Mallet in Geneva. The former thought he was making progress until, on 21 November 1780, he learned from Hillsborough that George III was unwilling to countenance any negotiations with France so long as “she continues to abett and support Rebellion now raging in His Majesty’s North American colonies.” No attention, he stated further, could be paid to “proposals made or suggested” in the “unavowed and private manner” of Mountstuart’s “Genevan friend.”

Crushed by this response and further disheartened by the dismissal of Necker from office in the spring of 1781, Mountstuart licked his wounds and bided his time. With North out of office, he tried unsuccessfully in the spring of 1782 to insinuate himself once more in the role of mediator. He reached Paris on 16 December 1782, after Jay and his colleagues had signed the Preliminaries but before France and Spain had completed their own preliminary negotiations. On 22 December he dined with Oswald. That same evening Jay made a social call on the British commissioner, and Oswald, as Jay recorded in his diary below,2 read his American visitor the portion of Mountstuart’s letterbook regarding his abortive Franco-Genevan negotiations.

Edmond Genêt, minister from France to the United States during the French Revolution, asserted that Necker had never interfered in the concerns of the Department of Foreign Affairs and wrongly denied that the events described therein had ever taken place.3 Lord Mountstuart’s letterbooks from Turin, now in the British Museum, as well as the Foreign Office Papers in the British Public Record Office, substantiate the account Jay entered in his diary of a covert proposal to dismember America.