“Court.  Did you hear no mention made of any scheme to betray or seize him?

“Cooper.  Mr. Clayford said he could easily be seized and put on board a boat, and carried off, as his female friend had promised she would assist:  but all present thought it would be hazardous.”

“William Savage, sworn.

“Court.  Was you at the Serjeant’s Arms on the 21st of May?  Did you hear any thing of this nature?

“Savage.  I did, and nearly as the last evidence has declared; the society in general refused to be concerned in it, and thought it a mad scheme.

“Mr. Abeel.  Pray, Mr. Savage, have not you heard nothing of an information that was to be given to Governor Tryon?

“Savage.  Yes; papers and letters were at different times shewn to the society, which were taken out of General Washington’s pockets by Mrs. Gibbons, and given (as she pretended some occasion of going out) to Mr. Clayford, who always copied them, and they were put into his pockets again.”

The authenticity of this pamphlet thus becomes of importance, and over this little time need be spent.  The committee named in it differs from the committee really named by the Provincial Congress, and the proceedings nowhere implicate the men actually proved guilty.  In other words, the whole publication is a clumsy Tory forgery, put forward with the same idle story of “captured papers” employed in the “spurious letters” of Washington, and sent forth from the same press (J.  Bew) from which that forgery and several others issued.

The source from which the English fabricator drew this scandal is fortunately known.  In 1775 a letter to Washington from his friend Benjamin Harrison was intercepted by the British, and at once printed broadcast in the newspapers.  In this the writer gossips to Washington “to amuse you and unbend your minds from the cares of war,” as follows:  “As I was in the pleasing task of writing to you, a little noise occasioned me to turn my head around, and who should appear but pretty little Kate, the Washer-woman’s daughter over the way, clean, trim and as rosy as the morning.  I snatched the golden, glorious opportunity, and, but for the cursed antidote to love, Sukey, I had fitted her for my general against his return.  We were obliged to part, but not till we had contrived to meet again:  if she keeps the appointment, I shall relish a week’s longer stay.”  From this originated the stories of Washington’s infidelity as already given, and also a coarser version of the same, printed in 1776 in a Tory farce entitled “The Battle of Brooklyn.”

Jonathan Boucher, who knew Washington well before the Revolution, yet who, as a loyalist, wrote in no friendly spirit of him, asserted that “in his moral character, he is regular.”  A man who disliked him far more, General Charles Lee, in the excess of his hatred, charged Washington in 1778 with immorality,—­a rather amusing impeachment, since at the very time Lee was flaunting the evidence