Eliza
18 MAY 1692
Monsieur Bernard,
I am en route from St.-Malo to Cherbourg aboard the jacht of my husband. In Cherbourg I'll post this on to Le Havre; I pray it reaches you soon in Paris. I shall tarry in Cherbourg until the invasion is launched.
In St.-Malo this morning I received your despatch of the 12th instant stating that you have the Bills of Exchange in your pocket and want only instructions as to whom they should be endorsed.
This amounts to asking me for the names of the agents who shall be sent across the Channel to present the Bills for payment in London. I regret to inform you that the names of these agents are not known to me yet (though I have some ideas as to who they shall be). Even if they were, I should be chary of sending them to you in a letter during wartime; for the enemy has spies everywhere, and consider what disaster would ensue if our agents' names became known. For most of them are Englishmen secretly loyal to James Stuart—and if they were caught in England with these Bills in their pockets, they should suffer the penalty for High Treason, which is to be half-hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn Cross.
A safer expedient would be for you to endorse the bills to a trusted intermediary who is resident here at Cherbourg, and who shall not be setting foot outside of France until after the invasion. That intermediary can then hold the Bills until the last moment and then endorse them to the several agents just before they cross the Channel. In this way the identity of the agents shall never be exposed to any risk of discovery.
To serve in this role of intermediary, several candidates come to mind, for Cherbourg is crowded just now with notable personages. But all of them are busy and distracted. I, meanwhile, have nothing to do save gaze out the window of my cabin in the sterncastle of this jacht, and watch the preparations. As odd as it might sound, I may be the safest person to choose for this rôle, since there is obviously no likelihood whatever of my crossing the Channel and falling into the hands of enemy interrogators; this alone should be a great comfort to the agents whose names I shall write across the backs of those bills before they set forth on their perilous missions. So, unless you object very strongly, simply endorse the Bills to me and send them to me at Cherbourg.
I don't know how Lothar is sending the avisas to London, but presumably his channels are swifter than ours, and his payers in England will be ready and waiting for our payees whensoever they arrive.
Eliza
P.S. I look forward to continuing our conversation about St.-Malo. The merchants of the Compagnie des Indes, who on a normal day swagger about that town as if they owned it, have been displaced, and quite out-classed, by the captains and admirals of our invasion fleet. As a result they are almost pathetically eager to talk to anyone about anything—including the state of our commerce with India. My head is full of more information than it can hold, and all of it useless to me. After the invasion, we must meet again at the Café Esphahan, and I'll tell you all that I know.
23 MAY 1692
Madame la comtesse,
Five Bills should be enclosed, each in the amount of one hundred thousand livres tournoises and each endorsed, for the time being, to you. These are drawn ultimately on the credit of the French treasury as personified by M. le comte de Pontchartrain. If you see him, perhaps you could think of a polite way of reminding him that the chain of credit passes through yours truly; my friend Monsieur Castan; and diverse members of the Dépôt of Lyon.
It is a good thing that I went to Lyon, for in the end it was necessary for me to involve myself in the negotiations with Lothar (he was obviously present in Lyon, but we were never in the same room together; his factor Gerhard Mann mediated all of our discussions).
Monsieur Castan is cunning and assiduous, but when presented with something outside his scope he does not respond well, and is apt to become flustered and then irritable. This happened very early in our talks with the House of Hacklheber. It took some time for me to understand why: Lothar believes that the invasion will never actually happen; or that if it does, it will be snuffed out within a few hours. In consequence, our negotiations over the terms of these Bills were strangely duplicitous. The nominal purpose was to pay troops in England, and so we had to settle terms in such a way that we—meaning France—could get silver coin in England, while allowing Lothar to realize some profit. In that sense I got what we wanted, viz. wholly legitimate, negotiable Bills which you now have in your hand. But Lothar's true purpose, as I eventually came to understand, was to reap a large windfall at very little risk by expressing a willingness to forward silver for an invasion that would never materialize. In effect he was selling us insurance against the contingency that our invasion fails to fail. It was this subtext that M. Castan had not understood, with the result that he was bewildered by what he saw as erratic demands made by the House of Hacklheber.
At the beginning we proposed that the five Bills' dates of expiry should be at one-week intervals. We envisioned, in other words, that, beginning shortly after the invasion, our agents would present Bills in London approximately once a week for a period of five weeks, as our army fought its way across southern England toward London. We presumed that Lothar would prefer it thus, as it would spread out the transaction over a long period of time and simplify the logistics of buying or shipping the silver and having it minted. This was when we were still naïve enough to believe that Lothar construed payment of the bills as an opportunity. Later, as I have mentioned, I perceived that Lothar actually sees the possible consummation of this transaction as a risk to be hemmed in and mitigated as strictly as possible. Accordingly, he hated the idea of staggering the Bills' dates, because it would mean committing himself to be at risk (risk of having to pay silver to some unknown person in London) over a period of almost two months. For the first Bill would become payable, in theory, about two weeks following the date that Lothar wrote it in Lyon, i.e., in mid-May. The last one would remain payable in theory as late as the middle of July. It was in his interest to limit our freedom in the matter by having the Bills all payable only during a narrow interval of time shortly after the scheduled date of the invasion. That way, if the invasion came off as scheduled and a stable beach-head were established on English soil, we should have only a few days in which to present the Bill in London and demand that all of the silver be supplied at once. The deal became, in other words, an all-or-nothing proposition to be resolved, one way or the other, quite early. Indeed, Lothar wanted to issue one single Bill for half a million livres rather than breaking it up into several smaller ones—this struck me as too risky and I persuaded him to relent. So there are five separate Bills. Four of them bear the same dates—they are 45-day Bills—and the other is a 30-day Bill. All of them were written by Lothar himself; for only he has authority to write Bills of this size. He wrote them in Lyon on the 6th day of May, the Year of our Lord 1692. Postal time from Lyon to London is generally reckoned at about two weeks, so they could be presented there as early as 20 May (by the French calendar). The 30-day Bill is payable on 5 June, the other four on 20 June.