Dear Sir

I should not have wrote so soon but for my flutter on acc^t of the american news. you perhaps will so [sic] good as to fling some light on it. I attribute it to th[...][?e] precipitate motions of G. Conway; & the natural effect of an ill digested plan more calculated to overthrow the ministry than anything else. surely we are a sold people: but everything must a rise that is evil if our american army perhaps pleased with the country join with the loyalists & make a peace of their own.

The only use of Gibraltar is to get better terms.¹ if I was in the house I would risque the madness of the people by moving the giving of it up. I worship the loyal Elliot
Faithful found
among the faithless.²

Your rebuke to Moses is not amiss. He shall for the future only do things I mention in print. Pray send me Mess^rs Goslings note to the amount of the Bill, & I will pay moses

I am Dear Sir
most faithfully y^rs

Tho. Pennant

Downingoct^r 4^th 1782.

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Editorial notes

1. The siege of Gibraltar was lifted in February 1783 and the set of treatises to end the American Revolutionary War, known as the Peace of Paris, 3 September 1783, left Gibraltar with the British.
2. Words describing the seraph Abdiel ('faithful found, / Among the faithless') in John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 5, lines 896–7.
3. The address is not in Pennant's hand.
4. Stamped in ink.
5. Handwritten.