Page:Englishmen in the French Revolution.djvu/110

90 of Grafton in 1769 for having offered him £5000 to procure one of his sons the reversion to the post of Clerk of the Crown in Jamaica. The proceedings seem to have been dropped on Grafton's resignation of the premiership in January 1770, and the Letters of Junius, which had at first sharply attacked Vaughan, afterwards pronounced him "honest but mistaken." He took a warm interest in the Corsican rising, and helped to raise a subscription for Paoli's adherents. Benjamin was born in Jamaica in 1751, and was educated at Hackney, Warrington, and Cambridge, but being a Unitarian, could not graduate. The Vaughans were related to Horne Tooke, and he may have been named Benjamin after Tooke's eldest brother, a great horticulturist at Brentford. Lord Shelburne, also fond of horticulture, presented Benjamin Horne with some fine strawberry plants from Saratoga, the first known in England, and he frequently stayed a night with him. This may account for Benjamin Vaughan becoming private secretary to Shelburne. Both of them sided with the American colonists. In 1777 Jonathan Loring Austin, the American envoy, went with Vaughan and Dr. Priestley to the House of Lords to hear a debate on America, but admission was refused. In March 1778 Vaughan sent Franklin an outline of