Downing Street,
Feb. 5th, 1811.

Mr. Perceval presents his humble duty to Your Royal Highness, and has the honour to acknowledge the receipt of Your Royal Highness’s letter of last night, which reached him this morning.

Mr. Perceval feels it his duty to express his humble thanks to Your Royal Highness for the frankness with which Your Royal Highness has condescended explicitly to communicate the motives which have induced Your Royal Highness to honour his colleagues and him with your commands for the continuance of their services in the stations entrusted to them by the King. And Mr. Perceval begs leave to assure Your Royal Highness that in the expression of Your Royal Highness’s sentiments of filial and loyal attachment to the King, and of anxiety for the restoration of His Majesty’s health, Mr. Perceval can see nothing but additional motives for their most anxious exertions to give satisfaction to Your Royal Highness, in the only manner in which it can be given, by endeavouring to promote Your Royal Highness’s views for the security and happiness of the country.

Mr. Perceval has never failed to regret the impression of Your Royal Highness with regard to the provisions of the Regency Bill which His Majesty’s servants felt it to be their duty to recommend to Parliament. But he ventures to submit to Your Royal Highness that, whatever difficulties the present awful crisis of the country and the world may create in the administration of the executive government, Your Royal Highness will not find them in any degree increased by the temporary suspension of the exercise of those branches of the Royal prerogative which has been introduced by Parliament, in conformity to what was intended on a former similar occasion. And that whatever Ministers Your Royal Highness might think proper to employ, would find in that full support and countenance which, as long as they were honoured with Your Royal Highness’s commands, they would feel confident that they would continue to enjoy, ample and sufficient means to enable Your Royal Highness effectually to maintain the great and important interests of the United Kingdom.

And Mr. Perceval humbly trusts that, whatever doubts Your Royal Highness may entertain with respect to the constitutional propriety of the measures which have been adopted, Your Royal Highness will feel assured that they could not have been recommended by His Majesty’s servants, nor sanctioned by Parliament, but upon the sincere, though possibly erroneous conviction, that they in no degree trenched upon the true principles and spirit of the Constitution.

Mr. Perceval feels it his duty to add that he holds himself in readiness at any moment to wait upon Your Royal Highness, and to receive any commands with which Your Royal Highness may be graciously pleased to honour him.