 His transference from military life to diplomacy is not easy to explain, but in the account given by Wraxall, disfigured though it is by malicious or purely fanciful embroidery, there is perhaps a nucleus of truth.Whitworth was

The good offices of the queen and Dorset, according to this authority, procured for Whitworth in June 1785 his appointment as envoy-extraordinary and minister-plenipotentiary to Poland, of which country the unfortunate Stanisław Poniatowski was still the nominal monarch.He was at Warsaw during the troubled period immediately preceding the second partition.