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BURGOYNE and his whole army are prisoners of war!” Recalling the moment later, Austin said the effect was “electrical,” and throughout France the rejoicing over the rebel triumph at Saratoga was as enthusiastic as if it had been a victory by French troops. Beaumarchais, ever on the alert for an event that would enhance his stock market speculations, was in such a hurry to get to Paris that his reckless driving caused his carriage to overturn, injuring his arm.
    During these past weeks the English had been on tenterhooks of their own, waiting for word about Burgoyne’s army. They had been in the dark for more than three weeks, wrote the British man of letters Horace Walpole, who complained that “impatience is very high and uneasiness increases with every day.” On December 2 official news from General Sir Guy Carleton in Quebec reached Whitehall, announcing “the total annihilation … of Burgoyne’s army,” prompting Walpole to say, “we are … very near the end of the American war,” adding that the king “fell into agonies on hearing this account.…”
    On December 17, one day shy of two weeks after the news reached Passy, the American commissioners were notified that His Majesty Louis XVI was ready to acknowledge the independence of the United States and enter into a treaty of amity and commerce. On the evening of February 6, 1778, that treaty was signed, embodying most-favored-nation trading privileges and certain maritime principles along with recognizing independence. A second treaty—a “conditional and defensive alliance” that was to have a profound effect on the revolution in America—provided that in the event of war between France and Great Britain as a consequence of the first treaty, the United States and France would fight the war together and neither would make peace with the enemy without the formal consent of the other. Further, they would not lay down their arms until the independence of the United States was assured by a treaty ending the war.
    France at once conveyed to the British government the treaty of amity and commerce (though not the alliance), not realizing that a spy had already given George III’s agents a copy of both treaties. The spy was an American double agent, Dr. Edward Bancroft. Originally from Massachusetts, he had studied medicine in England and settled there to pursue scientific interests, through which he met Benjamin Franklin. When the latter went to France, Bancroft arranged to work as a spy for him, as he did, beginning in 1776, for Silas Deane as well. At the same time he was an agent of the British, who paid him a handsome £1,000 annually, with a promise of a pension of £500 a year. (It might be added that he was rewarded further through speculations in the market, based on the secret information he obtained.) As a final achievement, he arranged to be appointed secretary of the American Peace Commission negotiating the final settlement with Great Britain, and so effective was his cover that his career as a spy was not suspected until a century after he had died. As he put it after the war in a letter to Britain’s foreign secretary, he went to France and “during the first year resided in the same house with Dr. Franklin, Mr. Deane, etc., and regularly informed this Government of every transaction of the American Commissioners.…”
    If the stakes had not been so high, the frenzied activity of espionage agents milling around in the little house in Passy would have seemed a joke. In addition to British agents, Louis XVI’s secret service spied continuously on the American commissioners, suspicious that they might be carrying on behind-the-scenes negotiations with England while working for a treaty with France.
    At the center of British efforts to divine the relationship between France and the American colonies and prevent an alliance between the two was William