Victory at Yorktown Read Online Free PDF

Eden, an undersecretary of state and chief of the Secret Service in London. His man in charge of the Paris operation was Paul Wentworth, an American loyalist, Harvard graduate and classmate of John Adams, and until recently the London agent for New Hampshire. He was related to Benning Wentworth, who served as the first royal governor of New Hampshire, and his reason for becoming a secret agent was not the £500 a year he was paid, but the promise of a baronetcy, which meant a seat in Parliament and a position of some prestige in English society. Always prepared, he carried with him a cipher with recipes for several invisible inks, used as many as twenty assumed names, and devoted himself unstintingly to his work, with results that were of incalculable value to the British government. He prided himself on being a gentleman, yet he was capable of such outrageous acts as stealing a friend’s visiting card and seal and going to any lengths to buy or pilfer documents. However, he was never to achieve the goal he most desired. Lord Suffolk believed that Lord North should reward his services; Lord North thought the king should do it; but George III did not like Wentworth (or other agents, for that matter), who kept reporting French actions to assist the Americans, which the king didn’t want to hear.
    The monarch discovered a way to rationalize his prejudice against Wentworth: when he discovered that he liked to gamble, he took to calling him a “stock-jobber” and a “dabbler in the alley,” who was not to be trusted because such men were easily hoodwinked. Thanks to Wentworth and Bancroft, among others, the British government was far better informed about the secrets of its rebellious colonies than most Americans were, but the reason this knowledge had so little impact on the conduct of the war was the king’s unreasonable animus against financial speculation and his conviction that his secret agents were involved in gambling—which they were. If he had paid attention to his agents, he would have realized that no more than a handful of American leaders were advocating independence in the early stages of the war.
    For example, a letter to William Lee in London, written in October of 1775 and signed “J.A.” (almost certainly John Adams), was intercepted by British postal authorities and known to the Secret Service, if not the king’s ministers. It read:
    We cannot in this country conceive that there are men in England so infatuated as seriously to suspect the Congress or people here to erect ourselves into an independent state. If such an idea really obtains amongst those at the helm of affairs, one hour’s residence in America would eradicate it. I never met one individual so inclined but it is universally disavowed.
    To be sure, that was written late in 1775, but two years later Benjamin Franklin was still reluctant to push the French too hard by revealing his advocacy of independence. Not until he heard the news of Saratoga in December of 1777 did he feel sufficiently confident that the French would back the Americans with an alliance and, better yet, warships and troops, so that he could speak openly about independence.
    In other words, by heeding Lord Stormont’s reports from his spies, George III might have understood that an opportunity existed to settle affairs with the Americans short of independence, while keeping the colonies within the empire. Not until after the American victory at Saratoga was Wentworth instructed to propose terms secretly to Franklin—terms which North announced in Parliament two months later. But by then it was too late by far.
    In a last-minute desperation move aimed at reconciliation with the former colonies, a peace commission headed by Frederick Howard, Lord Carlisle, the twenty-nine-year-old, extremely rich friend of the opposition politician Charles James Fox, was dispatched to America in 1778, bearing terms that would take relations