Thomas J. Schaeper
Edward Bancroft
Edward Bancroft was born in Westfield, Massachusetts, in 1745 and died in England in 1821. He is most famous (or infamous) today because from 1777 to 1783 he lived in Paris and worked as a British spy.
Edward Bancroft befriended and served as a general assistant and advisor to Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, John Paul Jones, the Marquis de Lafayette, and many other prominent Americans and Frenchmen. He kept his superiors in George III’s government in London apprised of all that went on between the American representatives and French ministers.
The story of his espionage involves aliases, secrets codes and ciphers, invisible inks, messages left in the hole of a tree, and other fascinating topics.
More than all that, however, there is the story of the man himself. After I started to work on this book I came to realize that his entire life was worth studying. How did a boy born of a modest New England family end up a famous scientist, author, and friend of prominent statesmen? And why did he agree to spy for the British?
First page of deciphered intelligence sent by Edward Bancroft to London in May 1777. Courtesy of the British Library.
Editor: Erind Pajo
Edward Bancroft
Thomas Schaeper Edward Bancroft: Scientist, Author, Spy Yale University Press 352 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches ISBN 978 0300118421
Available here →June 8, 2011
20110608-schaeper-thomas-edward-bancroft-scientist-author-spy-1-1
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Thomas J. Schaeper
Thomas J. Schaeper received his Ph.D. in history at Ohio State University. Since 1979 he has been a professor of history at St. Bonaventure University, in western New York State. His publications include France and America in the Revolutionary Era: The Life of Jacques-Donatien Leray de Chaumont, 1725-1803 (Berghahn Books, 1995), Rhodes Scholars, Oxford, and the Creation of an American Elite (Berghahn Books, 2010), and Edward Bancroft: Scientist, Author, Spy (Yale University Press, 2011).
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Bancroft was a Loyalist, not a traitor, and Franklin was not his accomplice.
Nearby IW · Philip deserves the epithet Great, and Alexander, who wrecked his father's project, does not.
Nearby RV · De Gaulle became the one thing Churchill never managed to be, a great peacetime leader.
Nearby RE · The 1743 Memoirs of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman, reprinted as a novel, is substantially true.
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