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will consider as enemies to his Majesty and this country, all those who shall [advise] the farther prosecution of offensive war on the continent of North America.” This rather startling proposition was carried without a vote. It put an end to the matter. To refuse Parliament’s advice was unconstitutional. No lawless monarch, George III knew only that he must stay within the rules. To carry on as before would mean overt conflict with Parliament; he must either comply or step down. He actually drafted a statement of abdication which said that as the Legislature has “totally incapacitated him from either conducting the war with any effect or from obtaining any peace that would not be destructive to the commerce and essential rights of the British nation His Majesty therefore with much sorrow finds he can be of no further Utility to his Native Country which drives him to the painful step of quitting it forever.” In consequence, “His Majesty resigns the Crown of Great Britain and the Dominions appertaining thereto.”

Rather than come to that point, he chose the lesser misery and agreed to drop North and treat for peace. On March 20, 1782, in “one of the fullest and most tense Houses that had ever been seen,” with the streets outside equally crowded, the First Minister, who for twelve years had placidly presided over the most turbulent times since the Gunpowder Plot, was relieved at last. Given his long-desired and perhaps now ambivalent wish, Lord North resigned. A government of the Opposition took over, with Rockingham, Shelburne, Fox and the young Pitt. On April 25, the Cabinet agreed to negotiate peace terms with no allowance for a veto of independence.

In the interim, the Battle of the Saints had lifted British spirits even at the cost of disturbing Sir Horace Walpole’s sleep. He complained, expressing the Whig view of Rodney, that his windows had been broken by a noisy demonstration “for that vain fool Rodney when he came out of his way to extend his triumph.” The damage in the Battle of the Saints to French naval prestige ensured that the French would not return to America to lend further aid to Washington, which, together with restored British self-confidence won by Rodney, stiffened the British spine in the peace parleys. At the same time, the Americans were stiffened by formal Dutch recognition when the Dutch provinces cautiously, one at a time, voted to accept Adams’ credentials as minister-envoy of the United States and the States General of the United Provinces confirmed the vote in 1782, becoming the first nation after France to register formal recognition of the United States. A British negotiator proposed by Shelburne—a liberal Scots merchant named Richard Oswald, not a figure of political eminence—had been chosen and accredited to the Congress. Issues to be settled were as many and as hard to handle as a barrel of fish. Boundaries of Canada and the regions of the Northwest and of the Spanish territories in Florida and the South, and the perennial problem of treatment of the Loyalists, relations with the Indians, rights of trade and all the debris of military damage to lands and property required infinite discussion. After a preliminary treaty was reached on November 30, 1782, unfinished business was moved to Paris, where Franklin and John Jay negotiated for America. Differences and disputes between them, repeated by their respective partisans in Congress, prolonged the talks, which suffered further from interference of Vergennes in his effort to control the terms to French advantage. Difficulties stretched out the discussions for another ten months. The definitive peace treaty ending hostilities and acknowledging the independence of the United States was not signed until September 3, 1783.

Even then a new nation was not born from the labor pains. To create a national entity with agreed laws under a single sovereignty on a sound financial footing out of thirteen distinct colonies with interests and habits almost as separate as those of the Dutch was a path as rocky as the Revolution itself. Stumbling over the