On September 25, 1780, George Washington and Alexander Hamilton watched a young mother seemingly lose her mind in a house overlooking the Hudson River. It was an act. This episode looks past the traditional Benedict Arnold story to focus on his wife, Peggy Shippen, a Philadelphia judge’s daughter educated in politics and finance who may have been the highest paid spy of the American Revolution.

We follow her from the British occupation of Philadelphia, where she met Major John Andre, to her 1779 marriage to Arnold and the back channel to British intelligence they opened within weeks. Learn how invisible ink, chatty letters, and millinery codes concealed the plot to hand over West Point, how she burned the evidence before staging her breakdown, and how a payment from King George III for her meritorious services revealed her true role.

• How Peggy Shippen’s upbringing in a quietly loyalist family taught her to conceal her allegiances
• The espionage tradecraft: invisible ink between the lines of social letters and coded orders for millinery
• Arnold’s command of West Point, the capture of Major Andre, and the collapse of the plot
• Peggy’s calculated hysteria, her banishment from Pennsylvania, and her later life in London and New Brunswick
• The Aaron Burr confession controversy and the British records tying her payment to secret dispatches