The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes

by Mark Urban

  From Falmouth to the Solent, the Fleet disgorged the consequences of another ill-conceived foreign expedition in numerous bays and harbours. Once more, the Royal Navy had brought the Army out of a disastrous campaign, just as they had in Flanders, the River Plate, Dardanelles and the second Egyptian campaign. One observer wrote in The Times, ‘the fact must not be disguised that we have suffered a shameful disaster’.

  The Implacable’s passage took just three days. The ship was a prize of Trafalgar, formerly the Duguay Trouin, which itself made an eloquent enough point about the different fortunes of Britain’s soldiers and sailors. She was one of twenty vessels taken when the French sailors had had enough of the battering of British broadsides and struck their colours. Three and a half years later, this trophy of the nation’s most sublime victory at sea was bearing back the lice-infested survivors of another ill-considered adventure on land.

  Scovell left Implacable in Torbay and made his way to Portsmouth, where his two horses, servant and the remnants of his corps of Guides had been disembarked. He returned to a land buzzing with rumour and speculation, a land in which the name of Sir John Moore was already being murmured with the reverence befitting another martyr of the long struggle against the French.

  The expedition had barely returned before a whispering campaign against General Moore began in Parliament and Horse Guards.* Major-General Charles Stewart, who had actually served in the Corunna campaign, was one such malcontent. Stewart damned Moore several years later, in one of the first histories of these events: ‘he wanted confidence in himself – he was afraid of responsibility – he underrated the qualities of his own troops and greatly overrated those of his adversary’.

  Stewart, a cavalry general, was the brother of Lord Castlereagh, the secretary of war, and as such was influential among the ruling Tory faction in London. Stewart was Scovell’s polar opposite. Of limited brain and boundless confidence, he had risen through influence. Everything about him was show. The cavalry general loved his hussar’s uniform with its rows of rich lace weaving back and forth across the chest, connecting shiny buttons. The ensemble was crowned with a furry busby towering eighteen inches on his head. Stewart was also fond of wearing his decorations, great crusty chunks of enamel and jewels, in the field, seeing himself as the dashing light cavalry officer, a beau sabreur par excellence. Moore saw him as ‘a very silly fellow’. If only it could have been that harmless. As a Member of Parliament serving in the field, something not uncommon, he had no understanding of the dangers of mixing party politics with military duty. Since political influence counted for so much in the Army hierarchy, however, he was a fool who had to be suffered gladly by various generals.

  At that moment, early in 1809, there were many officers who shared Stewart’s views about Moore’s failure, but they did not enter publicly nor quite so fiercely into the spirit of party rivalry. A few weeks after the Corunna embarkation, Captain William Warre, for example, wrote in a letter to his father, ‘everything I hear confirms my opinion that our retreat from Spain, etc etc etc was inconsiderate, and I fear will place us in rather a disgraceful light. This entre nous.’

  Despite Warre’s delicacy, word about Corunna was filtering around the country. London newspapers carried the French accounts of these events, as well as Castlereagh’s version. The Gentlemen’s Magazine, for example, translated the thirty-first Bulletin of Napoleon’s army, with its report that ‘the English retreated in confusion and consternation … the English have lost everything that constitutes an army; generals, horses, baggage, ammunition, magazines’. And the truth was that 8,000 of Moore’s 35,000 had not come home. Perhaps only one tenth of these had been lost at the Battle of Corunna itself; the remainder had expired or fallen behind on the dreadful retreat.

  Scovell’s private pain at all this – for his journal provides ample evidence of his admiration for Moore – must have been considerable, but he did not allow himself time to weigh up the events of Corunna for some months. He attended to business in Portsmouth as best he could and then set out at the end of January to find Mary. It was left to more prominent supporters of the slain general to defend his reputation publicly. James Moore published a collection of his late brother John’s dispatches a few months after Corunna with the preface that, ‘he could not remain passive when his Brother’s memory was assailed by ungenerous attacks and dark insinuations’.

  For the architects of this expedition, it was important to quash these criticisms by declaring a glorious victory as quickly as possible. Lord Castlereagh went to Parliament on 25 January and paid tribute to Moore, who, he said, ‘fell deeply lamented, on the 16th January at Corunna, where he defeated a very superior French army and established the glory of the British military character’.

  Castlereagh was given a rough ride, with much heckling and derisory cheering. The government of which he was part was drawn from one of the Tory cabals whose membership shifted its allegiance between leading politicians with the unexpectedness and force of a Solent tide. The Ministry was under attack from unhappy Tories as well as their old enemy, the Whigs. In 1809, though, ministers often admitted their mistakes and the spirit of party rivalry was not so violent that it blinded members to Castlereagh’s courage and sense of honour when he told them that no blame could be attached to General Moore, who had done his best to follow difficult orders.

  If Castlereagh had been honourable enough to accept responsibility for any failure himself, he was also an astute enough minister to understand the value of moving swiftly on to more palatable business. Two days later, with recriminations about Corunna still echoing in the lobbies of Parliament, he felt it an auspicious moment to remind everyone of the victory of Vimiero, six months earlier, in Portugal.

  Lieutenant-General Sir Arthur Wellesley was there to receive the vote of thanks in person. Entering the chamber, Wellesley looked around, acknowledging the approbation of his fellow MPs. He wore his full dress uniform: a red coat, with cuffs, collar and lapels of royal blue, chevrons of gold lace marking his rank on the sleeves. In the field, he preferred a plain blue coat, but Wellesley was a man of finely honed political instincts and knew he must look the part of the conquering hero. As he listened to the panegyrics, many members no doubt took the opportunity to study him. Wellesley’s hooked nose and hawk-like gaze were often remarked upon. Goya sketched him a couple of years later, with his close-cropped hair brushed forward across the brow, enhancing the impression of an intense, brooding intellect. His wiry frame and precise manner of speech suggested an active, zealous personality.

  Having grown up in one of the great Anglo-Irish political families, Wellesley understood how to speak to this audience. For, while he and the circles he moved in considered many members of the Commons to be little more than upstarts and blackguards, Wellesley knew that they saw themselves as the defenders of England’s ancient liberties and that exploiting these sentiments would consolidate his good standing. In replying to the vote of thanks, he told them:

  no man can value more highly than I do the honourable distinction which has been conferred on me; a distinction which it is in the power of the representatives of a free People alone to bestow, and which it is the peculiar advantage of officers and soldiers in the service of His Majesty to have held out to them as the object of their ambition.

  In the Commons, they knew he had won victories in India, but what they really cared about was that he had made such a good showing against the French at Vimiero (never mind that the odds were stacked in his favour) and that he had the complete confidence of the Ministry. The Corunna affair may have cooled some of the patriotic excitement of the previous summer, but the performance of the British troops in Elviña or of the cavalry in its rearguard actions had convinced many Members of Parliament that the game was still worth pursuing in the Iberian Peninsula. Some also believed the nation wanted to see Sir John Moore avenged, and there were rumours that Austria was about to launch a new war against France. The expediency of organizing a further expedi
tion to stir up the Iberian hornet’s nest was clear to most Members of Parliament. If anyone was the favourite to lead such a new enterprise, it was Arthur Wellesley.

  *

  The fortnight Scovell spent with his wife in February 1809 was an idyll that would sustain him through untold hardship in later months. He had not seen her for six months, although this would have been nothing to the naval officers on blockade, who might not come home for three years at a stretch.

  He found her at Sprotborough Hall, a sumptuous pile in Yorkshire where she had gone to be with her family. They did not own this huge mansion with its wings, elaborate gardens and great fountain, but were frequent guests there of its masters, the Copleys.

  George and Mary had married nearly four years earlier, in May 1805, in Manchester Cathedral. They had grown up in rather different worlds. She was the eldest daughter of the Clowes family, Lancashire landowners. Her family was not hugely wealthy during her childhood, but by 1809 the expectations of the Clowes clan were looking more promising. Twenty years before, when her grandfather had made a will, their scattered holdings around Salford and Manchester had given him a worth of £5,000 – certainly no great sum. The Clowes patriarch had lived on (surviving his son, Mary’s father) to see his holdings increase in value severalfold as their city found itself at the heart of England’s industrial revolution.

  Scovell had come from humbler origins. A family servant tactfully described Mary’s future husband as ‘the son of very respectable parents, though not independent gentlefolks’. His parents (also George and Mary) had married at St Martin’s in the Fields Church in Westminster in 1770. Young George, born in London in 1774, was the eldest of five siblings. Scovell, it seems – for he was reticent about revealing details of his early life – grew up in the great metropolis of his birth. He excelled at school, particularly in languages, mastering Latin, Greek and French. George’s father had propelled him towards a trade as a teenager, for the Scovell family could not afford to carry passengers. George found himself apprenticed to an engraver, an occupation in which his patience and methodical approach to problems could be applied to some profit.

  It was the mayhem across the Channel, and the emergence from it of Napoleon Bonaparte as emperor, that transformed Scovell’s prospects. The triumph of France’s revolutionaries set off a series of invasion scares in Britain. The Army needed to be expanded rapidly and vast reserves of militias, yeomanry and fencibles created in case Bonaparte’s hordes crossed the Channel. It was this mobilisation that allowed Scovell to escape his destiny hunched over an engraver’s table and become a gentleman. When the Warwickshire Fencibles, a regiment of cavalry for home defence, was raised, his intelligence and literacy singled him out for commission as an officer.

  Britain’s hysteria about a possible French invasion abated occasionally, and during one such period, in 1800, the Fencibles were disbanded, which led to an even greater stroke of luck. Scovell was offered the chance of converting into a regular cavalry regiment, the 4th Dragoons, with the rank of lieutenant; a transition from a band of county amateurs to one of Britain’s best-trained bodies of heavy cavalry. He had taken another step up the ladder of gentility without any outlay whatsoever, for those seeking advancement in a regiment as fashionable as the 4th Dragoons often paid large sums of money to jump the promotion queue.

  Scovell loved his new life in the 4th. He took on extra duties as the colonel’s adjutant, helping to administer the regiment, while applying himself earnestly to the training. His desire to make his way in this new military family was so intense that, late in 1803, he paid a vast sum, £3,150, to buy a captain’s commission in the 4th Dragoons. Since he had netted just £262 from the sale of his lieutenancy, he had to draw on his family for the difference, almost £2,900. This high figure (almost as much as the purchase of a commission in the Household Cavalry) reflected the 4th’s status as a fashionable regiment.

  In 1804, the year after a purchase that had strained every financial sinew, Scovell’s regiment found itself posted to the south coast in response to renewed hostilities with France. It was not military duties that were to prove the ultimate cause of his crisis, but social ones. The 4th was in Brighton and Lewes and its officers were soon putting in long hours in the salons and assembly rooms, adorning the fashionable set surrounding the Prince of Wales. There were numerous functions requiring full dress uniform, royal reviews of the regiment and much granting of reciprocal hospitality.

  With the expense of holding his own on the regimental scene exceeding his captain’s annual salary of about £270 by three- or fourfold, Scovell had no choice but to give up the game. The bitter physic for his financial malady involved increasing his income and lowering his outgoings. He had accepted the advice of those who told him that the only way in which a man of his talents and limited means could make his way in the Army was by joining the Staff. Late in 1804, a few months after the 4th went to the south coast, Scovell transferred to Derby. There, he received extra pay while working at the local Headquarters as one of the new breed of officers being established by Horse Guards. His duties as a ‘Major of Brigade’ (confusingly, he remained a captain), involved assisting the major-general in command of this Army district, and ranged from assisting the general in disseminating his orders to preparing the regiments garrisoned in the district for deployment overseas.

  Scovell’s progress in the Army led him into the best and worst of experiences of his life before the Corunna campaign. It took him to the centres of fashionable society, to Bath and Brighton, where he could observe the greatest men of his age and believe that he had ventured far from his origins. The Army had also transformed the one-time apprentice engraver into a worthy match for a grander family connection. Scovell’s friendship with Captain Leigh Clowes of the 3rd Dragoons (another heavy cavalry regiment), who also lived in Derby, led to an introduction to his sister, Mary. The couple most likely met at one of the many dances or assemblies attended by the eligible people of the county.

  The union between George and Mary had been one of love, as their later adventures would demonstrate, but also one of carefully matched pragmatism. Although the eldest child, Mary stood to inherit very little: an allowance of little over £200 per year. Marrying at the age of thirty in an epoch when a young woman of good family usually made her alliance between twenty and twenty-five, she was also most unlikely to be deluged by rival suitors. By the rates of exchange of the Georgian marriage market, Mary’s various liabilities equalled Scovell’s one great one: his obscure birth.

  For Mary, her brother’s officer friends offered a way to escape the tedium of family life in Lancashire and to travel more widely. Another of her brothers, John, was a clergyman, but although this must have brought many respectable men of the cloth into her social orbit, the prospect of sharing her life with them was evidently unenticing. Mary, it seems, shared Jane Austen’s view that marrying into the Army was an altogether more exciting proposition than the clergy: ‘it has everything in its favour; heroism, danger, bustle, fashion. Soldiers and sailors are always acceptable in society.’

  Soon after George and Mary’s union in 1805, Scovell applied to study at the Royal Military College in Wycombe. It was there that he could learn the business of the Quartermaster-General’s branch properly. His sights were set not just on scholarly edification but on the extra pay received by a Deputy Assistant Quartermaster-General, just over £172 per annum. An ambitious Wycombe graduate hoped, once qualified, to be sent overseas on some expedition that might bring distinction and the notice of a general who could further his interest.

  In 1806, the couple left Derby and took up residence near the college, where Scovell began life as a student. For all the happiness of his new life with Mary, Scovell was evidently still in great financial difficulty, however. He avoided the conventional dangers awaiting cavalry captains off the battlefield (gambling, duelling or too much whoring), but his life as an officer in the 4th Dragoons was still proving way beyond his means.

&
nbsp; The promise of extra pay once he left Wycombe was not enough to save him, so Scovell had to swallow an even more bitter pill. While at the college, he transferred from the 4th Dragoons into the 57th Foot. The difference between being a captain in one regiment and another was a good deal of money: £1,650 to be precise, enough to secure his immediate future with Mary.

  The cavalry carried a greater cachet than a marching regiment of foot, so on 27 February 1807, Scovell signed a deed exchanging his cavalry commission with the less valuable one of Captain Oliver in the 57th. Henry Hardinge, a fellow student at Wycombe, was also an officer in the 57th Foot and he helped his friend Scovell arrange the deal. Scovell may have restored his finances with the £1,650 gained from the swap, but, in his early thirties, he had actually gone backwards in the promotion stakes.

  Prior to sailing for the Iberian Peninsula, he spent the best part of two years at Wycombe working on French, German, mathematics, trigonometry, topographical drawing, fortification and siegecraft. But although Scovell’s brain was carrying him into the ranks of Britain’s most diligent and professional soldiers, he found it very hard to accept he had lost the status he had enjoyed for twelve years as a cavalry officer.

  In February 1809, following Scovell’s return from Corunna, there was time for reflection as George and Mary walked arm in arm around Sprotsborough Hall’s formal gardens, wrapped up against the chill. He was losing hope of ever getting promotion, his will to carry on working twice as hard as the officers with greater means and better connections was faltering. And did they talk about whether the good Lord might still bless them with children? Or was Mary also bereft of hope, for she was just a few months younger than George and many considered it unhealthy, even dangerous, for a woman of thirty-four to give birth.

  As the captain on leave pondered whether there was any future in the Army, events in London took a dramatic and unexpected turn. The whole system of promotion and patronage had been blown open by a scandal. It involved sex, corruption and the royal family.