The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes

by Mark Urban

  I enclose the deciphered copy of a letter in cipher, from Gen. Montbrun to the Governor of Ciudad Rodrigo, from which it appears that it is the enemy’s intention to endeavor to introduce large supplies of provisions into that place from the side of Plasencia, as well as from that of Salamanca. The dates being all in cipher, and not having been able to discover that part of the key, we don’t know exactly on what day the operation is to commence, but I should imagine about the 20th or 21st.

  Wellington’s supposition, filling in the last piece of the jigsaw, was exactly right. Marmont’s operation began on 21 September. Since he already knew from other deciphered messages and scouts’ reports that the Army of Portugal had been joined by a strong force from the Army of the North, his position was precarious. Estimates suggested that the combined French armies would outnumber the allied troops in the area by 15,000 or so.

  In September, as in June 1811 at Badajoz, successful French cooperation forced Wellington to withdraw. He would have to pull back and abandon the siege of Ciudad Rodrigo. Wellington’s frustrations burst out as he wrote to Beresford, ‘the devil is in the French for numbers’.

  On 24 September, the British fell back in front of Ciudad Rodrigo, allowing the French to enter the town. Since he had no intention of offering battle in the plain beside it and Marmont had achieved his limited objective, Wellington assumed the danger was over.

  The following day, Montbrun, with a strong force of 2,500 cavalry, pushed down the road from Rodrigo to Fuente Guinaldo, where Wellington’s Headquarters was located. They caught several British battalions about halfway up this route at El Bodon, unprepared for a serious defence. For a couple of hours, the fate of these British troops hung in the balance as they fell back under heavy pressure from the French cavalry.

  Marmont could not move his infantry forward fast enough to capitalize on Wellington’s mistake and bring on a general engagement. Still, the French commander had learned a great deal from El Bodon. Wellington made mistakes, just like any other general, and the key to future French success would be pouncing on such an error more quickly and exploiting it.

  The day after this engagement at El Bodon, both generals brought up reinforcements. In Marmont’s case, this included regiments of the Imperial Guard belonging to the Army of the North. Scovell and other members of the Staff took up positions on a hillside and watched as these picked men marched into view. The French army formed up in front of them and troops were drawn up in lines for review.

  The guard infantry were altogether smarter in appearance than the footsloggers who normally stood against Wellington. They marched with precision and their shakos were decorated with tall plumes. The guard cavalry also made a fine spectacle. The horse grenadiers, resplendent in bearskin hats, sat atop magnificent chargers while the chasseurs à cheval, on smaller mounts, wore a gaudy uniform of green and red draped with lace and aiguillettes. The guards’ bands started playing their old favourites, the thumping of drums echoing around the hills, and the French marshal rode along the lines, cheered by the troops. Scovell wrote in his journal, ‘Marmont passed down the line in great state. Not a shot was fired on either side.’

  Wellington had chosen not to fight following this display of power because it was already apparent to him that he could not defend the Fuente Guinaldo area against such numbers. He ordered his men back into Portugal, daring Marmont to follow and resigning any designs on Ciudad Rodrigo for the time being. The marshal had only been in command for four months, but the British Staff had been most impressed. One of them noted they had formed ‘an extremely favourable notion of the judgement and good sense’ of Marmont.

  *

  Wellington had understood that Marmont would be most reluctant to follow him on to the barren border plateau, and within a few days Headquarters had settled down in Frenada, a grindingly poor Portuguese village a little to the east of the Coa gorge, just a mile or two behind the spot where Scovell had fought for his life against the French cavalry on 5 May. With the seasons turning, this upland countryside reminded many a British officer of home. The leaves on the oaks browned, Frenada’s chimneys sent zigzags of smoke into the grey sky and the dry stone walls around the village were dusted each morning with a sugar coating of frost. The air on this plateau is intoxicatingly pure and riders going to and from Frenada were charmed to see all forms of game scampering between the big boulders and ferns that carpeted the landscape. Some of the Staff described it as just like being on Dartmoor or in the west of Ireland.

  For Major Scovell, arriving in Frenada allowed some reflection on family matters. It was the first time in months that he had broken the continual ritual of moving from one barn or bivouac to another. His billet in one of the village’s low-roofed farmhouses was a spartan one and most likely it was here that he began wondering whether Mary might join him in Portugal. A few weeks before, he had received the sad news that his wife’s brother, Samuel Clowes, had died.

  The death of Samuel threw the Clowes family’s affairs into some turmoil. Mary’s grandfather was still alive but he had buried a son (Mary’s father) and a grandson who were both heirs to the dynasty’s new-found wealth. The succession had devolved upon another of her brothers, the vicar John Clowes. He was forty-four years old and childless, like his sister. If he remained so, then the fortune would go to the next brother in line, Leigh Clowes, who incidentally had arrived in Portugal in August of 1811 as a major, second-in-command of the 3rd Dragoons.

  The loss of Samuel must have been difficult for Mary to bear, being followed as it was by the dramatic change in Major Clowes’s expectations at the very moment that he had placed himself in the midst of a campaign. George wanted them to be together at this difficult time. There was no question of taking leave; this bad news had arrived just as he was becoming indispensable in Headquarters. What was more, Wellington’s refusal to grant leave to his low-born officers, while sending the aristocrats home to winter in London, was already the subject of muttering and resentment in the Staff. Scovell did not even ask, but began thinking about a different project.

  Some officers in the Army had brought their wives with them. His old friend Lieutenant-Colonel Dalbiac of the 4th Dragoons, or rather his wife Susannah, was the talk of many a mess. She shared every hardship of campaigning, riding with her husband at the head of the regiment. When the 4th were sent to Estremadura earlier that summer, Susannah Dalbiac had slept under the stars like a common trooper.

  If he could not comfort her at home, why not bring Mary to Portugal? After all, she would not be leaving any children behind if she did come. George and Mary Scovell started to hatch their own plan of campaign.

  Leigh Clowes was not the only relation to join Scovell in Portugal that autumn. George’s brother Henry, aged twenty, had come out to fill a lowly civilian post as a Deputy Assistant Paymaster General. Major Scovell, it seems, had already begun to use his interest, slim as it was, at Headquarters to the benefit of his family.

  And the war itself? Wellington did not rule out another attempt on Ciudad Rodrigo as the forces concentrated by Marmont began to disperse, but the moment would have to be chosen most carefully. Don Julian continued to seize the enemy’s messages and to bring reports from Wellington’s spies.

  In Ciudad Rodrigo, the principal agent was a former member of the town junta, a committed and brave man who had remained within the walls, incognito. Of course, many people knew who he was as he went about gathering information on the state of the garrison’s supplies, but he relied on their hatred of the French to protect his secret. When the town gates were opened at daybreak, some small report would be handed to a farmer going outside the walls to work. He would then hand the spy’s report to one of Don Julian’s scouts.

  In Salamanca, Wellington’s principal correspondent was an Irish priest, Father Patrick Curtis. Already seventy-odd years old, this grey-haired little man moved about the streets of the university town in his black habit, acknowledging the respectful greetings of its citizens and observing t
he comings and goings of the French army.

  Wellington could not have been more fortunate as to Curtis’s location, geographic and social. Salamanca was the ideal point at which to gain warning of any great project of Marmont’s three or four days before it might bear fruit on the border. Being Professor of Astronomy and Natural History at the university, as well as Rector of the Irish College, Curtis also had an entrée into the higher level of society. When Marmont was in Salamanca, he frequently entertained the town’s grandees at his table. From some of these contacts, Curtis might sometimes learn something about the marshal’s plans.

  These agents’ reports, combined with those of exploring officers and deciphered letters, were consumed voraciously by Wellington, installed in the farmhouse in the centre of Frenada that had become his Headquarters. While Scovell worked away on his deciphering, or Somerset received some of the agent reports from a Guide coming to the door, only the commander himself obtained the intelligence picture in its entirety. He guarded this prerogative jealously, and by the autumn of 1811 was becoming quite nervous about sharing his knowledge with others, lest it lead the French to find his agents. He became angry with the Commandant of Northern Portugal, one General Silveira, who needed to be kept in the picture about French movements but, as Wellington noted in a letter to Beresford, ‘the intelligence received from Salamanca by General Silveira, [is] forwarded by him to the Portuguese government, from which papers it is copied in the English papers. Our correspondents there will certainly be discovered if this practice is continued.’

  On 15 October, Wellington and his Staff momentarily forgot any anxieties they may have had as Frenada’s little central square echoed to English voices bearing some unexpected and quite remarkable news. General Regnaud, the Governor of Ciudad Rodrigo, had been captured by Don Julian Sanchez.

  The day before, Regnaud had ridden out of the fort with a small escort of cavalry. The tedium of his situation was such that he had wanted to take some exercise riding around the little plain of Rodrigo. A party of guerrillas was lurking in the trees not 500 yards from the gate. They had gone there to carry off as many of the garrison’s cattle as they could find, a brigandry that had assumed a patriotic legitimacy, since it was designed to reduce further the supplies available to the French. On seeing the governor’s party make its way down the steep slope from the city walls to the river and then cross the Roman bridge over the Agueda, the guerrillas had decided that the odds were favourable for a combat. Regnaud, two of his staff and a good many cows were taken.

  Regnaud must have thought himself a lost man when he was bound and carried off by the guerrillas. Who, indeed, would not have wondered whether they would torture him, whether they would finish him off with the knife or a shot to the head? He had been delivered first to the HQ of General Carlos D’Espagne, commander of a small Spanish force attached to Wellington’s Army. This release from the custody of the guerrillas brought no relief – far from it: D’Espagne had first wanted to shoot Regnaud in retaliation for the killing of some Spanish generals by the French.

  The British prevailed upon D’Espagne to hand over his prize and Wellington thought it only right that Regnaud should receive decent hospitality at Frenada. The governor, after all, had become a British prisoner, unlike poor General Franceschi. The captured Frenchman was invited to dinner.

  Wellington’s table in the Frenada Headquarters was not a large one, so Regnaud joined about a dozen British officers as they sat down for their meal at five in the evening. Major-General Charles Stewart was there, as were Scovell, Somerset and several of the commander’s young ADCs. Stewart commiserated with their guest for his bad luck. The Adjutant-General noted, ‘his misfortunes were borne with the utmost philosophy and good humour’, and there was every reason why they should be.

  There must have been several times between his capture and this meal when Regnaud feared immediate execution, yet here he was in the warmth of Wellington’s Headquarters consuming a tasty roast and feeling the inner warmth of the fine claret they shared with him. Finding himself in such elevated and civilized company, relieved beyond measure, the governor became most talkative. Scovell’s presence at the table was assured by his superb grasp of French and his need to learn as much as possible about the hidden world of the enemy camp. Any detail Regnaud let slip about the name of some brigade commander or the jealousies between two generals might prove significant in the deciphering of dispatches. One of the keys to breaking strong ciphers, Scovell had scribbled in his Conradus notebook, is ‘knowing well what is going on’ (his emphasis).

  Wellington naturally led this gentle cross-examination; it was his table, after all, and his own French, polished decades before at a military school in Anger, was extremely good. After several meals in this company, Scovell had learned much. He summarized it in his journal:

  He assured us that all was silence and distrust in French society and that no man thought himself secure with his friend where there was a third person. He instanced the table of Dorsenne, and compared it with ours where every man spoke what he thought. The different Armies in Spain are all independent and only acknowledge the emperor’s order.

  The ebullience at Headquarters resulting from Regnaud’s capture brought its own bitter aftertaste two days later. The French had launched some kind of hunt for spies, with the consequence that Wellington had feared. Father Curtis had been arrested in Salamanca. Eventually, he obtained his release but remained under suspicion by the French, having to rely on ever more elaborate methods to get his messages out. Wellington’s spy in Ciudad Rodrigo, however, fled the city, fearing imminent arrest.

  Just before the end of that month, some kind of happy equilibrium was restored at Headquarters when Lieutenant-Colonel John Grant presented himself. He had disappeared while on exploring duties in Estremadura some weeks before. Taken by the French, he had been taking exercise outside his prison in Talavera when he was rescued by a guerrilla commander called Temprano. It was a further example of the kind of episode of guerrilla daring that made the French look flat-footed and cheered the company around Wellington’s dinner table. News from Lieutenant-General Rowland Hill, commanding Anglo-Portuguese forces to the south, was also most encouraging. He had attacked and routed a French division at Arroyo de Molinos, leading Napoleon to recall its commander in disgrace.

  At the end of October, a ciphered message from Marmont to General Foy was captured and brought in to Frenada. It proved particularly interesting in the light of Regnaud’s table-talk.

  Marmont and King Joseph had fallen into dispute. Foraging closer and closer to Madrid in search of supplies, the Army of Portugal had incurred the king’s displeasure. Marmont wrote to Foy, ‘as a general principle you must not obey any order given to you in the name of the King, if it runs counter to my stated aims’. The marshal added, ‘I am going to Madrid and will spend two days there in the hope of enlightening the king on the conduct his true interest dictates he should display towards the French army’.

  Wellington was evidently thrilled at receiving this deciphered message. It gave some inkling that the kind of cooperation between Marmont and his fellow generals that had thwarted British plans since June was not necessarily going to remain a fact of life. It was also the kind of high-level gossip that he loved. Writing to the secretary of war in London on 13 November, he enclosed a copy of Marmont’s letter, ‘which shows how these gentry are going on; in fact each Marshal is the natural enemy of the king and of his neighbouring Marshal’. Mindful of the risks to his sources of intelligence, Wellington added, ‘pray take care that this letter is not made public, as it would disclose that we have the key of the cipher’.

  The key, in fact, was already changing. Ever careful, Marmont’s staff made sure new cipher tables were circulated whenever possible. When Regnaud’s successor as Governor of Ciudad Rodrigo arrived on 30 October (escorted by an entire division of infantry), he most likely brought new codes with him. For when a message bound for the fortress was captured a cou
ple of weeks later, it could not be deciphered from the existing Army of Portugal key. The changed cipher was based on the same 150-character table, but the meanings of each number had been rearranged.

  For weeks, a small number of officers had been setting their brains to the methodical elimination of possibilities required to make out each letter, word and then sentence in code. Scovell had been doing it, but so had Somerset and even Wellington himself, all of them trying to solve the puzzle together. By November, with changes being made to the Army of Portugal cipher, Scovell found himself increasingly responsible for the effort. The duties of the army commander and his military secretary were too varied and consuming for chasing after these riddles to be much more than a curious form of relaxation. Scovell had also shown great aptitude. More and more, he was the master of this work. Wellington increasingly looked to him for prompt solutions to these vital puzzles and Scovell relished his new-found position.

  Deciphered by Scovell, the message in the changed Army of Portugal cipher brought in mid-November produced intelligence of another mission to replenish the fortress. Wellington prepared a military response, a kind of ambush in which the Light Division would be used to surprise the relief. The French, however, were becoming cannier. When they had escorted the new Governor into Ciudad Rodrigo at the end of October, they made sure nobody was allowed to leave Salamanca for forty-eight hours before the column departed. In this way, armed French sentries had barred the way to any tinker or muleteer concealing a scribbled warning to Wellington from Father Curtis. Marmont’s staff also had its own spies (usually itinerant Spaniards) and they seem to have detected British preparations. On 27 November, Wellington abandoned this mission, noting in a letter to London, ‘I think it probable that they will have heard of our movements; and if they entertained the intention of moving a convoy to Ciudad Rodrigo, they will now abandon it.’