The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes

by Mark Urban

  As in 1812, the officers of various regiments, notably in the Light Division, spent many a winter’s day putting on theatricals. In January it had been She Stoops to Conquer; February’s production was The Rivals. Captain Hobkirk of the 43rd had the honour of playing Mrs Malaprop, with fresh-faced young lieutenants taking the younger female parts. ‘It is impossible to imagine anything more truly ludicrous than to see Lydia Languish and Julia … drinking punch and smoking behind the scenes at a furious rate between the acts,’ wrote one spectator. Wellington attended The Rivals at its makeshift playhouse in Gallegos, riding twenty miles there and twenty miles back to Frenada in the darkness. Officers of the Peninsular Army went to such lengths to amuse themselves in those long winter weeks of 1813.

  Of all those in Frenada, Scovell must have enjoyed the most pleasant evenings. With Mary, he had laughter, companionship and the pleasure of society. It was in his nature, though, that having beaten the grand chiffre he found himself with too much time on his hands, and that he should be meditating a great new project which might unite his own interest with that of Lord Wellington, Judge Advocate Francis Larpent and the good of the service.

  NOTES

  1 ‘It was about midnight on a December’s evening and few people were stirring in the bivouac’: details of Saornil’s raid are gleaned from Francis Larpent’s journal, The Private Journal of Judge Advocate F. S. Larpent. This is an excellent book, full of the sort of detail most officers at Headquarters considered irrelevant. It also includes recollections of George and Mary Scovell.

  2 ‘A British officer who had encountered Saornil’s band in the summer of 1812’: Captain William Tomkinson.

  3 ‘the general sent him on his way home with these brutal words’: Wellington’s letter to Colonel Framingham, Dispatches, 6 May 1813.

  4 ‘Murray returned to his office as Quartermaster-General and became the second most important man in the Army’: for reasons of brevity, I have not told the story of London’s attempts to foist a second-in-command on Wellington. Farcically, their candidate, General Sir Edward Paget, was captured by the French in November 1813, just one week after coming out to the Army. In a letter to Earl Bathurst in Dispatches, 26 December 1813 (during a further round of pressure from London for a second-in-command), Wellington expressed his views pungently, calling an officer in such a post: ‘a person without defined duties, excepting to give flying opinions, from which he may depart at pleasure, must be a nuisance in moments of decision; and whether I have a second in command or not, I am determined always to act according to the dictates of my own judgement’.

  5 ‘Before setting off for Cadiz, Wellington had complained to London, “I have not yet any intelligence”’: letter to Bathurst, 2 December 1812.

  – ‘The letters spread out in front of him were one from Joseph to the emperor …’: Saornil’s prize is a significant example of intercepted correspondence not found in the Scovell Papers. They are in the Wellington Papers, WP 1/361 Fol 2, and when placed together reveal the original folds of the courier’s packet.

  6 ‘a further letter from Joseph to the emperor and dated 22 December 1812’: in the Scovell Papers, WO37/2.

  7 ‘For months, Joseph had kept the contents of Soult’s letter to himself – probably because it was too humiliating to confess to his brother that eminent marshals had been plotting in this way’: this is my interpretation. There are suggestions in Joseph’s later letters that the king may have copied Soult’s 12 August message before to the emperor. It may be that he assumed the papers had been lost in Napoleon’s baggage in Russia and therefore sent another copy in January 1813.

  8 ‘On his return to Paris, Desprez had written to Joseph’: his letter, dated 3 January, is in Du Casse’s Correspondance du Roi Joseph. I must confess a certain fascination with Desprez, in some sense an unsung hero of the French staff system, and someone whose knack of being in the wrong place at the wrong time allowed him to witness all of the great moments in the collapse of Napoleon’s power. He was also in the Waterloo campaign!

  9 ‘It was only when the downpours of March and April had raised the level of the Coa that trout and the fish locals called bogas and barbos could migrate up from the Douro’: I am no fisherman; this knowledge was derived from a restaurateur in Almeida who proved a mine of useful local detail.

  10 ‘It is impossible to imagine anything more truly ludicrous than to see Lydia Languish’: according to Leach of the 95th.

  * A disbandment, the complete collapse of military order.

  † The Spanish parliament.

  ‡ Route battalions, made up of detachments going to different units who marched together for security.

  1. DONT. BELIEVE. WE. WERE. EVER. DECEIVED. IN. THESE. LET. 843. 688. AND. COLONEL. S. 174. VELL … IS. THE. PERSON. WHO. MADE. THEM. OUT.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The Vitoria Campaign, April–July 1813

  In April 1813, each cavalry regiment in the Peninsular Army received a request for volunteers. Men of good character and exemplary service were asked to come forward for the formation of a Staff Cavalry Corps. Parties from each regiment were to make their way to Frenada where they would be placed under a commandant and receive training in their new duties.

  At Frenada, George Scovell threw himself into his new task with customary vigour. He had been appointed Brevet Lieutenant-Colonel and Major Commandant of the Staff Cavalry Corps.* A plan that he had first committed to paper in 1808 was finally coming to fruition. Scovell, it is clear, saw his new command as an embryonic regiment of Headquarters horsemen, able to turn their hands to a variety of duties.

  Their commandant had long understood that special troops were needed to maintain discipline, particularly during marches. Scovell had written of the need for a gendarmerie even in 1810: during Wellington’s retreat from the frontier to the lines of Torres Vedras, Scovell had ridden through a riot in the town of Leira, recording:

  a most disgraceful scene of Plundering commenced chiefly from the Stragglers, the Portuguese soldiery and the Women. It was not stopped until the unfortunate men were hanged on the spot by the Provost, and more than 100 flogged. Safeguards should always be put on towns when an Army has to pass through or near. A sort of Gendarmerie such as the French has is absolutely necessary in all large armies to superintend the Police, arrest stragglers etc.

  During the retreat from Burgos in 1812, he had again been scribbling ideas in his journal for how a new force of this type might work, some weeks before Wellington’s angry General Order rebuking the Army for its conduct.

  By April 1813 he had been given the task of making this plan into a reality. The men of the Staff Cavalry were all volunteers and many were veterans who were familiar with the tricks of stragglers and camp followers. By the end of the month, parties of new recruits were arriving. Francis Larpent, the Judge Advocate and Scovell’s frequent dinner companion, was an enthusiastic supporter of the new project and recorded: ‘officers do not take to it as yet, but very good-looking men have volunteered in general’. Men of the Household Cavalry also held back. They let it be known that since they had been police at home (by which they meant the king’s final defence against the mob), they had no intention of being police in Spain. The troopers and sergeants who answered the call to Frenada were given a smart new uniform. They had a red cavalry jacket with dark-blue lapels and an elegant shako. In all, about 200 men joined the Staff Cavalry.

  The new corps would fulfil Scovell’s dreams of commanding a regiment of British cavalry and at the same time create the kind of HQ troops that John Le Marchant had proposed in 1802. Wellington, on the other hand, wanted the Staff Cavalry for one purpose above all: to police the bloody-backed rogues of his Army. So Scovell added the title of ‘father of the British Military Police’ to those of Assistant QMG, forge designer, chief Guide, mapmaker, postmaster, code-maker and code-breaker.

  Ambition and circumstance threw Scovell into the role of Wellington’s truncheon, a duty that did not necessarily sit well eith
er with his gentle temperament or his views on discipline. He certainly did not share Wellington’s faith in generous amounts of flogging and hanging. Like many a reform-minded officer, though, the campaigns in Iberia had convinced Scovell that the British Army contained a substantial element of criminals. Sir John Moore, a noted sceptic when it came to using the lash, had been shocked by the plundering and drunken criminality of his men during the Corunna campaign. Almost every officer who had witnessed the riot and rape in Badajoz in 1812 was repelled by it.

  The British soldier was usually a volunteer and many fell into the hands of recruiters while penniless and longing for drink. When they sobered up in some garrison, many regretted their decision to join, but the gallows awaited any deserter who was caught. On the march, this Army became a volatile assembly, one in which many men sought any opportunity to steal. Taking the possessions of a dead Frenchman was permitted, stealing from the peasants was not. Scovell was struck by the contrast between the narrow section of British society dredged up by traditional recruiting methods and the higher quality of many French recruits, who were products of the world’s first properly organized conscription system. ‘It is quite wonderful to see the intelligence of these fellows when compared with our own,’ Scovell wrote after interrogating a French deserter in October 1812.

  The Vitoria Campaign

  The Battle of Vitoria

  Evidently some senior officers must have asked whether Scovell was really the right man to impose order, since later in 1813 he wrote to a colleague at Horse Guards, ‘you need be under no apprehension on the score of my good nature when the good of the Service is placed in competition with it. I should be very sorry to be accused of cruelty, but I do not see the keeping up the discipline of any Army in that light.’ Wellington at least had faith in Scovell to discharge his new responsibilities professionally and that was the key thing as they stood on the threshold of the 1813 campaign.

  The word about Headquarters was that Lord W intended putting the Army in motion on 1 May. Scovell did not have long to turn the little detachments of five or six men who came from each regiment into an effective corps. He was aided in his task by the fact that all of these recruits were trained mounted troops, unlike the deserters he had introduced to horses when forming the Guides years before.

  That first corps founded by Scovell, the Mounted Guides, continued to exist, and on 21 April he relinquished the command to Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Sturgeon, an extremely capable officer with a similar background to his own.

  These new developments did not excuse Scovell from his cipher work, and as Wellington made his final preparations for the 1813 campaign, some important new dispatches were captured. The most significant was dated 13 March and was from King Joseph to General Charles Reille, commanding the Army of Portugal. It brought Wellington’s understanding of the general scheme of French defensive operations up to date.

  The new dispatch showed that a general offensive against guerrillas in northern Spain had begun, drawing half of the Army of Portugal north, a step which precipitated a redeployment of the Armies of the South and Centre. This was important news for British Headquarters since the French were repeating their error of early 1812 in reducing their force in front of Wellington at precisely the moment he was meditating an offensive. It meant those forces opposed to him would not be the 100,000 suggested in Joseph’s letter of December, but more like 80,000. The king also told General Reille, ‘I am counting on moving my headquarters to Valladolid at any moment.’

  Guerrillas in northern Spain provided the British with a further letter, from Colonel Lucotte, one of Joseph’s staff officers, to Madrid, sent on 16 March. He spoke with authority about Napoleon’s view because he was on his way back to Madrid from Paris where he had been given the emperor’s directives on how the campaign in Iberia should proceed. Lucotte was not important enough to use the grand chiffre, but had resorted instead to a very curious cipher of hieroglyphs. It was different from others Scovell had worked on, as its encoding table involved lines of letters that would suggest the next few substitutions, not just the conversion of single characters one by one. Notwithstanding the application of this new principle, Scovell seems to have regarded this new code as something of an insult to his intelligence, scribbling on the bottom, ‘de-cyphered at Frenada with ease in 6 hours and immediately sent home by L. W’.

  Lucotte described the collapse of security on the main road to France, noting that ‘supplies are hardly guaranteed from one day to the next all along the line; and the emperor believes it is of the most pressing importance to take urgent steps to secure communications’. All of this confirmed the British general’s view that the operations against Mina and Longa in the north would last for some time. Wellington’s speed in relaying the message to London was a result of its political content; Lucotte suggested that the emperor was expecting Austria to join the coalition against him at any moment. In passing this intelligence to Earl Bathurst, the general showed a caution absent from his own communication to Cadiz of 29 January, warning, ‘this letter was in cipher and it is desirable that its contents should not be published’.

  Colonel Lucotte also made clear that the emperor’s desperate struggle to raise a new army meant Joseph’s constant demands for cash were falling on deaf ears in Paris: ‘Sire, it is absolutely necessary to replace the money that is not coming from France with forced contributions in Spain and by drawing it from Valencia – Napoleon’s needs are enormous.’ The system of coercing localities to provide money for the army was a familiar feature of the occupation of Spain, but reports such as Lucotte’s inspired a last great wave of formalized looting of cash and items of value from the locals. Lucotte told the king that he was hastening down as fast as he could, in company with Colonel Desprez. That officer, who had spent a few weeks in Paris restoring himself to health after the horrors of the retreat from Moscow, was showing admirable devotion to duty in returning at this juncture.

  While Scovell was working on those latest intercepted messages received at Headquarters, a letter that Wellington had sent to London eight months earlier finally received its reply. It was from Earl Bathurst and contained the report of the London government decipherers on the French correspondence that had been sent to them before the Battle of Salamanca. These experts in secret writing had taken all those months to add 164 new meanings (and they confessed their uncertainty even over some of these) out of the 1,400 numbers in the cipher. They added an exculpatory note: ‘with the few cyphers and consequently the slender materials which the decypherer had to work upon, it was scarcely possible to render this key more complete’.

  Wellington was evidently unimpressed with this tardy reply and indeed its contents. Had Headquarters been dependent on London to crack the code, none of the results so critical for the Salamanca campaign and indeed the one he was now about to launch would ever have been achieved. He could not resist the temptation to send them back a copy of Scovell’s deciphering table, which by that point had opened up pretty much the entire code. The general wrote back to London sarcastically:

  I am very much obliged to your Lordship for the key of the cipher as far as it had been discovered, which you transmitted to me on the 5th April last; I now enclose for your information such parts of it as have been made out by Lieut Colonel Scovell without reference to the key received through your Lordship.

  It was significant that Wellington acknowledged Scovell’s sole responsibility for this work in writing, for back in the summer of 1811 when simpler ciphers had first appeared on the Spanish border, other officers such as Somerset and Hardinge had also been involved.

  The general’s pleasure at reading his enemy’s most secret correspondence was curtailed somewhat during the early months of 1813, however. The flow of intercepted French messages had declined markedly. Those French divisions facing Wellington remained largely inactive, so there was little need for their commanders to communicate. The new French defensive line was more compact and some way back from th
e hunting grounds of that interceptor of mails par excellence, Don Julian Sanchez. Occupied with training his men to act as a regular force at the head or flanks of Wellington’s column of march, he had less time for long-range patrols in search of enemy messengers. The general’s most reliable provider of reports from inside the enemy camp, Father Patrick Curtis, was also out of action. He had been banished from Salamanca by the French early in 1813, and had sought refuge in Ciudad Rodrigo.

  As the time neared for him to send his Army into action, Wellington needed to be sure that his strategy of moving through the difficult country to the north-west of the French defensive line would work. To this end, several officers were sent out on reconnaissance during April. Among them was Lieutenant-Colonel William Gomm, an Assistant QMG. Gomm had been campaigning, like Lieutenant-Colonel Scovell, since Sir John Moore’s expedition and had done equally well out of Staff work. Unlike Scovell, he did not reside in the main Headquarters but was attached to the 5th Division.

  Gomm emulated the tactics of previous exploring officers, setting out with just a servant and a pair of horses to make sketches and check the levels of different water courses. They made their way through the hilly country, crossing the Duero to the west of the main French line on the river and evading the cavalry patrols sent into this no man’s land. He worked his way up to the Esla, a tributary of the Duero that Wellington needed to cross if he were to bypass the French with his first great turning movement. During the last three days of his expedition, Gomm found himself drenched with rain. At last the downpours needed to nourish the fodder were doing their work.