The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes

by Mark Urban

  Lieutenant-Colonel Scovell, Colonel De Lancey and Lord March, accompanied by an orderly dragoon, were trying to make out what was happening in that part of the battlefield. There were familiar faces everywhere that day as Wellington and Napoleon fought it out. The two military leaders had been at war for twenty years, but this was their first time on the same ground. Their trial in these green Belgian fields was to be the deciding match in the long Anglo-French struggle for domination of the Continent. Hardly a member of the Peninsular Staff had been overlooked. Hardinge was with Prussian headquarters, as Wellington’s confidential representative. FitzRoy Somerset was beside his master almost throughout the day. Only Murray was absent, as he had not been able to travel over to Belgium in time for the battle. His place as the Army’s Quartermaster-General was taken instead by William De Lancey.

  Scovell was proud enough to know that his name had been one of those on a list Field Marshal Wellington had prepared for Horse Guards as essential to the smooth running of his Staff. He had been placed in charge of the Army’s communications once more.

  As they pushed forward, Scovell and his comrades were riding towards death. They had just galloped past Ompteda’s brigade of the King’s German Legion, closer to the enemy. The smoke had blinded them to the presence of a powerful French battery not far ahead. Had one of them realized and called out, the din of cannon was so deafening that the others would probably not have heard him in any case. This was an intensity of fire they had never experienced in Iberia. Napoleon had positioned a grand battery of eighty-four cannon to smash the British centre.

  In a few short moments, De Lancey was off his mount and so was March. The whizzing and cracking of round shot and grape had suddenly filled their ears, followed immediately by the ominous smack of metal striking flesh. A ricocheting cannonball had bounced off the ground and hit the QMG square in the upper body. The dragoon who had accompanied them was killed instantly by another shot. Scovell reined in his horse, and it reared up. He put his hand up to his hat to stop it falling off and a cannonball shot through his cloak, just under his arm. Another ball whizzed across his horse’s rump, leaving a six-inch strip of pink flesh, shaved hairless. Then five pieces of grape shot hit the animal and Scovell, too, was dismounted.

  He picked himself up and scurried across to De Lancey. Wellington and some other officers who had been riding not far behind appeared on the scene. The colonel looked up at Scovell, telling him, ‘I am mortally wounded,’ and bidding him to look after March. The young ADC had been hit in the arm by grape and was able to get to his feet. They called out for help. De Lancey was carried from the field and March taken to a surgeon. Scovell had somehow emerged from that cloud of hot metal unscathed. He found another mount and galloped off to do the duke’s business in another part of the field.

  As De Lancey had received his mortal wound, the battle reached its crisis. The French took La Haye Sainte soon afterwards, but all the while the Prussians were approaching the field to join the British. Early that evening, having failed to break the allied centre, Napoleon threw his Imperial Guard into the fray. Once they had been repulsed, the Battle of Waterloo was won. The emperor’s last gambit had been foiled.

  The price paid by the Staff for this triumph was high indeed. They all knew that they were engaged in a dangerous business, but somehow almost all of them had come through years of Peninsular campaigning alive and largely unscathed. On the evening of 18 June, Scovell and Wellington himself were among the few of the old campaigners still in one piece. The Prince of Orange’s arm had been shattered; Hardinge, it turned out, had been similarly injured at Ligny the previous day; Alexander Gordon (a favourite young ADC) was mortally wounded; and at the end of it all, FitzRoy Somerset had one of his arms smashed.

  Early that evening, Dr Gunning the surgeon sawed away at Somerset’s arm, taking it off above the elbow. Somerset was awake throughout this grisly procedure, propped up by Scovell on a bloodsoaked kitchen table. As was Somerset’s style, he made light of his calvary. As the orderly carried off his severed limb, its former owner called out, ‘Hallo! Don’t carry away that arm until you’ve taken off my ring.’

  Somerset’s wound was bound up and he was loaded, together with the Prince of Orange, General Alava (Wellington’s Spanish ADC) and Dr Gunning, into the duke’s carriage and packed off to Brussels.

  Scovell did not rest the following day. He managed to find out that De Lancey had been taken to a little Belgian farmhouse in the village of Waterloo and took a surgeon there to attend him. He was also able to discover the whereabouts of De Lancey’s wife, who was in Brussels and had been told that her husband was dead.

  When Lady De Lancey was brought to the farmhouse, Scovell met her outside and warned her of her husband’s condition. He added: ‘any agitation would be injurious. Now, we have not told him you had heard of his death; we thought it would afflict him; therefore do not appear to have heard it.’ The couple spent a few hours together. Their married life had begun only a few months before, after De Lancey’s return from the Peninsula, and it was destined to end here, in a small house near the field of Waterloo, the following day. The colonel’s young widow never forgot her debt to Scovell for making that last meeting possible.

  Two days before De Lancey finally expired, at about 9 p.m. on the day of the battle itself Wellington had declared it was time for supper and asked Scovell to join him at his quarters. ‘This is too bad, thus to lose our friends,’ the field marshal said as they ate. ‘I trust it will be the last action any of us see.’

  *

  Waterloo, that final emphatic victory over Napoleon, was evolving into a thing of national legend as Scovell walked along Wimpole Street in a state of some agitation on a bitterly cold January morning in 1819. He had resolved to write to the Duke of Wellington to ask for help.

  After the Battle of Waterloo, the Staff Cavalry had become part of an Army of Occupation in northern France. It had to be credited also that his little corps was very well suited to its duties, for the soldiery, deprived of long marches and battles, needed to be kept in order lest they vex the French to the point of revolt. He and Mary had lived very well and for a moderate outlay. His mastery of the language had assured an entrée into society. That had been helped by the one further sign of the duke’s approbation he had received at the beginning of 1815: a knighthood. His work forming the Staff Cavalry and breaking codes had earned him that noble distinction. Scovell’s gratitude could easily be appreciated and contrasted with some others, like the surgeon Sir James McGrigor, who had told the general that, as a matter of fact, he had been expecting a peerage for his services.

  Whatever debt his old master may have felt in the Peninsula and immediately afterwards, it all seemed to have been forgotten by December 1818. The Army of Occupation had been brought home and Horse Guards, immune to all reason, had decided to disband the Staff Cavalry. A quiet word from the duke might possibly have saved them.

  In many corners of what had been the Peninsular Army, officers felt the loss of Wellington’s interest keenly. William Napier wrote that as the seven-year struggle for Iberia terminated, so did ‘all remembrances of the veteran’s services’. William Grattan, one of the men who had led the 88th Foot at Salamanca in the 3rd Division’s key attack, noted bitterly,

  in his parting General Order to the Peninsular Army he told us he would never cease to feel the warmest interest for our welfare and honour. How that promise has been kept, everybody knows … that he neglected the interests and feelings of his Peninsular Army, as a body, is beyond all question.

  It might seem, then, that Scovell had no more cause to resent what had happened to him than hundreds of other officers. He had, after all, been able to make the vital steps to major and lieutenant-colonel in quick succession while working for the duke in the Peninsula. Nevertheless, while the duke had indeed done little to advance the careers of those fighting men who had won his victories, the favoured members of the Staff were very much remembered; and that meant
that almost all of Scovell’s friends had been looked after.

  On Christmas Day 1818, Scovell had been placed on half-pay. For a lieutenant-colonel, this was only about £150 per annum, and being Sir George did not alter such harsh realities. After years of solving those problems few others in the Staff could be bothered with, and years of living well from it, he could see himself slipping back to the state of penury and inactivity he thought he had left behind years ago.

  Once back in London, the Duke advanced other loyal members of the Staff, but only in so far as they were suitable to do his bidding without question on a new battlefield: the House of Commons. He had joined the Cabinet and was engrossed in party politics.

  So FitzRoy Somerset was found a seat in Truro, Henry Hardinge became MP for Durham, Lord March (before inheriting the dukedom of Richmond) sat for Chichester and George Murray would represent the Perthshire constituency of his family estates. Charles Vere (AQMG of the 4th) was also mobilized for this service, gaining a seat in Suffolk. Some of them traded on their status as ‘A Hero of Waterloo and the Peninsula’ in handbills they gave out on the hustings.

  All of these Westminster new boys sat, naturally enough, in the Tory interest. Several played a key role in organizing Wellington’s partisans. Those who remained in the Army had been given prestigious commissions in the Guards.

  Scovell, with his reform-mindedness, intellectual self-confidence and lowly social standing, was once more a figure on the periphery of Wellington’s vision. He was evidently unsuitable as a Tory MP, and even his military services were of limited value. It was just as it had been in 1809. The golden-haired aristocrats like Somerset and March hogged centre-stage. They had never left it, of course, but expediency had dictated some others should be allowed supporting parts in Wellington’s great Iberian drama. The duke remained faithful to that gilded youth sketched in glorious colour in his memory of the Peninsula. For the others, Scovell included, peace brought a final realization that Wellington had only ever seen them in the dull grey shades of mezzotint.

  There was every sign now that Wellington’s hope, uttered to Scovell on the night of Waterloo, that it should be their last battle was being fulfilled. In the new climate of European peace, party allegiance was paramount once more. Military professionalism counted for little.

  Sitting down to write his letter, Sir George Scovell knew he must cast aside any pride. He knew also the duke would appreciate brevity and abhor circumlocution. Scovell set pen to paper:

  You are aware of the reduction of my Corps on the 25th of last month and that one of the greatest evils of life has befallen me, namely want of employment after an active life. Relying on the uniform kindness of your Grace to me, I take the liberty of requesting that should any situation civil or military not beyond my capacity fall vacant, I may not be out of your recollection as being willing to exert my talent (such as it is) in any way which I may be useful to your Grace or to the public.

  There is no record of any reply from Wellington.

  *

  Three years after writing that plea to Wellington, Scovell sat at his desk as the November darkness came on with its usual suddenness. There was a pile of French dispatches in front of him. It was like meeting a long-lost acquaintance, going through those angry Peninsular letters written by Marmont and Soult. He was looking at the Paris Cipher again, more than a decade since he had started breaking it in the mayor’s house of Fuente Guinaldo.

  Perhaps he should look at another before he abandoned the task for the day? The Colonel glanced out of his office window and into the gloom that was engulfing the drill square. The cavalry barracks in Croydon were a smart establishment, modern-built in the neo-classical style.

  He had been appointed colonel in command of the Royal Wagon Train, based at Croydon, in 1820. General George Murray, it seems, had arranged it. As for steps in rank, age alone would see to it from that time onwards. Seniority would eventually bring promotion to the colonel who lived long enough.

  The Wagon Train, comprising the Army’s supply troops, was another in the long line of worthwhile tasks that Scovell applied himself to, but which the better-connected officers would have avoided like the plague. Murray knew that a man of the colonel’s intellect would soon get bored watching the schooling of drivers and wagoneers round and round the square at Croydon. Indeed, Scovell found his new duties sufficiently dull and had been thinking of leaving the Army. He wondered whether he might become head of one of the new police forces being established in the shires and colonies.

  Late in 1823, Murray asked Scovell to re-examine many of the intercepted French dispatches from the Peninsular campaign and also to make some recommendations about the use of ciphers in the British Army. Not one to take on such a task by halves, Scovell decided to revisit many of the decipherings he had done in the field in Rueda, Guinaldo or Frenada.

  He examined forty-four letters in the grand chiffre. In many places he made notes, often scribbling the word ‘correct’ in pencil by an earlier supposition. He found few errors. Some of the letters he had not seen before. They had fallen into the British Army’s hands at some stage of the campaign, but had eluded him at the time. Some of these provided little fragments of knowledge or explained the context of things that had puzzled him for years. Eventually he sent them back to Whitehall, but quite a few originals remained in Scovell’s possession.

  Murray may have had other motives in mind when asking Scovell to complete this task, for Wellington and a number of other senior officers had been irritated by the appearance of a history, a Narrative of the War in the Peninsula by Southey. This work caused widespread dissatisfaction and Murray was considering writing his own narrative of these events. Had he ever done so, it is most unlikely that Scovell’s role would have gone unsung. However, the former QMG of the Peninsular Army was left behind in the race to publish by William Napier, with his own four-volume work. This prepared the way for the later printing of tomes of Wellington’s Dispatches, starting in 1835. Later editions of Dispatches included many captured French messages sent en clair and some that had been deciphered. Even then, however, only those in the simple or Army of Portugal codes were revealed. The breaking of the grand chiffre, the Great Paris Cipher, was to remain a secret. This was the line Wellington wanted to draw: the breaking of less complex codes could be alluded to, but that of the toughest one used in Spain remained a more sensitive matter.

  Napier’s work was to set the tone for decades of subsequent writing about the Peninsula. It began the mythologizing of those campaigns, identifying the steadfast British national character as a key to victory. Ideas of grit, fortitude and honesty were central to Napier’s view of the British soldier, and indeed to the political image projected by Wellington. The author eulogized the duke as ‘a master spirit in war’. Not only were matters of intelligence or code-breaking covered sparsely and inaccurately, but there was nothing in the text to suggest Wellington and his circle ever made Napier fully aware of the spectacular successes in capturing and decoding letters in the grand chiffre. Wellington had become a political leader by this time. The legend of his great generalship might have been undermined, however subtly, by revelations that he had been reading his enemy’s most sensitive mail.

  Given that Scovell reviewed that priceless intelligence at Croydon in late 1823, we can be quite sure that Murray at least had been reminded of the significance of the ciphered dispatches shortly before the compilation of Napier’s history began. Having checked his earlier workings, bundled up the papers and sent them back to Headquarters, Scovell’s work with French army ciphers finally ended.

  *

  Early in 1829, Major-General Sir George Scovell was appointed Lieutenant-Governor of the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. It can be imagined that he followed in the footsteps of his old teacher and mentor John Le Marchant with some pride. Evidently, Scovell’s former Wycombe classmate Henry Hardinge had assumed his reaction would be positive when he offered him the job. It had been in his gift, s
ince Hardinge had become Secretary at War in Wellington’s ministry (the duke had finally captured the prime ministership the year before). Hardinge and Murray had risen so high that they were able to help their old comrade and ensure that his twilight years would be most comfortable.

  Scovell was to receive £1,000 per annum as Lieutenant-Governor. As his natural longevity took him up the Army List, he acquired another plum in the shape of the colonelcy of a cavalry regiment. First it was the 7th Dragoon Guards and later the 4th Dragoons. Becoming the titular head of the regiment he had been forced to sell out of decades before must have been a sweet experience indeed. While he and Mary prospered in their old age, Scovell was to prove listless and dissatisfied in a post he must long have coveted, however.

  Wellington, it was clear, had never liked the Royal Military College. In particular, its junior branch, which trained young men in their teens, prior to their first commission, seemed to him to be a hotbed of sedition and riot. The prime minister was also alarmed by plans to teach ordinary soldiers to read and write, telling one friend, ‘if there is mutiny in the Army … you’ll see that all of these new-fangled school masters are at the bottom of it’.

  It seems likely then that Scovell was offered the lieutenant-governorship with the understanding that there could be no great innovations of curriculum, or reforms of the cadets’ spartan living arrangements. In any case, such matters would have to be referred to the board of governors, which remained packed with Wellington’s placemen. Instead of becoming a reforming educator, Scovell slipped into his dotage, hunting and entertaining well at his residence. Having the superintendence of the college without any ability to overhaul its workings must have been purgatory for Scovell and it seems that he turned his back on professional matters and grew steadily wealthier from his various sinecures.