by Roger Knight
You are in the daily habit of receiving the intelligence, and of combining it, and drawing your conclusions from it. I am therefore very much disposed to think that your ideas are more just than mine; and you may rest assured that I am decided to act upon your ideas (in which Mr Pitt perfectly concurs) rather than upon any doubts of my own.
– Henry Dundas, secretary of state for war, to Lord Grenville, foreign secretary, on Grenville’s certainty of a Dutch revolt against the French in 17991
Wartime governments, in order to decide upon both defence and foreign policy, needed to know two vital things about the enemy: his intentions and his capability. Of course, when an army was in the field or a fleet was at sea, tactical intelligence was the responsibility of the general or admiral commanding. Policy, however, involved continual complex assessments, undertaken by a number of departments across Whitehall. In the 1790s it was never simple to find out what unstable French governments were planning; nor was it to be any easier to find out what the emperor was thinking during the Napoleonic War.
Assessing the enemy’s plans depended upon information from diplomats, a task performed formally by the Foreign Office, which also ran secret informers, while agents worked covertly for the Home Office, the Admiralty or the secretary of state for war. In addition, William Windham, secretary at war between July 1794 and February 1801, had a great deal of contact with French royalist sympathizers in his efforts to stir up resistance in the Vendée in south-west France.2 The whole operation in the Vendée in 1795 was flawed because of over-optimistic assessments of the strength of the royalists: the evidence for their effectiveness came from the royalists themselves, leading to exaggerated claims, a classic intelligence mistake.
The Admiralty ran secret agents abroad to assess the state of readiness of the ships in the French north-western bases, but most information came from British warships blockading ports. Their captains were ordered to report any observations of the enemy fleet in port: their seamanship experience would pick up details such as the height of an anchored ship out of the water (that is, whether it was yet weighed down by guns or stores), or whether topmasts were in place or sails bent on the yards, which were firm indicators of the imminent departure of a ship. The luggers and fishing boats reporting to Captain Philippe D’Auvergne at his base in Jersey kept a continuous watch on Le Havre, Brest, L’Orient and Rochefort, looking for these sorts of clues, while his agents around the French ports would also pick up other telltale signs: concentrations of seamen, or leave being stopped, or other indications that an enemy fleet was about to leave port. He reported to both the Admiralty and the War Office.3 Every source of information could help to build a picture of the capacities of the French and their allies. At the Admiralty, clerks compiled a classified index by geographical area into which every piece of intelligence was inserted.4 In a general memorandum to the cabinet in April 1798 Lord Spencer described the system:
All the intelligence received from time to time has constantly been circulated for the information of the Cabinet, and it is all entered in books (now forming a pretty voluminous collection) kept on purpose. A précis of the latest intelligence last received may easily be made out, and shall immediately be prepared if it is required; but no very great stress can be laid upon the inspection of any such partial extract, because it cannot always be known what degree of reliance should be placed upon any particular piece of information, and it is only from a general view and comparison of the whole that anything like a tolerable judgement of it can be formed.5
A few weeks later Henry Dundas sent some intelligence to Spencer from an American source, whose reliability was unknown: ‘the only use such information can be of is by comparing with other channels and thereby judging of its probability.’6 These principles remain the basis of central government intelligence assessment today.
Information on sightings of enemy-ship movements would be volunteered from all directions, often from merchants, whose business decisions depended upon the speedy conveyance of news; and sometimes it would come from that hotbed of commercial gossip and news, Lloyd’s Coffee House.7 Only fragmentary evidence has survived from these commercially driven international networks, but there is little doubt that they were efficient.8 As well as information from agents and naval officers, fishermen and smugglers, material came from neutral ships, especially Americans, escaped prisoners of war and open sources such as French newspapers.
Intercepted despatches to and from French and other European governments were another fruitful source of intelligence, undertaken by the Secret Office in the Post Office. This department, complete with openers and decipherers, had been established in the seventeenth century and was never officially acknowledged; by 1793 it was funded by secret service money issued by the Treasury. Owing to staff shortages in other parts of the Post Office, the Secret Office had also been involved with internal security, but from 1798 it concentrated upon foreign posts and despatches, providing valuable information, for instance, about the United Irishmen. The Secret Office had agents at a number of foreign post offices, but it worked particularly closely with the ‘secret bureau’ in Hanover: in the 1780s staff of both institutions had exchange visits.9
Of course, both sides in this conflict were doing their best to get hold of enemy communications.* A constant fear of French spies within ministries dogged the life of ministers. There was nothing that we today would recognize as security clearances. James Bland Burges was told by a double agent not long into the war that a clerk in the Foreign Office was in French pay. For some periods Grenville had his despatches delivered to his home.10 Very properly, negotiators at the peace talks in 1796 were circumspect about what they included in their correspondence. Granville Leveson Gower, writing to Lady Bessborough from Paris, ended one missive by saying, ‘I am not sure that our letters may not be inspected by persons belonging to the Directory.’11 In late 1798 Evan Nepean was warned by Richard Cadman Etches, a Dane who had worked as an agent for Catherine the Great, that a Frenchman named Gadole had been seen in London: ‘[previously] a principal commissaire in Belgium … I know him sufficiently to be confident that he will have Agents about all the Offices of Government more particularly the Marine from belonging to it in Paris.’12 By 1801 the diplomat Arthur Paget was reporting from Vienna, after a visit through Paris, of a suspicion that French agents were deep into the British political machine: ‘Mr Merry suspects that there is some sad foul play going on in our Fleets. The French, it is thought, have our private signals – Talleyrand has been heard to say that he has every determination of our Cabinet in eight days.’13
At the outbreak of war, the British secret service was a small internal surveillance organization headed by Evan Nepean, undersecretary at the Home Office.14 It would rapidly grow into the Alien Office, which monitored entry of people into Britain after the passing of the Alien Act of 7 January 1793.15 For the duration of the French Revolutionary War, this office – which dealt with both defensive home security and offensive spying on the Continent – was led and dominated by William Wickham. He was an expert linguist and member of the elite Christ Church group, known to Canning and others in the government, and rightly deserves his recently bestowed title of ‘Master Spy’.16 After a false start as a barrister, Wickham spent time in France and married into a well-placed Geneva family. The next step in his curious career was as a magistrate in Whitechapel, and while in this role he became involved in government security, trying to check hundreds of French émigrés who came flocking to London as the situation in France grew more volatile and dangerous. By August 1793 Grenville was employing him in secret activity in London.
Wickham also organized the surveillance of radicals in the London Corresponding Society, at that time the flourishing centre of British Jacobinism, by planting agents within it. On 8 May 1794 Wickham provided Pitt with clear evidence that some in the Society were bent on revolution, rather than on purely parliamentary reform. The government, alarmed that weapons were being stockpiled by poten
tial revolutionaries, made rapid arrests, with Dundas steering the suspension of habeas corpus through parliament in two weeks, and the Society was broken.17 As a result of this important report, Wickham was appointed superintendent of the Alien Office, working to the duke of Portland as home secretary. His job was, in Portland’s words, not ‘to omit any proper means of being well informed of the description and abode of all foreigners’ and to ensure that the information given by the émigrés at the point of entry was ‘the best and truest key to our Security with respect to the Aliens and even to their own’.18
At the same time as being engaged on internal security, Wickham was also working to the foreign secretary, Lord Grenville, intercepting and assessing foreign correspondence. Straddling the various ministries in this way made him the manager, for a short time, of an embryonic centralized intelligence assessment system.19 However, in October 1794 the Foreign Office received faint peace feelers from moderate elements in the French government, and Wickham was abruptly sent on a secret mission to Geneva to follow up the French overture; he was to remain there until the end of 1797.20 John King, formerly of Christ Church and now undersecretary at the Home Office, took on the oversight of the Alien Office.21 As a result, separate ministries re-established their own networks. Secret service money was issued to each minister with a department engaged in defence or services business, so that he could maintain his own intelligence contacts. Putting together evidence to form accurate assessments of the enemy’s intentions, therefore, came to depend upon exchanges of information and discussions at undersecretary and cabinet level. For instance, in January 1798, Canning sent from the Foreign Office to Nepean, by then at the Admiralty, an extract of a consul’s despatch from Corfu about French ship movements.22 But, as we shall see, internal jealousies between ministers, as well as resulting in an imperfect understanding of what information might be useful to others, could lead to a lack of timely circulation of intelligence around government. It was to handicap accurate judgements, which, in turn, led to faulty policy decisions.
Expenditure on intelligence went up sharply in wartime. Evan Nepean dispersed £50,571 on Home Office secret service business between June 1791 and March 1795.23 Pitt was to explain to the House of Commons that overall secret service expenditure in 1795 totalled £150,000.24 Money was transferred from country to country through the business houses of international bankers such as Boyd, Benfield & Co., or Herries, Farquahar & Co., each transaction passing through three or four houses, and often changing currencies as many times. Without the cooperation of the bankers, it is difficult to see how there would have been a secret service.25 Every minister had to provide an affidavit confirming that he had ‘disbursed the money entrusted to me for foreign secret service faithfully according to the intention and purposes for which it was given’. Lesser figures could also be entrusted with secret service money. Tom Grenville, the brother of Lord Grenville, who had been sent on a diplomatic mission, swore an affidavit for receiving such payments on 13 May 1800, ‘at my house in Duke Street, Westminster’. It was countersigned by an official from the Auditor’s Office.26 This process did not, however, preclude the use of this money for purposes other than for the defence of the country. For instance, some of it found its way into the pockets of members of the Irish parliament, in an attempt to influence their votes on the Act of Union in 1801.27
There were some advantages to this decentralized arrangement, by which secret service money was divided among at least four ministries, as localized intelligence networks could be organized with the knowledge of only a few people. Personal links could be made in Whitehall between departments, and experience of handling intelligence transferred. Evan Nepean moved between three departments in a short time in the mid 1790s (he went from the Home Office in March 1794, to do a short spell as undersecretary to the secretary of state for war, and then in July 1795 became secretary of the Board of Admiralty). In 1797 and 1798 he corresponded with Lord St Vincent, at that time commanding the fleet outside Cádiz, and who was often in port in Lisbon. The admiral talked with Portuguese politicians, trying to divine the balance of the parties at the Portuguese court at a very tricky stage in Portuguese–French relations, which might have led to a treaty between the two countries. He interviewed one of Nepean’s agents, Joseph Wilkes, to arrange for intelligence to be sent to the British Fleet of the movement of Spanish warships in the harbour. Wilkes did not do well, and St Vincent complained to Nepean: ‘Although every inhabitant of Cádiz was aware of the late move of the Spanish Fleet for days before it sail’d, Mr Wilke’s emissary did not send the most trifling intelligence on that occasion.’28 In July he discovered that Wilkes had been paid £5,000 from secret service funds.
I cannot express my astonishment I feel at the extraordinary charge in the account you have enclosed from Mr Joseph Wilkes who has never rendered the most trifling Service to the Public … I have the strongest grounds to think they were traitorous – in any case they performed nothing – had they been efficient, one hundred pounds would have rewarded them amply.29
On another occasion, he vented his frustration to Nepean with an obsolete but still comprehensible insult: ‘Mr Walker is an Imposter, and his intelligence not worth a Louse’s Quin, therefore stop your hand in payment.’30
Additionally, the disadvantages of not having a clear overall intelligence hierarchy led to jealousies between agents in different networks. John Trevor, British minister to Sardinia, based in Turin, and Francis Drake, British minister in Genoa, both diplomats responsible for intelligence in their area, bitterly resented Wickham’s influence with Lord Grenville, but the foreign secretary made it clear that Wickham had precedence within the Foreign Office.31 Several departments and agents were involved in the Vendée, including Wickham for the Foreign Office, Windham as the secretary at war with links to the royalists, and the Admiralty.
Among those whom Evan Nepean at the Admiralty ran was the maverick naval captain Sir Sidney Smith – self-publicist, full of ideas, knighted by the Swedes for service there before the war, speaker of perfect French, a cousin of both Pitt and Grenville, both of whom trusted him, and extremely unpopular with his fellow naval officers, who very much did not.32 Smith first came to the fore commanding a small naval squadron off Normandy, liaising with D’Auvergne in support of the operations on behalf of the French royalists in south-west France. During 1796 Smith built up networks within France, carrying out counter-intelligence operations, and landing agents and money, off the coast under the cover of his role as a naval officer commanding a warship, with orders to capture French privateers.
In April 1796 Smith was captured with a fellow agent, John Wesley Wright, who was posing as his secretary, during a cutting-out operation at Le Havre about which mystery still remains. When the wind died the wherry being used for the raid was seized by French oared launches.33 Smith was incarcerated with Wright in the Temple Prison in Paris and treated as a state prisoner, rather than as a prisoner of war, but he lived well, was allowed limited parole, and even managed to start up another intelligence network. He was supported by money from the British government through Henry Swinburne, the agent for transports in Paris, who had diplomatic immunity, as he was responsible for the exchange of prisoners of war.* The Directory regarded Smith’s role in the burning of the dockyard at Toulon in 1793 as incendiarism because he was not acting under a regular commission at the time, only on written orders from Admiral Hood. His imprisonment was an embarrassment for the British government and complicated Lord Malmesbury’s peace negotiations, which continued through 1796 and 1797. The French were intransigent, however, and would not listen to British arguments. Smith and Wright escaped in April 1798, a venture masterminded by Richard Cadman Etches, with the help of some clever travelling and disguise arrangements by royalists. Etches received £1,200 for his disbursements from Nepean’s secret service accounts, and Smith £1,514.34
From his base in Switzerland, William Wickham, under the orders of Grenville at the Foreign Off
ice, ran a variety of covert, cloak-and-dagger operations in 1795, and was financing and trying to coordinate émigré royalists to seize France from the unstable Directory. The rapidly changing regimes in Paris were dependent upon the army, and indeed in the early years the survival of the Republic depended upon the French state being under military threat; it therefore made sense to try to suborn the generals. The most promising was the attempt to bribe Jean-Charles Pichegru, conqueror of Holland in 1794, who was by now disenchanted with the republicans, but the project was compromised.* Not all the cabinet in London, nor the king, were convinced that the restoration of the Bourbons would provide a stable government for France, which made Wickham’s mission more difficult. The Austrians were similarly hesitant and as a result were running a timid military strategy. Wickham’s efforts also have to be seen against the background of the disintegrating coalition against France. As his effectiveness depended ultimately upon the military success of the Allies, and France successfully countered attempts to overthrow the Directory in 1797 and 1798, his three-year mission was to fail. More than anything, he was hindered by the divisions and rivalries amongst those Frenchmen, especially between the royalists and the constitutional monarchists, who opposed the republicans, and he lost faith in his warring partners very early on.35
The effectiveness of intelligence depended not only upon trusted agents, but also upon the speed and security with which intelligence travelled across the world, and particularly across Europe, back to London. The traffic in despatches was heavy. British diplomats at the great courts of Europe were expected to inform London of developments once a week or every fortnight, and thus a great many ordinary diplomatic despatches were carried by post, in cipher. It is likely that these ciphers were not secure against French counter-intelligence.36 Most of the ciphering and deciphering was done in the Foreign Office, a process dominated by the Willes family for over 120 years, of whom Sir Francis Willes was latterly the most eminent, retiring in 1807.* King’s Messengers were entrusted with the most secret documents, sometimes running a shuttle service from the Continental courts to meet the English packet boats departing from North Sea ports.† Since, however, only forty messengers were on the establishment, controlled by the lord chamberlain, and they were expensive, other couriers could be informally pressed into service. King’s Messengers were employed only for the most important messages and for carrying code books.37