by Roger Knight
This expanded number was almost exactly the size of the army that Napoleon prepared in 1811 for his invasion of Russia and that was destroyed during the retreat from Moscow in 1812. Had that disaster not struck the French, those huge British militia battalions might have been needed and the fortifications come into their own. Instead, by the end of 1813, after nearly twenty years of mobilization and construction, the threat of invasion had been overcome and the army was able to release most of its line regiments and deploy them overseas in the Peninsula and to the near Continent.133
10
Intelligence, Security and Communications 1803–1811
But for the justification of a hostile armament against Denmark we must look for other reasons. I trust however that the world will feel that we have them … Intelligence from so many and such various sources of B[uonaparte]’s intention to force or seduce D[enmark] into an active confederacy against this country, leaves no doubt of his design. Nay, the fact that he has openly avowed such intention in an interview with the E[mperor] of R[ussia] is brought to this country in such a way as it cannot be doubted. Under such circumstances it would be madness, it would be idiotic … to wait for an overt act.
– Scribbled memorandum by Spencer Perceval, chancellor of the Exchequer, undated [but 22 July 1807], on information that Napoleon intended to force Denmark to declare war on Britain, in the period before the operation against Copenhagen1
From the time of the resumption of war in 1803 after the Peace of Amiens, the intelligence battle between England and France began to take a different direction, as ideological conflict gave way to more traditional war between nations. As we saw in Chapter 5, in the 1790s espionage initiatives had attempted to foster an uprising in France. Though the Alien Office had played its part in counteracting the dangers to the state at home and in Ireland, its attempt to stir up trouble on the Continent was an expensive failure. The end of this phase of secret warfare was marked by an assassination plot against Napoleon by French royalists, uncovered in early 1804 by the French secret police, and implicating a senior French figure, General Jean-Charles Pichegru. Led and financed by Britain, the plot, when it was discovered, caused the British government acute embarrassment.2 As a postscript to the plot, in March 1804 Sidney Smith’s erstwhile fellow secret agent, John Wesley Wright, returned to Quiberon on the coast, south of Brittany, commanding a ship whose mission was to evacuate any survivors of the Pichegru plot; but Wright was betrayed, captured and imprisoned, again, in the Temple Prison in Paris. He was murdered in his cell on 28 October 1805.3*
This final attempt by Britain to foment counter-revolution ended in the death of Pichegru, and also that of the duc d’Enghien on 21 March 1804. The latter’s offence was merely to be a Bourbon prince, and he had played no part in the plot against Napoleon. Further, he was captured on foreign territory and brought by French agents to France, where he was rapidly tried and executed. The emperor lost the propaganda advantage he had gained through the discovery of the plot to assassinate him: eliminating a young prince who was clearly innocent was unpopular, even in France. Nevertheless, Napoleon was able to consolidate his power, and British attempts to destabilize the French government ceased.4 After these events both French royalists and their bitter rivals, the constitutional monarchists, were forced to take a lesser role. Some continued to provide information to Britain, although others also undoubtedly contributed to Napoleon’s spy network in England.5 Of the major French royalist political adventurers, only the comte d’Antraigues, who became close to George Canning when he was foreign secretary, remained useful to the British government.
Systematic collection and better organization were to be the hallmarks of intelligence analysis during the Napoleonic War, although an attempt in early 1803 to bring about the comprehensive integration of military intelligence was to fail. The idea of the establishment of the ‘Depot for Military Knowledge’ was similar to that of the French in Paris, who centralized secret and open source military intelligence in their ‘Bureau de Renseignments’ and whose ‘Topographical Bureau’ held maps and plans.6 The new quartermaster-general, Major General Sir Robert Brownrigg, formerly military secretary to the duke of York, had the commander-in-chief’s support for the new measure, and it was approved by Charles Philip Yorke when he was secretary at war. The British version was to consist of four departments: Plans, Movements, Library and Topographical. Brownrigg also went further by proposing that the Secret Office in the Post Office and the Alien Office be integrated with foreign intelligence. The failure to establish the Depot was due to the prosaic reason of a lack of office space, as the duke of York later explained to Lord Castlereagh: ‘The chief obstacle has been a want of sufficient accommodation to place in security and to arrange in order the valuable materials which were to be collected.’7 There would have been enough space on the additional floor of the Horse Guards then being built, but it was not finished until 1805. For the moment, some military maps were drawn, but nothing further was done.*
In the last three years of the French Revolutionary War, William Wickham had briefly achieved what could be described as centralized, cross-government intelligence assessment.† Known as the Inner Office’, with its network of Christ Church graduates, it had been broken up by Addington when he introduced peacetime economies.8
Wickham fell out of favour with Pitt, and was appointed by Addington as chief secretary to the lord lieutenant of Ireland in February 1802, in which post he spent an unhappy two years. It was during this period that Robert Emmet’s one-day rebellion broke out on 23 July 1803, and, as we saw in Chapter 8, although Wickham was not himself in Dublin on that day, he was blamed for not having anticipated it. He resigned, citing overwork and strain. On the fringe of politics, and now uncomfortable in it, he had no further part in the intelligence world.9 The career of Evan Nepean, secretary of the Admiralty, and another important hub in the Whitehall intelligence machine, took a similar turn. He fell out with the naval members of his Board and, as his colleague William Marsden noted, ‘having long found his official situation irksome’, was appointed by Addington to follow Wickham as chief secretary of Ireland, a post for which he, too, was little suited.10
Information circulated around Whitehall with more system, purpose, verification and analysis than had been the case in the 1790s.* From the resumption of war, there was better cooperation between cabinet ministers and departments, the lack of which had marked the intelligence failures before Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt in 1798. Detailed correspondence circulated around Whitehall, signed and annotated by each of the undersecretaries as he read a letter or memorandum before sending it on. The movements of the documents can be traced through the Foreign Office, Home Office, Admiralty and secretary of state for war. The Post Office was often included in this network, for its packets could pick up important information on ship sightings when at sea; and the Alien Office, interviewing passengers through the ports, would transmit useful intelligence through John King, undersecretary at the Home Office.
To handle this mass of information, greater system was used in the internal workings of each office, brought to a new level of collation and cross-reference by the indexing and summarizing of correspondence in great volumes known as ‘Digests’.11 The young Colonel Henry Bunbury – appointed military undersecretary to the secretary of state for war in late 1809 when Liverpool hurriedly succeeded Castlereagh – assumed a major role in summarizing intelligence from all sources for his chief. Although one of the most urgent issues was to discover how many reinforcements were to be sent to the French armies in the Peninsula, Bunbury handled and processed every sort of intelligence destined for the secretary of state’s office.12
Routine intelligence and security systems operated effectively. The Alien Act of 1796 limited entry to certain ports, under the terms of which persons seeking entry to Britain had to obtain permission from the secretary of state.* As ever, the navy maintained its watch on French ports. Philippe D’Auvergne, made a rear-admiral in
1805, and assisted by General Sir George Don, lieutenant-governor of Jersey, filed his voluminous intelligence reports from Jersey until he retired on half-pay in 1812. D’Auvergne now had a network of agents in every port from L’Orient as far north as the Texel. From them he brought large amounts of both naval and military intelligence together that were sent back to Whitehall.13 The efforts of D’Auvergne’s agents ashore were supplemented by the observations of the small warships under his command, which also harried French trade and pursued enemy privateers.14 In the same way, a small squadron of gun-brigs,commanded by Captain Edward Owen from the Immortalité, collected intelligence when Napoleon was massing his invasion flotillas in 1804, and made a thorough nuisance of themselves along the French Channel coast by bombarding ports and taking any small enemy vessels that ventured out.†
The government also used smugglers to deliver and collect intelligence which often traversed the Channel and southern North Sea at speed, making it difficult for the authorities on both sides to keep developments of any sizeable operation secret. Information often travelled in vessels under ten tons, light rowing galleys, cheap to construct, manned by perhaps a dozen oarsmen, up to forty feet in length. In calm conditions these fast galleys could complete a Channel crossing under cover of darkness. No one knew French and Dutch waters and their dangerous tides better than the fishermen and watermen of Dover and Deal. Transmitting intelligence by these fast vessels was mixed with other business. Smuggled tobacco, alcohol and French lace and silk were still profitable in wartime, as were earnings from the transport of bullion and escaped prisoners of war, in both directions.15 The Dover customs collectors complained to the customs commissioners in London that these boats were ‘so finely constructed and manned with such expert rowers that few if any of the boats in the service of the Revenue are equal to them in swiftness’. In 1809 the Preventative Water Guard was founded, but it had only thirty-nine revenue cutters and sixty-two boats to patrol the entire English and Welsh coastlines.16 Thus, contact between smugglers and fishermen on both sides of the Channel was hardly interrupted by wartime conditions, and carrying intelligence provided another source of business. Family links were strong between the ports of England, France and Holland. In 1804 Sir John Moore, at Shorncliffe on the Kent coast training troops, reported to the Home Office: ‘There is hardly a family in Folkestone which has not Relatives settled at Flushing and there is a constant intercourse.’17
During the height of the invasion threat in 1804 and 1805, Lieutenant-Colonel Willoughby Gordon, the assistant quartermaster-general of the Southern District, maintained a network of spies with which he communicated by means of the smugglers through Flushing.18 In 1811 the Foreign Department of the Post Office wrote to John Barrow to plead very strongly for the release of some smugglers who had been detained by a warship:
a boat was coming from France as usual, the Master of which had French Newspapers for this Office … regularly sanctioned and approved by the Post Master General and equally by Government, and it is always the rule when any intelligence is received to forward it to the secretary of State & afterwards to the public newspapers. The principal channels through which Intelligence is procured is by the means of Smugglers & it has generally succeeded … it is of material consequence to the Govt to have a channel by which Intelligence may occasionally be obtained.
The secretary to the Board of Admiralty endorsed the letter: ‘Their Lordships cannot interfere.’19 Intelligence also flowed by this means in the opposite direction. In July of that year H.M. Gunboat Locust stopped a rowing galley, the Apus of London, just outside Gravelines. The master claimed that his vessel was on a secret mission ordered by John Wilson Croker, but gold and English newspapers were found aboard, ‘and in two kegs with false heads’, the naval commander reported to the customs officials at Dover, ‘were also secreted a quantity of letters addressed to French merchants and various other papers – upon the discovery of which the master appeared very much agitated indeed.’20
Escaped prisoners or deserters often conveyed intelligence across the Channel, especially if they were sailors, and their information could be given some weight. One British seaman, Ralph Dunlop, who as a prisoner of war suffered ‘cruel and harsh treatment, into an almost hopeless state, [he] with several others agreed to engage in the French service, in the hopes of being brought to the Coasts, to find an opportunity to escape’. His information after the action in the Basque Roads in 1809 was precise and detailed. Two years later D’Auvergne sent some intelligence gained from French sailors who had deserted from St Malo to Jersey, ‘representing they were not paid for serving in the French ships of war and [were] very ill treated’. The deserters’ information was corroborated by neutrals ‘lately arrived at Guernsey’.21
Ordinary diplomatic and military communication had to be swift and reliable. Post Office packets carried despatches to the West Indies, the Mediterranean and across the North Sea, as well as domestic and commercial mail. These ships also transported the King’s Messengers, who travelled the Continent, delivering particularly important despatches and cipher books to and from British diplomats at foreign courts. Those areas of conflict far from London, such as the Mediterranean, however, often experienced long periods without contact between politicians in Whitehall and admirals and generals in the field. Nelson became frustrated with lack of information during his long watch on Toulon between 1803 and 1805, and had to take a large number of independent decisions. During Collingwood’s period as commander-in-chief from 1805 to 1810 he had to run his own Mediterranean-wide intelligence network, largely composed of the officers under his command, and as a result he developed a particularly acute strategic awareness.22 He was, according to Thomas Creevey after reading his correspondence some years later, ‘the prime and sole minister of England, acting upon the sea, corresponding himself with all surrounding states, and ordering everything upon his own responsibility’.23 Nor was Collingwood a stranger to the subtleties of intelligence deception. His last success at sea, in October 1809, when his ships destroyed a French force that broke out of Toulon with supplies for the French Army in Barcelona, was triggered by a clever ruse in disguising the readiness of his fleet in Port Mahon, which he knew was being observed by someone he suspected of being a French double agent.* The action ended with the destruction of two French ships of the line and thirteen transports, while four were captured.24
In spite of British ascendancy at sea, it was a struggle to keep communications open with diplomats and governments on the Continent, especially in those countries such as Prussia and Austria that resented the overweening influence of the Napoleonic regime. Naturally, this was a difficulty that France avoided, as French conquests were mainly on the Continent: it had few sea communications and the advantage of internal lines. Merchants also faced problems. For almost all the Napoleonic War, European waters were packed with enemy privateers, not only from France and Holland but also from Spain, until that country turned against France in 1808. From 1807 Denmark and Norway were actively hostile, and between 1812 and 1814 bold and successful American privateers captured many British merchant ships in both North American and European waters (as we will see in Chapter 13). British Post Office packets also suffered considerably: between 1803 and 1808 ten Falmouth-based packets were captured by French privateers, and two by Spanish. After 1812 eighteen struck their colours to American privateers.25 Packet losses were fewer among those working out of Harwich and Yarmouth to the Continental North Sea ports: seven were taken during the war as a whole, three of which were interned in Hellevoetsluis in Holland at the sudden outbreak of the war in May 1803.26
All packets were built for speed and sailed close to the wind, but they found well-manned privateers difficult to shake off. Debate was continuous within the Post Office as to whether or not the vessels should be more heavily armed, because guns added significantly to the weight of a packet and adversely affected its speed. In 1811 one Falmouth-based packet was chased off Finisterre but got away, as
the packet commander related when applying to the postmasters-general for compensation to replace equipment: ‘I was obliged for the preservation of the packet and to prevent the loss of H.M. mails and despatches, to knock out the stanchions, throw overboard the long boat, and run off my lee gun amidships in order to expedite the sailing of the vessel, which I am happy to say had the desired effect and after a hard chase of thirty-six hours we escaped.’27
As the war became concentrated away from the Channel, and conflict both on land and at sea moved further north, the importance of communications across the North Sea increased. As French domination spread north taking in the German ports and then Denmark, the packets were forced to take the mail by northerly and more distant and dangerous routes. In 1803 the Post Office struggled to keep the Cuxhaven route open, but increasingly the southern Danish ports of Husum and Tonningen had to be used for mail delivery, a distance of 240 miles. As a precaution postal agents were set up in Heligoland, from which mails were sent onwards to Hamburg and other German ports by fishing boats.* As the head of the Hamburg Post Office put it to a Post Office official in London in 1806, ‘the way is the most sure and the only one that will continue to dure the longest time.’28 An agent with credentials was also set up in Gothenburg in southern Sweden: the route flourished, although here the danger to packets was due to weather rather than to French predators.29 For a short period in 1806 the Cuxhaven route was again possible, but in the summer of 1807, the year of the apogee of Napoleon’s power, British hostilities against Copenhagen made the delivery of mail to Danish and German ports impossible. From 1807, the only route for mails to countries in northern Europe was from Harwich or Yarmouth to Gothenburg, a voyage of 480 sea miles, which necessitated sailing a round trip of at least a thousand miles. This compared with the peacetime route of Dover to Calais of just over twenty miles, or Harwich to Hellevoetsluis of 120 miles. As year by year the North Sea and the Baltic assumed greater wartime strategic and diplomatic importance, the packet service had to stretch itself even further.