Beware of Heroes

by Peter Shankland

  When closely questioned he fumbled a bit, particularly when he had to invent fictitious names, but on the whole he told a very convincing story. When asked how the false order for Sir Sidney’s release from the Temple had been obtained, he said he thought it had been managed by a Scotsman, Right, or Reith, who had lived nearly all his life in Paris. He said that he had visited Lady Elgin because he had frequently enjoyed her hospitality in Constantinople when she was in happier circumstances, and he hoped also to lessen her antipathy for France.

  For a week or two he heard nothing, then one day he was taken from his cell to the Court of Criminal Justice where the state trial of General Georges Cadoudal and his companions was in progress. They were charged with conspiring against the life of the First Consul. Here he was brought face to face with Captain John Wesley Wright whom he had imagined to be in safety. He was asked to identify him, and he did so, seeing no harm in stating what was obviously known already, and considering that it would not have been reasonable to pretend that he had forgotten one of his fellow prisoners. In this way Sir Sidney’s two closest friends met again, but under compromising circumstances, both of them being, through a series of mischances, for the second time in the power of the secret police.

  It was only later that de Tromelin made out that the authorities were trying to incriminate Wright in the Cadoudal plot, and through him the British Government; and that thirty-eight alleged conspirators on trial for their lives had refused to identify him as the captain of the ship that had landed them in France. It seemed to him that the police had him brought there to identify Wright so that they could pretend that it was one of the conspirators who had done so. He at once wrote to the Chief Justice to make it clear that he had known Wright, after their imprisonment in the Temple, only as an officer of The Tigre in the Acre campaign, and as a friend of Sir Sidney Smith’s in London. He was taken back to solitary confinement in the Abbaye Prison.

  Several months later he had a visit from Monsieur Chepy, Police Commissar for the district of Brest, who suggested that he should appeal direct to Napoleon for a commission in the Imperial Army. Otherwise, he said, his case was hopeless. This was not an isolated example of this strange way of recruiting for the Imperial Army, but Chepy told him he was trying to help because during the Egyptian Campaign he had been a prisoner of the Turks in a dungeon on the Island of Rhodes, and de Tromelin, representing Sir Sidney, had not only visited him but had succeeded in getting him better treatment. He had already written to Police Chief Réal, he said, on his behalf, and to the Grand Juge, stating that he was well known to the Army of Egypt for his efforts to help his countrymen who had fallen into the hands of the Turks, he had indeed saved many of their lives, and that his arrest had caused consternation in the whole district of Finisterre. Another officer, Chef d’Escadron Beauvoisin, one of those released by Sir Sidney from the dungeons under the Bagnio in Constantinople, had also written describing his generosity to the French prisoners.

  Then once more the door of his cell was locked and barred, and he was left alone to ponder Chepy’s advice which seemed at least to offer an honourable way of escape from the persecution to which he was being subjected. While he had been languishing in prison, General Cadoudal and twelve of his companions had been executed, and General Moreau exiled. Bonaparte had become Emperor of the French, though he had not yet been crowned. He seemed so secure and so unshakeable that de Tromelin was tempted to look upon the Bourbons as superseded and on the approaching coronation as symbolising a change of dynasty, in which case he ought, perhaps, as a true Frenchman, to support it.

  At last, after much thought, he sent word to Chepy that he would accept his advice. He gave him a letter to deliver to the Emperor in which he offered his submission, saying that he owed to him the happiness of being allowed to return to France under the amnesty to be with his family, and asking for a commission. He suggested that he could be of the greatest service in the Levant as he could speak Turkish and several other languages used there, but that he was unable to serve in an infantry regiment, except at headquarters, because of an injury to his foot received while on reconnaissance at Abukir.

  In all this time he had not been allowed to communicate with his wife or to let her know if he was alive or dead, so he followed this letter with an appeal addressed to Police Chief Réal which ran as follows:

  I have just made my declaration to Citizen Chepy. I regret that it is from prison that I must offer my services...I do not yet know the reason for my arrest...I am in the most rigorous solitary confinement. I have left a tender wife at Morlaix nursing a child four months old. Allow me to let her know that I am well and give her the consolation that her condition requires. You are a husband and father, you will understand how I feel. Have the goodness to deliver me from the rigorous secret confinement in which I am; don’t refuse an unhappy father who has sworn limitless devotion to the government...

  He was left in the Abbaye for another six months, but at last he was released, his brother-in-law standing surety for him, and he received in due course a commission as Captain in the 112th Regiment of the Line. He had an interview with the Emperor who said to him: ‘Go and do as much harm to my enemies as you did to me in Egypt.’

  Captain Wright, when the war broke out again, had been given command of the Vincejo, eighteen guns, the ship that, in the Mediterranean, had unluckily captured Kléber’s dispatches to the Directory which had deceived the British Government about the actual fighting strength of the Army of Egypt. His duties were very similar to those of Sir Sidney in the earlier phase of the war — keeping up an inshore patrol of the French Coast, landing agents, interrupting communications by sea between their ports, and so on. And he had been captured in very similar circumstances: the Vincejo, lying becalmed close to the land in Quiberon Bay, was attacked by a swarm of gunboats, and after a brave fight in which Captain Wright was painfully wounded in the groin he was forced to surrender to prevent the needless sacrifice of the lives of his crew.

  Again he found himself in the Temple Prison in the same room he had occupied on the previous occasion, and again he was treated as a criminal instead of as a prisoner of war. With him in the Temple were three of his midshipmen: one was his nephew, one was Sir Sidney’s nephew, and the other was the son of the Bishop of Bristol. All three had served in The Tigre at Acre, and all were the same age — thirteen. They scrawled on the walls of their cell pictures of Bonaparte hanging from the gallows. After a while they were sent to the ordinary prisoner of war camp, but Wright was held in solitary confinement. This he endured for many months, and although he was frequently interrogated, and although he lived under the constant threat of execution, he refused to answer any questions if it would have given the slightest advantage to his enemies. He maintained that he was a prisoner of war and therefore, according to the law of nations, he owed no account of his service to anyone but his own government. He wrote a long account of his imprisonment. The narrative, in his own handwriting, concludes:

  I have now to declare, that perfectly resigned as I am to my fate, I am able to support the worst a barbarous enemy can further intend against me; that the character of my country, and the reputation of the navy, are the dearest considerations to me, and that in no possible circumstances will I ever lose sight of them, but make my death, should I die in the hands of the enemy, as disgraceful to him as it will be creditable to my country.

  To a fellow prisoner, the Abbé Allary who had been chaplain to the Army of Condé, he stated:

  Bonaparte will destroy me; he has not forgotten our proclamations in Egypt, nor what we have written to him, nor the reproaches which we have addressed to him on the subject of his crimes at Jaffa.

  On learning of Wright’s imprisonment, Sir Sidney went to William Windham and asked him to raise the matter in Parliament because he thought it would be of service to his friend to make the circumstances known as widely as possible. He thought it might lead to some action being taken on his behalf by the government, an
d at least he would learn that he was not disowned and forgotten by his countrymen.

  In July 1805, Windham made a speech explaining what had happened, asking the House to consider what it should do to maintain its dignity and independence, and suggesting that Britain should retaliate. He moved that copies of correspondence between his majesty’s government and the government of France on the subject of Wright should be laid before the House. He was seconded by Sir Sidney who read out a letter from one of the officers of the Vincejo, describing the gallant defence of the vessel, the final surrender and the subsequent treatment of the captain and crew. The letter ended:

  The men falling fast, the foremast nearly shot away, and the vessel nearly sinking, Captain Wright was obliged to hail that he had struck, just in time to save the lives of the few who could keep the deck, as the gunboats were rowing up alongside with numerous troops to board. The captain himself was wounded in the thigh early in the action by a grapeshot, but never left the deck. We lament his separation from us as we would the absence of our dearest friends...

  Here Sir Sidney could no longer control his emotion. He broke off abruptly and could take no further part in the discussion.

  Windham suggested that if French officers who had been captured were treated with the same rigour as Captain Wright it would have an effect on public opinion in France, particularly on the military, and that Bonaparte was not out of reach of public opinion. Besides, he thought, he might now be governed by more generous feelings than formerly. Having attained the summit of his ambitions he could not be insensible to the reproach of having been actuated by motives of personal resentment against an officer whom he first knew at Acre by the share he had had in that ever-glorious and memorable exploit in defence of that place. He might, from the influence of more generous opinions, not less than from the dread of the odium he would encounter in France, be induced to alter his conduct to that gallant officer.

  A demand was sent through the Spanish Ambassador that Wright should be released in exchange for a French officer of comparative rank. Napoleon agreed, but in abusive terms, that he should be repatriated, and to keep up the fiction that he was not a prisoner of war but a criminal he contemptuously refused to accept a French officer in exchange. This personal rancour, ascribed both by Wright himself and by Windham to events in the Egyptian Campaign, continued, however intensively he was occupied by his great ambitions and campaigns.

  At that moment he was at Boulogne, poised for the invasion of England and hourly expecting the arrival of a French fleet strong enough to give him command of the Straits of Dover so that he would be able to ferry his troops across under its protection. ‘Give me command of the Straits for six hours,’ he wrote, ‘and I shall be master of the world.’ The French ships were blockaded in Toulon, Ferrol, Rochefort and Brest so that they couldn’t combine. Spain had joined him with twenty-five ships of the line, and they were blockaded also. The British ships, however, were forced from their stations from time to time by stress of weather. He ordered his various fleets to slip out of their harbours whenever an opportunity presented itself, cross the Atlantic and rendezvous in the West Indies. There they were to do as much harm as possible to British shipping and to British occupied islands; and as soon as they had formed a large enough fleet they were to sail direct for the Channel and escort the invasion force to England.

  The Rochefort fleet got out first, on 11th January, 1805. It arrived at Martinique on 20th February. Then, on 30th March, Admiral Villeneuve slipped away from Toulon with ten ships, picked up eight ships from Cadiz, and also sailed for the West Indies. For a month Nelson didn’t know where he was, but as soon as he received positive information he sailed with ten ships in pursuit, arriving at Barbados on 4th June. When Villeneuve learned that Nelson was in the West Indies too, he sailed for Europe to release the rest of the French ships from the blockaded ports and concentrate them all in the Channel, but Nelson guessed that the plan was to lure him away from the main scene of action, and he sailed back again, now only three days behind. He sent the brig Curieux on ahead to warn the Admiralty.

  Lord Barham, the First Sea Lord, at once ordered the ships off Ferrol and Rochefort to intercept Villeneuve 100 miles out to sea, so that he would have to fight without the support of the blockaded ships. The resulting action was indecisive, fought in darkness and fog. Villeneuve lost two ships but got into Vigo, and then to Ferrol where he picked up six more ships. He now had to appear off Brest where he would be joined by the twenty-one French ships blockaded there. The French fleet would then number fifty-four ships of the line, sufficient, Napoleon thought, to drive away the twenty-four British ships off Brest and to escort the invasion fleet safely across to England — but he had also ordered him, if he got into difficulties to retire to Cadiz. Villeneuve considered that he was in difficulties; his ships were in need of a refit and he had sustained damage in the recent action. Napoleon wrote to Talleyrand on 14th August:

  Villeneuve sails from Ferrol with thirty-four ships. If he follows my instructions, joins the Brest Squadron and enters the Channel, there is still time — I am master of England.

  Villeneuve sailed accordingly. Two hundred and fifty miles off Cape Finisterre he sighted three ships which a Danish merchantman wrongly informed him were part of a large British fleet. He abandoned the enterprise and retired to Cadiz. On the same day Nelson joined Cornwallis who was blockading Brest, and it was then no longer possible for Napoleon to secure even temporary superiority in the Channel.

  In the meantime a new coalition of great powers had been formed against him. He seems to have deliberately provoked their hostility so that if he had to abandon his much-publicised invasion of England he would be able to save face by winning victories against his continental enemies; he would have the advantage of striking at them with his great army that stood primed and ready, before they had time to concentrate and combine their forces. He moved his army south to the Danube by forced marches and in great secrecy, outmanoeuvred the Austrian General Mack and forced him to surrender at Ulm with 30,000 of the best Austrian troops on 17th October — he was the same general who had so dismally disappointed Nelson in the Italian campaign of 1798 by surrendering to a French force half the size of his own.

  Napoleon next moved towards Munich which he entered on 24th October. Here he read in one of Fouché’s secret police reports, which were regularly brought to him wherever he was, that an intensive search of Wright’s room in the Temple, carried out on 18th October, had revealed some files, bits of rope, a hook and some money. (He had actually hidden them under the floor during his earlier imprisonment, and they had lain undetected since then.) Napoleon would no doubt have considered it a meritorious act if a French officer had attempted to escape from captivity, and in any case he had already agreed that Wright should be repatriated; but in spite of the manifold responsibilities of directing a great campaign his resentment broke out afresh. He replied to Fouché on 26th October from Munich: ‘Have the prisoner Wright put in solitary confinement, this miserable assassin who wished to escape from the Temple.’

  On the following morning, 27th October, before this letter could have reached Paris, Wright was found dead in his room. As far as anything could be clear that concerned the sombre and impenetrable Fouché, Napoleon hadn’t ordered the killing, but there was an outburst of anger against him in the British press. A cover-up story of almost unimaginable clumsiness deepened the conviction that Wright had been murdered. It was officially stated that he had cut his throat after reading in the Moniteur about the Capitulation of Ulm.

  Unfortunately for whoever fabricated the story, on the front page of the same number of the Moniteur, which was lying on his table, there was another news item: that the French and Spanish fleets were out again — therefore a naval battle was imminent, if Nelson could catch them, a naval battle which Wright must have believed, with all England, would be a victory. If he had had any inclination towards suicide — and the evidence was all to the contrary — this wa
s the most unlikely day of all that he would have chosen on which to end his life.

  Napoleon entered Vienna on 14th November, 1805. He left again on the 16th in a snowstorm to meet the Russian and the Austrian armies that were slowly approaching. On the road, between Hollabrunn and Znaim, he received the first news of the Battle of Trafalgar. He tried to suppress it, and went on to Austerlitz where he completely defeated the Czar of Russia and the Emperor of Austria. This led to the Treaty of Presburg, signed on 26th December, by which he took the Tyrol from Austria, and a great deal of territory in South Germany. He also took back Venice and all the Venetian territories that he had given her eight years ago by the Treaty of Campo Formio.

  The campaign had been as brilliant as any in the annals of war, but he was not satisfied with his triumphs. Alexander, not Caesar, was still his hero, and Britain was the hated enemy who prevented him from realising his heart’s desire, to be Emperor of the East. Three days before his coronation as Emperor of the trench he complained to Madame Junot, who was an intimate friend of the Bonaparte family, that it was vexatious to have been prevented from meeting his Druses, and that he had missed his destiny.

  He was not mistaken [she wrote in her memoirs] with regard to the real cause of the disasters consequent upon the long resistance at St. Jean d’Acre. In his mind Sir Sidney Smith and those disasters were inseparable.