The War of Wars (81 page)

But the
Imperieuse
itself was now in deadly danger, in only four fathoms of water as a gale blew up. Luckily the wind veered away from off the sea and onto the land and the
Imperieuse
was able to sail off by nine o’clock. In the course of the night the Spanish captain died. ‘Every attention possible was paid to the poor fellow, from admiration of his gallantry, but anything beyond this was beyond our power. On the following morning we committed his remains to the deep, with the honours of war.’

Britain’s war against France had been pursued on three main fronts: diplomatic and financial, in the form of subsidies to the continental powers of astounding dimensions; naval, in the constant fight to protect trade, disrupt French commerce and attack or blockade French warships; and military, in its continental exploits. But there was a fourth, shadowy front about which much less is known because so much was concealed.

Spies are drawn to wars like wasps to jam. The revolutionary and Napoleonic wars probably attracted the biggest swarm of spies, double agents, infiltrators, secret police, codemakers and codebreakers since the Elizabethan wars with Spain and possibly up to the two World Wars.

Equally, there were a stunning series of intelligence lapses. What the spies failed to find out was as often more important than what they did: for two thirds of the time the main adversaries, Britain and France, behaved like blindfolded men stumbling about trying to find each other in a darkened room. When they did encounter each other, it was sometimes more by accident than design. That didn’t stop the two sides trying. Spying has been described as the second oldest profession: it was probably a great deal less satisfying than the oldest in delivering what it promised.

Among the truly spectacular intelligence failures of the Napoleonic wars, nine stand out: Britain’s failure to foresee the French Revolution; its blind faith in the unthreatening nature of that rebellion until war was literally thrust upon it; its inability to infiltrate the royalist groups in
France; its failure to support them; the misjudgements surrounding the occupation of Toulon in 1793; the almost incredible failure to detect the immense armada preparing for the invasion of Egypt in 1798 and its destination which, in a brilliant piece of preventive espionage, was concealed from most of the French themselves; Nelson’s chase across the Mediterranean in which he missed the French fleet by a few miles, his finding them being based on a hunch, rather than intelligence; and an almost exact repetition of this experience with the chase across to the West Indies in the months preceding Trafalgar.

On the French side there were awesome failures of intelligence as to the power and the nature of the British fleet, which led to the assembling and then dismantling of a giant invasion armada in 1804–5; a failure to anticipate the scale and ferocity of the Spanish resistance to French occupation; and a repetition of this experience in Russia in 1812. Perhaps the worst of all intelligence blunders was the British failure to detect first the movement, and then the direction of Napoleon’s thrust into Belgium before the Battle of Waterloo, which so nearly secured him the battle.

Conversely the French attributed many dramatic events to British agents for which they were probably not responsible. One such was the assassination of the pro-French Tsar Paul of Russia; another, the murder of the ablest French general in Egypt, Kléber; a third, the assassination attempt on Napoleon on Christmas Eve 1800. The myth of the virtual invincibility of British intelligence probably dates from these times – at least a century and a half before James Bond.

For all that, intelligence was vital at many key moments. It can be subdivided into seven key areas, some of which persist to this day. These can be summarized as, ‘special operations’ – strikes at certain key targets by irregular troops or commandos under individuals outside the normal command structures, of whom Sir Sidney Smith was a towering British example; the activities of embassies and the spies around them to discern enemy intentions; counter-intelligence – the prevention of similar activities on domestic territory by the enemy; the infiltration of enemy émigré communities; the passage and interception of communications carried by despatch riders and – an innovation – by systems of interlinked signal stations within sight of each other on land;
the coding and decoding of despatches; and, most mundane but perhaps most important, the continuing watch of lowly agents for enemy ship and troop movements.

The most bizarre aspect of British intelligence during the revolutionary war was its tiny budget compared with the seniority of those that took an interest. From a fairly early stage it was apparent that William Pitt, the prime minister himself, devoted an inordinate amount of attention to intelligence-gathering, some of it of very dubious quality. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that he was for a long time effectively the head of British intelligence.

The chain of command ran down to William Windham, the Norfolk-based squire who became secretary of war. This able but shadowy personality reported directly to Pitt; beneath him was an under-secretary disbursing an almost incredibly small budget.

Shortly before war broke out, annual spending on Britain’s ‘foreign secret services’ was around £25,000 (only about £5 million today). The staff consisted of two under-secretaries in each office, twelve clerks for home and ten for foreign intelligence, a gazette writer, a gazette printer, a keeper of state papers, interpreters in Latin and oriental languages, a collector and transcriber of state papers, an embellisher and two codebreakers. Foreign office spying was done almost directly through embassies abroad, the most important of which, of course, was that in Paris.

It was by and large a pretty rackety operation. A flavour is given by one early French-born British agent, a M. de St Marc, who was motivated entirely by money. Grenville outlined:

the terms on which M. de St M. proposed to be employed and on which Mr Pitt imagined that it might be worthwhile to try him for a short time. They were that he was in the first instance to receive 100 guineas for the information which he is to give here, and if it appeared satisfactory 100gs more. That he was to be employed at Paris to give intelligence to Mr Hailes at an allowance of 60gs a month for three months and at the end of that time of 250gs if government was satisfied with his services. He states that it will be in his power to give copies of all material despatches sent by the French
Court to India, and also to furnish correct accounts of the number and distribution of the ships at Rochefort.

His masters were quickly disillusioned. One British official wrote:

I have only seen St Marc once within these three weeks, that is to say, since I gave him the last hundred guineas. He is either afraid, or indolent, or unwilling. He has a very pretty Englishwoman with him that he calls his wife, but I rather suspect from her appearance that she is his concubine, and I think the style in which he lives is hardly warranted by his frequent complaints of distress, and his precarious existence. I cannot help doubting his having been to Rochefort as he pretended. I really do not think he shows any activity, and I find him uninformed upon the most common topics in public affairs.

All of this was small-scale stuff in the buildup to war. What was much more explosive, later, was the widely held belief in many French royalist circles that the French Revolution itself was a dastardly plot hatched by British agents working for Pitt to cripple Britain’s traditional enemy. Certainly the French ambassador in London, Le Luzerne, believed this and pointed to the presence of Danton in London before the Revolution. A leading French writer, Camille Desmoulins, alleged that ‘our revolution in 1789 was an affair arranged between the British ministry and a minority party of noblemen (in France).’

Pitt was alleged by one French journalist to have been behind the 1788 financial crisis in France, the meeting of the states general and the Revolution itself. An important part of the French court, including by some accounts the Queen, believed Pitt to have been behind the Revolution. The British ambassador in Paris, the Duke of Dorset, was moved to protest: ‘It is unnecessary that I should tell Your Grace how entirely destitute of foundation is this as well as all other reports of the same kind . . . The French, I find, suspect, or at least wish to have it supposed that we have done by them what they would have done by us in similar circumstances; they are completely wrong in this idea.’

There had indeed been contacts between the British government through the secret service and members of the dissident community in France criticising the King of France. The purpose was to try to prevent the French joining the Spanish in the dispute between the British and the latter over the Nootka Sound. A British agent, Hugh Elliott, was despatched to deal directly with the leader of the dissident faction in the aristocracy, Mirabeau.

Pitt himself wrote to the King about the purpose of the mission:

Elliott went lately to Paris, principally from curiosity, but before his departure he mentioned to Mr Pitt, that he had formerly happened to be in habits of intimacy with M. de Mirabeau, and might probably be able to learn something from him respecting the views of the prevailing party in France on the subject of the discussion with Spain. Mr Pitt recommended to him to be very cautious not to commit any body by his conversation but to endeavour to find out whether there was any chance of making any of the leading persons see in a just light the nature of the dispute between this country and Spain, and of thereby preventing or delaying any hostile measures which might be taken by France.

The King was somewhat alarmed and wrote that ‘no encouragement must be given to forwarding the interested views of the democratical party’.

Elliott appears to have relished the role of agent: he wrote to Pitt: ‘The sentiments expressed in my conversation with the deputation of the diplomatic committee were such as I thought best suited to my audience, and the particular purpose I had in view, but were not to be taken as literally mine. The speech I made was in every sense a French speech, and therefore the terms glorious revolution and others of a similar nature are applicable to their notions and not to my own opinion.’ He claimed that the existing government of France was ‘bent upon cultivating the most unbounded friendship with Great Britain’. A cryptic sentence says, ‘what has taken place in my more intimate conversations with individuals cannot be committed to paper.’ He added: ‘I must observe that there is no such thing as a private
negotiation to be carried on here. Everything like a secret is avoided as dangerous, and likely to expose.’

This spy, moreover, assured the early French revolutionaries that the British government had no sympathy with Edmund Burke’s celebrated attack on the Revolution. He argued:

Burke and his book [should be treated] with that degree of levity, which I believe the best means of preventing government here, from being harassed with formal applications from the French court, for the prosecution of the author, as a libeller either of the present government of France, or indeed of the persons of the sovereigns themselves. You will also be pleased to observe, that I have fully expressed to Mirabeau, our resolution to take no share in the internal divisions in France, and have, I hope, fulfilled the whole of your idea upon that delicate subject . . . [He added that he] did not humour the erroneous wishes of our court by assuring ministers that a counter-revolution would not be interrupted in its march, that any attempt to stay it would only enrage an immense population.

This astonishing letter supports the view that Pitt, attacked later as the greatest prosecutor of the war against France, was perfectly ready to negotiate with the French revolutionaries at an early stage – many of them then being, of course, aristocrats.

One reason for Pitt’s dalliances with the revolutionaries was the influence of the French King’s relation, the dubious Duc d’Orleans, who it was believed – certainly by the French – was being heavily subsidized by the British. After his expulsion from France in October 1789 d’Orleans was said by French newspapers to be indulging in ‘delicious orgies with the Prince of Wales and all the English lords’. The French ambassador in London did not share these suspicions of treachery, suggesting that d’Orleans was merely enjoying the social round of ‘wine, horses, gambling, girls and Madame de Buffon’.

Nevertheless there seem to be grounds for believing that the British government, with the limited resources it had at its disposal for espionage, was secretly delighted by the political crisis affecting its greatest enemy, even if it is probably far-fetched to suggest that the
British instigated or even assisted the French Revolution (but American ideas, originally influenced by British ones, certainly played a major part). Pitt was to realize his grotesque mistake when within a few years the terrifying military machinery of revolutionary France was to turn upon Britain with an effectiveness never displayed by Bourbon France.

The importance of traditional cloak-and-dagger spying was thus limited. On a much larger, if even more dubious, scale, was that of the growing and eventually enormous French exile community in England and, conversely, the possibility that they were infiltrated by French agents, something about which the British authorities could do little. There were continual stories of French royalist groups in Paris betrayed by what would now be called French counter-intelligence moles in London who had penetrated the émigré groups.

The émigré situation was rendered all the more complicated by the intense divisions that existed within it: in particular those between the supporters of the fat, obtuse and indolent Comte de Provence, the pretender, and the ambitious and scheming d’Orleans, who to most seemed a more plausible candidate. The British preferred the first as being more pliable. The details of these émigré intrigues need not concern us, except in two respects: the impact of French agents stirring up dissent in Britain, and the harm done to British backing of royalist resistance groups in France.