The War of Wars (82 page)

The first can be quickly disposed of. As has already been noted, Pitt, an enlightened, tolerant and idealistic young man, was hardened by the impact of war into imposing deeply illiberal restrictions upon his country which violated many traditional British constitutional principles and were besides, largely ineffectual: the authorities of about 1795 behaved as though revolution in Britain was imminent – which was not just untrue but, had it been true, could hardly have been instigated by a handful of French spies. A repressive regime was instigated against traditional British principles of toleration which, on and off, was not to be lifted until the Grey administration in 1830: the only brief moment of light was to be Grenville’s Ministry of All Talents, which reactionary circles in Britain quickly undermined.

Revolutionary and Napoleonic propagandists attempted to portray Britain as being on the brink of revolution, French-style, which overlooked the fact that Britain had already been through two such revolutions in the seventeenth century and was not ready for another. As far as ‘the mob’ was concerned, their power in mainland Britain was always much exaggerated, even throughout the French Revolution being largely manipulated by aristocratic and middle-class intellectual dissidents; it only occasionally emerged in sporadic riots. The French Revolution had a much more potent appeal among agitators and ordinary people in Ireland, but that was to do with the wretched conditions of most of the inhabitants coupled with the sense of colonial domination and the existence of a racial and sectarian overclass in the Protestant Scotch-Irish community.

Ironically, as has been noted, Pitt himself flirted with opponents of French absolutism and Fox openly and unashamedly espoused many of the ideals of the French revolutionaries until the process got out of control. Perhaps the most significant impact of the French Revolution on British politics was its splintering of the old Whig opposition into three distinct groups: the grandees, led by Grenville, who upheld traditional freedoms, and despised the small-minded court party around the King and its allies in the lesser country gentry, the ‘Tory’ squires: Grenville, although the second most ardent prosecutor of the war against France, was nevertheless much more open to negotiation than Pitt; the parliamentary liberals, surrounding the charismatic Charles James Fox, who were openly attracted to American and French revolutionary ideals; and the extra-parliamentary Radicals, around men like Bright, Cobbett and Cochrane, who occasionally slipped into parliament in those few constituencies where the franchise was a genuinely large one, and seemed to pose the most dangerous threat to the authorities.

The latter found it convenient to paint the Radicals in French revolutionary colours and openly to persecute and imprison such men. Thus the effect of French intelligence agents and revolutionary propagandists in Britain was largely counterproductive: to precipitate a crackdown by the government on opposition groups seeking to address the huge problems of a new industrial age of social change in
which workers and their families were crammed into the unsanitary conditions in the new cities of Britain. There is not the slightest evidence that Britain was on the verge of a French-style revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, or that French agents and their sympathisers could inspire one.

The effect of the British secret services in even comprehending, much less supporting, the counter-revolutionary effort in France was not just inadequate but laughable. Pitt himself veered between attempting to accommodate the revolutionary regime in France and seeking to overthrow it. He seriously botched the opportunity offered by the counter-revolutionary uprising in Toulon in 1793, which had it been backed with speed and efficiency by the British, might have ignited a ferocious anti-Jacobin flame throughout France: instead the insurgents were abandoned by the British and butchered in a frenzy of blood letting.

The failure to support the insurrection in mid-western France was even more culpable. The sad fate of the pro-rightist explosion in Toulon has already been described, as has the ultimate tragedy of the revolt in the Vendée. But there was an earlier, much less well-known failure surrounding the contacts of British intelligence with a legendary royalist leader, known only as Gaston, who in 1793 was said to be commanding an army of 200,000 men in the Vendée. Nepean, the operational head of the British secret service, commissioned a ship, the
Lydia
to come to Gaston’s aid: ‘For a cover the
Lydia
was cleared out for Lisbon, and to call at Nantes, by way of looking for freight; whatever information she could pick up she was to deliver to the government of Jersey or Guernsey, and all the English men of war had notice of her, that she might not be molested.’ The
Lydia
provided money and equipment to the insurgents until captured later by a French warship. It was soon discovered that Gaston, a young peasant leader, had actually been captured and shot in April 1793.

Thus the performance of British intelligence during the Long War was far from impressive. In the case of French intelligence in Britain, it was negligible, except on three counts: the encouragement of Irish insurgents, which was a case of pushing at an open door; the infiltration of royalist émigrés in London; and the infiltration of French agents into
Britain and Brussels before Waterloo which nearly secured a French triumph by lulling the British into a sense of false security.

The work of a number of extraordinary individuals redeemed the general inadequacy of British intelligence. Apart from Mackenzie, who discovered the secret element in the Tilsit treaty, the three giants of British intelligence warfare were Sir Sidney Smith, his close and tragic associate, Captain John Wright and Thomas Cochrane, the master of irregular naval warfare.

Smith in some ways presaged T.E. Lawrence: his exploits at Acre have been outlined, and on his return to England from that expedition he arrived in Turkish dress, turban, robe, shawl and girdle around his waist with a brace of pistols, according to
The Times
. A brilliant linguist, he became a rival of Nelson, who in his extreme vanity resented him. Curly haired, hook-nosed and weatherbeaten, he was to become an instant popular hero celebrated by his own hornpipe and dances.

The son of an impecunious naval captain distantly related to Pitt, Sidney Smith was born in about 1764. He joined his first ship at the age of thirteen in 1777, taking part in the Battle of Chesapeake Bay in 1781 and Rodney’s great victory in 1782. He then enlisted as a mercenary under the Swedes in 1788, fighting in two furious actions with the Russians, receiving a knighthood for his bravery.

The outbreak of war in 1793 found him in the pay of the Turkish navy. He chartered a ship, manned it with British sailors and arrived off Toulon, where he found Hood preparing to leave under attack from French revolutionary forces. Smith volunteered to burn the French fleet. The contemporary naval historian John Marshall described the scene:

Sir W Sidney Smith, and the officers immediately under his orders, surrounded by a tremendous conflagration, had nearly completed the hazardous services assigned to them, when the loud shouts, and the republican songs of the approaching enemy were heard at intervals amid the bursting of shells and firing of musketry. In addition to the horror of such a scene . . . the dreadful explosion of many thousand barrels of gunpowder on board the
Iris
frigate, in the Inner Road, will ever be remembered by those who were witnesses
of the scene. The concussion it produced shook the houses in Toulon like an earthquake, and occasioned the sudden crash of every window in them; whilst the scattered fragments of burning timber which had been blown up, descending with considerable force, threatened the destruction of all the officers and men who were near the spot. Fortunately, however, only three of the party lost their lives on the occasion. This powder-ship had been set on fire by the Spaniards, instead of scuttling and sinking her, as had been previously concerted.

Sir W Sidney Smith having completed the destruction of every thing within his reach, to his astonishment first discovered that our perfidious allies had not set fire to any of the ships in the basin before the town; he therefore hastened thither with the boats under his command, for the purpose of endeavouring to counteract the treachery of the Spaniards; when lo! To his great mortification, he found the boom at the entrance laid across, and was obliged to desist in his attempts to cut it, from the repeated volleys of musketry directed towards his boats from the flagship, and the wall of the Battery Royale. He therefore proceeded to burn the
Héros
and
Thémistocle
, prison-ships, in the Inner Road, which he effected, after disembarking all the captives. This service was scarcely performed, when the explosion of the
Montreal
, another powder-ship, took place, by means equally unsuspected and base, with a shock even greater than the first; but the lives of Sir W Sidney Smith and the gallant men who served under him, were providentially saved from the imminent danger in which they were thus a second time placed.

Smith followed this up with raiding parties against the French in the Atlantic, before being captured in April 1796 and spending two years in the grim Temple prison in Paris before his famous escape; the heroic defence of Acre followed.

Smith was a close friend of the notorious Lord Camelford, cousin of both Grenville and Pitt, and had an affair with Princess Caroline, the abandoned wife of the Prince of Wales. In 1805 he was posted to serve under Nelson. Sir William Hamilton wrote: ‘Be assured that Lord Nelson now understands Sir Sidney well and really loves and esteems
him; and . . . will give him every proof of it, if ever they should meet on service together . . . They are certainly the two greatest heroes of the age.’

Smith urged an attack on Boulogne using Robert Fulton’s torpedoes and William Congreve’s rockets. He reconnoitred the coast with General Sir John Moore, who displayed a soldier’s caution. Smith replied: ‘General Moore, I am persuaded, would do his utmost to realize any plan laid down for him . . . but he is too wary to undertake such a task voluntarily, though, of course, foremost when ordered to go to work. We go on, as usual, pleasantly and well together.’

On 1 October 1805 Smith set out in eight ships carrying Fulton’s primitive torpedoes, as well as catamarans equipped with some 500 rockets each. These craft were thought to be more stable on recoil than ordinary boats, which proved to be the very opposite of the case. They rolled so badly that most of the rockets hit the water. The torpedoes also proved ineffectual. The First Sea Lord, Lord Keith, fulminated: ‘We shall get our ships crippled, fail of success and at a great expense . . . To support this kind of warfare . . . will bring our judgment into disrepute and end in nothing but disgrace. The vessels employed upon it might be used to much more advantage in an attempt on the enemy’s fleet at Cadiz.’

In spite of his record for crazy antics, Smith was given command of a squadron of Collingwood’s Mediterranean fleet in 1806 where he accurately reflected on Napoleon’s megalomania: ‘Knowing Bonaparte as I know him, I can easily imagine his thirst to realize a speculation manqué on Constantinople and the route to India. He cannot fail to find it increase on being nearer to the capital of the Eastern Empire than he is to his own . . . All this he can do if he is not counteracted . . . it will be a giant’s labour to eradicate them from the Hellespont and Bosphorous if they once establish themselves there. I dare say I shall be looked to for the Herculean labour.’ The following year he took part in Duckworth’s assault on Constantinople.

He also successfully supervised the evacuation of the Portuguese court from Lisbon later in the year. Towards the end of the war he fought off Sicily and besieged Algiers. He lived his later life in Paris, ironically enough, surviving to the ripe age of seventy-five, dying in 1840.

Most poignant of all was the fate of the third great spy, Captain John Wright, Smith’s great friend. Wright had been imprisoned along with Smith at the Temple prison in 1798. After acting as a spy and liaison officer with royalists they had been captured while becalmed off Le Havre. Smith had nearly been executed before his spectacular rescue in 1800 by royalists under the direction of William Windham, head of the British secret service.

Soon afterwards Wright turned up in Paris to the disgust of the British ambassador, the able Lord Whitworth:

I fear he is too well known to be of any material service; and I will confess to your Lordship that I am not without apprehension that, in a moment of irritation like the present, it may be recollected that he was a prisoner here and that he escaped from prison. I cannot but help think a less remarkable person, however intelligent Captain Wright may be, might have been equally useful without the risk of adding another pierre d’achoppement to the many which we may expect to find in our way. I have, however, told him that he might remain here for the present and see his old friends, if they are willing under the present circumstances to renew their acquaintance – which I very much doubt.

Nevertheless Wright behaved with unexpected sensitivity. In August 1803 he performed his most spectacular mission, landing George Cadoudal, the wily planner of the assassination attempt on Napoleon in rue Nicaise, near Dieppe, and General Pichegru, another royalist plotter, ten days later. Wright reported directly back to Pitt at Fort Walmer on the Dover coast, which acted as a base not just for espionage but for shipping goods, supplies and guns to sympathizers in France.

Subsequently Wright was given command of a small squadron of spyships off the French coast, only to be wounded and captured. A week after the Battle of Trafalgar he was found dead, as we have seen, his throat slit, supposedly having committed suicide on learning of the French victory at Ulm.

Mackenzie, Smith, Wright and Cochrane: these were the fathers of British intelligence. Mackenzie’s intelligence was responsible for one of
the most controversial episodes of the war; Smith was to perform spectacularly in a single military action, a series of minor naval ones, and supremely as an intelligence officer; Wright missed immortality only because of the failure of the plot against Napoleon. Cochrane became the second greatest sailor of the age. Such was the glamorous, secretive hit-and-miss world of the early cloak-and-dagger men. But the greatest of all perhaps were the legions of lowly men observing troop and fleet movements, at great danger to their lives, in an age when there were no telephone or satellite intercepts to allow them to do so without risk.