Map of a Nation (23 page)

Even in the early days of the Revolution, there were those in Britain who had predicted its transformation into something more threatening. When in
January 1790 Edmund Burke had read Richard Price’s sermon extolling the Revolution’s virtues as an exemplar of enlightened government, based on ‘the right to choose our own governors’, he had replied with an ardent,
eloquent
defence of tradition, gradual change and social stratification. Price had viewed Britain’s Glorious Revolution as a move towards republicanism and a direct antecedent of the French Revolution. But Burke’s pamphlet interpreted the events of 1688 very differently, as instrumental in ‘
settling
the
succession
of the [Hanoverian] crown’. He described how it was ‘natural’ to ‘look up with awe to kings’ and worried that the French Revolution might prove dangerously contagious, ‘drawing us into an imitation of the conduct of the National Assembly’. Burke also gloomily predicted the ‘assassination’ of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, two years before that event actually materialised. His
Reflections on the Revolution in France
sold astonishingly well: it went through eleven editions and sold 32,000 copies within its first year of publication. The book functioned as ‘the manifesto of a
Counter-Revolution
’, shoring up Britain’s defences against the eruption of republican urges on this side of the Channel.

The combined circumstances of war, the Terror and Burke’s eloquent rebuttals of radical politics all helped to turn a great deal of British public opinion against the French Revolution. Ideological objections combined with weighty military anxieties. A rumoured uprising in Britain in late 1792 sparked fears about a French invasion of England’s south coast with the aim of fomenting a revolution here. When war broke out between Britain and France in 1793, the possibility of invasion became a grave concern. The most serious threat was posed in October 1797, shortly before the French Revolutionary Wars became the Napoleonic Wars. The Corsican artillery leader Napoleon Bonaparte was rising to prominence as a charismatic and efficient military leader, and he was put in charge of what was known as the French ‘Army of England’. A force of 120,000 soldiers was stationed on the northern coast of France, waiting to cross the Channel. The danger was averted when Napoleon decided to go into Egypt instead, but this scenario had nearly made England’s worst nightmare a reality.

Strategies to defend England’s south coast against invasion were many and varied. Since 1757 the Militia Act had ordered each county in England and
Wales to maintain a quota of able-bodied men, who were willing to fight on a part-time basis. In the 1790s local militia regiments were raised and trained along the south coast. From 1794 corps of volunteers were also raised. In the event of an invasion, some statesmen suggested that a ‘scorched earth’ policy should be pursued whereby all livestock in the vicinity of the coast would be driven inland with the aim of leaving French invaders no incentive to remain in the country. Some suggested that the southern peasantry should be
educated
in local defence with the assistance of the ‘
carte du Paÿs
’. Lennox’s own obsession with fortifications was reinforced by the outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars on the Continent, and he embarked on a lengthy tour of the nation’s coastal defences.

On the face of it, it looks as if the Ordnance Survey was established as one of a series of military reactions to the threat of a feared French invasion of the south coast. But the truth is not quite so simple. Britain was at war with France by the mid 1790s, but when the Ordnance Survey was founded in 1791 the Anglo-French relationship was more benign. So although the
mapping
project later gained some legitimacy as a defensive military scheme, the Ordnance Survey’s foundation cannot entirely be explained in these terms. It took a decade to produce the first maps and by the time that a number of different surveys were rolling off the press, the threat of invasion had largely passed. Furthermore, the military utility of such a map only really applied to those spots most vulnerable to invasion – the coasts and the country leading to London – and did not justify the creation of a complete national survey. The Army already possessed such military maps, which were inscribed with potential landing points and which categorised the roads according to the quantities of men and artillery that they could accommodate.

In the early 1790s, a rather shadowy figure called Robert Edward Clifford returned to Britain from France where he had been attending an Academy for English Catholic Youths, followed by a position in a regiment of Irishmen. As the Revolution became hostile for Catholics, Clifford returned to Britain where, because of anti-Catholic penal laws, he could not obtain an official commission in the Army. But his acquaintance with French tactics and surveying methods was invaluable, and General John Graves Simcoe asked him to help produce a military map of the whole of southern England
as far north as the line running between Anglesey and the Wash, where Norfolk meets Lincolnshire. At this time the civilian map-maker John Cary was producing maps of England and Wales on a scale of one inch to five miles, which showed inhabitations, roads and rivers, and which were even recommended to Napoleon as the most suitable for planning an invasion. Clifford produced skeletons of Cary’s maps that showed only the coastline and rivers and were said to resemble ‘the anatomy of the Veins’. He intended that these would ‘be very easy to fill up [with] just what one pleases’ and he hoped that his maps

‘Coup d’oeil’ literally meant ‘stroke of the eye’ and denoted the talent of
discerning
the military strength or weakness of the land at a glance. Clifford hoped that officers in the field could nurture these skills and, in doing so, create their own maps of the territory.

This is not to say that the Ordnance Survey had no military utility:
generals
certainly saw the value of more accurate maps of the coastal areas than currently existed, and skeleton maps of the early sheets of the Ordnance Survey would be used for defensive planning similar to General Simcoe’s. Its progress would also be structured according to sites of greatest military
utility
: the Ordnance Survey would map the coastal areas and the land surrounding London first. But that the Ordnance Survey was the product of a number of quite different other pressures is reflected by the fact that it derived funding from George III as well as from the Board of Ordnance. The King was an enthusiastic sponsor of Enlightenment and nationalist endeavours, such as the Royal Academy of Art, and the mapping project pricked his interest. The Ordnance Survey was also indebted to the Society of Arts’ attempt to ‘incline the Administration … to make accurate Maps of Districts, till the whole Island is regularly surveyed’, and to the dramatic rise in the quality of county maps and estate surveys in the same period.
Instrument-makers’ improvement of the precision of surveying equipment and map-makers’ widespread acceptance of triangulation as the most
accurate
technique for large areas provided the Ordnance Survey with its methods and apparatus. Surveys conducted by geodesists to ascertain
knowledge
about the shape of the earth and institutions like the Royal Society contributed to its ambitions and patronage. Most of all, the Ordnance Survey was a product of the Enlightenment ambitions of William Roy to create an accurate image of the natural world. When it was finally founded in June 1791, the Ordnance Survey was a culmination of the efforts of
literally
hundreds of map-makers and organisations over the previous century, deriving from a wide variety of surveying traditions. The French Revolution served to bring these to a head. The hopes and expectations of all these ghosts now rested on the shoulders of four men: the Ordnance Survey’s
progenitor
Charles Lennox, its assistant Isaac Dalby and its directors, Edward Williams and William Mudge.

 

 

 

C
HAPTER
F
IVE

 

C
HARLES
L
ENNOX FELT
unequal to the task of choosing the Ordnance Survey’s first directors on his own. He made a special trip south of the river to the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, where he sought out the Professor of Mathematics, Charles Hutton. Hutton did not hesitate. William Mudge and Edward Williams were, he said, the best mathematicians among the Ordnance corps and ‘the fittest officers’ to oversee the new map of the nation. Ranking major to Mudge’s lieutenancy, Williams was duly appointed the Survey’s director in July 1791 and Mudge became his deputy.

Little is known about Edward Williams. A member of the Royal Regiment of Artillery, he appears to have relished pomp and circumstance. Three years before the Ordnance Survey’s foundation, Williams staged a mock battle before Lennox, King George III and the Prince of Wales. Its
showiness
and sophistication provoked a news reporter to rhapsodise that, ‘of all the sham battles we ever witnessed, we think that this, in point of shew and interest, was the best’. During the social season, the press enthusiastically covered Williams’s attendance at glittering gatherings. Shortly after the Ordnance Survey’s foundation, in the winter of 1792, he acted as Steward for a ‘Ladies Night’ at the town hall in Bath. Williams also enjoyed regular afternoon assemblies at St James’s Palace, where he was presented to George III or, in the event of the King’s indisposition, due to recurrent bouts of
porphyria
-induced insanity, to his flamboyant son George, the Prince Regent.
Williams readily adopted a role as the Ordnance Survey’s figurehead and he largely eschewed its practical day-to-day activities. This substitution of celebrity for surveying did not endear him to his closest colleagues. The Ordnance Survey’s first assistant, Isaac Dalby, described how Williams ‘never made an observation or calculation’ and ‘proved a dead weight in the
undertaking
by frequently retarding its progress; and the only time he benefitted the service, was when he took his departure to the next world’.

Fortunately William Mudge was the opposite of Williams in terms of both attentiveness and gravity. In 1804 the artist James Northcote painted a
portrait
(the original is now missing) of Mudge, in which thoughtful, kindly eyes hinted at their bearer’s solicitude and a smile played around his lips. Mudge protested modestly at his depiction and playfully accused Northcote of having ‘put too much brains in it’, but even he acknowledged ‘the likeness to be extremely strong’. These qualities of kindness, conscientiousness and quiet humour rendered Mudge a well-liked and respected member of the Ordnance Survey from the start. From the moment of his appointment Mudge declared himself ‘impressed with just ideas, as to the importance of the task and responsibility of my situation’.

Mudge’s disposition was perhaps a reflection of his family: an
extraordinary
conglomeration of high-achievers with a wide variety of interests, temperaments and friends. He had grown up in Plymouth in the 1760s and 1770s as part of an old Devonshire clan. His grandfather Zachariah had been born in Exeter in 1694, and although he was raised a Presbyterian
dissenter
, this serious, thoughtful man turned to the Church of England in his late twenties. Zachariah Mudge took Holy Orders and was rapidly made vicar at St Andrew’s Church in Plymouth, a post which carried one of the richest ecclesiastical salaries in England. Zachariah’s politics were
conservative
and his sermons eloquently asserted ‘the necessity of Government’ and urged ‘Obedience to Authority’. He was certain that ‘there has been ever acknowledged something sacred in the Persons of Princes, a kind of Divine Cloud hovering round their Heads, to which we are naturally prompted to pay a Veneration’. It is likely that William Mudge inherited from his
grandfather
a distaste for republicanism that perhaps sharpened his efforts to fend off the French Revolutionary Armies.