Map of a Nation (30 page)

In the wake of his superior’s demise, Mudge received the much-deserved notification from the Master-General that ‘you will accordingly take on
yourself the charge as it has hitherto been held by Colonel Williams’. Cornwallis added that he was ‘assured of its coinciding with the wishes of his Grace the Duke of Richmond’. On 30 April 1798 the
St James’s Chronicle
approvingly described how Cornwallis had once again presented Mudge to George III, but this time Mudge ‘had the honour to kiss his Majesty’s hand on his promotion to succeed the late Colonel Williams, as Superintendant and Director of the Trigonometrical Survey’. This patient, hard-working man was now given full official control over the project to which he had
dedicated
every waking hour for the previous seven years. For every spring and summer surveying season between 1791 and 1798, and during many of the winter periods too, Mudge had been separated from his young family, still living in Devon. By now he had one daughter and three sons aged between two and nine. Missing out on so much of their childhood was a sacrifice that would increasingly distress him.

In the late summer of 1799, the Trigonometrical Survey also lost Isaac Dalby, not to the Grim Reaper but to the new Military Academy that had been founded in High Wycombe. At fifty-five years of age, Dalby was ‘no longer able to endure the fatigues incident to the service’ and he decided to return to teaching. In the second volume of the
Account of the Trigonometrical
Survey
, which was published under Mudge’s name alone in 1801, Dalby’s boss paid ardent homage to ‘the extent of his service, his unremitted labour, and attention’. But ‘whilst I lament the loss of a man so perfectly calculated to assist me in this arduous undertaking,’ Mudge continued, ‘I derive every consolation from a knowledge, founded from experience, of the talents and abilities of Mr Simon Woolcot, his successor.’

William Mudge’s assumption of responsibility for the Ordnance Survey had important repercussions. First, he applied to the Royal Society to obtain the theodolite that had been used during the Paris–Greenwich
triangulation
of 1787–8, to supplement the one that the Ordnance Survey already possessed. But more importantly, his superintendency affected the way in which the mapping project was perceived in the public domain. The Ordnance Survey had originated from a mixture of motivations: some
martial
, some scientific, some ideological. And because the project was not purely military in nature, the resulting maps were not as jealously guarded as
other pieces of intelligence. The public utility of the endeavour was on the minds of its progenitors from the start, and on his appointment Mudge argued that the maps themselves should be made available to the general populace. In the first volume of the Ordnance Survey’s
Accounts
, he had described how Britons were clamouring ‘to possess some general Map,
published
on the same principle with the
Carte de France
, a performance highly celebrated’, and he was adamant that ‘it has been very justly expected by the Public, that from the present undertaking, they should derive the advantage of an improvement in the geography of their country’. Mudge’s reference to the Cassinis’ endeavour indicates that he saw the Ordnance Survey first and foremost as the heir to the Enlightenment’s ambitions for cartography. With its trained draughtsmen and its copious funding, the Board of Ordnance was a suitable host for that mapping agency, but Mudge had not forgotten that the Ordnance Survey had developed from a scientific endeavour to
triangulate
between the Paris and Greenwich observatories, under the sponsorship of the Royal Society and the Académie Royale des Sciences. As a child of the Enlightenment and a descendant of a circle that included a theologian, artist, a politician, a doctor, a lexicographer, a horologist, and even an actor, Mudge had an outlook that was arguably wider than most in the military.

Mudge’s bold decision to release the Ordnance Survey’s maps to the
general
public and openly inform the populace of its progress also, perhaps consciously, had the effect of mitigating some potential popular hostility to the project during the 1790s. The climate of that decade was peculiarly conservative in Britain, and some map-makers came under fire as dubious presences in the landscape. The French Revolution had provoked intense fear on the north side of the Channel. The foundation of plebeian
societies
designed to politicise the working classes, rumours of republican uprisings, and demonstrations at the devastating effects of Enclosure and the exorbitant rise in wheat prices all spooked the British administration. Under the supervision of the Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger and William Windham, Secretary at War, a counter-revolutionary operation was
established
to suppress such dangerous expressions of discontent in Britain. This entailed the manipulation of the press, the foundation of conservative political organisations to combat their radical counterparts, the stage-management of
loyalist public rituals, the prohibition of seditious meetings and
publications
, the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, the appointment of London magistrates and the launch of a permanent police force in Scotland.

Pitt and Windham also oversaw the establishment of an ‘Alien Office’. Its remit was initially counter-espionage, but the Office soon developed a
network
of rigorously vetted spies and informers to scrutinise British radicals. Its charismatic coordinator William Wickham described the organisation as a ‘System of
Preventitive
[
sic
] Police’, ‘the most powerful means of Observation & Information’ that ‘was ever placed in the hands of a Free Government’. It has been argued that prior to the French Revolution, there was a tacit understanding in Britain that in certain places, such as the home or the coffee-house or the gentleman’s club, the individual could speak freely as a private citizen. But during the 1790s, in the period known colloquially as ‘Pitt’s Terror’ (a conservative counterpart to Robespierre’s Terror in
revolutionary
France), these assumptions appear to have been overthrown. Informers seemed to be everywhere. Conversations in coffee-houses were overheard and proponents of anti-royalist sentiment were hauled before courts, such as the Berkshire labourer Edward Swift who was accused of being a ‘pernicious seditious & evil disposed Person’ for speaking ‘treasonous and seditious words, viz. Damn and bugger the King and all that belong to him’. The climate of 1790s Britain appeared to manifest what the political philosopher Jeremy Bentham and, after him, the French historian Michel Foucault termed ‘panopticism’, all-seeing authoritarian surveillance.

Map-makers had a history of unpopularity among the general populace. The presence of a map-maker in an area often indicated changes in taxes, a new Enclosure Act or ‘improvement’ to the disproportionately large estates of the nobility. As the nineteenth century progressed, map-makers would also become associated with the unstoppable progress of industrialisation and the sacrifice of the landscape to the pursuit of profit. Wordsworth described with ‘astonishment’ how ‘Engineer agents’ who were working for the railways ‘came and intruded with their measuring instruments’ upon his neighbour’s garden. Above all, map-makers suffered from British citizens’ fierce protection of their personal privacy. A map-maker was often seen as a busybody, poking his nose and theodolite into other people’s business and
land. It was the same in France. In the early 1740s one of the surveyors on the
Carte de Cassini
was mapping the region around a village called Les Estables, in the Haute-Loire region of south-central France. Apparently for no other reason than an overriding fear and hatred of strangers, he was hacked to death by the villagers.

In the 1790s these negative associations were augmented by a fear that map-makers might be spies, working for revolutionary France or for the newly vigilant and intrusive British government. Surveying was a standard activity of foreign agents, who often jotted down information about
vulnerable
locations in the form of maps. For this reason, in the 1790s black-velvet facings were added to the blue uniforms of military engineers, to clearly
distinguish
them from French soldiers, whose livery was the same colour. A man with a telescope and notebook in his hands, scanning the horizon intently, might also resemble a government mole.

In the summer of 1797, as William Mudge was mapping the West Country, two shady amateur surveyors in the same area, near the Quantocks, provoked enormous suspicion. Spotted by a local doctor ‘wandering on the hills towards the Channel, and along the shore, with books and papers in his hand, taking charts and maps of the country’, one of these men was instantly suspected of being ‘surely a French Jacobin’, a foreign agent ‘to some principal at Bristol’. The doctor’s fear was magnified when it became apparent that the two men were associating with the well-known British radical John Thelwall and were overhead uttering French-sounding words. A possibly apocryphal story relates how the government sent their own spy from the Alien Office to monitor these suspected French intelligence officers. The government spy, a man named Walsh, arrived in Somerset on 15 August 1797 and took a room in Stowey, five miles from his suspects. On tailing the strangers he became increasingly convinced that the two men ‘are a Sett of violent Democrats’. But he also worried that he had been discovered, which seemed certain when one of the men apparently began talking loudly about ‘Spy Nosey’. Walsh was soon forced to face the humiliating discovery that, far from being French spies, his tails were the poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who had been talking about Spinoza. Their maps were really ‘
studies
, as the artists call them’, that Coleridge was making
in preparation for a topographical poem called ‘The Brook’. ‘Had I finished the [composition],’ that poet recounted cheekily, ‘it was my purpose in the heat of the moment to have dedicated it to our then committee of public safety as containing the charts and maps, with which I was to have supplied the French Government in aid of their plans of invasion.’

British map-makers were also to be found spying in France. The
map-maker
Hugh Debbieg, who had worked beside Roy on the Military Survey, spent much of the 1760s on ‘a Secret Service to Survey the principle
seaports
of France & Spain & to make Sketches and Drawings and to take Plans thereof with a view to Discover and State the Strength and weakness of those places’. After the Peace of Amiens in 1802, the Catholic map-maker Robert Edward Clifford, who had fled France after the outbreak of the French Revolution and helped supply the British Army with military maps, decided to return. In November and December 1802 Clifford wrote a series of letters back to England indicating that he was searching for books and maps in Paris and warning that an ‘immense invasion’ was shortly going to be ‘attempted from every port in France’ as ‘the whole ambition of this country I suspect to be the destruction of England’. Under the guise of a young aristocrat with a peculiar penchant for geology, he managed to gain access to materials in the Bibliothèque Nationale. When war was declared again between Britain and France in spring 1803, Clifford fled and arrived back home in England on 30 May 1803 with ‘a box 5 feet long 2 feet broad & a foot high’ containing ‘200 weight of maps plans & manuscripts of france & its environs’. General Simcoe wrote to Clifford’s brother that ‘the Plans of the Vendée found upon your brother … at such a place as Calais & at such a moment would have authorized any legal Government, even any
subordinate
authority to have executed them at the Instant’. Clifford handed over these maps to the British Army and spent August 1803 making a ‘grand
military
expedition through Kent’ to report on the quality of the county’s military installations. His religion prevented Clifford from possessing formal employment in the Army, but his shadowy role often worked in his favour as a map-making spy.

Whether map-makers were suspected as state spies or foreign agents, both were unpopular. Many British citizens with left-leaning political tendencies
despised Pitt’s surveillance mechanisms as hallmarks of a state that had overstepped the mark. One commentator complained, exaggeratedly, that the Alien Office was ‘a system of
TERROR
almost as hideous in its features, almost as gigantic in its stature, and infinitely more pernicious in its tendency than France ever knew’. The essayist and minister Vicesimus Knox was adamant that ‘the employment of spies and informers is a virtual declaration of hostilities against the people. It argues a want of confidence in them. It argues a fear and jealousy of them. It argues a desire to destroy them by ambuscade. It is, in civil government, what stratagems are in a state of war.’ Employing Swiftian frames of reference, some Members of Parliament had accused Charles Lennox’s fortifications scheme of perpetrating a similar invasion of private space in the mid 1780s. ‘If this Military Projector was not checked in his career,’ one MP had warned, ‘a Master General, with his Committee of Engineers, like the Laputan philosophers in their flying island[,] might hover over the kingdom in an Ordnance balloon, descend in a moment, and seize on any man’s house and domain [to turn] their pleasure grounds into horn works and crown works’. By insisting upon the open publication of the Ordnance Survey’s maps and the accounts of its progress, William Mudge may have hoped to avoid any association of his map-makers’ endeavour with this surveillance state.

It has also been suggested that when institutions like the Ordnance Survey render themselves open and accountable to the public, they benefit from greater cooperation. Prior to 1841 the surveyors had no legal right to enter private property and depended on the goodwill of landowners. That Mudge’s efforts were not entirely successful in persuading British citizens to acquiesce to its needs was indicated by the fact that the Ordnance Surveyors were forced to apply for a Royal Warrant in 1804 to gain safe passage through the nation. Its assistant Simon Woolcot wrote to Mudge confessing that he felt ‘a considerable degree of uneasiness’ and thought that ‘the authority of a
warrant
is now become … necessary to guard me, particularly on the coast, from those insults and interruptions, in the execution of my business, which I have so frequently and so lately experienced’. A warrant would be ‘a measure highly expedient to facilitate the execution of Military Surveys’, he asserted. But one journalist spoke for many when he described in impressed tones
that ‘these maps the Board of Ordnance have very liberally determined to publish for the benefit of the public’. Mudge’s decision was also made in the belief that it would encourage a better quality of cartography. He hoped that the maps’ surveyors and engravers would proceed with acute consciousness of a wide and discerning audience for their work. Last, and importantly, with the full publication of its maps, the Ordnance Survey became a commercial and potentially profitable concern.