The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes (2 page)

I must of course give thanks to the researchers who assisted me in this substantial task: Helena Braun (for transcribing the journal written in Scovell's often painful hand); Roger Nixon (for certain parts of the Scovell family story); Denise Harman and Ronald Rigby (details of the Clowes family) and Cyril Canet, who delved into the French army archives for me. Martin Scovell, a great-great-great-grandson of George's brother Henry, gave me valuable assistance on their family history.

During my labors the library staff at the Public Record Office, National Army Museum and British Library were indefatigable. Andrew Orgill, librarian at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, was especially helpful. He dug out many interesting items from the papers of Major General John Le Marchant. Mrs. Margaret Richards, the duke of Beaufort's archivist at Badminton in Gloucestershire, rallied to my assistance when I belatedly realized what an important source the letters kept there might be. John Montgomery, at the Royal United Services Institute, was also vital to the project, using RUSI's collection and every interlibrary loan imaginable to help. He is also the custodian of the Challis Index, an almost forgotten attempt (by a long-deceased civil servant) at a complete biographical record of British officers serving in the Peninsular War. As can be imagined, it was most useful for checking details of service, dates, etc.

I must also raise my hat to those established Napoleonic historians who encouraged the amateur: Dr. David Chandler, Rene Chartrand, Paul Britten Austin, and especially Dr. Rory Muir, who checked my manuscript. My editors Julian Loose (Faber and Faber) as well as Dan Conaway and Nikola Scott (HarperCollins) deserve credit for licking into shape my sprawling tract. My editor at Newsnight, Sian Kevill, has my permanent gratitude for allowing me so much book leave. Lastly, I must applaud my beloved wife, Hilary, and daughters, Isabelle and Madeleine, for putting up with me (while writing and in general).

Any mistakes in what follows are mine alone.

G
eneral Arthur Wellesley, duke of Wellington: At the center of this drama is one of the great figures of military history, a man with an uncanny ability to fight on terrain of his own choosing and to understand his opponents' strategies. He was also intensely conservative (after his battlefield triumphs, he became Tory prime minister), defended the established order and believed that officers should rise through “family, money and influence.”

Wellington was an utter perfectionist. His dispatches contain brutal criticism of allied commanders and damn his own with faint praise. He was unable to choose his generals—they were sent out by London, often for political reasons. In the face of often breathtaking amateurism by these officers, Wellington tried to exercise total control. He once complained, “I am obliged to be everywhere, and if absent from any operation, something goes wrong.”

To insure his instructions were obeyed and incompetents kept
under close observation, Wellington used a picked team of officers whose efficiency and objectivity could be relied upon. Men like Scovell and his colleagues on the staff were tools to achieve his ends. Although most respected their general deeply, few expressed any affection for him in their letters and diaries. Even one of those more partial to Wellington noted, “Some complain a little of him at times and are much afraid of him. Going up with my charges and papers for instructions I feel something like a boy going to school.” His partisans believed that Wellington's harsh regime was indispensable to victory, one major writing home in 1811, “It is a hard task for a man to teach at once soldiers, officers, commissaries, staff, generals and last of all himself. This, however, he has done.”

As an aristocrat and a minister in a Tory government when he assumed command, Wellington distrusted many of those who wanted to modernize the army. He chose as his aides-de-camp dashing young aristocrats, “my boys,” who he indulged shamelessly while many of the staff officers who slaved to bring his army to the pitch of perfection he craved went unrecognized.

The Staff:
Scovell's friends and workmates had the unenviable task of translating Wellington's impulses into orders, routes of march, and billeting plans. Nothing could happen without their work, but they were rarely taken into their commander's confidence, since he saw them as little more than servants, noting, “The staff officers of the army are attached to me to enable me to communicate my orders to my inferiors, and otherwise to assist me in the performance of my duty.”

Wellington's HQ was an unlikely, and often tense, mixture of aristocrats and earnest graduates of the Royal Military College—“scientific soldiers” skilled in preparing orders, mapmaking and languages. Today it is hard to conceive of the subservience expected of these clever, diligent men. One graduate of the Royal Military College, describing in his journal an error of Wellington's that resulted in three thousand soldiers losing their lives through illness, remarked, “One ought not to venture an opinion. Nobody can appreciate all the motives that sway a Commander in Chief but himself.”

Even though an appointment to the Staff offered unending toil and little incentive, there was intense pressure to get one. Working directly
for a successful general offered desperate officers one of their few chances to come into contact with the great men of the age, be noticed and then promoted. Inevitably there was great rivalry and factionalism in this world, where Scovell was just one of many. A perceptive observer at headquarters noted, “The officers in the lower branches of the staff are sharp-set, hungry, and anxious to get on, and make the most of every thing and have a view even in their civilities … there is much obsequious time serving conduct to any one who is on office, or is thought to have a word to say to Lord Wellington.”

Three of Scovell's colleagues in particular will feature in the book. Lieutenant Colonel William De Lancey was an American who acted as Scovell's immediate superior during his most tense period of code breaking. The son of a New York loyalist family, De Lancey enjoyed many of the social connections denied to Scovell. Handsome and confident, he was one of the
jeunesse dorée
of Wellington's HQ, since he met the general's exacting criteria of genteel birth combined with professionalism. In the final chapter, De Lancey is killed with Scovell at his side at the Battle of Waterloo.

Henry Hardinge and FitzRoy Somerset both knew Scovell before the Peninsular campaign and remained his friends for life. Hardinge was a classmate of Scovell's at the Royal Military College with a gift for being in the right place at the right time. He had numerous scrapes with death and was also involved with codes. Although the son of a country vicar, Hardinge was able to display the fearless zeal expected by Wellington and so entered his inner circle. This became important after the war, when Hardinge was appointed as a minister in the Tory government headed by the duke. It was Hardinge who saved Scovell from the poverty of half pay when Wellington later forgot his codebreaker.

Somerset benefited from being from one of the great noble families and therefore easily found his way onto the staff without any formal training at the age of twenty-one. Many noticed that Somerset bore a striking physical resemblance to Wellington as a young man, and he soon became one of the commander in chief's intimates. Young FitzRoy was also noted for his kindness and as the general's private secretary proved a well-placed ally for Scovell. Later, as Lord Raglan, Somerset ordered the infamous charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War.

Major General John Le Marchant:
The guru of “scientific soldiers” like Scovell, Hardinge and several other members of the staff, Le Marchant was the visionary who established the Royal Military College in 1802 and campaigned against the army establishment for the creation of a professional general staff. He believed that Britain had no other choice if it was to stand a chance opposing Napoleon's armies as they swept across Europe. In 1805, after yet another rejection for his staff plans, Le Marchant wrote, “How can we be so absurd as to oppose that, neglecting as we do all instruction and the aid of science in our military enterprises, [if] we are to be victorious over troops that possess those advantages in the highest degree of perfection?”

During the early years of the Peninsular War, Scovell and other Royal Military College graduates wrote many letters to their old teacher, and the Le Marchant papers form one of the fascinating but barely tapped primary sources for this book. As a scientific soldier, Whig and advocate of Catholic emancipation, Le Marchant in many ways stood for everything Wellington opposed. His professionalism was so widely admired, though, that in 1811, to the surprise and delight of his old students, Le Marchant was given command of a heavy cavalry brigade in the peninsula. Scovell's code-breaking breakthrough and Le Marchant's personal moment of triumph came together, at the decisive Battle of Salamanca in July 1812. Tragically, it was at this moment that Le Marchant was killed by a French sharpshooter.

Major General Charles Stewart, Lord Londonderry:
The prime minister's half-brother, a reactionary Tory who typified the “gentleman amateur” approach and was a self-appointed scourge of army reformers, Stewart loved to wear extravagant hussar uniforms encrusted with decorations. He served as adjutant general in Wellington's army, but absented himself each winter, when the campaigning slowed down, so that he could attend to business and maintain his social life in England.

Wellington believed that the way to handle men like Stewart, whose appointments he could not prevent but whose presence on campaigns he understood as politically necessary, was to sideline them. Stewart wrote from Portugal to his brother, “the situation and business of the Adjutant General, deprived of close communication with the head of the army, is
reduced to keeping accurately the returns of all descriptions of regiments … you will admit it does not carry with it interesting or pleasing occupation.”

When Stewart tried to assert himself, the Commander in Chief checked him mercilessly. Years later, Wellington described one argument: “at last I was obliged to say that if he did not at once confess his error and promise to obey my orders frankly and cordially I would dismiss him
instanter
and send him to England in arrest. After a great deal of persuasion he burst out crying and begged my pardon.” Early in 1812, after a number of unpleasant scenes, Stewart went on indefinite leave.

During the long campaigns in Iberia from 1808 to 1814, Wellington slowly revised his opinion about the desirable qualities for his generals. Le Marchant and Stewart, at opposite ends of the spectrum, eventually convinced him that professionalism was more important than party allegiance.

Don Julian Sanchez:
A Castillian guerrilla leader, Don Julian embodied the spirit of the anti-French resistance. It was Wellington's good fortune that the don had grown up in Ciudad Rodrigo, one of the principal fortresses on the Portuguese-Spanish border and a key area in Britain's struggle against the French. Sanchez and his
partida
were expert horsemen; before the war they enjoyed nothing more than riding into the oak forests to hunt wild pigs with
picos,
or lances.

Early in 1810, Don Julian's men wiped out a party of eighty French dragoons, refusing to take prisoners. The French responded with a proclamation that Sanchez would be executed as soon as he was caught. When British forces moved toward Castille, Don Julian's
partida
applied their pig-hunting skills to the French messengers who tried to cross the Castillian plain. One of their most celebrated coups was the capture of the French governor of Ciudad Rodrigo.

Don Julian's dirty war made some British officers most uneasy. Captain William Bragge described one meeting in his journal: “Don Julian and Carlos, the great guerrilla leaders, joined our army with their Myrmidons and a more verminous set of fellows you never beheld.” But such sentiments were a luxury that Wellington could not afford: the Spaniard provided more of the captured communications necessary for Scovell's code breaking than any other
guerrillero.

Marshal Nicolas Jean de Dieu Soult:
The son of a small holder and notary in southern France, Soult made his way up the ranks, serving as a sergeant in the Royal Army at the time of the French Revolution. His progress was then swift, rising to divisional general by the time of Napoleon's celbrated 1800 Italian campaign.

Soult was created one of the first batch of marshalls of the empire declared in 1804. His zenith coincided with that of his master, with the glorious victory over Austria and Russia in the 1805 Austerlitz campaign. An able administrator and strategist, Napoleon showered the marshals with titles, honors, and pensions. Having reached his peak influence, Soult became increasingly nervous about his position in later years, taking whatever action he felt was necessary to sustain his wealth and power. Dubbed “the Iron Hand” by his soldiers and “the Sultan of Andalucia” by his rivals in the officer corps, he was a feared opponent on and off the battlefield.

Joseph Bonaparte, King of Spain:
Napoleon's older brother was a lawyer by education and would probably have practiced his profession quietly in southern France and his native Corsica had history not placed his sibling on the pedestal of supreme power. After Napoleon crowned himself emperer of France, he sought to secure his hold over the vassal kingdoms he had conquered by placing members of his family on their thrones. For Joseph and his wife, Julie, this initially meant enoblement as the king and queen of Naples.

When the French took over Spain, Joseph accepted its crown (another of Napoleon's brothers wisely refused the same honor) and tried to pacify its rebellious population. Joseph oscillated between a deluded optimism that he could win over his new people, expanding the small pro-French party, and a sense of hopelessness about the scale of his task.