The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes (50 page)

FitzRoy Somerset was found a seat in Truro, Henry Hardinge became MP for Durham, Lord March (before inheriting the dukedom of Richmond) sat for Chichester and George Murray would represent the Perthshire constituency of his family estates. Charles Vere (AQMG of the 4th) was also mobilized for this service, gaining a seat in Suffolk. Some of them traded on their status as “A Hero of Waterloo and the Peninsula” in handbills they gave out on the election trail. Those who remained in the army had been given prestigious commissions in the Guards.

Scovell, however, with his reform-mindedness, intellectual self-confidence and lowly social standing had once more become a figure on the periphery of Wellington's vision. He was evidently unsuitable as a Tory MP, and it seemed that even his military services were now of limited value. It was just as it had been in 1809. The golden-haired aristocrats like Somerset and March hogged center stage. The duke remained faithful to that gilded youth sketched in glorious color in his memory of the peninsula. And while expediency had dictated some others be allowed supporting parts in Wellington's great Iberian drama, those, including Scovell, came to the final realization that Wellington had only ever seen them in the dull gray shades of mezzotint.

There was every sign now that the hope Wellington had uttered to Scovell on the night of Waterloo, that it should be their last battle, was being fulfilled. In the new climate of European peace, party allegiance had become paramount once more, and military professionalism counted for little.

Sitting down to write his letter, Sir George Scovell knew he must cast aside any pride. He knew that the duke would appreciate brevity and abhor circumlocution. Scovell set pen to paper:

There is no record of any reply from Wellington.

Three years had passed since writing that plea to Wellington as the November darkness came on with its usual suddenness and Scovell sat at his desk. There was a pile of French dispatches in front of him. For eight years they had been stored at army headquarters, their secrets guarded by George Murray, the former quarter master general of the Peninsular army. He was looking at the Paris Cipher again, more than a decade since he had sat in the mayor's house of Fuente Guinaldo and started working day and night to break it. Going through those angry Peninsular letters by Marmont and Soult was like meeting a long-lost acquaintance.

Perhaps he should look at another before he abandoned the task for the day? The colonel glanced out of his office window and into the gloom that was engulfing the drill square. The cavalry barracks in Croydon were a smart establishment, modern-built in the neoclassical style.

In 1820 Scovell had been appointed as colonel in command of the Royal Wagon Train, based at Croydon, a post probably arranged by Murray, who was now a general. From that time onward, any steps in rank would be determined by age alone. Seniority would eventually bring promotion to the colonel who lived long enough.

The Wagon Train, comprising the army's supply troops, was another in the long line of worthwhile tasks that Scovell applied himself to, but which the better-connected officers would have avoided like the plague. Murray knew that a man of the colonel's intellect would soon get bored watching the schooling of drivers and wagoneers round and round the square at Croydon. Indeed Scovell found his new duties so dull that he had been thinking once more of leaving the army, wondering whether he might become head of one of the new police forces being established in the shires and colonies.

Thus, late in 1823, Murray asked Scovell to reexamine many of the intercepted French dispatches from the Peninsular campaigns and to make some recommendations about the use of ciphers in the British army. Not one to take on a task by halves, Scovell decided to reexamine many of the decipherings he had done in the field in Rueda, Guinaldo or Frenada.

He examined forty-four letters in the
Grand Chiffre.
In many places he made notes, often scribbling the word “correct” in pencil by some of his earlier suppositions. He found few errors. A number of the letters he had not seen before. They had fallen into the British army's hands at some stage of the campaign but had eluded him at the time. Now they provided little fragments of knowledge or explained the context of things that had puzzled him for years. Eventually he sent the package back to Whitehall, but a few originals remained in Scovell's possession.

Apart from stimulating the colonel's mind, Murray may have had one other motive in mind when asking Scovell to complete this task, for Wellington and a number of other senior officers had been irritated by the appearance of a history,
Narrative of the War in the Peninsula
by Southey. This work produced great dissatisfaction and Murray was considering writing his own narrative of these events. Had he ever done so, it is most unlikely that Scovell's role would have gone unsung. However, the former QMG of the Peninsular army lost the race to publish to William Napier's multivolume work.

For decades, Napier's
History of the War in the Peninsula and in the South of France
was to set the tone of subsequent writing. It began the mythologizing of those campaigns, identifying the steadfast British national character as a key to victory. Ideas of grit, fortitude and honesty were central to Napier's view of the British soldier, and indeed to the political image projected by Wellington. The author eulogized the duke as “a master spirit in war.” Not only were matters of intelligence or code breaking covered sparsely and inaccurately, but there was nothing in the text to suggest Wellington and his circle ever made Napier fully aware of the spectacular successes capturing and decoding letters in the
Grand Chiffre.

In 1835, the printing of tomes of Wellington's dispatches started. Later editions of “Dispatches” included many captured French messages sent
en clair
and some that had been deciphered, but curiously only those in the simple or Army of Portugal codes were revealed. The
breaking of the
Grand Chiffre,
the Great Paris Cipher, was to remain a secret for years to come. A line was drawn: the breaking of less complex codes could be alluded to, but that of the toughest one used in Spain remained a more sensitive matter.

Wellington had become a political leader by this time. The legend of his great generalship might have been undermined, however subtly, by revelations that he had been reading his enemy's most sensitive mail. Matters of espionage were regarded as somewhat underhanded.

Given that he asked Scovell to review that priceless intelligence at Croydon, in late 1823, we can be quite sure that Murray had at least been reminded of the significance of the ciphered dispatches shortly before the compilation of Napier's history began. Those around Wellington, and presumably the duke himself, did not see fit to tell Napier the story of how they had been broken. Scovell, having checked his earlier workings, bundled up the papers and sent them back to headquarters, his work with French army ciphers finally ended.

Early in 1829, Major General Sir George Scovell was appointed lieutenant governor of the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. It can be imagined that he followed in the footsteps of his old teacher and mentor John Le Marchant with some pride. Evidently it had been a gift of Scovell's former Wycombe classmate Henry Hardinge, who had become secretary at war in Wellington's ministry (the duke had finally captured the prime ministership the year before). Hardinge and Murray had risen so high that they were able to help their old comrade and ensure the comfort of his twilight years.

As lieutenant governor, Scovell was to receive £1000 each year. His natural longevity took him up the Army List and he acquired the colonelcy of a cavalry regiment. First it was the 7th Dragoon Guards and later the 4th Dragoons. Becoming the titular head of the regiment he had been forced to sell out of decades before must have been a sweet experience indeed. But despite the fact that he and Mary prospered in their old age, Scovell was to prove listless and dissatisfied due to the influence of his old superior and now prime minister.

Wellington had never liked the Royal Military College. In particular its junior branch, which trained young men in their teens prior to their
first commission, seemed to him a hotbed of sedition and riot. The prime minister was also alarmed by plans to teach ordinary soldiers to read and write, telling one friend, “If there is mutiny in the Army … you'll see that all of these new-fangled school masters are at the bottom of it.”

It seems likely that Scovell was offered the lieutenant governorship with the understanding that no great innovations of curriculum or reforms of the cadets' spartan living arrangements would occur. In any case, such matters would have to be referred to the Board of Governors, which remained packed with Wellington's placemen. Consequently, instead of becoming a reforming educator, Scovell slipped into his dotage, hunting and entertaining well at his residence. Having the superintendence of the college without any ability to overhaul its curriculum must have been purgatory for Scovell, and it seems that he turned his back on professional matters and grew steadily wealthier from his various sinecures.

With the passage of years, time began to take its toll on the “Heroes of Waterloo,” and Scovell found himself called upon to attend the annual celebratory dinner at Apsley House in London. His exchanges with Wellington remained brief and formal. Only one topic seems to have united the old soldiers: their strong feelings, love one might even say, for FitzRoy Somerset. When Scovell commissioned a portrait of Somerset in 1841, he sent a print to Wellington, and this at least received a reply, albeit of the briefest kind. The young military secretary of the Peninsular headquarters rose up the army hierarchy to become Lord Raglan and Field Marshal. His name was to live on in history as the man who ordered the charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimean War. When he died of dysentery the following year, Scovell was heartbroken, feeling the loss of someone who was the closest thing he would ever have to a son.

On 10 August 1836, the duke went to dine with friends at Mr. Rogers's town house. His table companions often found him a witty raconteur on the subject of his battles and affairs of state. As the silver cutlery scurried back and forth across the porcelain and crystal glasses carried fine wine to the lips of the highborn diners, the discussion moved to the subject of ciphers and their use in protecting secrets.

Count Bourck, the Danish minister at Joseph's court in Madrid, was a singular case, the prime minister recalled.
En clair,
he would simply tell the true state of affairs, leaving nothing unsaid of each new ghastly reverse for the French, but avoided offending King Joseph's spies when they read his mail by adding, “but this is what the extreme side of the other party report. “He had no need of a cipher. There were knowing smiles and polite laughter. Was your Grace ever deceived by the French ciphers?

The duke replied that the smaller codes had all been broken easily and those of a more complex nature were often made out as well. His audience was impressed, and he evidently detected their admiration of this intellectual feat. One of the diners had a further question on the subject: Surely a task of such a complexity would have to be undertaken by an expert in this arcane business. Had your Grace anybody with the army for the purpose of making out ciphers?

“No,” replied the duke, nobody in particular. “I tried, everyone at headquarters tried, and between us we made it out.”

The most generous explanation of Wellington's remark is that he was old and had simply forgotten Scovell's achievement, attributing the code-breaking successes of the Peninsular War to “everyone at headquarters.” The less kind interpretation was that it was vanity that led Wellington to claim the credit for himself and his favorite, FitzRoy Somerset.

For decades, Britain's old Peninsular enemies remained ignorant of this distorted view. Charles Parquin, for example, a former cavalry officer who had been escorting Marmont at the Battle of Salamanca in 1812, wrote memoirs in which he testified that although the French had lost the engagement, “the enemy ought to have been happy that the Marshal, who had been waiting for seven days, did not wait one more day. For King Joseph and Marshal Soult
[sic]
would have arrived followed, by 40,000 men
[sic].”
In fact, in that particular situation, not only had deciphered letters kept Wellington perfectly acquainted with Joseph's plan to join up with Marmont, but the seizure of all messages announcing the impending arrival of this reinforcement had left the marshal himself in the dark.

In the decades following the Peninsular War, the magnitude of Scovell's code-breaking achievement slowly revealed itself. The participants
in those campaigns died one after the other, leaving diaries or papers. Some officers working on the staff had been aware of what Scovell had done. When William Tomkinson's journal was finally published in 1894, it contained the following passage, written shortly after the Battle of Vitoria in 1813:

Tomkinson had slightly exaggerated Scovell's achievement, for definitely there had been a period during the first half of 1812 when there had been difficulties in reading coded messages. However, Wellington's papers themselves contained official confirmation of Scovell's work. He had, when writing to Earl Bathurst, the secretary of war, in April 1813, identified Scovell alone as the person who had been working to break the Paris Cipher. After waiting months to see the disappointing progress made by the best decipherers in London, Wellington had written back to his political master enclosing the solutuons, “made out by Lieut Colonel Scovell without reference to the key received through your Lordship.” Indeed, although the duke subsequently forgot the fact, Scovell was the only officer ever mentioned as a code breaker in the headquarters correspondence from the peninsula.