The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes (55 page)

242. “Wellington's private verdict…”: Dispatches, 25 July 1812.

242. “For this achievement Scovell was mentioned in the Salamanca dispatch …”: I see no other explanation for the mention than his codebreaking. His activities on 22 July were admirable and risky, but no more so than his actions beside Wellington at half a dozen other major battles, none of which earned him a similar distinction. Clearly there was no sense that the honor was being used to make a long-overdue promotion (as was often the case), since Scovell had received his majority just the previous spring. Given the difficulties of moving from major to lieutenant colonel, we can safely assume Scovell would have waited years for it had Wellington not been extremely grateful for his work during the Salamanca campaign.

244. “On 12 August, Soult tried an extraordinary gamble”: a copy of his letter resides in the Public Record Office in the W037 class. Unfortunately for us, this is one of the messages for which the ciphered original is unavailable. Napier suggests that the Soult letter was only read after being captured in Joseph's baggage at Vitoria in June 1813, but I do not believe this to be the case.

244. “no message from Paris had reached his desk for more than four months …”: this fact, along with the details of how it was being sent, were contained in the letter itself.

246. “The king's French secretary of state, part of the evacuation …”: Miot de Melito; the quote is from his memoirs.

247. “on the first, Wellington agreed to attend a bullfight in his honor …”: some sources say the last day of August; I have gone with this date because it is
in Scovell's journal, W037/7b, which also provides the colorful passages that follow.

248. “General Bertrand Clausel, the Army of Portugal's commander, despaired of the morale of his troops”: this letter was not intercepted by the Allies. It is reproduced in Du Casse,
Correspondance du Roi Joseph.

249. “On 27 September, Major Cocks heard a rumor …”: this comes from the very excellent book based on his papers by Julia Page.

250. “After one operation, Burgoyne wrote home bitterly …”: Burgoyne's published journal is an anodyne work. The letters were obtained later by Sir Charles Oman and used in his great work.

250. “the tensions had been exacerbated by a rebuke on Wellington's part during their advance to Madrid”: this unusual evidence of an open clash between the general and Scovell emerges from an addendum (probably added months or even years after the event) to his journal. I have not quoted verbatim, since the writing is bad even by the standards of Scovell's often atrocious hieroglyphics.

251. “Scovell was directing hundreds of men in this task and … spent £22,477 in little over one year on it”: details from accounts found at AO 1/171/488.

252. “He wrote back to the commodore …”: Wellington's Dispatches, 11 August 1812.

253. “A diplomatic cipher had been sent out, but there had been problems…” these emerge in Wellington's dispatches of 29 August and 2 September 1812.

253. “to quote an example given by him, the code 134A18 could be deciphered as follows …”: it is among his remarks on codes in his Conradus notebook, W037/9.

255. ‘“The ruler's first interview with the Marshal produced some lively arguments'”: Jourdan's
Memoires.

261. “It was about midnight on a December evening and few people were stirring in the bivouac”: details of Saornil's raid are gleaned from Francis Larpent's journal,
The Private Journal of Judge Advocate F. S. Larpent.
This is an excellent book, full of the sort of detail most officers at headquarters considered irrelevant. It also includes recollections of George and Mary Scovell.

262. “A British officer who had encountered Saornil's band in the summer of 1812 …”: Captain William Tomkinson.

265. “general sent him on his way home with these brutal words …”: Wellington's letter to Colonel Framingham, in Dispatches, 6 May 1813.

265. “Murray … became the second most important man in the Army, in practice if not by seniority”: for reasons of brevity, I have not told the story of London's attempts to foist a second in command on Wellington. Farcically, their candidate, General Sir Edward Paget, was captured by the French in November 1813, just one week after coming out to the army. In a letter to Earl Bathurst in Dispatches 26 December 1813 (during a further round of pressure from London for a second in
command), Wellington expressed his views pungently, calling an officer in such a post “a person without defined duties, excepting to give flying opinions, from which he may depart at pleasure, must be a nuisance in moments of decision; and whether I have a second in command or not, I am determined always to act according to the dictates of my own judgement.”

267. “before setting off for Cadiz, Wellington had complained to London “I have not yet any intelligence … letter to Bathurst, 2 December 1812.

267. “The letters spread out in front of him were one from Joseph to the emperor …”: Saornil's prizes are a significant example of intercepted correspondence
not
found in the Scovell Papers. They are in the Wellington Papers, WP 1/361 Fol. 2, and when placed together reveal the original folds of the courier's packet.

268. “a further letter from Joseph to the emperor and dated 22 December 1812 …”: in the Scovell Papers, W037/2.

271. “For months, Joseph had kept the contents of Soult's letter to himself—probably because it was too humiliating to confess to his brother that an eminent marshal had been plotting in this way”: this is my interpretation. There are suggestions in Joseph's later letters that the king may have copied Soult's 12 August message before to the emperor. It may be that he assumed the papers had been lost in Napoleon's baggage in Russia and therefore sent another copy in January 1813.

273. “On his return to Paris, Desprez had written to Joseph …”: his letter, dated 3 January, is in Du Casse's
Correspondance du Roi Joseph.
I must confess a certain fascination with Desprez, in some sense an unsung hero of the French staff system, and someone whose knack of being in the wrong place at the wrong time allowed him to witness all of the great moments in the collapse of Napoleon's power. He was also in the Waterloo campaign!

274. “It was only when the downpours of March and April had raised the level of the Coa that trout and the fish locals called
bogas
and
barbos
could migrate up from the Douro”: I am no fisherman; this knowledge was derived from a restaurateur in Almeida who proved a mine of useful local detail.

275. “It is impossible to imagine anything more truly ludicrous than to see Lydia Languish …”: according to Leach of the 95th.

277. “In April 1813 each cavalry regiment in the Peninsular army received a request for volunteers”: by an order of Wellington, 13 April 1813, Dispatches. The authority to raise them was given by the duke of York in a letter of January 1813.

277. “A plan that he had first committed to paper in 1808 …”: this emerges in his letter to Le Marchant of 23 November 1808, reference given above. Alas, I have not found the plan itself.

278. “By the end of the month parties of new recruits were arriving”: the quote comes from Larpent's memoirs, as does the intriguing information about the reluctance of the Household Cavalry men to serve—an early example of the special
pleading by these regiments that anyone who has served in a subsequent British army will find all too familiar.

278. “Those who answered the call to Frenada were given a smart new uniform”: it was sketched by the artist Charles Hamilton Smith and published in a book of British uniforms in 1813.

279. “You need be under no apprehension on the score of my good nature …”: this comes from Scovell's letter to James Willoughby Gordon, the quarter master general at Horse Guards, of 4 July 1813. It now resides in the British Library Manuscript collection as Add. 49506. It is clear from the letter that the charges against Scovell must have emerged into the open following the pillage of French baggage at Vitoria in June 1813, an outbreak of general thieving so large that Scovell's two hundred men could hardly have stopped it.

282. “The most significant dated 13 March, from King Joseph to General Charles Reille …”: another original dispatch preserved in the Scovell Papers, and also in Lucotte's.

283. “It was from Earl Bathurst and contained the report of the London government decipherers …”: this is the table referred to in previous chapters, WP 9/4/1/5. Earl Bathurst's covering letter of 5 April 1813 is also in the Wellington Papers.

284. “The general wrote back to London sarcastically”: his letter of 24 May 1813.1 am convinced that it was sarcasm since the knowledge of the Great Cipher was sufficiently good by early 1813 for the general freely to be quoting chunks of ciphered French dispatches to Spanish politicians (see above) and the secretary of war. Scovell's own papers state the cipher was to all intents and purposes completely broken by the end of 1812.

284. “He had been banished from Salamanca by the French early in 1813, seeking refuge in Ciudad Rodrigo”: Curtis's fate emerges in a letter he wrote to Wellington and which survives in his papers at Southampton University.

285. “Gomm emulated the tactics of previous exploring officers …”: details of his mission emerge from Sir William Gomm,
His Letters and Journals from 1799 to Waterloo,
London, 1881.

285. “All aspects of supply had been attended to”: details gleaned from various journals by our regular informants, Lieutenant Cook, Rifleman Costello, and Captain Tomkinson.

286. “Just north of Salamanca, on 25 May, the British caught up with General Villatte's rear guard”: Scovell describes the action and his thoughts in his journal, W037/7b.

288. “Marshal Jourdan had seen to it that silver was broadcast around the border …”: see his
Memoires.

289. “The countryside was largely undisturbed by the war”: the first quote comes from Cook, the one about the band from G. Simmons,
A British Rifleman,
London, 1899.

290. “On the fourteenth, Scovell found himself invited to a picnic lunch in a field”: this bucolic vignette was sketched for us by Larpent in his journal.

290. “Jourdan, it has to be said, did not expect a fight at Vitoria at all”: the quote is from his
Memoires
again.

292. “The 71st was forced back briefly”: details from the journal
A Soldier of the Seventy First.
Most of those lost Highlanders had actually been captured and were free the following day.

294. “One of the king's courtiers recorded …”: Miot de Melito in his memoirs.

295. “The road to Pampluna was choked up with many carriages filled up with imploring ladies …”': this rather literary description came from Lieutenant Cook. This panorama of destruction and pillage reminds me of the Mutla Ridge, where I saw the remnants of Iraq's army following the liberation of Kuwait in 1991.

296. “FitzRoy Somerset wrote to his brother, ‘The only thing …”': letter to the duke of Beaufort of 26 June 1813, BP FmM 4/1/9.

296. “The many ditches, walls and hedges of the market gardens and smallholders' plots surrounding the city had also made it very hard for the British cavalry to pursue …”: this was the view of FitzRoy's brother Lord Edward, the cavalry commander, in his letter home of June 1813, also in the Beaufort Papers.

297. “He finally found the large document, folded up, with the words
Sa Majeste Catholique
written on its outside …”: Joseph's table resides in the Wellington Papers, WP 9/4/1/6.

297. “the minister of war in Paris needed to know”: Joseph's letter of 27 June to Clarke is in Du Casse.

297. “The king never suspected that the British had been reading … for the previous year …”: this seems obvious, given his letter to Clarke. A French researcher, Cyril Canet, while helping me, uncovered a letter in the Army of Catalonia's carton (File 295, item 17 at the French army archives at Vincennes) suggesting that they were aware that their ciphers had been compromised in 1813. This letter to Marshal Suchet is dated 15 February. We must assume that the author was referring to the simple
chiffres
used only in that army area. If not there is a possibility that headquarters never reacted properly to this alarming news.

298. “an intercepted dispatch from the French minister of war to Marshal Suchet, in command of the Army of Catalonia …”: Scovell Papers, W037/3.

299. “It was early afternoon as the small group of staff galloped across the top of the Mont St. Jean ridge …”: this account is based on Scovell's later memorandum on the battle (in W037), a manuscript account left by his servant Edward Healey (residing in the National Army Museum Library), and
A Week at Waterloo,
edited by Major B. R. Ward, London, 1906, which contains the account of Lady De Lancey, Colonel William's widow.

Once again, I have skipped in the narrative here. Scovell's campaigns in Spain and France during the latter part of 1813 and early 1814 tell us little or nothing about code breaking or indeed the relations in headquarters. Scovell's conduct following
the fighting at St. Pierre d'Irrube in December is worth mentioning, though. During this action Captain Carey Le Marchant, son of the late general, was mortally wounded. It is clear from the accounts of others that Scovell did everything to help the young officer in his final days, which were spent in Scovell's billet. This humane side of the man is rarely visible in his journal and emerged again following Waterloo. When the Peninsula War ended, George and Mary rode back across France to the Channel coast. They evidently had an enjoyable time, taking in Paris and visiting many other cultural sites.