The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes (7 page)

For Captain Scovell this purchase strained every financial sinew. One year later, in 1804, Scovell's regiment found itself posted to the south coast in response to renewed hostilities with France. But it was not their military duties that were to prove the ultimate cause of his crisis. The 4th found itself in Brighton and Lewes and its officers were soon doing long hours in the salons and assembly rooms adorning the fashionable set surrounding the prince of Wales. There were numerous functions requiring full dress uniform, royal reviews of the regiment, and much granting of reciprocal hospitality.

Finally, the expense of holding his own on the regimental scene
exceeded by three- or fourfold his captain's yearly pay of about £270; Scovell had no choice but to give up the game. The bitter remedy for his financial malady involved increasing his income and lowering his outgoings. He accepted the advice of those who told him that the best way for a man of his talents and limited means to make his way in the army was by joining the staff. Late in 1804, a few months after the 4th went to the south coast, Scovell transferred to Derby in the Midlands. There, he received extra pay while working at the local headquarters as one of the new breed of officers being established by Horse Guards. His duties as a “major of brigade” (confusingly, he remained a captain) involved assisting the major general in command of this army district. The tasks of staff officers were many and varied, from helping the general in disseminating his orders to preparing the regiments garrisoned in the district for deployment overseas.

Despite overreaching himself financially, Scovell had still benefited enormously from being in the army. It took him to the centers of fashionable society—to Bath and Brighton, where he could observe the greatest men of his age and believe that he had ventured far from his origins—and it had also transformed the onetime apprenticed engraver into a worthy match for a grander family connection. Scovell's friendship with Captain Leigh Clowes of the 3rd Dragoons (another heavy cavalry regiment), who also lived in Derby, led to an introduction to his sister Mary, most likely at one of the many dances or assemblies attended by the eligible people of the county.

The union between George and Mary had been one of love, as their later adventures would demonstrate, but also one of carefully matched pragmatism. Though she was the eldest child, Mary stood to inherit very little: an allowance of little over £200 per year, in fact. Marrying at the age of thirty in an epoch when a young woman of good family usually made her alliance between twenty and twenty-five, she was also most unlikely to be deluged by rival suitors. By the rates of exchange of the Georgian marriage market, Mary's various liabilities equaled Scovell's one great one: his obscure birth.

For Mary, her brother's officer friend offered a way to escape the tedium of family life in Lancashire and to travel more widely. Her brother John was a clergyman, but although this must have brought many respectable men of the cloth into her social orbit, the prospect of
sharing her life with them was evidently unenticing. Mary, it seems, shared Jane Austen's view that marrying into the army was an altogether more exciting proposition than the clergy: “It has everything in its favour; heroism, danger, bustle, fashion. Soldiers and sailors are always acceptable in society.”

George and Mary were married in May 1805 in Manchester Cathedral. Soon after their union, Scovell applied to study at the Royal Military College in Wycombe. It was there that he could learn the business of a staff officer and in particular of the quarter master general's branch. His sights were set not just on scholarly edification but on the extra pay received by a deputy assistant quarter master general, just over £172 per annum. An ambitious Wycombe graduate hoped, once qualified, to be sent overseas on some expedition that might bring distinction and the notice of a general who could further his interests.

In 1806, the couple left Derby and took up residence near the college, where Scovell began life as a student. It is evident, though, that for all the happiness of his new life with Mary, Scovell was still in great financial difficulty. Although he avoided the conventional dangers awaiting cavalry captains off the battlefield (gambling, dueling or too much whoring), his life as an officer in the 4th Dragoons was still proving to be far beyond his means.

The promise of extra pay once he left Wycombe was not enough to save him now, so Scovell had to swallow an even more bitter pill. While still at the college, he transferred from the 4th Dragoons into the 57th Foot.

The cavalry carried a greater cachet than a marching regiment of foot, and the difference between being a captain in one regiment and another was a good deal of money: £1650 to be precise. So on 27 February 1807 Scovell signed a deed exchanging his cavalry commission with the less valuable one of Captain Oliver in the 57th. Henry Hardinge, a fellow student at Wycombe (and the same Hardinge who would later witness General Moore's death at Corunna) was also an officer in the 57th Foot, and he helped his friend Scovell arrange the deal. Scovell may have restored his finances with the £1650 gained from the swap, enough to secure his immediate future with Mary, but it also meant that in his early thirties, he had actually gone backward in the promotion stakes.

Prior to his first campaign in the Iberian Peninsula he spent the best part of two years working away at Wycombe on French, German,
mathematics, trigonometry, topographical drawing, fortification and siege-craft. But although Scovell's brain propelled him into the ranks of Britain's most diligent and professional soldiers, he found it very hard to accept he had lost the status he had enjoyed for twelve years as a cavalry officer.

Now, in February 1809, following Scovell's return from Corunna, there was some time for reflection as George and Mary walked arm in arm around Sprotborough Hall's formal gardens, wrapped up against the February chill. He was losing hope of ever getting promotion, and his will to carry on working twice as hard as the officers with greater means and better connections was faltering. And did they talk about whether they might still be blessed with children? Or had Mary given up hope, for she was just a few months younger than George and many considered it unhealthy, even dangerous, for a woman of thirty-four to give birth.

While the captain on leave pondered whether he had any future in the army, events in London had taken a dramatic and unexpected turn. The whole system of military promotion and patronage had been blown open by a scandal. It involved sex, corruption and the Royal family. Since the hallowed traditions of Britain's press run as deep as those of its army, details were published extensively in the newspapers.

Days after Parliament had voted its thanks for the Battle of Vimeiro, a member of the Commons, one Colonel Wardle, had leveled a series of damaging charges against the duke of York.

The duke had for years kept a courtesan by the name of Mary Anne Clarke. He had broken off the affair in 1806, but she had continued to spend lavishly on fine clothes and high living, exploiting her connection with royalty to run up huge bills with London tradesmen. When the duke had told her to live within the means of the annual pension he was giving her, she had threatened to go public with accusations that she had been earning money by trafficking in army commissions. Not only had she been paid to bring the names of young officers to the duke's attention for promotion, but she had also been able to fake his signature on letters of recommendation. The commander in chief refused to pay her more hush money, so she had gone to Colonel Wardle with her allegations.

The ironies of the Clarke affair were rich. The duke of York himself often grumbled that the commission system was allowing wealth alone
to determine the prospects of officers. The system of purchase, and the setting of higher prices for commissions in certain prestigious regiments, meant that these parts of the army were packed with the sons of rich tradesmen, “nabobs” who had made their fortunes trading Indian spices, or the new industrial barons of Derbyshire or Lancashire. Even the Life Guards, the most prestigious of regiments, had been nicknamed the Cheesemongers in the army a few years before and dismissed by the duke of York as “nothing but a collection of London tradespeople.” But Mrs. Clarke had been pushing forward the sons of those very tradesmen the duke so despised, in lieu of settling her debts.

The episode left a bitter taste in many mouths and focused everyone's concern on the injustices and confusion of the system for advancement. Officers could make each step by a variety of means: simply being the most senior in their rank when a vacancy at the next rank came up; jumping the queue by buying that commission; or getting the recommendation of a senior figure like the duke of York.

So serious were these accusations that they resulted in the suspension of the king's son from his role as commander in chief of the army. The Clarke scandal left Parliament with a desire to find a fairer promotion system. Some changes were made. The practice used by many aristocratic families of getting a son commissioned early in his teens and while still at school so he could rise up the seniority ladder was ended. There were also new regulations to ensure that more senior ranks would be promoted strictly by seniority. Attempts would also be made to prevent officers from buying their way rapidly up toward the rank of lieutenant colonel (a method employed by Lieutenant General Wellesley, among others). Nevertheless, the sale of commissions went on, since a thing that miraculously transformed the sons of upstart tradesmen into gentlemen was too lucrative a scheme for the exchequer to quash. The changes in the promotion system were limited, but still angered many conservatives in the army who believed promotion should be based on breeding, connections and money.

On 19 February, a messenger brought the post to the low-bred captain on leave at Sprotborough Hall. Scovell broke the seal on the back of the folded paper packet and opened it. Perhaps the scandal playing itself out in London, and the promise of reform that it seemed to bring, led him to look more favorably on the letter's contents. He was appointed as a
deputy assistant quarter master general on the staff of a new expedition to Portugal and directed to make his way to Cork Harbor for embarkation. His orders were signed in person by Lieutenant General Brownrigg, the quarter master general at army headquarters in Horse Guards. A few weeks later, Sir Arthur Wellesley was appointed to command the new venture.

Scovell had another ten days with Mary before he had to gather his portmanteaus, trunk and other effects. He had been with her for three weeks, and it was to be more than three years before they would see one another again. Britain was to try its luck once more in the peninsula. Scovell was chancing his with one more campaign. He was heading back to war.

CHAPTER FOUR
N
ORTHERN
P
ORTUGAL
, M
AY
1809

I
t was about 10
A.M
. on a typically sleepy May morning as Scovell and some of the other officers on Sir Arthur Wellesley's staff dismounted in the narrow streets of Vila Nova. Oporto, that great city of northern Portugal, had burst out of the natural confines of the plateau overlooking the Douro gorge and the Vila Nova had been created as the New Town, a suburb on its southern bank. Their chief had already gone ahead of them, on the terrace of the Serra monasetry, formulating a plan of battle. As the men found their way through the quarter, the curious peeked from their windows at the red-coated officers. Many started bundling their families down into cellars, anticipating trouble with the British entering one part of their city while the French remained in the other. As Scovell and the others emerged from the huddle of Vila Nova's cheap little houses to join their chief beside the Serra monastery, a steep slope dropped away in front of them and a quite breathtaking vista presented itself. From their vantage points the British could look across the
Douro, deep in its channel. The curves of the river and the depth of its course opened Portugal's second city to them like a ripe fruit: the spires of the Se cathedral and the Tower of Clerigos marking its tempting center. Wellesley intended to make a sensational start to his second Portuguese campaign by delivering Oporto from French occupation.

The Serra occupied a point on the southern side of the river that was singularly suited to the British general's purpose. It was virtually the only one close enough to the heights opposite for cannon to rake them with fire. Looking down to the quayside on the northern bank, the occasional sentry making his rounds marked the only French presence. To the foreigner, there seemed an air of normality in the city. A local would have expected to see more bargemen and fishermen moving about on the quay, but the French sentries had told them to stay indoors. Smoke snaked lazily into the sky from the homes in the city above and behind them.

Wellesley and his men knew that the next few hours were going to determine whether their plan would secure them a famous victory or end in ignominy. So far, their presence in Vila Nova and that of thousands of troops filing through its little streets had gone undetected.