The Spy Who Never Was

By

Michael Durey

Published in the Times Literary Supplement, 10 March 2000, pp.14-15.

In the last years of the eighteenth century the neutral city of Hamburg, the only convenient port of entry to Europe from Britain not under the control of revolutionary France, seethed with a cosmopolitan mixture of merchants on the make, spies, double agents and disaffected Irishmen fleeing from the consequences of their failed rebellion. [1] Into this cauldron arrived, in September 1798, a boatload of passengers from Yarmouth, including the poet William Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Their ostensible reasons for visiting the continent were, according to Wordsworth, to learn German and 'to furnish ourselves with a tolerable stock of information in natural science'. [2] While on board, between bouts of seasickness, they had made the acquaintance of several fellow passengers, including two who possibly may have been secret agents embarking on their missions. According to Kenneth R. Johnston, however, in his book The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet Lover Rebel Spy (Norton 1998), there were three, not two, spies on board. The other was Wordsworth himself, an agent of the British secret service. [3]

The main evidence for Johnston's claim lies in a small notebook purchased a few years ago by the Wordsworth Trust, in which there is the cryptic comment in a list of accounts paid under the year 1799: 'June 13 To paid Mr. Wordsworth's Draft £92-12'. [4] According to Johnston, this was a reference to William Wordsworth. The entry, he declares, was made by the duke of Portland, then home secretary in William Pitt's ministry; the notebook was Portland's 'payment book for secret intelligence services rendered'. [5] Approaching this evidence 'as a modern investigative reporter', with the 'rule of thumb . . . [that] when there's a choice of possibilities, investigate the riskier one', [6] Johnston puts forward three main propositions to support his thesis that Wordsworth was a British agent. The first is that Wordsworth travelled to Hamburg with a French spy, whom he exposed to Sir James Craufurd, the British minister to the Circle of Lower Saxony. The second is that Wordsworth is alluded to as a spy in the correspondennce between Craufurd and William Wickham, a secret service controller in London. The third is that, while he was incommunicado in Germany in early 1799, one of Wordsworth's secret objectives was 'to relay or deliver orders, or pick up papers or money' from James Talbot, whose blighted secret mission in Swabia was being closed down. [7] Although based on circumstantial and highly qualified evidence, Johnston believes that he has discovered several motives to explain why the British secret service was prepared to employ Wordsworth.

Johnston's claims are sensational but ill-conceived and based on a mistaken interpretation of the evidence. Documents unknown to Johnston, which are available in the Archives Nationales in Paris and the Public Record Office in London, prove that Wordsworth was not a spy when he mysteriously sank from sight with his sister in Germany in the early months of 1799.

Some of the confusion Johnston displays in his account of Wordsworth's supposed secret activites stems from his ignorance of the way the British secret service worked in this period. For the first time since the seventeenth century, Britain's secret service was centralized and highly efficient at turning information gained from many disparate sources into useful intelligence. The great departments of state and the Irish administration in Dublin had their own intelligence networks, but information gathered from these sources was directed to one secret department, where Britain's espionage and counterintelligence policies were formulated. This department existed in the shadows cast by the Alien Office, a sub-department of the Home Office created in 1793 as a wartime measure to control and administer the huge influx of refugees fleeing from the excesses of the French Revolution. [8] The titular head of this secret department was the duke of Portland, but although he was 'a man of business', playing an active role in the cabinet and keeping in regular contact with his departmental staff, he was not by inclination an interventionist. In 1798 and the first half of 1799, the effective controller of the secret department within the Alien Office was William Wickham, who held the official positions of undersecretary of state at the Home Office and Superintendent of Aliens. Wickham, lately returned from a long and arduous mission to Switzerland, was highly experienced in both espionage and counterintelligence; little of a secret nature escaped his notice or was decided upon without his advice being sought. He devised the coordinating and filing system which was the key for turning the base metal of undigested information into intelligence gold. It is the failure of Johnston to understand the role of Wickham's secret department that explains his incomprehension when faced, for example, with foreign secret service accounts being channelled through the Home Office.

Johnston has made much of the presence on the packet to Hamburg of a Frenchman called de Leutre, who had been expelled under the Alien Act and whom Wordsworth befriended. Using evidence from Coleridge's letters, he claims that de Leutre was 'a known agent of the [French] Directory' and that on his arrival in Hamburg Wordsworth may have reported this fact to the resident minister, Sir James Craufurd. [9] According to Johnston, de Leutre later switched sides, becoming an English agent and assuming the title Baron de Leutre. In fact, Johnston has confused two different people. The de Leutre on the Hamburg packet was a bourgeois émigré who had been involved-both politically and in business-with the constitutional monarchists Mallet du Pan, Mounier and Montlosier in London. [10] The 'Baron de Leutre' was the Baron de Lenthe (sometimes written as Lerthe or Lentha), the Hanoverian minister to the Court of St. James. [11] Nor was the real de Leutre ever a French spy; when travelling with Wordsworth he most probably was an English agent, using expulsion from Britain under the Alien Act as a cover for his activities on the continent. His connections with Mallet du Pan's colleagues suggest such a role, for they had been involved with the British secret service since 1793. We can, therefore, ignore Johnston's suggestion that Wordsworth was sent to Hamburg to warn Craufurd of de Leutre's activities on behalf of the French. Craufurd, of course, would have been ignorant of de Leutre's real mission, but he was aware of the cover story, for he already possessed official Alien Office lists of names of foreigners about to be deported from Britain, including de Leutre's, before Wordsworth left England. [12]

Craufurd plays a significant part in another of Johnston's speculations about Wordsworth. The minister, whose duties included reporting on British subjects in Hamburg and infiltrating the city's Jacobin clubs, naturally had his own network of spies and informers, but also at this time there were, initially unknown to him, a number of spies directly controlled from London. The most important were Samuel Turner (code names Richardson and Roberts), a former United Irishman who still possessed the confidence of the Irish rebels in exile; and James Powell, a baker and member of the London Corresponding Society, whom Francis Place had helped to 'escape' to Hamburg in April 1798 but who had been a government informer since 1794. [13] Turner and Powell were the jewels in the British secret service's crown. When Craufurd discovered their presence in Hamburg, he foolishly wrote of them en clair in private letters to Wickham. Understandably, Wickham scolded Craufurd for this elementary security lapse, with the result that, a few days after Wordsworth's arrival in Hamburg, the penitent minister promised Wickham that 'You may rely on the most scrupulous caution respecting the two individuals mentioned to me in your letter'. [14] Thereafter, Craufurd always referred to Turner by his alias and to Powell as 'the person whose name is not to be mentioned'. [15]

Johnston's determination to act as an investigative reporter and always to take the riskier possibility leads him to conclude that 'the two individuals' were Wordsworth and Coleridge, but that only the nameless one (Wordsworth) was a spy. This is despite his knowledge of both Turner and Powell, the discussion of whom he relegates to an appendix. Johnston can reach these conclusions partly because Wickham's letter to Craufurd no longer exists, but as it was a private communication and as it was embarrassingly critical of the recipient, its destruction is hardly surprising. Yet the remaining correspondence makes it abundantly clear that Powell's was the name not to be mentioned in correspondence capable of being intercepted. Johnston erroneously rejects this evidence, twisting it to support his preconceived opinion of Wordsworth's activities.

The least convincing of Johnston's propositions is that Wordsworth may have been sent to Germany to help wind up James Talbot's Swabian mission, the main purpose of which had been secretly to assist the Swiss in their struggle against a French invasion, but which also, through its contacts with and financial support for the Royalist émigré Swabian Agency, had been expected to obtain intelligence from the interior of France. Talbot and his brother Robert, who may indeed have been on the same Yarmouth packet as Wordsworth, as Johnston suggests, were enthusiastic but naive secret agents. They were soon drawn into a harebrained Royalist plot that sought to effect a coup de main against the Executive Directory in Paris. Whether or not Talbot was a willing partner in this scheme, neither Wickham nor Lord Grenville at the Foreign Office became aware of it until the very end of 1798. In January 1799 Talbot was ordered to close his mission, recover the money he had given to the Royalists and return to England. [16]

The only positive connection that can be made between Talbot and Wordsworth is that they were both in Germany at the same time, although hundreds of miles apart. There was no need for Wordsworth to act as a courier to Talbot, for the latter's brother regularly took that role. Nor, when Wordsworth left England, did the authorities know of Talbot's irregular activities. As for Johnston's suggestion that Wordsworth may have been needed to repatriate money to London, at the time he was in Germany the funds remained tied up in secret accounts in Paris, from which they were recouped only after Wordsworth had returned home. [17] Moreover, as one might expect, the British secret service was reluctant to transfer money in coin to and from the continent. Wickham used a number of private continental banks with connections to London houses to do his secret financial business. [18]

Thus, Johnston's speculations as to why the British secret service would want to employ Wordsworth fail to stand up to scrutiny. His one apparently solid piece of evidence is the mention of a Mr. Wordsworth in the notebook now held by the Wordsworth Trust. This notebook is in fact an account book, recording payments from the secret department in the Alien Office. This book is filled from both ends with accounts of secret payments, some for operative field expenses (both at home and abroad), some for pensions for services rendered in the past (the Corsican general and freedom fighter Pasquale Paoli was receiving regular payments of £1000). From one end are the accounts of two undersecretaries, Evan Nepean (for 1793 to 1795) and Wickham (for 1798-99, in whose pages Wordsworth's name appears). From the other end are John King's, the other undersecretary of state at the Home Office, who was also involved, though less directly than Wickham, with secret service activities from 1793 until 1801. The account book is the third of a series recording secret service payments; the first, kept by Nepean in 1790 and 1791, can be found in the Dropmore papers in the British Library. [19]

Johnston admits that the entry in Wickham's accounts is 'by itself . . . not conclusive evidence of Wordsworth's acting on behalf of the new "Secret Department"' [20] and he considers, but rejects, the possibility that it might refer to Wordsworth's cousin Robinson, who was the collector of customs at Harwich. New evidence, however, conclusively proves that the Wordsworth mentioned as having been paid £92. 12s in June 1799 was Robinson, not William. Luckily, the vouchers or invoices on which the account book's entries are based still exist. The relevant one, dated 16 March 1799, states that Robn. Wordsworth was owed £92. 12s for expenses incurred in arresting and taking to London Charles Gowing and Stephen Watts on charges of high treason, under warrants signed by the duke of Portland. [21] This is certainly the voucher which Wickham acknowledges having paid on 13 June. At that point he was preparing once again to embark on a mission to the continent. Before leaving, however, under the provisions of the Civil List Act he was required to settle his secret service accounts and swear an oath that the money had been legally expended. [22] This he was doing in June and it was thus pure chance that the Wordsworth entry in his accounts came between references to payments to Craufurd in Hamburg, which unfortunately sent Johnston off on the wrong track entirely.

How does this new information leave Wordsworth's reputation? Johnston has noted that if Wordsworth can be shown to have been a British agent, 'leftist historicist critics of Wordsworth's antiradical ideology may have a field day . . . , because it seems to confirm their frequent thesis about the inevitable complicities of genius with the established order'. [23] This day will obviously now have to be postponed. But even conservative commentators, perhaps unmoved by knowledge of Wordsworth's supposed patriotic activities, may be disturbed by the thought that the radical poet may have been informing on his friends as early as 1797. This is what Johnston would have us believe, for he claims that James Walsh's statement in his report to government on the activities of Wordsworth, Coleridge and John Thelwall at Alfoxden-that Wordsworth was 'a name known to Mr. Ford'-supports the view that Wordsworth was already informing, or 'turning the spit' in the current Irish phrase, in the summer of 1797. [24] Richard Ford, perhaps best known for his liaison with the actress Mrs. Jordan before she became the duke of Clarence's mistress, was both a London magistrate and a close colleague of Wickham in the secret department. [25] He was most closely concerned with counter-espionage and knew the names of all radical suspects in London. [26] The name Wordsworth was known to him, not because Wordsworth was reporting to him, but because his name had arisen in connection with reports on radical circles in London. Ford was the expert on the London radical societies; when Craufurd informed Grenville in November 1798 of the presence in London of an Irish rebel called O'Finn, he wrote: 'His person is well known to Mr. Ford'. [27]

In the light of knowledge that Wordsworth was not a spy, his reputation must return to what it was before the publication of The Hidden Wordsworth, a man with a youthful past of radicalism that he was only slowly repudiating. In a letter to the New York Review of Books, Johnston has admitted that, 'with the exception of the "spy" information', he presents no new information on Wordsworth's early life. Rather, his purpose is to offer a 'powerful interpretation' of the Prelude, 'one of the most powerful autobiographical fictions in English'. [28] Wordsworthian biography, he avers, needs not more facts, but more speculation. [29] Unfortunately, facts have a disconcerting habit of rising up and biting you.

FOOTNOTES

1. Olivier Blanc, Les espions de la Révolution et de l'Empire (Paris 1995); Paul Weber, On the Road to Rebellion: The United Irishmen and Hamburg (Dublin 1997); Ian Waterston, 'The Political and Military Intelligence Role of Sir James Craufurd at Hamburg 1798-1799', Honours dissertation, Murdoch University 1997.

2. Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford 1989), 148.

3. Kenneth R. Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet Lover Rebel Spy (New York 1998).

4. Wordsworth Trust, Cumbria, Home Office Notebook (WLMS A/Home Office), 37. I am grateful to officers of the Trust for permission to pay for a photographic copy of the notebook, which I have on loan.

5. Johnston, Hidden Wordsworth, 616.

6. Ibid., 9.

7. Ibid., 657.

8. Elizabeth Sparrow, 'The Alien Office, 1792-1806' Historical Journal 33 (1990): 361-384; Sparrow, Secret Service: British Agents in France 1792-1815 (Woodbridge 1999), Part 1.

9. Johnston, Hidden Wordsworth, 615.

10. For de Leutre's business connections with Montlosier, see François, comte de Montlosier, Mémoires (Paris 1830), II, 208; Montlosier, Souvenirs d'un Émigré (Paris 1951), 203-206; Courrier de Londres, XXXVI, 44 (28 November 1794), 354-55. I am very grateful to Dr. Simon Burrows for these references.

11. The Later Correspondence of George III, ed. A. Aspinall (London 1967), III, 99.

12. Archives Nationales, AN F7/6450. This file comprises papers taken when Craufurd's successor, Sir George Rumbold, was kidnapped by French forces in 1804. They include papers handed on to Rumbold by Craufurd, among which are lists of aliens sent out of Britain in 1798 and 1799. De Leutre is first mentioned in the list of those due to leave from April 1798, although it is mentioned that he would be allowed to remain in England for a while to settle his affairs.

13. In his letter of response in the Times Literary Supplement, 17 March 2000, Johnston claims that I have confused two Powells, James and John. In fact, apart from describing James Powell as a 'baker' (for which, see J. Ann Hone, For the Cause of Truth: Radicalism in London 1796-1821 (Oxford 1982), 62) rather than as a clerk, there is no confusion. According to the Notebook held at Grasmere, James Powell was being paid by the authorities for his information on the London Corresponding Society in November 1794, some months earlier than has usually been thought. See Home Office Notebook, 2 (for 27 November 1794).

14. Hampshire Record Office, Wickham Papers, Craufurd to Wickham, 28 September 1798, HRO 38M49/1/66, fo.9.

15. See, eg, Craufurd to Wickham, 12 February, 2 April 1799, HRO 38M49/1/66, fos.20 and 23; Waterston, 'Sir James Craufurd', 61-2.

16. Talbot's papers are in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. For two accounts of his career in Swabia, see Elizabeth Sparrow, 'The Swiss and Swabian Agencies, 1795-1801', Historical Journal 35 (1992): 861-884; Michael Durey, 'The British Government and the Plot to Assassinate the French Directory 1798-99', paper presented to the Australasian Modern British History Association conference in Canberra, February 1999.

17. Bodleian Library, Talbot Papers, Ms Talbot b.27, fos. 35, 82-83, 100, 104-05, Talbot to George Canning, 18 February, Talbot to Grenville, 12 April, Talbot to Frere, 3 June, Talbot to Robert Craufurd, 15 June 1799.

18. See, eg, HRO 38M49/1/122/1-87.

19. British Library Add MS 69078, Evan Nepean's Account Book, 1790-91.

20. Johnston, Hidden Wordsworth, 616.

21. Public Record Office, Secret Service Papers, PRO HO387/3/6.

22. David Wilkinson, '"How did they pass the Union"?: Secret Service Expenditure in Ireland, 1799-1804', History 82 (1997): 223-51.

23. Johnston, Hidden Wordsworth, 669.

24. Ibid., 663.

25. Claire Tomalin, Mrs Jordan's Profession (London 1994), chaps. 5-8.

26. Hone, For the Cause of Truth, passim.

27. PRO FO33/16, Craufurd to Grenville, 9 November 1798.

28. New York Review of Books, 24 June 1999.

29. Johnston, Hidden Wordsworth, 8.

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