4 - ‘Exaggerated Dimensions and an Unnatural Appearance’: Plotting Regime Change in France, 1796–7

Summary

Master Spy

By the time Wickham advised Grenville in December 1795 of the failure of allied plans, he was no longer a neophyte in the secret world of espionage. He had had to learn the role of spy controller almost from scratch. He had picked up the rudiments of intelligence analysis at the Home Office and had run a small group of surveillance officers, but in Switzerland he was working on a far grander scale and in a far more hostile environment with much less support. The measure of Wickham's inexperience can be gauged from Grenville's need to teach him, by correspondence, the basic diplomatic niceties, such as writing in a large hand (for the benefit of the king's eyesight) and separating information on different topics into numbered despatches. These were minor issues, easily absorbed by Wickham, although he used his poor calligraphy skills – ‘of my handwriting I fear I shall remain incorrigible’ – as an additional reason for the transfer of a secretary-writer from London to Berne. More importantly, his first year in Switzerland had shown that Wickham appeared to possess many of the essential requirements of a diplomat-spy: a natural tact and emollient character; a thick skin and a grim determination; and the (occasionally fallible) ability to judge character and to make cold and clear assessments of bountiful raw data.

By the end of 1795 raw information was arriving in increasingly large amounts and was to burgeon further over the next two years. Still held today amongst Wickham's papers covering his first mission in Europe are more than 1,500 non-diplomatic items relating to his espionage in France, as well as many hundreds of official items of correspondence with British politicians and diplomats. Nor was it Wickham's practice to keep every secret document that came his way. Many were read, noted and destroyed. Some of the information he received was spurious; some came in the form of bulletins, which were a mixture of raw intelligence and biased political opinion; and some, probably the most, came from select agents who garnered information from their own spy networks.