6. Tales of Secret Service (1)
The Baron de Agra, 1808–9
It is not often that a British Foreign Minister has been completely duped for a couple of months or more by an impudent secret agent of a hostile power, and induced to discuss with him matters of high importance, military and political, on which it was most essential that the enemy should be kept in the dark. Such, however, was the ill-luck of George Canning between September and November 1808. That the adventurer was ultimately detected, and went to the scaffold six months later, must have been a poor satisfaction to the Minister, when he reflected on the indiscretions of which he had been guilty.
Yet the circumstances were such that the success of the trick played upon Canning is in no wise surprising. And the very impudence of it was in great measure responsible for its having caught him unawares.
Napoleon’s infamous kidnapping of Ferdinand VII of Spain, the Complot de Bayonne, had taken place in May. The unfortunate young King had been shut up in Valençay, and on the news of his captivity indignant Spain had flared up into half a dozen local and independent insurrections, rather to the surprise of the kidnapper, who had thought that a disarmed people, long oppressed by a corrupt government, would have no heart to rise against the invader. Had he not made his preparation by garrisoning Madrid, and seizing the best of the Spanish fortresses, St. Sebastian and Pampeluna, Barcelona and Figueras, under false pretences of lending aid to the Bourbons against perfidious Albion? For, indeed, as the Spanish war-song very truly declared:
No contento el malvado
Luchar con desarmado
Oculta con oliva
Su infame puñal
There was for several months no Spanish Central Government opposing the French invader. Each province uttered its defiance, slew or chased away governors who had submitted to the French usurpation, and tried to raise a raw army of some sort. Then most of the insurrectionary juntas made, as one of their first efforts, the attempt to get into communication with England, the old enemy of Napoleon, and to beg for money and arms. For the aid of a British expeditionary force they were at first too proud to ask, being wholly unconscious of the inefficiency of patriotic levies to cope with the French Grande Armée.
In June the first emissaries from the local juntas began to arrive in London; in July there were four or five separate parties of them, not in the least in touch with each other, and each thinking their own needs the most important. In August there was quite an invasion of Spanish petitioners of all sorts—some of them set merely on private ends or grievances—shipowners who wanted their recently captured vessels released, now that Spain was no longer a hostile power, military adventurers who were ready to raise regiments, merchants who had schemes for the reopening of the long-barred trade between Britain and Spanish America. Canning had to see and to sift them all—some of his visitors were persons of high political importance, some mere self-seekers.
On August 19th the British frigate Seine, cruising off the Biscay coast, to watch Bilbao and St. Sebastian, both in French hands, was hailed by a fishing-boat under Spanish colours, which had run out from the little port of Orrio. From it there came on board three well-dressed Spanish gentlemen, who declared to the captain that they were bearers of dispatches from the imprisoned King of Spain for the British Government, which should be delivered at once. Ferdinand, they said, had succeeded in smuggling out letters from his prison, despite of the vigilance of Talleyrand’s minions. This had been managed through the youngest of the three travellers, Don Enrique Ramirez de Arellano, son of the Marquis of Guadalcazar, the King’s private secretary, one of the few Spaniards who had been carried off to Valençay along with their master. He had been allowed to see his father, who had passed the correspondence on to him, with orders to transmit it to Don Francisco Godinez de Pareja, Baron de Agra, a trustworthy person who had done secret work for Ferdinand when he was only a much-oppressed heir-apparent in his father’s unhappy time. The letters had been passed on to the Baron at Tours, and he had made such haste that he had got from the heart of France to the Biscay coast in six days.
The Baron was a man of about forty-five, a dignified and plausible person, very fluent both in Spanish and in French, but (as was natural) speaking not a word of English. The third person of the party was a cousin of the Baron’s, one Don José Godinez, who played a minor part in the proceedings, and was the only one of the three who escaped the scaffold in the tragic end of the story. The Baron showed the captain of the Seine a sealed letter addressed to the British Foreign Minister and a thin dispatch box, also sealed, which he said was to be entrusted to the minister to be forwarded elsewhere. Both were sealed in an odd way, with a reverse impression of one of the few peseta pieces which had been struck at the Spanish mint for Ferdinand, during the troubled weeks when he was King-regnant at Madrid. The Baron explained that his Majesty had no seal of his own left him.
The captain thought that the dispatches must be important; it was obvious that it would be highly advantageous to get in touch with the imprisoned King, of whose condition and intentions no one in England or Spain had any idea since he had disappeared from Bayonne into French captivity. Accordingly he took upon himself the responsibility of running across the Bay of Biscay, and of dropping the Baron and his companions at Portsmouth, after which he returned to his cruising. From Portsmouth the three Spaniards took post-chaise for London, and descended at Warren’s Hotel, Charles Street, St. James’s, on or shortly before the last day of August.
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