6. Tales of Secret Service (3)
The True Identity of the Baron
If Canning had known what the Baron was doing in September and early October, the money would certainly not have been sent. De Agra and his companions were carefully avoiding all touch with the numerous Spaniards who were now present in London, and had refused several invitations to attend meetings and public dinners offered by various city companies and patriotic societies to the representatives of insurgent Spain. The fact was that there existed a small, but not quite negligible, number of Spaniards who might know who the Baron was, and a still smaller number who might—unlikely as it seemed—know who Don Enrique de Arellano was not. If any of the deputies or intriguers now in London happened to have been in touch before now with the French secret service, they might have met the Baron de Agra under another name. And if—though this was more improbable—any of the recent arrivals had been much about the Spanish Court of late, they might chance to have been well acquainted with the Arellano family, of which the Marquis of Guadalcázar was the head. Wherefore the Baron and his young friend kept very quiet.
The only things which we know of them are that they did much writing, and that they got a London die-sinker, ignorant of the Spanish language, to cut them an armorial seal, inscribed SELLO PRIVADO DE S.M.C. F. VII—Private seal of his Catholic Majesty King Ferdinand VII. It did not at all resemble genuine Spanish royal seals.
Knowing these facts—which were very much unknown to Canning in October 1808—we need have no hesitation in explaining who the Baron really was. Talleyrand, as Napoleon’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, had many disreputable but capable employés of various nationality. Among them was a renegade Spanish friar, one Luis Guttierez, who had been expelled from the Trinitarian Order some twelve or fifteen years back, when Spain and the French Republic had been at war, during the period before the Peace of Basle. Whether Brother Luis had fled the Spanish realm on account of personal scandals, or whether he had been one of the few Spaniards with republican sympathies who existed under the late Bourbon regime, we do not know; the former is to be presumed. When he is next discoverable, about 1802–3, be was ostensibly the editor of a newspaper called the Gaceta Española de Bayona, published at Bayonne in Spanish, and for Spanish consumption, but devoted to French propaganda.
But this was only part of his activity; he had long been the agent on the frontier to whom all French secret emissaries in Spain, or Spaniards in French pay, made their reports for transmission to the confidential department of Talleyrand’s Foreign Office. As to his recent doings, he had been the scribe who drew up for Murat his proclamation to the Spanish nation when the “Lieutenant of the Emperor” entered the Peninsula in March 1808, and he had translated into Spanish many documents which Maret, later Duc de Bassano, had drawn up for publication during the period of intrigue which preceded the kidnapping of Ferdinand VII.
The Gaceta de Bayona stopped publication on July 22, 1808, a more hazardous but much more lucrative employment having been found for its editor. Two schemes were in hand. Firstly, it was most important for the French Government to discover what was the precise amount of support which Great Britain was about to give to the Spanish insurgents. It must be remembered that the present and the future were equally problematic. Dupont’s surrender at Baylen happened only two days before Guttierez’s newspaper office put up its shutters, and it, as also Sir Arthur Wellesley’s landing in Portugal on August 3rd, was unknown at Bayonne.
Secondly, there was a chance that something might be done towards getting into touch with the Francophil party in Spanish America. Discontent in the colonies was rife; it might be diverted into a direction unfavourable to the Bourbon dynasty, and favourable either to a declaration in favour of the new French King of Spain, Joseph Bonaparte, or (at worst) into disavowal of the Spanish insurrection, and the proclamation of colonial independence.
Guttierez’s two companions were his brother José—a much younger man than himself, who had recently been acting as interpreter on the staff of Marshal Lannes—and Juan Enrique Goicoechea, a young Basque, who had been for the last six years a correspondence-clerk in the Franco-Spanish Bank of Messrs. Blaque de Mirlan at Bayonne. The Baron had offered him the dangerous job of representing the son of the Marquis of Guadalcázar, because he was presentable, unscrupulous, and a fluent penman both in French and in Spanish. The bulk of the documents with which the party had furnished themselves were in his neat and flowing script. Only the signature of Prince Carlos had been added by the Baron himself.
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