7. Tales of Secret Service (7)
The Summons from Sir Wellesley
In the spring of 1808, however, he received an unexpected reminder that his offer had not been forgotten. This was a letter from Sir Arthur Wellesley—then (though the fact is often forgotten) Secretary for Ireland and a member of the House of Commons. Wellesley wrote to him to the effect that he had been recommended by the Viceroy as a man of ability with a thorough knowledge of Germany. He was asked to come to London, and to send his address to Sir Arthur at his private residence in Harley Street. This Brother James, agreeably surprised, did without delay. But there was then an interval of many weeks without any summons being sent him, and fearing that the idea had fallen through, he accepted the post of tutor and secretary in the family of a Roman Catholic peer.
Hardly had he done this, when he got, on May 31, 1808, the summons from Wellesley which he had given up the hope of receiving. On presenting himself he had a definite offer made him. “I know, Mr. Robertson, that you are a man of resource, and you say that you are a man of courage. Would you go to Germany at a day’s notice on a secret mission?” “That would I with the utmost alacrity,” replied the monk. “I should be working for the cause of my religion, and the cause of every people in Europe, against the most unjust of oppressors.” Wellesley then explained to him that there was a good reason for sending an emissary to North Germany, and added, after his sardonic fashion, that the last two gentlemen who had gone in that direction were “missing”, and were believed to have been shot. As Robertson persisted in his offer, he was told that he should see Mr. Canning, and a few days later, on June 10th, the monk called again on the General, and was driven over to Downing Street by him. There after some waiting, he was taken in to see Mr. Canning. According to Robertson’s idea the Foreign Secretary did not seem much impressed with him, and not perhaps without cause, for the visitor was a round, merry little man with a great flow of language, not at all of the type of the mysterious and taciturn secret agent of common belief.
However, Canning informed his visitor that he would be given his chance, if he cared to take it, remembering that several British agents in Germany had disappeared of late. The Duke of Richmond had a good opinion of his plausibility and readiness, and Sir Arthur Wellesley was anxious that a certain experiment should be tried. Had Mr. Robertson any demands to make? The only answer was that he had an aged mother and two sisters in Scotland, and that if he never came back from Germany, he trusted that the British Government would provide a small pension for them. For this, the Foreign Secretary replied, there would be no difficulty, and he made a note of the point on paper.
Robertson was then handed over for instructions to Bartholomew Frere, who had been Secretary of Legation at Madrid in 1802–4 and knew Spain well. This was the brother of John Hookham Frere, who wrote the inimitable comic poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, and was destined in the following winter to quarrel so bitterly with Sir John Moore.
The mission on which Robertson was to be sent requires a word of explanation. When Napoleon was planning his treacherous attack on Spain, and the deposition of the Bourbons, his preparations were lengthy and devious. One of them had been to disarm his unsuspecting ally as far as possible before the coup d’état came off. And with this object he had requisitioned the pick of the Spanish army for service in the North. The excuse was the danger in the Baltic, where the Emperor’s Danish allies were liable to be overwhelmed by the combination of the Swedes and the British Navy, which dominated all the waterways of the Belts and the Sound. Since the Copenhagen expedition of 1807, and the capture of the Danish fleet, a Swedish-British raid in greater force seemed more possible than ever. So at least said Bonaparte to the imbecile Godoy; and the latter duly supplied 15,000 of his best troops, under the command of the Marquis of La Romana, one of the few Spanish generals who were both honest and capable, and therefore one whom Godoy was glad to see out of Spain. His subordinates were also in large measure officers whom Godoy distrusted, as having shown themselves not sufficiently sycophantic in their bearing toward himself.
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