“For centuries, kings and queens of England, along with British generals and admirals, have used spies and agents to achieve successes on and off the battlefield.”

By Douglas Brown

IMAGINE IT’S THE year 1905. The Great Powers of Europe have lined up their alliances for the next general war, except for Britain, which waits on the sidelines, perilously isolated.

Now British intelligence catches wind of a plot between Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia to effect a restructuring of the alliances to pit all Europe against the United Kingdom. London must dispatch a secret agent immediately to uncover the plot before it comes to fruition.

That’s the premise of my new novel The Honorable Spy. The story follows the exploits of the fictional operative Captain Ranald MacKenzie as he works to thwart the two hostile powers as they negotiate the real-world Treaty of Bjorko.

The novel, which is released this week, commemorates the 117^th anniversary of the Kaiser and Tsar’s clandestine meeting at Bjorko Sound near St. Petersburg. My protagonist, MacKenzie, is still haunted by the memories of the disaster he remembers as “that day” and has as his only ally on the continent a woman claiming to be Agent Catriona Cameron. But Cameron is reported missing on assignment in Germany.

Of course, Britain has long been considered a global power in the world of espionage, credentials firmly cemented in the public consciousness after details emerged of a number of intelligence operations undertaken during the Second World War – from the cracking of the German Enigma codes and Operation Mincemeat to the famous Double-Cross System. The reputation was further bolstered by intelligence-officer-turned novelist Ian Fleming’s fictional spy James Bond.

However, Britain’s history of espionage predates the modern era and the founding of MI6 in 1909. For centuries, kings and queens of England, along with British generals and admirals, have used spies and agents to achieve successes on and off the battlefield. Here are a few examples.

British spies of the Roman era

In 367, the Roman province of Britannia was wracked by the infamous Barbarian Conspiracy. Simultaneously, Scotti from Ireland, Picts from modern-day Scotland, and Saxons from Germany all raided into the heartland of the province. The Romans had areani to act as scouts north of Hadrian’s Wall, but apparently the Picts bribed them into silence or otherwise neutralized them. The Picts successfully surprised and cut off the Roman garrison commander and his army. It would take two years to restore Roman control over the province, which, at any rate, they abandoned 40 years later.

Intelligence turned the tide at Crécy

In the summer of 1346, during the Hundred Years War, Edward III of England led an army of 10,000 to 15,000 men in a great chevauchee (essentially, a large-scale raid) across northern France. By mid-August, his army found itself in a dreadful position. Supplies had run low, the French militia harassed their march, and a larger enemy army under Philip VI had beaten it to the north bank of the Somme, blocking all the nearest crossing points. Intelligence revealed that the ford at Blanchetaque was practicable for his army, though there are several versions as to who actually revealed the information to Edward. The English outflanked the French defenses and brushed aside what forces tried to stop them in the Somme (fighting even in the river itself), beating the French to the ground north of Crécy. There, the English longbows outshot the Genoese crossbows arrayed against them and devastated the French cavalry charges, winning Edward a great victory.

English intelligence cost Mary Queen of Scots her throne and her head

Sir Francis Walsingham ably served Elizabeth I from 1573-1590 as secretary of state and unofficial intelligence chief. Devoutly Protestant, he did not want England to return to the Catholic fold under Mary Stuart, Elizabeth’s Catholic Scottish cousin. Walsingham’s cryptanalyst John Somer broke the cyphers used by Mary’s mother and regent, Marie de Guise, feeding the Protestant Scottish Lords of the Congregation vital information that they used to gain power and eventually run Mary out of the country. Mary was put under house arrest in England, where Catholics began to intrigue to unseat Elizabeth and enthrone Mary in her place. Walsingham used double agents, cryptanalysis by Thomas Phelippes, and even a little forgery to implicate Mary in a plot on Elizabeth’s life. Reluctantly, Elizabeth signed a warrant for Mary’s execution, and she was beheaded. 

British codebreakers were at work long before Bletchley Park

Britain has liked to portray herself as the defender of European, and even global, liberties against a succession of five particularly formidable Continental tyrants. Each one had their codes broken by British intelligence. Walsingham’s cryptanalysts and agents worked with the Dutch rebels to crack Philip II of Spain’s codes and give Sir Francis Drake the warning he needed to launch a preemptive strike against the Spanish Armada the year before it sailed in 1588. Louis XIV of France valued secrecy as much as any of his other traits, but John Wallis cracked his codes and fed vital intelligence to William III before the Battle of the Boyne. (Wallis stayed at his post amid the turbulence of the various regime changes in 17^th century England because he was too valuable to dismiss). An officer on Lord Wellington’s staff, Lieutenant Colonel George Scovell, cracked Napoleon’s codes during the Peninsular War. After our period, Room 40 and Bletchley Park gained lasting fame for cracking the codes of Wilhelm II of Germany and Adolf Hitler, respectively, in the two world wars.

Intelligence was Duke of Marlborough’s secret weapon

The Duke of Marlborough played the leading role in curbing Louis XIV’s European ambitions, and intelligence always stayed close to his heart. His quartermaster-general, William Cadogan, reconnoitered, interrogated prisoners and deserters, and ran an agent network in France for him. Meanwhile, John Wallis’s grandson William Blencowe decrypted French messages sent to him by the Brussels postmaster. Marlborough planned his famous march across Europe to Blenheim in 1704 based on a captured French ministerial memorandum. Then he and his ally Prince Eugen won a resounding victory at Blenheim in large part because his opponents had no good intelligence about the allied armies.

Superior intelligence turned the tide of the Peninsular War

By late 1811, the Peninsular War between Britain and Napoleon’s France appeared to be at a stalemate. The British controlled the two fortresses guarding the way into Portugal, and the French controlled the two guarding the way into Spain. Happily for Wellington, Spanish guerrillas brought him a wealth of captured French dispatches, his staff officer George Scovell had decrypted most of the French code, and Wellington had an effective intelligence network in Spain. Intelligence informed him during early winter that the French army opposing him in Spain was being dispersed towards Napoleon’s other projects, enabling him to launch a lightning strike to seize the fortress-town of Ciudad Rodrigo, which he took by storm on Jan. 19, 1812. The British had a toehold in Spain and would use it to launch two offensives in 1812 and 1813. The latter ran the French out of Spain and brought the Peninsular Army all the way into France itself.

British Intelligence was saved by a disgraced officer

Embarrassed by public outrage over the reading of the mail of foreign revolutionaries in exile in Britain, Parliament closed the Deciphering Branch in 1844. Difficulties with intelligence in the Crimean War led to the formation of the Topographical & Statistical Department, but it was allowed to languish until then-Captain Sir Charles Wilson became director in 1870. As its executive officer in the preceding year, Wilson had studied the flaws in the department, and the government put his ideas into practice to reorganize and streamline it amid fears over German aggrandizement in the Franco-Prussian War. By 1873, the British War Office had a much-improved Intelligence Branch. Unhappily for Wilson, command of the advance British forces marching to the relief of popular hero General George Gordon at Khartoum in 1885 fell to him after his two superiors were killed. Wilson prudently delayed four days to regroup and reconnoiter, but his troops then arrived two days too late to save Gordon from death at the hands of Mahdist rebels. Even though the British government had dragged its feet for months before even sending a relief column, Wilson became the scapegoat and was never really forgiven.

Intelligence scored a diplomatic triumph for Prime Minister Disraeli

The army initially distrusted Wilson’s Intelligence Branch, but it soon proved its worth to the politicians. Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and Foreign Secretary Lord Salisbury found it very helpful during a crisis in 1878. Russia had just thrashed the Turks and seemed set to dominate the Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean. To forestall this, Disraeli took several steps, including calling the other European powers to the Congress of Berlin. When Disraeli and Salisbury produced a settlement that satisfied the British public, Salisbury gave much of the credit to the Intelligence Branch.

Most intelligence came from a library of foreign newspapers

The Intelligence Division (later Department) mostly read newspapers and foreign publications rather than secret reports. Each officer read six newspapers a day. They would index the military articles (with as many as four or five headings), cut them out, and put them in a cutting-book. The intelligence service had 40,000 books in 1886 in its library, with 5,500 added a year. Not surprisingly, it adopted the Dewey Decimal System shortly after it was invented.

Britain was a century behind Germany in establishing a general staff

Prussia established a general staff in 1806 to coordinate intelligence, plans, and preparation for future wars, but for the longest time Britain resisted such a move. Many in Britain thought a general staff, if established, would allow the army to get the government in over its head or where it did not want to go. Ninety-eight years after Prussia’s decision, in February of 1904, Britain formed a Directorate of Military Operations with 4 subdivisions numbered MO1-MO4. MO3 was Administration and Special Duties, “special” meaning counterintelligence, covert intelligence, and censorship. In The Honorable Spy, the fictional Captain MacKenzie is one of the two officers assigned to MO3. (Even then, Britain did not revive its tradition of excellent cryptanalysis until World War I compelled her to.)

The founder of the Boy Scouts was an avid spy

Robert Baden-Powell is best remembered today as the founder of the Boy Scouts, but he also had a career as a spy for British intelligence. At one point he used the cover that he was a crazy butterfly collector when in reality he was sketching forts in his pictures of the butterflies, using their spots for gun positions. He liked the idea of enthusiastic gentlemen playing at spying more than the thought of paid secret agents.

Secret missions were “officially unofficial”

Rarely did associates of ambassadors or military attachés, who were closely watched, perform secret service missions. Rather, officers not linked to embassies would work in the target country for a few weeks pretending to be tourists in civilian garb, dubbed being “on the spy.” The generally accepted rules were that an agent had to be authorized by the commander-in-chief to believe he had any connection to or assignment from the Intelligence Division, he should not compromise himself via the laws of the country, he should not display notes or plans or take anything out of a military facility, and he should never send letters by post or address them to the War Office, Intelligence Branch, or anyone by name. To use government jargon from the British political satire Yes, Prime Minister, the mission was “officially unofficial.” In fact, one spy was told when he went to Russia that if anything went wrong and he was discovered, he would be disowned and punished for the sake of appearances.

Intelligence proved vital to Britain in the two World Wars after MI6 and other organizations were created, but the building of the British Empire before then owed a great deal to these agencies’ forerunners. Britain had its shares of intelligence failures, and it took almost the better part of a century to build up the agencies required to win such desperate conflicts as the World Wars. However, when faced with a mortal enemy like Philip II’s Spain or Louis XIV or Napoleon’s France, British intelligence almost always rose to the occasion.

Douglas Brown is a Texas-based writer who specializes in military history and historical fiction. His novel The Honorable Spy was released by Cheetah Publishing in July of 2022. Buy it on Amazon HERE. Follow him on Twitter @DougBrownAuthor or Instagram at douglasbrownauthor, or like his Facebook page, “Douglas Brown – Author.”

Sources

Andrew, Christopher. Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community. Sevenoaks, UK: Sceptre, 1987.

Andrew, Christopher. The Secret World: A History of Intelligence. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018.

Fergusson, Thomas G. British Military Intelligence, 1870-1914: The Development of a Modern Intelligence Organization. Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, Inc., 1984.

Fletcher, Ian. Vittoria 1813: Wellington Sweeps the French from Spain. Oxford: Osprey Publishing Ltd., 1998.

Graves, Donald E. Dragon Rampant: The Royal Welch Fusiliers at War, 1793-1815. Barnsley, UK: Frontline Books, 2010.

Moffat, Alistair. The Faded Map: Lost Kingdoms of Scotland. Edinburgh: Birlinn Limited, 2018.

Nicolle, David. Crécy 1346: Triumph of the Longbow. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2005.

Urban, Mark. The Man Who Broke Napoleon’s Codes. New York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 2001.