The Private Secretary

An Incident of Napoleon’s Threatened Invasion of England.

About the beginning of this century, while the Revolutionary Wars were raging, communication in cipher was naturally very prevalent; and ingenuity was taxed to the utmost on one hand to invent, and on the other to detect, the medium used in secret correspondence. As a rule, the decipherer had beaten the cipher; and no known method was secure of detection. If conventional signs merely were used, the recurrence of the different symbols gave a key easily followed out. Some ingenious spirits corresponded by reference to the pages of particular editions of particular books—others by an agreed upon vocabulary. But these last methods, although they might preserve the secret, disclosed what was often quite as dangerous, that there was a secret. I am about to tell you of a plan which for a long time was not only undetected but unsuspected. 

It was at that time that the first Napoleon had assembled his fleets and transports at Brest, with the ostensible, and as is generally believed the real, view of making a descent on England. The greatest precautions were observed by the English Government in regard to correspondence with France, and an amount of espionage was practiced at the post-office which left Sir James Graham’s subsequent performances in that line far behind. The national excitement was intense, and the political department was administered with an iron sway. 

My uncle, Sir George Trevor, was, as all the world then knew, high in the Admiralty; and as it was from him that I heard this anecdote, its veracity may be depended upon. 

The dispatches to and from the Admiralty were the subject of the greatest vigilance and the most stringent regulations. The clerks were… Read More