The Emperor's Gold Read online

  From the archives of the Comptrollerate-General for Scrutiny and Survey

  THE

  EMPEROR’S

  GOLD

  From the archives of the Comptrollerate-General for Scrutiny and Survey

  THE

  EMPEROR’S

  GOLD

  arranged by

  ROBERT WILTON

  First published in Great Britain in 2011

  by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © Robert Wilton 2011.

  The moral right of Robert Wilton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Hardback ISBN: 978-1-84887-837-2

  Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-84887-838-9

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-85789-436-6

  Printed in Great Britain.

  Corvus

  An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

  Ormond House

  26-27 Boswell Street

  London WC1N 3JZ

  www.corvus-books.co.uk

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  The Sea

  England

  21st July 1805

  22nd July 1805

  23rd July 1805

  24th July 1805

  25th July 1805

  26th July 1805

  27th July 1805

  28th July 1805

  29th July 1805

  30th July 1805

  31 July 1805

  1st August, 1805

  2nd August, 1805

  3rd August 1805

  4th August 1805

  5th August 1805

  6th August 1805

  France

  6th August 1805 – continued

  7th August 1805

  8th August 1805

  9th August 1805

  10th August 1805

  11th August 1805

  12th August 1805

  13th August 1805

  The Doom Bar

  for Elizabeth

  for everything

  for ever

  From the archives of the Comptrollerate-General for Scrutiny and Survey

  THE

  EMPEROR’S

  GOLD

  Introduction

  Buried treasure is rare in historical research; I stumbled over the roots of this story by chance. During one stint of my career in the UK Ministry of Defence, I worked in the Old War Office Building, a striking, if not quite successful, piece of Edwardian grandeur on London’s Whitehall. A colleague piqued my curiosity by telling me that, if I visited the MoD library in Scotland Yard (the capital’s police took the name with them when they left 120 years ago, and now alas the library has gone too), I could find out who had occupied my impressively panelled office back when we had an Empire and Europe was collapsing into the First World War.

  I was disappointed to read that I was not treading in the footsteps of some famous field marshal, but was instead the direct descendant of something called the Comptrollerate-General for Scrutiny and Survey. It didn’t even sound military. I soon forgot this dull bit of bureaucracy, whose members had, I imagined, spent the First World War shuffling papers and counting buttons while better men charged to their deaths in the charnel houses of the Somme and Passchendaele.

  Then, eighteen months ago, I was trying to pull together a short story involving Christopher Marlowe, the sixteenth-century poet and playwright whose death in a bar-room brawl has long been assumed to be the result of his dabbling in the murky world of Elizabethan political intrigue. Among his activities in the days before his death was one brief interview – though it may dramatically have altered the course of his last hours – with a court official entitled… the Comptroller-General of Scrutiny and Survey.

  Intrigued by this connection across the centuries, I went back to the War Office records. There, after a great deal of burrowing and thanks to two MoD librarians whose patience no number of lunchtime beers could ever repay, I found the remarkable archive on which this book draws.

  The activities of the Comptrollerate-General for Scrutiny and Survey do not exist in regular records. The further one digs, the more it emerges as a very peculiar institution indeed. That we know anything about it is thanks to the extraordinary man who was its chief during the later part of the First World War. Colonel Valentine Knox was a classic product of that generation, perhaps the last in which it was possible to have a brilliant military career while being certifiably eccentric. After a spat with him in the Boer War, the young Winston Churchill had tried hard to destroy Knox’s career, but later, once the future prime minister had spent time in the trenches in 1915–16, he described him as ‘one man I would unthinkingly follow into hell itself, on the calculation that Satan would most likely have evacuated the premises, Knox having made them too hot for him.’ Knox was captured twice and escaped twice, active in every arm of the forces including the fledgling Royal Flying Corps, and was wounded with staggering frequency, the last time when he was blown up in Palestine single-handedly attacking an armoured car while on horseback. By the time he was made Comptroller-General – minus an eye and with a German bullet lodged permanently against his spine; some even credited him with a wooden leg – he was one of the most highly decorated, and least popular, men in the British army.

  Knox had to fight hard to bolster the reputation of his ancient organization in the face of the new espionage departments that would later be known as Military Intelligence (5) and Military Intelligence (6). The best way to do this, he decided, was to bring together and quietly publicize whatever information he could find about the history of the Comptrollerate-General. Since Knox’s disappearance after the war – some ninety years ago – his archive has been collecting dust in the basements of the War Office and then the Ministry of Defence.

  To have it in one’s fingers it is a thrilling flirtation with the past, from flowing Elizabethan parchment to florid Edwardian typescript, torn, scorched (like the three small pages catalogued as SS M/827T, which feature in this book) and in one case actually bloodstained. From this frustratingly sparse set of documents springs an astonishing institution: a secret department of the Crown, altering its shape and affiliation and even name over the years, bringing together soldiers, diplomats, entrepreneurs, misfits, fortune-hunters and not a few outright frauds, and active in every significant war and international crisis in British history for at least four centuries – always discreetly, usually unofficially, and often at the most precarious moments of national security.

  I was keen to tell the story of this extraordinary organization, unknown to the general reader and underrated by professional historians even when they’d heard of it. However, a history of its centuries of existence will take much further research (I’m not even sure yet whether the Comptrollerate-General for Scrutiny and Survey is not, in some guise, still operating within the British armed forces or wider government machinery). The records of its individual operations are too fragmentary, and frankly too dry, to make books in themselves. But popular history writing
today focuses more on human stories than it used to. Accordingly, The Emperor’s Gold, the first coherent product of my research, presents one of the organization’s operations as a piece of dramatic narrative rather than dry analysis. As well as being a bewildering tale of intrigue, it restores the significance of overlooked episodes such as the London riots of 6 August 1805, and throws new and remarkable light on the naval movements of that autumn, when Britain was within hours of invasion and defeat.

  The strategic framework of events for this account is common knowledge. The detail is drawn directly from Knox’s archive of the Comptrollerate-General for Scrutiny and Survey, along with other relevant sources currently available (specific documents are referenced with the SS prefix, or equivalent; references are not given here for the many other documents that have contributed colour and background, including the notes and correspondence of Sir Keith Kinnaird). The exact play of dialogue and emotion is of course my conjecture, consistent with the data and tending, I hope, to illuminate rather than distort what happened. If my fictionalization of these incidental elements inspires the reader to their own investigation of the facts, then so much the better.

  R.J.W., February 2010

  THE SEA

  A shipwreck is a roaring machine of destruction.

  The schooner’s bow was wedged in a cleft of rocks now, thrown up by a muscular shove of the sea; her spine was broken, and the clawing of the waves around the carcase was pulling her apart. Giant breakers threw bursts of destruction back and forth over upper decks long stripped of men and cargo. Before she had been sleek, a creation shaped for speed. Now, held up at an angle, twisted and collapsing, she was ugly and unnatural. The quarterdeck smoothed by the tread of captains was submerged, planks a jagged edge in the shark’s mouth of the sea. The figurehead that had cut through the oceans reared up stupidly and askew, punched and taunted by the waves. The great beams that had eased the schooner’s glide through the water now heaved and broke under its pressure. The hidden collapse of a deck or the extinction of a pocket of air created an irresistible suction on the surface, a sudden explosion of spray. Each sweep of water cleared more detail from the decks; each surge of the sea wrenched at the violated structure. A charge of breakers rushed the stern; another vast twist, and a mast snapped. It toppled tired and silent, dragging down the yardarm and a mane of rigging before disappearing in the froth. Roaring out of the furnace in swoops and punches, the wind plunged down to snatch ropes from cleats and tear sails from their yards, to dance and snap away in the bilious sky. Out in the darkness of the sea, casks and spars bobbed and disappeared. Somewhere, a last living body lost its air and flailed, sluggish, to nothing. Just the skeleton of the schooner was left now, to be swallowed piece by piece by the foam.

  It happened only in black and white, and a sick flickering of grey and green that shifted between them under the helpless moon.

  This little destruction of man’s conceit, the tiny human tragedies swilling around the drowned decks, was only a detail. The storm was born in the unknown distance of the ocean, in the disordered stomach of the elements. Out from a thousand miles of midnight the water charged the land, heaving up in crests and spouts that wrestled and fell, lurching open in whirlpools that sucked back the waves around them, the sea eating itself with grey tongues. There are few havens on this extreme stretch of the English coast; unnamed miles of slate cliff mark the land’s front line with the water. Off their base lurk molars of rock, maddening the currents and dooming generations of men. Still the pistons of the sea drove it on, to hurl itself at the land at last, to climb the cliffs and detonate in clouds of spray. Then it fell back, the surf scrabbling around the cliff-foot for a hold, its fingers finding every cleft, milk spattering on the rock. An eternity of reinforcements galloped behind, rank after ominous rank in the abysmal, screaming night. Within the din of the storm, the crunching of the sea’s jaws on the wreck, the collapse of timbers, there was no human sound at all.

  Far up on the cliff, Jessel watched the savagery wide-eyed. He’d seen it before; there was a kind of thrill at nature’s terrible power. But even he felt human for a moment and, hunched in a sodden cloak with frozen limbs and drenched hair and eyes flinching against the driving rain, lost high above the roaring shambles of the sea, to feel human was to feel very small.

  Down in the little fishing village, where the storm wind whined and whooped through the roof slates and threw blasts of spray down the narrow streets, Parson Trewint looked out into the darkness of the bay, leaning into the gusts with his arm thrown up against the violence of wind and water. As clergyman, he muttered a prayer to an indifferent God to bring his parishioners through the maelstrom. As local Magistrate, he frowned at the thought of tomorrow’s damage, of the disputes over fallen chimneys and scattered lobster baskets, of the scuffling over debris deposited on the beach once the storm had blown itself out and the sea receded. And as a man, widowed, exiled and forgotten in this mean extremity of the world, he wondered about the terrifying and lonely deaths of the men on the schooner, far out along the cliffs and surrounded by brutal, vengeful nature in fullest flood. Now, surely, they were all gone, just so much driftwood and grit in the retching of the sea. The Parson let his arm fall, stared out into the storm, then turned and hurried home through the slippery alleys.

  But miraculously, out of the fatal desert of the sea, out of the inhuman carnage of the dying ship, out of the clutch of the waves, there came a man, an unconscious, bloodied man found on the rocks, white and still. Some freak of providence had thrown and wedged him there, some carelessness of the sea had let him go undrowned. Two children saw him in the dawn, approached warily, and began to peck at his clothes for trinkets while the gulls waited overhead. But the sea had left nothing except rags on him and, as they scrabbled, the dead face flickered and gave a shallow cough, and they scrambled away over the rocks.

  Parson Trewint carried the body in himself with his servant, a cloth over the face and the sea mist still hanging cold in the streets. Word had come from London, by the usual means, for just such a man. So to those few who saw or heard of the body from the sea, Parson Trewint put out that he was dead after all. He sent word back, locked himself in his house on the edge of the village, and tended the ghostly figure alone. On the second day there came a message, and on the second night a coach and two horses, to a certain oak a short way up the valley. Long after midnight, the Parson and the coachman carried the unconscious body along the hedges to the oak, and grappled it into the coach. The coachman bowed to the Parson, jumped up onto the box, and whipped the horses away into the night.

  Not a word had been exchanged. The Parson listened for a moment to the eerie rhythm of hooves and wheels, invisible and growing fainter, brushing at the mud and leaves on his cloak. Then he turned away and began the awkward tramp down to the village.

  A day later word came back to the Parson, by the usual means, that the man had died, died for a third and final time, somewhere on the journey. And his existence – and the name he might once have had, and the life he might once have had – passed first into memory, and then into nothingness, while the waves still beat on the fragments of the ship on the cliffs, and ground the rocks themselves to dust.

  On the western edge of the mainland of Europe, the soldiers were awake and polishing long before the sun had risen out of Asia to join them. A full two hours before dawn, the first shouts of the veteran Sergeants had started to soar across the acres of the encampments and challenge the cockerels. Quickly the Corporals were up and shouting too, hurrying through the tents with practised curses and shoves of scabbard or boot. Soon the buzz of the army began to rise, a swarming of metal on metal and skin on leather and the hum of expectant voices. Black leather was burnished to a mirror’s gleam, white uniforms brushed to an impossible purity in the sea of mud, plumes dusted and moustaches trimmed and buttons fastened and buckles clasped and horses combed and cannon hitched and swords sharpened. In the streets of Boulogne, while the civilians drows
ed and wondered vaguely at this distant military bustling, only the occasional chatter of hurrying boots disturbed the silence, as here and there an officer hurried to camp in the half-light, sword not properly buckled and a couple of coins left behind on a pillow.

  It was the same all along the coast. It was the same at Étaples, destroyed more than once by the English over the centuries and now home to a whole army corps. It was the same at pre-historic Wimereux. The same at Ambleteuse, where the Romans and the Saxons had embarked for their invasions, and where the estuary had now been re-routed in preparation for yet another. In all of these places, ships were gathering in widened and deepened harbours, against brand-new breakwaters, and on the beaches men were exercising, as numerous and certain as the waves. This was the greatest army in the world, one hundred thousand strong, and this was to be one of its greatest days.

  By dawn, the first of the regiments were ready on parade. As the minutes and then the hours passed, the numbers and the colours multiplied. A forest of a thousand muskets sprouted from every blue-and-white fusilier battalion. Next to them came the bearskins and moustaches of the grenadiers, and then the dark blue uniform of the light infantry, and the yellow plumes of the voltigeurs. Then cavalry, the skittering horses of the arrogant hussars; the solid green wall of light cavalry uniforms, and the brass-and-iron helmets of the heavy; the glorious red and green and gold of the horse chasseurs of the Guard. Finally, striding towards the front came the long blue coats and high bearskins of the grenadiers of the Old Guard, the proudest infantry regiment in the army, and by extension the finest on earth. Six feet tall, and a veteran, a man had to be to join the grenadiers. The Old Guard looked down on Europe.

  Steadily, inexorably, the parts of the machine meshed together. One after another, the regiments advanced, wheeled, came to a halt, adjusted and settled, one after another across the vast coastal plain until its greens and browns disappeared under the sea of white and blue and red and the gleaming metal ready to throw back the rays of the sun. A tenth of a million individual spirits disappeared, the flat accents of the industrial north and the twang of the southern mountains, all of the morning’s cursing and complaining and chattering and bragging, every ache of head or heart or groin or foot, each spark of imagination or homesickness, all dissolved in the discipline of the organism.