Captain John Wesley Wright R.N. – “A most artful and dangerous adventurer.”

 

On the morning of October 28th 1805 a gaoler called Savard arrived for work at the Temple prison in Paris. News of the French and Spanish defeat at Trafalgar had not yet reached the capital but the newspapers were full of Napoleon’s victory against the Austrians at Ulm. Savard did his rounds and went to check on one of the Temple’s most important prisoners. He opened the door to the cell and went in. In the weak light of an autumn morning he would have seen a flute lying on a table, a shelf full of books and a British Naval uniform draped over a chair. The occupant of the cell did not greet him. He looked closer at the form lying on the bed and saw that the Englishman’s eyes were open, with the sheet tucked high against his chin. Perhaps it was the stillness of the prisoner’s chest or a scent of something in the air that made Savard pull the sheet down.

The Englishman’s throat had been deeply cut from right to left. The prisoner’s right hand held a closed razor. Savard later commented that there wasn’t much blood on the sheets, but there was a trail of it across the floor. He hurried out to tell his superiors that Captain John Wesley Wright of the Royal Navy was dead.

Early Career

Wright began the career that would ultimately lead to his death, at an early age. He came from a Lancastrian family but grew up in Minorca where his father was a merchant. In 1780, when only ten, he was nominally commissioned as an ensign in an infantry regiment but quickly transferred to the Royal Navy as a volunteer – a sort of officer trainee. He took part in the defence of Gibraltar during the great siege but was soon sent to complete his schooling in England. As a teenager he worked for a London merchant and lived in St Petersburg for five years, where he found that he had an aptitude for languages.

Returning to London he met Sir Sydney Smith, who himself had spent time in the Baltic. Smith rivalled Nelson for eccentricity, ego and amorous adventures but his naval career was very different. Smith’s connections and talents lay in the clandestine world of royalists, raids, spies and conspiracies. He recognised that Wright had talents that he could use and offered him the post of his secretary on his ship HMS Diamond. Wright would be rated as a midshipman until he could pass his lieutenant’s exam. His job would be to liaise with royalists and confidential agents in France.

Capture

On 19th April 1796, Smith and Wright were part of a cutting-out expedition to capture a French privateer at Le Harve. They succeeded in taking the ship but the anchor cable was cut and the ship drifted into the mouth of the Seine. They were quickly surrounded by gunboats and forced to surrender.

The French were ecstatic. Smith had been responsible for setting firing to the French fleet during the siege of Toulon and was known to be involved with the myriad of conspiracies against the Directory ruling France. Instead of being exchanged, as most prisoners of war were, Smith, Wright and a royalist posing as Smith’s servant were sent to L’Abbaye prison in Paris. They were soon transferred to the notorious Temple prison but their contacts amongst the counter-revolutionaries were such that they quickly established clandestine communications with supporters on the outside.

For nearly two years, diplomatic efforts were made to get Smith and the others released. When they failed, more direct action was taken. A tunnel was dug from a house across the road but it was very nearly discovered, and then abandoned. Then one morning in April 1798, two French Army officers arrived at the gates of the prison with orders for the prisoners to be transferred. The governor looked the papers over and they seemed to be in order. He offered to provide an armed guard but Smith solemnly agreed to accompany the officers. They all walked out into a waiting carriage, and only then did Smith and Wright recognise some of the men around them as royalists. They were free and in Rouen before the authorities even knew of their escape. By early May they were back in London.

The Mediterranean

Smith’s next command was the 80 gun HMS Tigre and he took the core of his crew from Diamond with him, including Wright. The Tigre was sent to Constantinople as part of a joint military, naval and diplomatic mission to assist the Turks in their fight against the French. General Bonaparte had taken the Ottoman province of Egypt to threaten British communications with India. He was soon advancing along the Levant.

Wright performed his usual unconventional duties on the Tigre and ashore. His language skills were much used to negotiate with the Turks, and his diplomacy helped conclude the treaty of El Arish, which would have seen the French out of Egypt had not Smith’s superiors judged the terms too generous. Wright was badly wounded and rescued from a pile of corpses during the siege of Acre when the Tigre’s guns and marines helped defeat Bonaparte.

Whilst the Tigre was cruising off the coast of Egypt, Wright “landed a short distance from Alexandria in the night-time, not openly as a British naval officer but bearded, moustachioed, and shawled à la Turque and for the express purposes of gathering valuable intelligence.” He was picked up the next night.

Command

French troops were eventually defeated in Egypt in 1801 by General Sir Ralph Abercromby’s expedition. Smith was reassigned and Wright was promoted and given the command of the sloop HMS Cynthia, in which he sailed back to Britain. During the brief Peace of Amiens he was sent to Paris to make contact with his old royalist friends. Working with the British Embassy, he avoided notice of the authorities until rumours began to spread of an impending arrest. He left Paris secretly with a large chest of confidential documents and maps from the embassy just before the fragile peace collapsed and war was declared again.

Promoted to captain, Wright was given command of the brig HMS Vincejo, a Spanish prize. He was tasked with landing agents and communicating with the remaining royalists and rebels along the Normandy and Brittany coasts. It is in this role that he makes an appearance in my novel, For Our Liberty. In August 1803 he carried the major players in the so-called Grand Conspiracy which aimed to replace Bonaparte with another French general prior to the restoration of the Bourbons. Wright’s orders often came from the highest levels of the government and this put him at odds with Admiral Keith, his nominal commander. Keith was very put out that he was privy to the same secrets as one of his subordinates.

Captured Again

The Grand Conspiracy failed, and on 7th July 1804 the Vincejo was off the Brittany coast surveying for future landings. Wright had been ashore on the island of Houat in Quiberon Bay and had rejoined the ship when it became becalmed in sight of a French harbour. Gunboats soon set sail from the harbour and Wright tried towing the ship with its own boats, but the tide turned and swept them back towards shore and the waiting French.

The French opened fire. The Vincejo’s short range carronades were no match for the 24 pounders in the gunboats, and the British ship was soon badly damaged. Wright’s thigh was slashed by grapeshot but he refused to leave the deck. Eventually it was clear they could not win and Wright ordered the colours be hauled down.

The French towed the battered brig into harbour and the crew were taken prisoner. Unfortunately for Wright, he was interviewed by the local governor General Julien, who instantly recognised him. Julien had been captured in Egypt and taken aboard the Tigre where Wright had lent him his own cabin. Wright was sent to Paris, along with his 14 year old nephew who had been part of the crew. Julien sent a letter to the Minister of Police and spymaster Joseph Fouché telling him that “Captain Wright is a most artful and dangerous adventurer” whose interrogation would yield much useful information.

Wright was incarcerated in the same cell in the Temple that he had occupied with Smith ten years previously, but this time with the collapse of the royalist opposition there was little hope of escape. Wright did find a file, a saw and some rope that had been hidden there during his first stay but his wound precluded any thought of escape.

Wright was interrogated but refused to say anything, even when threatened with a firing squad. However, other members of the Grand Conspiracy did talk and did implicate him. Prisoner exchanges were offered but refused by the French, but as the months went by, Wright did manage to establish secret communications with the outside world. On one occasion the police rushed into his cell while he was writing a letter. He quickly put the paper in his mouth and carried on chewing even whilst being beaten by the police. All his writing materials were removed.

Murder

He amused himself by reading and playing the flute. He did manage to hear that he had been promoted to post-captain. On October 24th 1805 the old cache of tools and ropes were discovered. Napoleon ordered the guards to “have the prisoner Wright put in solitary confinement, this miserable assassin who wished to escape from the Temple.” On October 28th, Wright was found dead.

The French authorities claimed he had committed suicide after reading of Napoleon’s victory at Ulm. They also said it was suicide when Admiral Villeneuve, who had been defeated at Trafalgar by Nelson, was found with six deep stab wounds to his chest and a knife sticking out of his heart. The British press and authorities said Wright had been murdered. The chief suspects in ordering the death were Fouché, and Napoleon himself.

Following the defeat of the French in 1815, Sydney Smith did try to find out the truth but the prison had been demolished and the police records destroyed. However, Smith was convinced his friend had been murdered. When asked about Wright’s murder on St Helena, Napoleon denied involvement and said that Wright had killed himself to avoid incriminating others. He denounced Smith for claiming Wright had been murdered because it could only have been done on his orders and he asked what he had to gain by such an act.

Whatever the truth, no one can deny that Wright died a hero, serving his country.

References

A Thirst For Glory – The Life of Admiral Sir Sydney Smith – Tom Pocock
The Terror Before Trafalgar – Nelson, Napoleon & the Secret War – Tom Pocock
Secret Service – British Agents in France 1792-1815 – Elizabeth Sparrow

Available from Amazon or directly from the publisher Helion, which means I make a little more rather than Amazon getting all the profit!

The Curious Tale of how the Rosetta Stone came to Britain

The Rosetta Stone is one of the most important archaeological artefacts ever discovered and has had pride of place in the British Museum for over two hundred years. However, it was discovered in Egypt by the French, not the British, and the tale of how it came to London rather than the Louvre involves war, skullduggery and tenacity.

General Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt in July of 1798 and rapidly defeated the country’s Ottoman rulers. The Egyptian campaign was designed to be the first step in threatening Britain’s empire in India. With Bonaparte’s army were the dozens of artists and scientists of the Institut d’Égypte, whose mission was to catalogue and uncover the secrets of the Pharaohs. It wasn’t just intellectual curiosity that drove them. Science and engineering at the time was still very much based on classical teachings from Rome and Greece but the wonders of Egyptian knowledge were locked behind their impenetrable written language – Hieroglyphics.

A year after the invasion in July of 1798 near the village of Rashid in the Nile delta, known to Europeans as Rosetta, a party of French troops and local labourers was destroying an old wall to provide stones to improve the nearby Fort St Julien. It must have been hot, tiring and dusty work. In charge was Lieutenant of Engineers François Xavier Bouchard. You may not have heard of Bouchard but his name surely deserves to be up there next to Howard Carter as one of the heroes of Egyptology.

When one of his men found a curious stone covered in writing he could have just told them to break it up and carry on but he instantly recognised its significance. The stone wasn’t just covered with Hieroglyphs like most relics of the area, it also included ancient Greek and an another unknown script (Demotic). Bouchard informed his superiors, and the scholars of Institut d’Égypte soon took possession of the stone. In August 1798 Nelson destroyed the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile and Bonaparte himself left Egypt for greater things back in France.

The reason the stone was significant was that it appeared to have the same text repeated in each of the three scripts. If the hieroglyphs could be deciphered by using the Greek version then the secrets of Egypt might be at last uncovered. Copies of the stone were made and sent to Europe, and the find publicised in the Courier d’Égypte. The news soon reached Constantinople, and the British minister there – Lord Elgin. Elgin is, of course, famous for his ‘collecting’ of artefacts from Greece through his contacts in the Ottoman court. In 1801, when he was informed of plans for a British expedition to drive the French out of Egypt, so he made sure that his principal agent, William Richard Hamilton, was on hand to secure the stone and other French finds for Britain.

Hamilton was young and not long out of university at Oxford and Cambridge, but he had already served Elgin well in several diplomatic missions, as well as assisting with a little collecting. British troops landed near Alexandria in March 1801 under the command of the seasoned and popular General Sir Ralph Abercromby. The French were waiting for them on the beaches but they were driven back and the British were soon besieging Alexandria. Abercromby was mortally wounded in battle on 21st March when the French tried and failed to break the siege.

Command of the British army devolved to the less able and less dynamic General John Hely-Hutchinson who, nonetheless, led his troops slowly and steadily towards victory. Hamilton persuaded the general to add in a clause to the French surrender treaty specifically naming the Rosetta Stone and the other antiquities found by the Institut d’Égypte, to ensure that they fell into British hands, but the Institut d’Égypte fled as the British approached Cairo and took shelter in the still besieged city of Alexandria. They took the stone with them.

Alexandria soon fell as well though and Hamilton rushed into the city in search of the stone. The French weren’t going to give it up easily though. It was hidden amongst the baggage of the French commander General Menou in a warehouse near the harbour. Hamilton tracked it down and, with a party of gunners from the Royal Artillery, seized it. He found other artefacts scattered across the city including a large green stone sarcophagus in the hold of a French ship.

The stone was sent back to Britain in the frigate L’Égyptienne, herself a prize seized at Alexandria and soon to be commissioned as HMS L’Égyptienne. The stone arrived in February 1802 and was studied by the Society of Antiquaries. It was handed over to the British Museum later that year and has remained there ever since. It was, of course, the subject of intense study, and many attempts were made to decipher it. Thomas Young made significant progress but ironically it was a Frenchman, Jean Francois Champollion, who eventually cracked it in the 1820s.

I’ve been lucky enough to work on several projects with the British Museum, and it was reading the tale of the Stone’s discovery and capture that inspired my first novel, Forty Centuries Looking Down. It’s always interesting to uncover the ‘full’ story behind these iconic objects from history – there’s almost always more to be told than the details that most people know, and it often takes less digging to reveal them than you might expect.

References:
Lord Elgin & the Marbles – William St Clair
The Rosetta Stone – Carol Andrews
British Victory in Egypt – Piers Mackesy

Available from Amazon or directly from the publisher Helion, which means I make a little more rather than Amazon getting all the profit!