"He will regard you," replied Tallmadge simply, "just as the British regarded my old comrade and schoolfellow, Nathan Hale. Your fate will be the same as Hale's."
It is not difficult to understand the fierce indignation of the Americans at this critical time, when the black treachery of a commander on their own side is considered, and it was, from the very first, written in the stars that André should receive no mercy, although, indeed, a strong effort was made to exchange him for Arnold whom, in all probability, the Americans would have preferred. In General Washington, above all, there was an elemental severity of the early Roman type which would leave nothing to chance, although the plot had, happily for his own arms, totally miscarried. Nevertheless, with that ideal sense of justice which was found later in his illustrious successor, Lincoln, he convened a military board with the object of making careful inquiries and reporting their "opinion of the light in which the prisoner ought to be considered and what punishment ought to be inflicted." The court consisted of six major-generals and eight brigadier-generals. It was held at Tappan, where Washington had his headquarters. Inevitably André was held to be "a spy from the enemy and only death could satisfy his crime." Washington stood by the verdict and sentenced Major André to be hanged as a spy on the second day of October at four in the afternoon.
At four accordingly on the second day of October 1780, Major André was executed upon an eminence near Tappan village, in the presence of a vast concourse of people. He was dressed in full military costume and white top-boots. A large procession of officers preceded him to the gallows—a cross-piece between two trees. The prisoner's step was firm nor did he falter until he saw the gallows, realising then that, despite his appeal to Washington, he was to die as a felon and not as a soldier. His hesitation was only momentary, however. A baggage-wagon, in which was laid a plain pine coffin, had been driven under the gallows, a grave being dug near by. Into this wagon the prisoner stepped, and taking the rope from the hangman adjusted it to his neck, tying also a white silk handkerchief over his eyes. The Major was then told that he might speak if he wished. Lifting the fold lightly from his eyes and bowing courteously, André replied in a firm voice: "All I request of you, gentlemen, is that while I acknowledge the propriety of my sentence, you will bear me witness that I die like a brave man." And taking his last look at the sky, he replaced the bandage on his eyes. The wagon was driven swiftly from under him, and in a few minutes he was no more.
VIII
BRITISH SECRET SERVICE
Under the euphemism Secret Service, we describe in England our system of espionage. In common with other countries, espionage has always prevailed in England as essential in some degree to most conditions of our political, social, diplomatic and commercial life, all of which are conducted on the most comprehensive and complex lines. The story of England has, however, revealed but little of the spy in any class and, indeed, next to nothing at all when considered in proportion to the vastness of its national and international relations and commitments, a happy state of affairs which is attributable to the fact that our constitutional liberties represent the nearest approach to the ideal in respect of the completeness of their guarantees. Going back to early periods, it is only in the case of prominent figures like Alfred—who did his own spying, it will be remembered—or the seventh Henry, or Wolsey, that we find there was anything like the beginnings of an organised secret service system. The father of King Harry, through the agency of his lawyers Empson and Dudley, undoubtedly spied out the financial conditions of the territorial nobles as well as the monastic properties, and by doing so, certainly facilitated the seizure of the Abbey possessions when the Reformation took place in the next reign. The agents employed in the case of the wealthy landowners were usually chaplains who also exercised secretarial functions for their patrons, while in the monasteries renegade monks were always to be found willing at a price to put Henry's financial sleuths in the way of obtaining correct information. The Lord Cardinal, there is no doubt, spied on the goings and comings of Campeggio when that legate was in England, and neither is there any doubt of his having spied successfully, and much to the irritation of the monarch, on King Henry himself who retaliated, however, more than once by informing the Chancellor as to certain romantic but very unpriestly trysts of the Cardinal which had come within the royal cognisance. In royal circles, of course, we may be sure that spying has always been the custom, all the more so since household officers justify their persistent attentions on the ground that the safety of the royal person requires that it should be perennially shadowed. Did not Fouché once surprise Napoleon, who was boasting of the superiority of service rendered by his own corps d'espions, when he informed the Emperor regarding every detail of a nocturnal outing which Majesty had made through Paris in company with Murat, and in the course of which visits were paid, in turn, to a low music-hall, a lower night-house and a cheap restaurant?
To find the first definite shapings of organised secret service we must come to the time of Elizabeth when the Intelligencer and the Spy were well-known characters in the society of the period. The Intelligencer proves highly interesting as a study of the purely parasitical life. In general, he started in life as a man who made it his business to learn what was going on at all the main centres of public and private life, trading off the items to men of business, politicians and diplomatists for the best price he could obtain. He corresponded very closely to the Roman quidnunc with whom the Satires of Horace made us all familiar in our schooldays. Who can forget the picture of that oily Nasidienus—what a nose for news the name holds!—whose chief title to dine with Mæcenas depended on the fact that he constituted in his own person a kind of central news agency upon which all the gossip and intelligence of Rome was sure to converge. For indeed, the famous quidnunc had his own corps of reporters whom he employed to scour the City in quest of tittle-tattle for his patron. The Intelligencer or private newsmonger of Elizabeth's age was, it is recorded, looked upon as a highly respectable member of the workaday classes until, to use a journalistic Americanism, he began to "put it over" on his patrons—meaning to say, when he began to supply them with the news that was not, drawing good money in exchange for false intelligence. Like the free-lance of our own day, the Intelligencer had first of all to build up a connection, as the phrase goes, the same being remunerative, or the reverse, in proportion to the man's energy and reliability. Since in those days he invariably dealt with principals, it happened not so seldom that he effected a permanent way into the good graces of a wealthy patron, rising afterwards to positions of honourable importance. It is, nevertheless, a fact that the majority of these men deteriorated, and for the simple reason that, deeply versed as they became in the sordid architectonics of life of all kinds, social, political and commercial, they quickly shed their ideals. Their previous experience and knowledge of ways and means had, however, fitted them in a peculiar manner for the business of watching other men and they were invariably sought out by personages of wealth and position to exercise the trade of spy, or common informer. And, accordingly, when Burleigh and his congeners were looking around for plausible excuses for killing off Mary of Scotland, they fell back on the services of an informer who had originally made his bow before the public as an Intelligencer. It is not necessary to go into the story of the mysterious "J. B.," whom one Delbena, an Italian adventurer, had introduced to the English Ambassador in Paris, Poulet, as a man of good birth, but desperate in all enterprises and a traitor to the last fibre of his spinal column. The records of Elizabethan days would seem to indicate either that Burleigh and Walsingham were not very astute judges of the common spy, or else that "J. B." was devilishly apt in extracting large sums out of credulous statesmen and diplomats, for it is written that having raised many thousands from Poulet on his simple promise to capture an agent of Mary Stuart, whose papers were certain to incriminate that Queen—why, the rascal failed to deliver goods, to use another expressive newspaper Americanism. Then there was the informer Gifford whose early training as a priest enabled him, in his clerical capacity and with forged credentials, to spy on the great Catholic families of his time, in all cases transmitting false yet incriminating information to Burleigh. His nefarious activities brought at least a dozen men to the execution block in those days. In two years another of the species, one Thomas Phillips, also an ex-Intelligencer, had contracted to the Crown a debt equal to the large sum of £60,000 of our own money on account of infamous work done for its ministers, mostly political, be it said. Indeed, the record of the Elizabethan spy constitutes one long chronicle of the bloodiest treachery in the whole history of secret service, since the Tower, if not Tyburn, invariably figured as the last scene in the life of the unfortunate who fell into the hands of the Queen's sleuths. Treachery seems, for all the halo which surrounds our notion of the "good old days," to have played a part in the whole social fabric as universal as it was sinister, nor can the fact be wondered at, seeing that the promiscuous distribution of the confiscated estates of murdered men, which often in a day rewarded poor men with vast lands, was an ever-present incentive to the cupidity of the adventurer.
Cromwell, if we may judge by diaries and records of his day, was the best-informed man in England. He had an undoubted faith in the value of secret service and was ably served by the many agents he employed, not only at home, but also abroad, where their activities helped to lay the broad foundations of that foreign policy which is based upon the principle known as the Balance of Power. It was the Protector's custom to invite to his table men whom he well knew to be what the current vernacular of the time termed "trimmers" and what the American calls a "mugwump"; these men he invariably surprised with the correctness of his information regarding the variety of their political friends and relations, as well as of the dangerous company which they frequented, advising them always in a friendly way to beware. The Protector was one of the few statesmen in Europe who remained a perennial puzzle to Mazarin, during whose large ascendancy on the Continent, Cromwell strengthened the foundations of that naval power which has given England for so long a paramount voice in Europe's councils. His successor Charles II. distinguished himself above all other English monarchs by receiving into his intimate court circle a paid spy of Louis XIV. in the person of Louise de Kérouaille, on whom he conferred the title of Duchess of Portsmouth. This lady, as Duchesse d'Aubigny in France, was at the same time drawing a ducal revenue from the coffers of Louis XIV., while it remains a matter of statistical record that in the year 1681 she took in perquisite from the English Exchequer the sum of £136,000—equal to more than half-a-million sterling of our time. There can be little doubt that the capacity for political intrigue of the Duchess, as well as her complete ascendancy over Charles and her own greed of money, contributed at a later stage to swell the indictment which ultimately led to the banishment of the Stuarts. In her Life of the Duchess, Mrs Colquhoun Grant takes a view generally accepted by historical writers, to wit, that the favourite's character was neither vicious nor depraved, that her conduct was not immoral according to the notions of the age, that she was a woman of immense political capacity, while of a tender and affectionate heart. Her political correspondence, in which she exercised her specific rôle as informer to the French court, was carried on with Madame de Montespan, who is memorable as one of the splendid favourites of Louis.