A biography of William Wickham (1761-1840), Britain's master spy on the Continent for more than five years during the French Revolutionary wars. It follows Wickham's career to narrate the rise and fall of his secret service community.

A biography of William Wickham (1761-1840), Britain's master spy on the Continent for more than five years during the French Revolutionary wars. It follows Wickham's career to narrate the rise and fall of his secret service community.

The first-ever detailed, comprehensive history of intelligence, from Moses and Sun Tzu to the present day The history of espionage is far older than any of today's intelligence agencies, yet the long history of intelligence operations has been largely forgotten. The codebreakers at Bletchley Park, the most successful World War II intelligence agency, were completely unaware that their predecessors in earlier moments of national crisis had broken the codes of Napoleon during the Napoleonic wars and those of Spain before the Spanish Armada. Those who do not understand past mistakes are likely to repeat them. Intelligence is a prime example. At the outbreak of World War I, the grasp of intelligence shown by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith was not in the same class as that of George Washington during the Revolutionary War and leading eighteenth-century British statesmen. In this book, the first global history of espionage ever written, distinguished historian Christopher Andrew recovers much of the lost intelligence history of the past three millennia--and shows us its relevance.

Discover the underground war waged between Britain and Revolutionary France

Enlightened Oxford aims to discern, establish, and clarify the multiplicity of connections between the University of Oxford, its members, and the world outside; to offer readers a fresh, contextualised sense of the University's role in the state, in society, and in relation to other institutions between the Williamite Revolution and the first decade of the nineteenth century, the era loosely describable (though not without much qualification) as England's ancien regime. Nigel Aston asks where Oxford fitted in to the broader social and cultural picture of the time, locating the University's importance in Church and state, and pondering its place as an institution that upheld religious entitlement in an ever-shifting intellectual world where national and confessional boundaries were under scrutiny. Enlightened Oxford is less an inside history than a consideration of an institutional presence and its place in the life of the country and further afield. While admitting the degree of corporate inertia to be found in the University, there was internal scope for members so inclined to be creative in their teaching, open new research lines, and be unapologetic Whigs rather than unrepentant Tories. For if Oxford was a seat of learning rooted in its past - and with an increasing antiquarian awareness of its inheritance - yet it had a surprising capacity for adaptation, a scope for intellectual and political pluralism that was not incompatible with enlightened values.

Britain’s War for the Mediterranean provides a definitive study on British warmaking in the Mediterranean during the War of the First Coalition. It traces the origins of foreign and naval policies from the early eighteenth century to describe the duality of British affairs. These contradictions manifested themselves in the War of the First Coalition as Great Britain attempted to build consensus in the Mediterranean World while clinging to its power base of naval power and commerce. The book explores the decisions of individuals and the wider trends of the British political and naval system, honed over the course of the eighteenth century. In explaining war against Revolutionary France, the book follows the decisions of admirals, diplomats, and politicians in attempting to cobble together a coalition of Spanish, Austrian, Sardinian, and Neapolitan forces. This book also makes connections with the other theaters of war: The Austrian Netherlands and the Caribbean. Britain’s War for the Mediterranean examines the internal working of the British government during the crisis of the French Revolution. It focuses on how politicians, diplomats, and military commanders formulated strategy for the Mediterranean theater. One of the major conclusions of this book is that the British government never spoke with one voice. Lacking synchronization in a changing conflict, the structure and conflicting objectives of each branch of the government failed to create a coherent plan to resist Republican expansion in the region. The book complicates the simplistic view of previous works on the weakness of allies and the naivete of the Pitt ministry, providing agency to diplomats and commanders across the region. The second major conclusion is that these conflicting objectives were firmly rooted in the experiences of the eighteenth century. British diplomacy, crippled in the aftermath of the American Revolution, saw the French Revolution as an opportunity to build consensus and a shared view of a British world. French aggression offered an opportunity to reclaim a position of influence lost over the course of the 1700s. In contrast, the trajectory of British foreign policy shaped the use of the Royal Navy in the eighteenth century. A trans-Atlantic force, a war in the Mediterranean forced British admirals to relearn the complicated nature of regional foreign policy. Diplomacy and naval power clashed over the conduct of the war – one rooted in foreign courts, the other in maritime coercion.

In the mid-nineteenth century a group of Irish revolutionaries, known as the Fenians, set out to destroy Britain’s North American empire. Between 1866 and 1871 they launched a series of armed raids into Canadian territory. In Canadian Spy Story David Wilson takes readers into a dark and dangerous world of betrayal and deception, spies and informers, invasion and assassination, spanning Canada, the United States, Ireland, and Britain. In Canada there were Fenian secret societies in urban areas, including Quebec City, Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto, and in some rural townships, all part of a wider North American network. Wilson tells the tale of Irishmen who attempted to liberate their country from British rule, and the Canadian secret police who infiltrated their revolutionary cells and worked their way to the top of the organization. With surprises at every turn, the story includes a sex scandal that nearly brought Canadian spy operations crashing down, as well as reports from Toronto about a plot to assassinate Queen Victoria. Featuring a cast of idealists, patriots, cynics, manipulators, and liars, Canadian Spy Story raises fundamental questions about state security and civil liberty, with important lessons for our own time.