Map of a Nation (21 page)

 

M
APS DOMINATED
Charles Lennox’s profession as much as his
personal
life. In his early twenties, he had become passionately interested in the relationship between geography and military defence. This athletic,
handsome
, rather arrogant young man was particularly obsessed by the topography of the region he knew best – south-east England, especially the coast – and he became preoccupied by its potential as a theatre of war. Lennox had many personal investments in the area’s security. He was the third generation of his family to be based at Goodwood, only fifteen miles from the crucially important naval base at Portsmouth. He also commanded local army and militia regiments, which he led back and forth across
south-east
England in reconnaissance and training marches. His fervour was driven by visions of this southern landscape overrun by French invaders. ‘The peaceful plains of England and the habitations of its industrious people [might] become the scene of bloody war and desolation,’ he warned. As the century progressed and Lennox aged, these dreadful possibilities seemed, if anything, more likely to materialise. The military conflicts that dominated the second half of the eighteenth century provided the background against which Lennox rose to political prominence and took the security of the nation into his own hands.

But this rise to respectability took a long time. Lennox was not a popular man. In the past, he had alienated himself from George III by resigning from the post of Lord of the Bedchamber when his brother was overlooked for a promotion. This was an enormous slight and the King openly referred to ‘the Duke of Richmond’s blackness’ thereafter. The initial rift between Charles Lennox and the monarch was widened by a further controversy, a serious flirtation between Lennox’s younger sister Sarah and George III,
shortly after his accession to the throne in 1760. The King strongly hinted at marriage to Sarah, whom the politician Henry Fox described as ‘different from and prettyer than any other girl I saw’. But on the advice of his former tutor John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute, George III opted instead for the ‘plain’ Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. This humiliating public
rejection
of Lennox’s younger sister intensified his dislike for the King.

George III’s animosity towards Lennox would only increase in the decades that followed. In the 1780s, Lennox was among a number of Whig politicians who began to seriously entertain the idea that a Reform Bill might be passed through Parliament. The term ‘Reform’ referred to the restructuring of the nation’s electoral system by extending voting rights and making government more accountable through frequent elections. In fighting for these changes, eighteenth-century Reformers often felt that they were upholding the spirit of the Glorious Revolution and the Enlightenment. In the 1780s Lennox became involved in the foundation of the popular Society for Constitutional Information, designed to ‘diffuse throughout the Kingdom … a knowledge of the great principles of Constitutional Freedom’. In
collaboration
with politicians such as William Pitt the Younger and the 2nd Earl of Shelburne, he drafted a Reform Bill to present before Parliament. His
ambitions
were far more radical than those of many of his contemporaries. In a period in which suffrage was restricted to owners of significant property, Lennox asserted that ‘it is the Right of every Commoner of this Realm (Infants, Persons of Insane Mind, and Criminals incapacitated by Law, only excepted) to have a Vote’. He advertised his bill as a measure to combat the ‘manifold Abuses which in Process of Time have been suffered to take Root in the Manner of electing the Representatives of the Commons’. George III read this as a shameless gibe at the election of Bute as First Lord of the Treasury back in 1763. The King interpreted Lennox’s bill as evidence of ‘his Unremitted personal ill conduct to Me’ and added, ‘it cannot be expected that I should express any wish of seeing him in my Service’.

Lennox’s breach with George III did him few favours. Sycophants knew that he could not help them gain royal patronage or a sympathetic ear. Lennox was also a difficult man. Brash and egotistical, he had a notoriously blunt manner and a hot temper which put paid to many of his political
proposals and ambitions. Promotion was slow to arrive. It was not until 1765, at thirty years of age, that Lennox was appointed British Ambassador to France, whereupon he was sent to Dunkirk to resolve a contretemps between British military engineers and the French, and came to form a long-lasting friendship with William Roy. Over the next decade, he edged his way from the outskirts of respectability to the centre of a prominent faction of Whig politicians. But his tenacity paid off. In March 1782 Lennox was given the prestigious post of Master-General of the Board of Ordnance, head of the branch responsible for the distribution of armaments, munitions and fortifications, and for the creation of military surveys. Until 1828 this post came with a Cabinet seat, so Lennox suddenly found himself one of the government’s principal military advisers. The Master-Generalship also brought him into frequent contact with William Roy.

Defences had been a major concern for Lennox for a long time. Upon his appointment as Master-General, he set about getting approval for a bill that granted the Board of Ordnance
£
400,000 in eight annual instalments to improve fortifications and dockyards along England’s south coast. In early 1783 when he first presented it before Parliament, Lennox’s scheme met with little resistance. Britain and France’s horns were still locked in the American War of Independence, there was widespread anxiety about a French invasion and the utility of such fortifications was self-evident. But by the end of that year the war was over, and when Lennox tried to claim the second massive instalment for his project, Parliament objected and demanded that his ‘Fortifications Bill’ be rigorously investigated. Lennox then set about forming an investigating committee, but he composed it of close friends and professional associates, including Roy, and dismayed onlookers cried ‘foul’. Furious that Lennox had crammed the committee with his cronies, appalled at the fortifications’ expense, and distressed by the wider
implications
of Lennox’s bill (namely, that Britain must ‘change our system and become a military nation’), his opponents defeated the scheme in Parliament. But within two decades, with the advent of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, Lennox’s ambition would not seem so reprehensible. In 1804 the first ‘Martello tower’ would be built, after Captain W.H. Ford of the Engineers, Brigadier-General Twiss and David Dundas – then General
Sir David Dundas – had recommended the idea to the Secretary of State for War. These coastal towers were small defensive forts designed to house around twenty-five soldiers plus ammunition, and they were based on the design of a similar fort at Mortella Point in Corsica (‘Martello’ is a
misspelling
of
Mortella
). The first decades of the nineteenth century saw a chain of Martello towers constructed along the south coast of England and then along the coastlines of East Anglia, Ireland and the Channel Islands, until they numbered over a hundred. So although his own scheme was stopped, Lennox’s vision of a chain of forts was realised within his lifetime.

In the wake of the failure of his Fortifications Bill in 1784, Lennox resigned himself to erecting minor defences in southern England. He also engineered places at the Board of Ordnance for his two estate surveyors, Thomas Yeakell and William Gardner, working with the cohort of civilian map-makers who were lodged in the Drawing Room at the Tower of London. Yeakell was granted the prestigious post of Chief Draughtsman, and when he died in 1787 Gardner replaced him. Between the late 1780s and early 1790s, Gardner’s mapping projects included surveys of the Channel Islands and Plymouth. In early July 1790, Lennox learned of the death of his old compadre, William Roy. The reminder of Roy’s lifelong efforts to create a national military survey appears to have spurred Lennox on in his role as Master-General. He moved quickly to put Roy’s plan into action. In June 1791 he recorded that he had secured the consent of the King, who had been fond of the Scottish map-maker, to proceed ‘with the Trigonometrical Operation begun by the late Major General Roy’ during the Paris–Greenwich triangulation, and the Board of Ordnance’s Expenses Ledger duly shows that
£
373 14s was paid for a ‘Great Theodolite’ to begin the measurements.

At this initial stage of the project, Lennox established only a national
triangulation
and not the means to flesh it out into a full map. The triangulation was the most scientifically advanced aspect of map-making, but on its own it simply produced data. Its results functioned like a
precursor
of the modern National Grid Reference System, a unique division of the kingdom into progressively smaller squares, designated by letter and number, through which the exact location of every spot of the nation’s landscape can
be identified. This sort of information had a wealth of utility to the scientific community but it was less immediately helpful to the military commanders who needed an accurate map of the south coast to organise their troops against a French invasion. To fill out a national triangulation into a complete map, a team of so-called interior surveyors were required to map the
intervening
countryside around the trigonometric skeleton, which ‘fixed’ these smaller measurements. It is unthinkable that, in his proposal to the King on the ‘Propriety of Making a General Military Map of England’, William Roy had meant anything other than the completion of a country-wide map, underpinned by a triangulation. We can imagine him in subsequent decades passionately discussing such an idea over the oak tables of the Mitre Tavern with other members of the Royal Society Club. It also seems inconceivable that Lennox did not intend that the minutiae of the British landscape be mapped in tandem with the triangulation he instigated in June 1791, but
initially
it was unclear whether he envisaged the mapping would be done by the Board of Ordnance’s own team of civilian draughtsmen from the Tower, or by external map-makers. In the Ordnance Survey’s early days, its surveyors were clearly conscious that the triangulation would later be supplemented by an interior survey and they marked their trig points on the ground with ‘small stakes’ and piles of stones to allow ‘some individual’ to produce ‘more correct maps of the counties over which the triangles have been carried’.

Because of the Ordnance Survey’s initial focus on triangulation, the
project
was popularly referred to in its first two decades by the name ‘the Trigonometrical Survey’. It was also called the ‘General Survey’, the ‘British Survey’ or sometimes ‘The Duke of Richmond’s Survey’. ‘Ordnance Survey’ was not used at all until 1801, when its director wrote the term on one of the draught interior surveys. The term first appeared in print in 1809, eighteen years after the project’s foundation, in a memoir written by a northern
map-maker
called Aaron Arrowsmith who was also ‘engaged in constructing a large Map of England’. The institution’s own map-makers first used the name on a publication a year later, in 1810, on their ‘Ordnance Survey of the Isle of Wight and Part of Hampshire’.

On 22 June 1791 Lennox made the first appointment to the national
triangulation
. Isaac Dalby, a Gloucestershire clothworker, had taught himself
mathematics in his spare time, later becoming a teacher in a country school and then in London. Whilst in the capital, Dalby had met the ‘wit, rake, and dope-fiend’ Topham Beauclerk, who had hired him to act as librarian, astronomer and chemist in his private Highgate laboratory. After Beauclerk’s death in March 1780, Dalby was recommended to Roy as a reliable number-cruncher by Jesse Ramsden, and he was hired to assist during the Paris–Greenwich triangulation. When Roy retreated to Lisbon in the winter of 1789 it was Dalby who had tidied up his calculations and prepared his article for publication in the
Philosophical Transactions.
Boasting such familiarity with Roy’s methods, Dalby was the ideal candidate for the post of assistant to the Ordnance Survey. He was offered a starting salary of a hundred guineas per year. On 12 July 1791, Lennox chose the
project
’s
two directors. He recorded that he had selected ‘Major Williams and Lieut. Mudge, of the Royal Regiment of Artillery, to carry on the Trigonometrical Survey with the assistance of Mr Dalby, and desired that they might receive an Extra Allowance equal to their pay and half-pay whilst actually in the field’. With these words, the Ordnance Survey was born.