This Dark Business

This Dark Business examines Britain’s clandestine campaign against Napoleon Bonaparte around the turn of the nineteenth century. Tim Clayton traces espionage networks, French royalist agents, covert communications and assassination plots operating alongside an unprecedented propaganda effort intended to convince the British public that Napoleon represented an existential political threat. The story moves through a world in which intelligence gathering, bribery, political manipulation and violent conspiracy often overlapped.

Clayton uses surviving British and French evidence to question the conventional picture of Britain as simply responding to Napoleonic aggression. The book argues that hostility to Revolutionary France and fear of domestic political upheaval encouraged British governments to pursue war by secret as well as conventional means. Napoleon remains the central target, but the wider subject is the emergence of organised state propaganda and covert action in Georgian Britain.