[BITList] Covers, under and between

[John Feltham]

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Beach,  Thomas Billis  [alias Henri Le Caron]  (1841-1894), spy, was born on 26 September 1841 at Colchester, Essex, the second son of the family of thirteen children of John Joseph Billis Beach (d. 1888/9), a Methodist cooper, and his wife, Maria Beach, nee Passmore. After an unsuccessful apprenticeship with a local draper Beach left Colchester in May 1857, moving to London where he worked briefly as a clerk, and from there journeying across the south of England before illness drove him back to Colchester. He left for Paris in 1859, where he became a choir member of the English church in the rue D'Aguesseau and a clerk in the banking house of Arthur & Co.

At the outset of the American Civil War (1861-5), the nineteen-year-old Beach sailed on the SS Great Eastern's first voyage to New York with several American associates to enlist in the Union army. Beach (who abstained from alcohol throughout his life) enlisted in the 8th Pennsylvanian reserves as a private for three months on 7 August 1861. Posing as a Frenchman, he chose the name of Henri Le Caron although, according to the Fenian John Devoy, Beach's grasp of French was decidedly poor. Transferring to the Anderson cavalry, Le Caron took part in the army of the Potomac campaigns for the next twenty-two months. His regiment was transferred to the western army in October 1862 and he rose to the rank of a non-commissioned officer. Commissioned a second lieutenant in July 1864, he was promoted to the rank of first lieutenant by the end of the year. Throughout the latter part of the war he commanded a reconnaissance company of cavalry in the army of the Cumberland, later serving in various administrative roles, including regimental adjutant. Demobilized in February 1866 after the war's end, Le Caron joined the veterans' organizations of the army of the Cumberland and the Grand Army of the Republic, serving in the latter as vice-commander and post-surgeon, with the rank of major. In April 1864 he had renewed his acquaintance with Nannie Melville, daughter of an Irish Virginian planter and his German wife; Nannie had saved the lives of Le Caron and several of his troopers when they were captured by Confederate irregulars near Nashville, Tennessee, on Christmas eve 1862. He married her shortly afterwards; they were to have six children.

While living in Nashville with his wife, Le Caron's regular letters to his father contained information about Irish-American plots against the British empire, including the abortive Fenian attempt to invade Canada in June 1866 led by 'General' John O'Neill, a former companion in arms of Le Caron. The Fenian strategy was to capture Canada as a base for attacks on England or possibly as ransom for Irish independence. Colonel O'Neill, a leader of the senate wing of the Fenian Brotherhood and the current United States claims agent in Nashville, was Le Caron's most important source. Sensing the potential importance of such intelligence, the elder Beach, now a rate collector, took the letters to Colchester's Liberal member for parliament, John Gurdon Rebow, who in turn showed them to the home secretary, Sir George Grey.

On returning to England in the autumn of 1867, Le Caron was recruited by the Home Office as a secret agent. Paid very modestly over the following years from secret service funds, Le Caron's arrangement with the Home Office included the extraordinary stipulation that his letters should remain his property and subsequently they would be returned to him. Implicit in that deal was Le Caron's perceptiveness that a spy's memoirs would sell well, should he survive to write them. In 1892 he recalled: 'My adventurous nature prompted me to sympathy with the idea; my British instincts made me a willing worker from a sense of right, and my past success promised good things for the future'  (Le Caron, 38). The bombing of the Middlesex House of Detention at Clerkenwell on Friday 13 December 1867, part of a failed attempt to release Fenian prisoners, created widespread panic and hysteria; the threat of Irish attacks was henceforth taken with the utmost seriousness. Le Caron now communicated with Robert Anderson, the new Home Office adviser on political crime, a euphemism for terrorism. Le Caron also reported directly to the Canadian chief commissioner of police, Judge J. G. McMicken, in Ottawa. Thus Henri Le Caron, a small, lean, dark-haired, and moustachioed man, began a career marked out twenty-five years later by The Times as one of 'astonishing courage, perseverance, and success'.

On returning to the United States from London, Le Caron moved his young family to Chicago, Illinois, where he studied medicine at the Chicago Medical College for about a year, subsequently joining the Illinois State Penitentiary at Joliet as its resident medical officer. He organized a Fenian circle in Lockport, Illinois, of which he was elected the 'centre', while renewing his friendship with the recently elected (31 December 1867) president of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), John O'Neill. That summer Le Caron reluctantly resigned his medical post when on 5 August 1868 he was appointed major and military organizer in the service of the Irish republic. In November of the following year he was promoted lieutenant-colonel and acting adjutant-general of the Irish Republican Army. The next invasion of Canada, partly organized and wholly betrayed by Le Caron, began on 23 May 1870 and failed miserably. Any hope for future Fenian attempts against Canada vanished when Gladstone's first government settled the Confederate ship Alabama claims for £3.5 million; the United States government no longer needed Fenianism as a lever in negotiations.

Le Caron next moved to Detroit, where he completed his MD degree at the Detroit College of Medicine. Removing to Wilmington, Illinois, he established a pharmacy and a medical practice in nearby Braidwood, a mining town. Retaining his connections with the IRB, Le Caron spent the next four or five years focused on his profession and local politics. However, by 1876 he accepted the necessity of joining the Clan na Gael, founded nine years before and potentially the most dangerous of the Irish-American organizations. Claiming that his mother was Irish to qualify for membership, he subsequently founded a camp at Braidwood (D 463), known as the Emmet Literary Association. As its senior guardian, he was assured access to all of the Clan documents, copies of which soon found their way to London.

Charles Stewart Parnell, leader of the Irish party in the House of Commons, and a colleague, John Dillon, made a fund-raising tour of the United States at the beginning of 1880 on behalf of the Land League, a new organization largely controlled by the radical Clan na Gael. Le Caron subsequently reported to Anderson that Parnell was aware of the league's real purpose and thus actually supported violence in Ireland, rather than the constitutional means that he publicly espoused. Le Caron travelled to Europe in the spring of 1881 charged with infiltrating Fenian groups operating from Paris. Le Caron also met with Parnell in the House of Commons on 23 May 1881, reporting to Anderson that night. Parnell's views, according to Le Caron, were 'a veritable bombshell': '[Parnell] had long since ceased to believe that anything but the force of arms would accomplish the final redemption of Ireland'  (Le Caron, 175).

After he returned to New York on 12 June, Le Caron continued his work for the Clan na Gael or United Brotherhood, which involved so much travelling that he had to hire another doctor to care for his patients in Braidwood. Over the next six years Le Caron's reports provided important insights into the bewildering complexity of Irish-American politics. Dynamite attacks within Great Britain, however, were now the dominant strategy of the Clan na Gael and Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa's Skirmishers. Between 1880 and 1887 Liverpool, Glasgow, and London were the sites of attacks. In London itself Irish-American bombs targeted the City of London, the streets of Westminster, the Tower of London, the House of Commons, London Bridge, railway stations, and the underground. Le Caron, however, was of no help when it came to such highly secret terrorism. Once again on holiday in England (April-October 1887), Le Caron found his secret material was the basis for three anonymous articles in The Times (beginning on 13 May 1887) written by Robert Anderson under the heading 'Behind the scenes in America'. Le Caron returned to London again at the end of 1887 in connection with a 'business speculation' which later failed to materialize. The master spy's final trip took place in December 1888, sailing for England to be with his father, who died on the day of his arrival.

Le Caron had written twice to Anderson offering to testify at the government's special commission into the charges by The Times of a connection between 'Parnellism and crime'. Le Caron was convinced that only a full disclosure of the 'foul conspiracy' existing in the United States would alert the nation and the world to the dangers. Now Anderson came forward with the news that The Times had approached him for a witness on the American side against Parnell. Le Caron agreed to testify on the condition that his family be brought to the comparative safety of England. Anderson returned Le Caron's reports and documents, excluding those made 'official' by being forwarded to the home secretary. On Tuesday morning, 5 February 1889, Le Caron took the stand. Although his six days of testimony withstood the highly critical cross-examination of Sir Charles Russell, counsel for the Irish members, in the end the newspaper failed to prove its allegations of complicity at the cost to itself of over £200,000.

Why did this spy 'come in from the cold', to use John Le Carre's phrase? Le Caron's patriotism, compounded by his strong belief in Parnell's complicity, must have been a major factor. Le Caron had maintained his cover (at times only barely) for more than twenty years. Unable to maintain his double life, at the age of forty-eight and apparently in good health he could have retired from Irish-American politics and British spying to pursue his medical practice. It is hard to imagine that he would have been prepared to expose his family to Fenian revenge for the anticipated proceeds of his spying chronicles. The Times reportedly paid for the transport and maintenance of his family, as well as the ongoing, round-the-clock Scotland Yard protection. Le Caron's 1889 will provided for dispensing more than £5000 to his wife and siblings. By the time of his death he, inexplicably, had only some £500 left.

Le Caron, his wife (who shared his secret), and four of their children (two had remained in America) moved to 11 Tregunter Road, South Kensington. Le Caron turned to writing his memoirs, while continuing to smoke some sixteen cigars a day and nurturing his carefully waxed dark moustache. Published in 1892 by William Heinemann in London as Twenty-Five Years in the Secret Service: the Recollections of a Spy, the book contained several portraits, including the author's, and facsimiles of documents. The book's considerable success, even at 14s., took it to six editions. In it Le Caron praised Sir Robert Anderson (currently head of the Metropolitan Police's criminal investigation division), criticized the 'miserable pittance' spent on secret service work, and took pride in the fact that he was never an agent provocateur.

Le Caron died at his London home of appendicitis and peritonitis on Sunday 1 April 1894, aged fifty-two, and was buried six days later in Norwood cemetery. Remarkably, Dr Thomas Billis Beach MD, dubbed the Prince of Spies and the 'champion spy of the century' by John Devoy, had died in bed, the victim of Victorian medicine rather than an assassin. His family subsequently relocated to his wife's home in Tennessee.

K. R. M. Short 

Sources  H. Le Caron, Twenty-five years in the secret service: the recollections of a spy (1892) + J. A. Cole, Prince of spies (1984) + K. R. M. Short, The dynamite war: Irish-American bombers in Victorian Britain (1979) + J. Sweeney, At Scotland Yard: experiences during twenty-seven years' service, ed. F. Richards (1905) + C. Curran, 'The spy behind the speaker's chair', History Today, 18 (1968), 745-59 + Report of the Parnell Commission (1890), 103-5
Archives TNA: PRO, CO 42/686
Likenesses  photograph, c.1888, repro. in Cole, Prince of spies · S. P. Hall, pencil sketches, NPG; repro. in The Graphic (16 Feb 1889) [see illus.] · portrait, repro. in Le Caron, Twenty-five years in the secret service
Wealth at death  £523 7s. 6d.: probate, 3 Aug 1894, CGPLA Eng. & Wales