The Books

Sharpe’s first story as an officer takes him to the daunting fort of Gawilghur. This is also the last of his Indian adventures. Sir Arthur Wellesley (the future Duke of Wellington) was never at his shining best when he had to lay siege to great fortresses, and few are greater than Gawilghur up on its vast cliff over the Deccan Plain. In the end the fortress fell to the extraordinary gallantry of some Scottish soldiers and I fear Sharpe muscles in on their achievement.

Sharpe, now a Sergeant, finds himself alongside Sir Arthur Wellesley at the terrifying Battle of Assaye. In later life Sir Arthur (who became, of course, the first Duke of Wellington), always reckoned Assaye was his finest achievement. During the battle he very nearly died, or certainly had his closest escape in a fight, and Sharpe, naturally, is there. The ‘villain’ in this book (apart from Hakeswill) is Anthony Pohlmann, a cheerful Hanoverian rogue who began life as a mercenary ranker and became one of India’s most successful generals.

If Arthur existed (and I am quite certain he did) then he was probably the great British war leader who won the battle of Mount Badon. No one knows where it was fought, or how it was fought, but we do know that the battle took place and it was the one great defeat inflicted on the English invaders of Britain. In Excalibur we follow Arthur and Derfel to that enormous struggle and incredible victory.

The first of Richard Sharpe’s Indian adventures, pitting him against the sinister Tippoo Sultan in the siege of Seringapatam, 1799. Like most of the Sharpe novels this one is based on a real campaign, and almost all of the actions described in the book really did take place. Sharpe begins this novel as a private and his worst enemy is not the Tippoo, nor even the Tippoo’s professional strongmen who had interesting ways of putting prisoners to death, but Sergeant Obadiah Hakeswill who will continue to harass Sharpe all through the Indian novels.

At the end of The Winter King Arthur fought the battle that forces unity on the warring British kingdoms and now he sets out to face the real enemy – the English (it is one of the great ironies of the Arthur stories that he should have become an English hero when, if he existed at all, he was a great war-leader who opposed the invading Sais). First, though, Merlin leads a perilous expedition into the mysterious west to retrieve a cauldron, one of the treasures of Britain – this cauldron story is almost certainly the root of the holy grail strand in the Arthur tales.