Dear Mr. Cornwell,
I hope this note finds you well. I have a story related to Sharpe’s Havoc that you may find amusing or interesting.
For several years I did free-lance research for a company that imports and sells military artifacts, and one of the projects that came up included five manuscript letters to Marshall Beresford in Portugal dated between 23 March 1809 and 1 June 1809. The early ones were posted from Oporto, until Soult conquered it, after which they were posted from other locations.
The letters were written by three British officers: Major Robert William Patrick, Major John Campbell, and Lt. Col. Nicolas Trant. My job was to transcribe the handwritten originals so they would be readable and put them in a historical context. Some of the references in the letters were to people and events that had obviously been discussed before the letters were written and so were referenced only elliptically in the letters I had.
By a wonderful—for me—coincidence, I had just finished reading Sharpe’s Havoc a month or so before this task came up, and the novel was able to supply me with information about situations and people that were obscure in the letters. This made it easier for me to get a picture of the context of the letters. For example, your figure “the Bishop” featured prominently in the letters as in the novel, but without a name. The novel references helped me find out exactly who he was and why he was a headache. The first letter, Patrick to Beresford, notes how it was too dangerous to leave the building he was in because the rioting in the streets caused by the Bishop’s call for patriots to gather in the city. They came by the thousands, then had nothing to do, and started attacking anyone in uniform.
In mid-April, a few weeks after his letter (dated 23 March 1809), Major Patrick, then a Lt. Col., led a small force of Portuguese troops that kept the French from capturing the bridge in Amarante. I first knew of the struggle for Amarante and the bridge, of course, from the novel. Major Patrick, according to descriptions of the action, actively commanded and coordinated the small unit defending the bridgehead until he was mortally wounded. The images of that action remind me of Horatius and Rome.
Three of the letters were from Lt. Col. Nicolas Trant to Beresford, and Trant is very interesting. You refer to a unit commanded by him in another Sharpe novel, but apparently he was very aggressive and extraordinarily good in battle, not unlike Richard Sharpe himself. For instance, Michael Glover says of the action at Coimbra against Massena, “The fate of the campaign, and probably of the Peninsula, was decided in those five days. It was not the Light Division which decided it but Colonel Nicholas Trant.” (Forgive me if you know of this already. I get excited about coincidences.) He was known in the Portuguese campaign for independent thinking and taking initiative when he saw something needed to be done on the battlefield. His initiative annoyed some officers, and Wellesley pays him a left-handed compliment in referring to this trait.
Wellesly also said he was, “a very good officer, but a drunken dog as ever lived.” Eventually, Wellesley appointed him military governor of Oporto, where he apparently was very well regarded, both for his governance and knowledge of wine. In 1949, a monograph was published by the Instituto do Vinho do Porto entitled O Governador Sir Nicolas Trant, Apologista do Vinho. If Wellesley was right, then governor of Oporto was just the job for Trant.
I dwelt on Trant because his traits and successes in unfavorable situations so resemble Richard Sharpe. He sounds more like a character in a novel than a real soldier. No complete biography of Trant has been done, although the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography has some material on him, as do a few other sources.
Finally, I want to thank you for the many, many hours of pleasure your work has given me. I used to teach literature and was never able to understand what intellectual powers produced such work.
Best regards,
Jerry Jacobson