Sharpe's Eagle

HISTORICAL NOTE

Sir Arthur Wellesley (who was soon to become, thanks to the events of July 27th and 28th, 1809, Viscount Wellington of Talavera) lost 5365 dead and wounded in the battle. About 15 percent of those casualties were killed outright on the field. French casualties numbered 7268 and there were also about 600 to add to the ‘butcher’s bill’. The French also lost seventeen guns but, alas, no Eagle. The first Eagle to be captured by the British in the Peninsular War was won by Ensign Keogh and Sergeant Masterman of the 87th, an Irish Regiment, at the Batde of Barossa on March 5th, 1811. Keogh died of his wounds, but Masterman survived and was rewarded with a commission, thus joining the small number of British officers, perhaps one in twenty, who had risen from the ranks. I hope that the ghosts of Keogh and Masterman, as well as the modern successors of the 87th, the Royal Irish Rangers, will forgive me for preempting their achievement.

Masterman was made into an Ensign, the lowest officer rank of Britain’s army in 1809. Above him, in a Battalion, there would be Lieutenants, ten Captains, two Majors, and a Lieutenant Colonel in command. That was on paper. A Battalion was supposed to consist of a thousand fighting men, but disease and casualties, added to the shortage of recruits, meant that Battalions often went into battle with only half their numbers of men and officers.

In Sharpe’s Eagle the South Essex, a fictional Regiment, is sometimes described as a ‘Regiment’ and sometimes as a ‘Battalion’. A Regiment was an administrative unit and usually consisted of at least two Battalions, the basic fighting unit. There were a few Regiments, like the imaginary South Essex, that were single-Battalion Regi-ments, and that is why, in the novel, the two words are used interchangeably.

Perhaps the strangest feature of Britain’s Napoleonic army, at least to modern readers, is the purchase system. A rich man, as long as he had served a minimum period in his rank, could buy promotion. Merit had nothing to do with his advancement, only the availability of cash. The system was grossly unfair and led to great resentment, but it also enabled some soldiers, like Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, to rise to high rank early enough in his career to become Britain’s most successful General. The French, of course, promoted purely by merit, yet they were never to defeat Wellington.

There is no such place as Valdelacasa on the River Tagus, nor was there ever a South Essex Regiment, but beyond those inventions the campaign of Talavera happened much as described in the novel. In the account of the battle only the adventures of the South Essex and the capture of the Eagle are fictitious; there was a Dutch Battalion fighting with the French, and I took the liberty of moving them from their position opposite the Spanish fortifications and offered them as a sacrifice to Sharpe and Harper instead. The account of Cuesta’s army, sadly, is true; they did run away on the eve of the battle, frightened by their own volley, and within days General Cuesta was to lead them to total defeat. Talavera was abandoned to the French, who, as Wellesley predicts in the novel, treated the British wounded with kindness and consideration. The ineffectiveness of the Spanish army was more than compensated for by the bravery of the Guérilleros, the Spanish civilian ‘freedom fighters’, who caused Napoleon to liken Spain to a ‘running sore’ on his armies.

Much of the detail in the book is taken from contemporary letters and diaries. Scenes like the growing pile of arms and legs outside the convent in Talavera defy imagination and come straight from eyewitness accounts. In addition to those I drew heavily on the scholarship of Michael Glover’s The Peninsular War, Lady Elizabeth Longford’s Wellington: The Years of the Sword, and the American historian Jac Weller’s Wellington in the Peninsula. To those three authors, and to the kind people of Talavera who showed me the battlefield, I acknowledge a special debt.

Richard Sharpe and Patrick Harper are, sadly, inventions. I hope that today’s Royal Green Jackets, who once marched as the 95th Rifles (and as the Royal American Rifles), will not be ashamed of them or their picaresque adventures that will, eventually, lead them to Waterloo and Napoleon himself.