The Spanish Bride, by Georgette Heyer. Book review

First published 1940. Edition reviewed: Arrow, 2005, ISBN 978-0-09-947445-6. 422 pages.

Set in 1812-1815 in Spain, Portugal, France, England and Belgium, The Spanish Bride tells the true story of Harry Smith, officer in the 95th Rifles, and his Spanish bride Juana de los Dolores de Leon. All the main characters are historical figures.

Harry Smith is an able and energetic young officer in the Rifles, serving with Wellington’s army in the war against Napoleon in Spain and Portugal and already a veteran at 25. After the horrors of the assault on the Spanish city of Badajos and the atrocities committed by British troops in the subsequent sack, a Spanish noblewoman comes to the British camp seeking protection for her young sister Juana. Impetuous as ever, Harry falls in love with Juana on the spot and marries her two days later. Juana refuses to be sent to Harry’s home in England or to travel with the baggage train. Instead, she insists on riding alongside the soldiers, sharing the hardships and dangers of campaigning as Wellington’s army hounds Napoleon’s troops all over the Iberian Peninsula to the final clash at Waterloo.

The Spanish Bride is mainly based on the autobiography of Harry Smith (available online here, and well worth a read). Many of the incidents and anecdotes, and even some of the lines of dialogue, are taken directly from the original. This produces a powerful sense of authenticity, almost as though the reader has stepped into an army camp and joined in the conversation. The book is full of memorable little episodes of the ‘stranger-than-fiction’ type, such as the soldier rescuing Juana’s pet dog from a battlefield and keeping it in his knapsack all day until he can return it to Juana in the evening, Wellington’s ingenious solution to the problem of using Spanish money in France, and the astonished delight of the French civilian population when they realise that this invading army actually pays for what it requisitions, in marked contrast to their own troops.

The romance in The Spanish Bride is unusual, as Harry and Juana fall in love and marry instantly, so there is almost none of the ‘will they get together in the end?’ suspense that classically drives a romance plot. Instead, the suspense comes more from the question ‘will they both survive?’ Harry is of course exposed to the dangers of battle, and his oft-repeated assurances to Juana that he is indestructible sit in uneasy contrast with the death or serious injury of one friend after another. Juana herself comes under fire on occasion, and there are all the hazards of travel in wild country, such as fording rivers in spate or climbing unstable mountain paths.

The progress of the war is at least as much a focus as the relationship between Harry and Juana. Troop movements, dispositions and major battles are described in meticulous detail, giving a clear overview of the last two years of the Peninsular War from Badajos to Napoleon’s first abdication in 1814. There is no map in the edition I read, so it is well worth having a modern atlas to hand in order to identify the places and follow the campaign. Although Harry is involved in many of the major battles, The Spanish Bride does not go in for lengthy blood-and-guts battle scenes. (For those, Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe series of Peninsular War adventure novels are hard to beat). It’s perhaps best described as a vivid portrayal of domestic life for army officers on active service – bivouacs and billets, food shortages when the baggage train has taken the wrong road through the mountains, dealings with the local civilian population, the transient social life of regimental dinners and impromptu balls held in barns with half the roof missing, and of the frequent alarms and unexpected attacks that mean Juana can be quietly ironing her husband’s shirts one minute and fleeing for her life the next.

As well as Harry and Juana, many of the secondary characters are also based on real historical figures, particularly their friends among the other officers of Harry’s brigade. The friendships, antagonisms and rivalries among colleagues, and their opinions (by no means always favourable!) of their superiors, are well portrayed. The relationship between Harry and the apparently foppish Daniel Cadoux is particularly well drawn. Lord Wellington also makes an appearance, a consummate professional who has an irascible temper and no interest in being popular but commands immense respect from the top of the army to the bottom.

A useful author’s note at the beginning outlines the main sources for the story, in addition to Harry’s autobiography. Unfortunately there’s no map, which would have been useful, but the omission can be remedied by finding a modern atlas.

Part love story and part account of the Peninsular War from Badajos in 1812 to Bayonne in 1814, with a coda at Waterloo, this is a dramatised retelling of the story of Harry and Juana Smith based on Harry Smith’s autobiography.

Rebellion, by James McGee. Book review

Harper Collins, 2011. ISBN 978-0-00-732024-0. 529 pages. Uncorrected advance review copy supplied by publisher.

This historical thriller is set in London and Paris in the autumn of 1812, during Napoleon’s Russian campaign. The central character, Matthew Hawkwood, is fictional. Important secondary characters such as Eugene Vidocq (founder of the French Surete police force), Colquhoun Grant (British intelligence officer) and the main players in the attempted 1812 Paris coup are historical figures.

Ex-soldier and Bow Street Runner Matthew Hawkwood is as tough as they come and no stranger to intrigue and danger. When he is seconded to a mysterious department of the Home Office and sent on a clandestine mission to France, Hawkwood knows it will probably take all his experience and nerve to survive, let alone carry out his mission (when he finally finds out what it is – the secrecy is such that even Hawkwood is not told before setting off). Shipwreck on the French coast is just the start of his troubles, as he is drawn into a deadly conspiracy. Success could bring down Napoleon and end the war – but failure risks taking Hawkwood and his colleagues to the guillotine….

Rebellion is Book 4 in the Hawkwood series. I haven’t read Books 1-3, so I have no idea how Rebellion compares. It seemed to me to work as a stand-alone, although there may be subtleties relating to the previous books that I missed. The central character, Matthew Hawkwood, is a sort of early eighteenth-century James Bond (in Bond’s more macho incarnations; think Sean Connery rather than Roger Moore). Part soldier, part secret policeman, part spy, he is a tough, violent man in a tough, violent world. Hawkwood also has brains as well as brawn, which is just as well as the central conspiracy – an attempted coup d’etat against Napoleon – is a lot heavier on political intrigue than on action.

The first part of Rebellion is suitably action-packed, with a chase sequence through the hills of Portugal and then a stormy Channel crossing. The shift between Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 is something of a jolt, and on first reading I found it hard to make any sense of (it turns out to be a cunning piece of authorial sleight of hand, explained about 100 pages later). After this adventurous beginning, the middle third of the book was a startling change of pace, slowing right down to provide a lengthy history lesson in conversation form as various characters explain the intricate ins and outs of French civilian and military politics to each other. This background is interesting stuff in its own right, and essential to follow what’s going on when the action starts up again, but readers who like their thrillers to be full of thrills and spills every few pages may find this section rather slow going. The pace starts to pick up again from about page 350 on, as the conspiracy and its aftermath play out.

I found Rebellion to be distinctly un-gripping. This surprised me, given the subject matter. The stakes could hardly be higher, and although I knew the outcome of the coup in advance (as, I am sure, does every reader the moment they look at the date), the how and why, not to mention the fate of the fictional characters, should offer plenty of scope for suspense. Perhaps it was because Hawkwood seemed to walk in to a ready-made conspiracy without actually having to do very much. The plotters have already made their plans and decided on their actions, and events are already in motion by the time Hawkwood appears on the scene. He just lends a bit of moral support and a helping hand, rather than driving events. As a result, Hawkwood is something of an outsider to the central plot, and I think this contributes to the uninvolving feel of the narrative. On the plus side, it’s a fast and easy read.

For me, the most appealing aspect of Rebellion was the presence of the historical figures Colquhoun Grant and Eugene Vidocq. Like Admiral Cochrane, these two men led lives more extraordinary than anything a novelist would dare to make up. Grant was one of Wellington’s Exploring Officers in the Peninsular War, riding reconnaissance missions deep behind enemy lines. Captured in Portugal, he escaped from custody and then promptly bluffed his way to Paris, where he established himself in the disguise of an American officer and proceeded to spy for British intelligence. Vidocq started out as a thug in the French criminal underworld, before going on to found the French Surete Nationale and then a private detective agency – a case of setting a thief to catch a thief if ever there was one. Beside these two colourful characters, everyone else in the novel rather fades into the background.

The attempted coup of 1812 really did happen, and many of its leading figures appear in Rebellion (Google if you want a potted history). Like Grant and Vidocq, the coup looks like a case of truth being stranger than fiction. Whether it contributed as much to undermining Napoleon as claimed in the novel, it can hardly have helped the Emperor’s cause, and it was fascinating to see the political side of the Napoleonic Wars as a change from the naval and military settings familiar in many historical novels. There is no Author’s Note in the advance review copy, and I hope there is one in the finished version. It would be most interesting to see how much of the conspiracy is fact and how much fiction (I suspect all the most unlikely elements are factual).

Political intrigue in Paris, as disaffected military officers attempt a coup d’etat against Napoleon in 1812.

Sharpe’s Peril. TV/DVD review.

Shown on UK ITV as two episodes each of 90 minutes including advert breaks and credits. Total running time probably a little over 2.5 hours without breaks.

Set in India in 1818, Sharpe’s Peril is a TV movie very loosely based on Bernard Cornwell’s novels featuring Richard Sharpe, rifleman hero of the Napoleonic Wars, in India. Cornwell’s novels were set during Sharpe’s early career, before the Peninsular War, but Sean Bean would now be too old to play a young Sharpe so the TV movie is set after Waterloo.

Colonel Sharpe and Sergeant Patrick Harper are travelling through India on their way to Madras, when Sharpe is asked to escort a beautiful French blonde to the next hill station where she is to meet her fiance, Major Joubert. As a notorious bandit called Chitu is raiding in the area, Sharpe is glad to fall in with an East India Company supply convoy. He was hoping to leave the blonde with them and ride on alone, but when the convoy is attacked by bandits Sharpe is the only officer able to take effective command. When they reach the hillfort they find the garrison slaughtered and Major Joubert missing, along with the Company record books. Sharpe now has to shepherd the column through 300 miles of hostile territory, battling against bandit raids from without and treachery within. What nefarious business is going on and what has opium got to do with it? Is the seemingly heroic Company cavalry commander Colonel Dragomirov all he appears? What has happened to the French blonde’s fiance? Of course all is not what it seems, and Sharpe has ample opportunity to prove his heroism in a desperate journey and a still more desperate last stand.

So far, so classic Sharpe. Lots of action, a pretty woman, some dubious double-dealing to give the plot some unlikely twists, and impressive photography among India’s spectacular landscapes. Unfortunately, the film reminded me of nothing so much as Eric Morecambe’s piano technique, “I’m playing all the right notes but not necessarily in the right order!”.

It seemed to be a loosely connected series of exotic scenes strung on a gossamer-thin thread of plot. A snake pit. Bandit raids. A beautiful blonde with the sort of bosom one normally associates with Andrew Davies adaptations, who insists on riding off alone in bandit country and duly having to be rescued. Fight scenes. Senior officers who are incompetent and/or corrupt. A surly, mutinous and corrupt Sergeant. More fight scenes. A shiny young ensign who really didn’t deserve his fate. A scene in an Indian palace where the beautiful blonde is dressed up in scanty Indian costume (reminiscent of the banquet scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, but without the comedy). Sharpe getting seriously wounded and having to be tended by the beautiful blonde, but apparently completely healed by the next fight scene. Nefarious wheeler-dealing by a posh officer. Did I mention the fight scenes?

Some events seemed to defy logic completely. Faced with a deep river to ford, Sharpe decides to turn all the baggage elephants and horses loose and cross it on foot. Um, wouldn’t it have been more sensible to ferry everybody across on the elephants and then abandon the animals once everyone was safely on the other side? (But that would have deprived the audience of Sharpe in a wet shirt and the beautiful blonde in a clinging wet dress.) Is it really likely that a French army officer would have been trusted with an East India Company hill station after England and France had been fighting each other across Europe for a decade? Why did the film have a beautiful Indian princess who apparently played no role whatsoever, not even as eye candy? And the ending was not so much a deus ex machina as a rabbit out of a hat.

I wonder if the film was edited down to a shorter running time in a hurry. If it had originally been intended for, say, three or three and a half hours and then had to be cut to fit the available slot, that could account for some of the cart-sized holes in the plot, and the apparently unemployed Indian princess if her storyline ended up on the cutting room floor.

Sean Bean was as moody and truculent a Sharpe as ever, and Patrick Harper provided a welcome note of humour. The other characters were rather flat in comparison. The beautiful blonde in particular would have qualified for a TSTL* award in a romance novel, going out for a ride on her own in hostile country having just been warned that there were bandits about. I hoped she was going to turn out to be a double agent, which would have been an interesting and rational explanation for her behaviour.

Now, action movies aren’t required to be realistic. They depend on a certain amount of larger-than-life Romance, in the older sense of the word. But turning a stream of unlikely events into a narrative that’s so much fun that you’re glued to it even though you know it’s pure hokum, is a rare and precious skill. The better James Bond films have it, as does Cornwell himself in (most of) his novels . I’m afraid Sharpe’s Peril isn’t in that league.

AA Gill in the Times noted that HarperCollins were credited as co-producers and wondered if the idea was to make you turn off the TV and pick up a book. I wouldn’t be quite that harsh, although if you’re new to Sharpe don’t judge the character or the books by this film. I’d categorise it as a pleasant and undemanding glossy action flick, designed to be watched for the fight scenes, the girl and the bit where the hero takes his shirt off.




*Too Stupid To Live

Cochrane: Britannia’s Sea Wolf, by Donald Thomas. Book review

First published 1978. Edition reviewed: Cassell 1999, ISBN 0-304-35282-9

This historical biography recounts the colourful career of Thomas Cochrane, later 10th Earl of Dundonald, whose daring naval exploits during and shortly after the Napoleonic Wars were far more outrageous than any novelist would dare to invent.

Cochrane was born in 1775 to an eccentric aristocratic father with a large ancestral estate but very little money, who proceeded to lose what was left of the family fortune by inventing various scientific innovations (such as gas lighting) by accident whilst looking for something else. The young Cochrane entered the Royal Navy as a midshipman in 1793, through the good offices of his uncle Captain Alexander Cochrane. His astonishing military talent was soon displayed when he was given command of a tiny warship, the Speedy. One of his most daring and spectacular actions was the capture of a Spanish frigate, the Gamo, which was far superior to the Speedy in size and armament. He first deceived the Gamo’s officers by flying the US flag, which allowed him to get so close to the frigate that its guns literally fired over his head and could do minimal damage, while his own guns could be angled upwards to rake the Gamo’s gundecks with shot. After about an hour of this, with the Spanish captain dead and the crew demoralised, Cochrane led a boarding party and by a mixture of cunning and ferocity convinced the Spanish to surrender. Further actions saw his tiny ship capture and destroy enemy shore forts, and destroy a squadron of French cavalry on the coast road, as well as taking numerous ships as prizes. Napoleon called him “le loup des mers”, the Sea Wolf, and later his Spanish adversaries in Chile were to call him El Diablo, the Devil.

Remarkably, Cochrane’s military successes were accomplished with very few casualties, often very few on either side. Frederick Marryat, who served under Cochrane as a midshipman (later becoming a captain and a successful novelist), wrote of him, “I never knew any one as careful of the lives of his ship’s company as Lord Cochrane, or any one who calculated so closely the risks attending any expedition”.

However, Cochrane’s military skill was only equalled by his talent for making enemies on his own side. He conducted a long-running feud with the Admiralty’s officials, who refused to buy his prizes and tried to avoid giving him the coveted promotion to post-captain. At one point they resorted to giving him command of a wallowing tub of a collier and stationed him in the Orkneys for a year in an attempt to keep him out of their hair. One can sympathise to some extent, as Cochrane was irascible, uncompromising, unforgiving and supremely confident to the point of arrogance, evidently not an easy man to get along with.

Nevertheless, the official system of naval procurement and some of the men who ran it deserved all the trouble he could possibly cause. The scale of corruption and mismanagement in the Admiralty in the early years of the nineteenth century was astonishing. Ships were built of substandard timber that rotted almost as fast as it was laid, and the metal nails that held a ship together were stolen by corrupt contractors and replaced with false heads and tips, with predictably fatal results. Work, if done at all, was charged for several times over. Cables could be hundreds of feet short of the specified length. Provisions were frequently rancid. Valuable copper compass mounts were stolen and replaced with iron, which deflected the ship’s compass and meant it might misread by 30 degrees or more, quite enough to put a ship hopelessly out of position and aground on rocks or reefs, as Cochrane found out to his cost when his frigate narrowly escaped being wrecked on the Brittany coast. A Commission of Enquiry conducted at the end of the Napoleonic Wars estimated that anything up to a quarter of the annual government expenditure on the navy had simply vanished into the pockets of fraudsters. It seems remarkable that Britain ever got a fleet to sea at all, and still more remarkable that Nelson and his colleagues managed to defeat not only the external enemy but the enemy at home as well.

Instead of putting up with the system, Cochrane stood for Parliament on a ticket of naval reform. In politics, he displayed an extraordinary mix of guile and naivete. On the one hand, he must be one of the very few men ever to have comprehensively outmanoeuvred the grasping voters of a Rotten Borough (in his case, Honiton), who to their chagrin found they had elected him to Parliament without the customary payment for their votes. On the other, he was shouted down in Parliament (which was evidently at least as much of an unedifying bear pit then as Prime Minister’s Questions is now) with little achieved for his cause, and was then embroiled in a Stock Exchange fraud by his crooked uncle.

The fraud could have come straight from the pages of The Count of Monte Cristo. The crooked uncle made a fortune in speculative share dealings and skipped before the subsequent trial delivered its verdict; Cochrane stayed to plead his innocence and was jailed after a biased trial. He promptly escaped from prison by means of some heroics with a smuggled rope, took his seat in Parliament, was arrested again, incarcerated in an unventilated dungeon which threatened to break his health, and was finally persuaded by his friends to pay a fine as a condition of his liberty, which he did with the defiant words, “I submit to robbery that I may protect myself from murder”.

Cochrane was now permanently out of a job with the Royal Navy, but other governments were eager to employ his talents. In 1818, Cochrane accepted the post of commanding admiral of the Chilean navy in Chile’s war of independence against Spain.

His career as a mercenary admiral in Chile followed the by now familiar pattern, defeating the Spanish military with daring and panache by land and sea, and then being done out of most of the rewards by more politically adept governments and rivals. After Chile, he fought equally successfully for Brazil in their war of independence against Portugal, and then with rather more mixed results for the Greeks in their attempt to throw off Turkish rule. At the age of 54, having gained massive fame and rather more modest financial rewards, Cochrane came home for good. For the rest of his life he applied himself with undaunted energy to campaigning to clear his name of the Stock Exchange fraud and inventing various ingenious military devices such as saturation bombardment and gas warfare, few of which were taken up. He died aged 85, having outlived most of his enemies, and was lauded by the Victorian public as a hero to rival Nelson. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Nor was the romance in Cochrane’s life only of the military variety. At the age of 39, he fell in love with Kitty Barnes, an eighteen-year-old beauty with no money or prospects, whereupon another uncle, the only one of the family with any money, threatened to disinherit him. Undeterred, Cochrane and Kitty eloped together to Scotland, got married no less than three times, had four sons and a daughter, at least one of whom accompanied them on campaign in South America, and lived happily ever after.

This is a clear, engaging and very readable biography of a man whose extraordinary life needs no embellishment whatsoever. As you will have gathered, the author succeeded in gaining my admiration for Cochrane. Yet the biography doesn’t idolise him. For all his military brilliance, Cochrane was his own worst enemy and much of his misfortune came from his political ineptitude and the ease – one could almost say the determination – with which he made and retained enemies in high places. Once Cochrane decided he hated someone, there was no possibility of compromise or of letting bygones be bygones. Nothing short of total victory would satisfy him, and this capacity to stoke the flames of a feud alienated men who might otherwise have been his allies. The author points out that Cochrane’s all-too-frequent response to officials who crossed his will was to flounce out and threaten to resign. While he was undoubtedly a star he was also something of a prima donna.

Think of every fictional action hero you have ever admired – Zorro, Hornblower, Aubrey, Sharpe – roll them all into one and move up a gear, and you get some idea of Cochrane’s extraordinary career. A remarkable man who lived a remarkable life, far outshining his fictional counterparts.

Has anyone else read it?