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Life
1785-1860 [Sir William Francis Patrick Napier], b. Castletown, Co. Kildare; soldier; commanded 43 Reg. at Salamanca, and wrote A History of the War in the Peninsula and the South of France, 6 vols. (1828); Governor of Guernsey, 1842; ed. his brother Charles’s Conquest of Scinde; Six Letters in Vindication of the British Army (1848); KCB, 1848; his English Battles and Sieges in the Peninsular War (1852), condenses the longer work; wrote several books on Sir Charles, as well as political pamphlets. CAB OCEL OCIL
References
Charles Read, ed., A Cabinet of Irish Literature (3 vols., 1876-78), selects ‘Assault on Badajas’. pronounced ‘our English Thucydides’ by Walter Savage Landor, and praised by Sir Robert
Peel as an eloquent and impartial historian.
Margaret Drabble, ed., The Oxford Companion to English Literature (OUP 1986), calls Scinde a defence of his brother’s conduct.
Notes
Monk Gibbon, Inglorious Soldier (1968), writes that ‘Sir
William Napier [...] felt bitterly about some of the things which our soldiers did - and if you remember he would not publish his work until it had been revised by the French Generals.’ (p.219.)
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