With Moore to Corunna

Ensign Charles Paget was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Second Battalion of the 52nd Regiment of Foot in February 1808, fought at the Battle of Vimeiro and was evacuated with the rest of Sir John Moore's army after the Battle of Corunna. He served in the Walcheren expedition and later returned to the Peninsula and fought at the Battles of Nivelle and Nive in 1814/. He lived on after the war into the 1840s and was connect to the influential Paget family, two of whose members - Henry Paget and Sir Edward Paget - played notable parts in the Peninsular and Waterloo campaigns. Professor Charles J. Esdaile is one of the leading historians of the Napoleonic era and holds a personal chair at the University of Liverpool. His wide-ranging history of Napoleon's attempt to conquer Spain and Portugal, The Peninsular War: A New History, and his international history of the Napoleonic period, Napoleon's Wars, are classic works on the subject. Among his many other books are The Duke of Wellington and the Command of the Spanish Army 1812-14, Fighting Napoleon: Guerrillas, Bandits and Adventurers in Spain 1808-1814, Peninsular Eyewitnesses: The Experience of War in Spain and Portugal 1808-1814 and Women in the Peninsular War. Mark Reed discovered Charles Paget's previously unpublished diary among family papers and, realizing its importance for the history of the Peninsular War, collaborated with Professsor Charles Esdaile to bring it to publication.