Bernard Cornwell

Cornwell was born in London in 1944. His father was Canadian airman William Oughtred[1] and his mother was Englishwoman Dorothy Cornwell, a member of the Women's Auxiliary Air Force. He was adopted and brought up in Thundersley, Essex by the Wiggins family; they were members of the Peculiar People, a strict sect of pacifists who banned frivolity of all kinds, and even medicine up to 1930. Reacting to being raised by Christian Fundamentalists, he grew up rejecting all religions and became an atheist.[2]

After his adoptive father died, he changed his last name by deed poll from Wiggins to Cornwell, his birth mother's maiden name. Prior to that, he used Bernard Cornwell as a pen name.[3] He met his father for the first time when he was 58, after telling a journalist on a book tour, "what I wanted to see in Vancouver was my real father."[1] There he met his half-siblings, with whom he shares many traits, and learned his genealogy.[3]

Cornwell was sent to Monkton Combe School in Somerset. He read history at University College London[4] between 1963 and 1966[5] and worked as a teacher after graduating. He attempted to enlist in the British armed services at least three times, but was rejected on the grounds of myopia.

Following his work as a teacher, Cornwell joined the BBC's Nationwide and was later promoted to head of current affairs at BBC Northern Ireland. He then joined Thames Television as editor of Thames News.[6] His first marriage ended in divorce in 1970s.[3] He met his second wife in 1978 in Edinburgh while he worked for BBC Northern Ireland; she was a travel agent from the US and the mother of three children from a previous marriage. He relocated to the United States in 1979 after marrying her. He was unable to get a United States Permanent Resident Card (green card), so he started writing novels, as this did not require a work permit.[1] He later became a United States citizen.[3][7]

As a child, Cornwell loved the novels of C. S. Forester chronicling the adventures of fictional British naval officer Horatio Hornblower during the Napoleonic Wars. He was surprised to find that there were no such novels following Lord Wellington's campaign on land, so he wrote that series himself—further motivated by the need to support himself through writing. He created his chief protagonist as a rifleman involved in most of the major battles of the Peninsular War, taking the character's name from rugby player Richard Sharp.[8][9]

Cornwell wanted to start the series with the Siege of Badajoz but decided instead to start with a couple of "warm-up" novels. These were Sharpe's Eagle and Sharpe's Gold, both published in 1981.[10] He went on to tell the story of Badajoz in Sharpe's Company published in 1982. He had a seven-book deal with publisher HarperCollins, after linking with Toby Eady as his agent.[3]

Cornwell and wife Judy co-wrote a series of novels published under the pseudonym "Susannah Kells": A Crowning Mercy published in 1983, Fallen Angels in 1984, and Coat of Arms (aka The Aristocrats) in 1986. Cornwell's strict Protestant upbringing forms the background of A Crowning Mercy, which takes place during the English Civil War. He also published Redcoat in 1987, an American Revolutionary War novel set in Philadelphia during its 1777 occupation by the British.

Cornwell was approached by a production company interested in making television adaptations of the first eight books of his Sharpe series. They asked him to write a background novel to give them a starting point to the series, and they also requested that the story feature a large role for Spanish characters in order to secure co-funding from Spain. The result was Sharpe's Rifles, published in 1987 and set when the English retreated at A Coruña until Wellesley arrived in Spain. It also resulted in a series of Sharpe television films starring Sean Bean.[11]

This was followed by a series of modern thrillers with sailing as a background and common themes: Wildtrack published in 1988, Sea Lord (or Killer's Wake) in 1989, Crackdown in 1990, Stormchild in 1991, and the political thriller Scoundrel in 1992.

Cornwell wrote two books a year for a long time, slowing to one book per year in his sixties.[3] He views historical fiction as presenting a big story in the historical events and a little story in the fictional plot. Patrick O'Brian wrote the Aubrey-Maturin series of historical adventures set in the Napoleonic era, and he said that there was "too much plot, not enough lifestyle" in both Cornwell's novels and those of C. S. Forester. Cornwell took that as a compliment and an accurate appraisal of the difference between their styles, while appreciating the favorable comparison to Forester.[3]

With the success of the Sharpe series, Cornwell began to write about other time periods and historical events of English and American history, both in series and in single novels. Azincourt was released in the UK in October 2008. The protagonist is an archer who participates in the Battle of Agincourt, a devastating defeat suffered by the French during the Hundred Years' War. In 2004, he released The Last Kingdom, beginning the Saxon Stories centered on protagonist Uhtred of Bebbanburg and telling how the nation of England began under Alfred the Great. The twelfth novel in the series was published in 2019 as Sword of Kings. He realized that few in England knew how England began, unlike Americans who have a clear date for their nation's beginning—so this became his big story. His own ancestral roots gave him the little story in the protagonist Uhtred.[3][12][13]

The Fort is another of Cornwell's standalone novels, published in 2010. It tells of the Penobscot Expedition of 1779 during the American Revolutionary War. He has been successful overall in his writing career, selling 30 million books by 2015 throughout the various series and individual novels, and he continues to write new novels.[1]

In June 2006, Cornwell was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the Queen's 80th Birthday Honours List.[14]

In addition to his many novels, including a fictional account (Sharpe's Waterloo) of the battle of Waterloo, Cornwell published a nonfiction book, Waterloo: The History of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles, released in September 2014, in time for the 200th anniversary of that battle.[20]

• Faulconer County

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