Sir, – I enjoyed very much the piece on Coimbra (Gerard Smyth, Magazine, July 27th).
It may interest some of your readers to know that a number of Irish clerics and academics taught at the illustrious European university there in penal times.
Coimbra is also where Sir Nicholas Trant, of a prominent Kerry family, while a lieutenant-general in Wellington’s army, raised a corps of some 3,000, including many volunteers from the university student body, and re-took the city and held it against Napoleon’s forces in 1809.
He had many other daring exploits in Portugal under his fellow Irishman Wellington, who on one occasion wrote of the Kerryman, when his position was threatened, “There is no officer the loss of whose services in this country would be more sensibly felt”, while on another described him as “a very good officer, but a drunken dog as ever lived”. – Yours, etc,
TERENCE COLM
McQUINN,
Kildalkey, Co Meath.