Father Salvador Montseny is one of the two main antagonists of the Bernard Cornwell novel Sharpe's Fury, along with Colonel Vandal. He is a Spanish priest based in Cadiz in 1811.
Biography[]
Montseny was the son of a lawyer from Catalonia who, after being widowed, sent him away to a church school. He became a priest and later served as the chaplain of a Spanish admiral, the Marquis de Cardenas. He was on a boat that was captured by the British at Trafalgar and was taken back to England as a prisoner along with the Marquis. Even though he learned their language, he was left with a deep hatred of the English.
Montseny and the Marquis ended up in Cadiz, the only part of Spain not under French occupation. They both opposed attempts to turn Spain into a democracy, wanting the king and the church to have absolute power, and also wanted both the British and the French out of the country. They made plans to bribe the cortes to make a deal with France that would see King Ferdinand returned to the throne and France withdrawing in exchange for assistance defeating the British and Portuguese.
Montseny finally gained leverage when a prostitute, Caterina Veronica Blazquez, came to him for confession. She revealed she had been the lover of Henry Wellesley, the British ambassador and brother of their army's commander Lord Wellington, and that he had written letters to her professing his love which her pimp, Gonzalo Jurado, had taken for blackmail purposes. Montseny tracked down Jurado, forced him to hand over the letters at knife point, and then killed him. He then sent a message to Captain Plummer at the British embassy, who Jurado had contacted about selling the letters. Along with men provided by the admiral, Montseny waited for Plummer to arrive with two aides. Montseny took the gold and then had the three men killed, claiming they were part of a British plot to annexe Cadiz.
Montseny consulted with the admiral and they made plans to publish a doctored version of the letters in the anti-liberal newspaper El Correo de Cadiz. He conspired with the newspaper's publisher, Eduardo Nunez, and a forger, Benito Chavez, to produce copies of the letters that would be published in the newspaper, now appearing to reveal a British plot to occupy Cadiz and turn it into an outpost like Gibraltar. Montseny still dreamed of getting further money from the British, so met with intelligence operative Lord Pumphreys and Captain Richard Sharpe to discuss selling the letters for 15,000 guineas. He also expressed his doubts at British reinforcements and their Spanish allies achieving anything against the French army besieging the city.
Montseny waited with a group of men at the cathedral, planning to again ambush those who came to pay the blackmail money, using some papers to convince them he had the letters. Sharpe and Pumphrey arrived with Sergeant Patrick Harper and Sharpe soon saw through the ambush, using smoke bombs to retrieve the fake letters. During the subsequent ambush attempt, Montseny was injured when Harper fired his volley gun at him, and Sharpe, Harper and Pumphrey all escaped. Sharpe subsequently managed to destroy the newspaper office, along with the letters and all the copies of the newspaper, ending Montseny's hope of taking his scheme further, and the British winning a battlefield victory over the French at Barossa and being hailed as heroes ended any chance of the cortes agreeing to a deal with the French.
