Wolfe Takes Command

Mad is he?” returned the old King; “then I hope he will bite some others of my generals.”

Our special project presenting the definitive account of France in Canada by Francis Parkman, one of America’s greatest historians.

Previously in Montcalm and Wolfe, Volume 7 of the French in Canada series. Continuing Chapter 24.

In his own view, as expressed to his mother, he was a person of very moderate abilities, aided by more than usual diligence; but this modest judgment of himself by no means deprived him of self-confidence, nor, in time of need, of self-assertion. He delighted in every kind of hardihood; and, in his contempt for effeminacy, once said to his mother: “Better be a savage of some use than a gentle, amorous puppy, obnoxious to all the world.” He was far from despising fame; but the controlling principles of his life were duty to his country and his profession, loyalty to the King and fidelity to his own ideal of the perfect soldier. To the parent who was the confidant of his most intimate thoughts he said: “All that I wish for myself is that I may at all times be ready and firm to meet that fate we cannot shun and to die gracefully and properly when the hour comes.” Never was wish more signally fulfilled. Again he tells her: “My utmost desire and ambition is to look steadily upon danger;” and his desire was accomplished. His intrepidity was complete. No form of death had power to daunt him. Once and again, when bound on some deadly enterprise of war, he calmly counts the chances whether or not he can compel his feeble body to bear him on till the work is done. A frame so delicately strung could not have been insensible to danger; but forgetfulness of self and the absorption of every faculty in the object before him, shut out the sense of fear. He seems always to have been at his best in the thick of battle; most complete in his mastery over himself and over others.

But it is in the intimacies of domestic life that one sees him most closely and especially in his letters to his mother, from whom he inherited his frail constitution, without the beauty that distinguished her.

The greatest happiness that I wish for here is to see you happy.” “If you stay much at home I will come and shut myself up with you for three weeks or a month and play at piquet from morning till night; and you shall laugh at my short red hair as much as you please.” The playing at piquet was a sacrifice to filial attachment; for the mother loved cards and the son did not. “Don’t trouble yourself about my room or my bedclothes; too much care and delicacy at this time would enervate me and complete the destruction of a tottering constitution. Such as it is, it must serve me now and I’ll make the best of it while it holds.”

At the beginning of the war his father tried to dissuade him from offering his services on board the fleet; and he replies in a letter to Mrs. Wolfe:

It is no time to think of what is convenient or agreeable; that service is certainly the best in which we are the most useful. For my part, I am determined never to give myself a moment’s concern about the nature of the duty which His Majesty is pleased to order us upon. It will be a sufficient comfort to you two, as far as my person is concerned, — at least it will be a reasonable consolation, — to reflect that the Power which has hitherto preserved me may, if it be his pleasure, continue to do so; if not, that it is but a few days or a few years more or less and that those who perish in their duty and in the service of their country die honorably.”

Then he proceeds to give particular directions about his numerous dogs, for the welfare of which in his absence he provides with anxious solicitude, especially for “my friend Caesar, who has great merit and much good-humor.”

After the unfortunate expedition against Rochefort, when the board of general officers appointed to inquire into the affair were passing the highest encomiums upon his conduct, his parents were at Bath and he took possession of their house at Blackheath, whence he wrote to his mother:

I lie in your chamber, dress in the General’s little parlor and dine where you did. The most perceptible difference and change of affairs (exclusive of the bad table I keep) is the number of dogs in the yard; but by coaxing Ball [his father’s dog] and rubbing his back with my stick, I have reconciled him with the new ones and put them in some measure under his protection.”

When about to sail on the expedition against Louisbourg, he was anxious for his parents and wrote to his uncle, Major Wolfe, at Dublin:

I trust you will give the best advice to my mother and such assistance, if it should be wanted, as the distance between you will permit. I mention this because the General seems to decline apace and narrowly escaped being carried off in the spring. She, poor woman, is in a bad state of health and needs the care of some friendly hand. She has long and painful fits of illness, which by succession and inheritance are likely to devolve on me, since I feel the early symptoms of them.”

Of his friends Guy Carleton, afterwards Lord Dorchester and George Warde, the companion of his boyhood, he also asks help for his mother in his absence.

His part in the taking of Louisbourg greatly increased his reputation. After his return he went to Bath to recruit his health; and it seems to have been here that he wooed and won Miss Katherine Lowther, daughter of an ex-Governor of Barbadoes and sister of the future Lord Lonsdale. A betrothal took place and Wolfe wore her portrait till the night before his death. It was a little before this engagement that he wrote to his friend Lieutenant-Colonel Rickson:

I have this day signified to Mr. Pitt that he may dispose of my slight carcass as he pleases and that I am ready for any undertaking within the compass of my skill and cunning. I am in a very bad condition both with the gravel and rheumatism; but I had much rather die than decline any kind of service that offers. If I followed my own taste it would lead me into Germany. However, it is not our part to choose but to obey. My opinion is that I shall join the army in America.”

Pitt chose him to command the expedition then fitting out against Quebec; made him a major-general, though, to avoid giving offence to older officers, he was to hold that rank in America alone; and permitted him to choose his own staff. Appointments made for merit and not through routine and patronage, shocked the Duke of Newcastle, to whom a man like Wolfe was a hopeless enigma; and he told George II. that Pitt’s new general was mad. “Mad is he?” returned the old King; “then I hope he will bite some others of my generals.”

At the end of January the fleet was almost ready and Wolfe wrote to his uncle Walter:

I am to act a greater part in this business than I wished. The backwardness of some of the older officers has in some measure forced the Government to come down so low. I shall do my best and leave the rest to fortune, as perforce we must when there are not the most commanding abilities. We expect to sail in about three weeks. A London life and little exercise disagrees entirely with me but the sea still more. If I have health and constitution enough for the campaign, I shall think myself a lucky man; what happens afterwards is of no great consequence.”

He sent to his mother an affectionate letter of farewell, went to Spithead, embarked with Admiral Saunders in the ship “Neptune,” and set sail on the seventeenth of February. In a few hours the whole squadron was at sea, the transports, the frigates and the great line-of-battle ships, with their ponderous armament and their freight of rude humanity armed and trained for destruction; while on the heaving deck of the “Neptune,” wretched with sea-sickness and racked with pain, stood the gallant invalid who was master of it all.

The fleet consisted of twenty-two ships of the line, with frigates, sloops-of-war and a great number of transports. When Admiral Saunders arrived with his squadron off Louisbourg, he found the entrance blocked by ice and was forced to seek harborage at Halifax. The squadron of Admiral Holmes, which had sailed a few days earlier, proceeded to New York to take on board troops destined for the expedition, while the squadron of Admiral Durell steered for the St. Lawrence to intercept the expected ships from France. In May the whole fleet, except the ten ships with Durell, was united in the harbor of Louisbourg. Twelve thousand troops were to have been employed for the expedition; but several regiments expected from the West Indies were for some reason countermanded, while the accessions from New York and the Nova Scotia garrisons fell far short of the looked-for numbers. Three weeks before leaving Louisbourg, Wolfe writes to his uncle Walter that he has an army of nine thousand men. The actual number seems to have been somewhat less.[1] “Our troops are good,” he informs Pitt; “and if valor can make amends for the want of numbers, we shall probably succeed.”

[1: See Grenville Correspondence, I. 305.]

Three brigadiers, all in the early prime of life, held command under him: Monckton, Townshend and Murray. They were all his superiors in birth and one of them, Townshend, never forgot that he was so. “George Townshend,” says Walpole, “has thrust himself again into the service; and, as far as wrongheadedness will go, is very proper for a hero.”[2] The same caustic writer says further that he was of “a proud, sullen and contemptuous temper,” and that he “saw everything in an ill-natured and ridiculous light.”[3] Though his perverse and envious disposition made him a difficult colleague, Townshend had both talents and energy; as also had Monckton, the same officer who commanded at the capture of Beauséjour in 1755. Murray, too, was well matched to the work in hand, in spite of some lingering remains of youthful rashness.

[2: Horace Walpole, Letters III. 207 (ed. Cunningham, 1857).]

[3: Ibid. George II., II. 345.]

On the sixth of June the last ship of the fleet sailed out of Louisbourg harbor, the troops cheering and the officers drinking to the toast, “British colors on every French fort, port and garrison in America.” The ships that had gone before lay to till the whole fleet was reunited and then all steered together for the St. Lawrence. From the headland of Cape Egmont, the Micmac hunter, gazing far out over the shimmering sea, saw the horizon flecked with their canvas wings, as they bore northward on their errand of havoc.

NOTE: For the material of the foregoing sketch of Wolfe I am indebted to Wright’s excellent Life of him and the numerous letters contained in it. Several autograph letters which have escaped the notice of Mr. Wright are preserved in the Public Record Office. The following is a characteristic passage from one of these, written on board the “Neptune,” at sea, on the sixth of June, the day when the fleet sailed from Louisbourg. It is directed to a nobleman of high rank in the army, whose name does not appear, the address being lost (War Office Records: North America, various, 1756-1763): “I have had the honour to receive two letters from your Lordship, one of an old date, concerning my stay in this country [after the capture of Louisbourg,] in answer to which I shall only say that the Marshal told me I was to return at the end of the campaign; and as General Amherst had no other commands than to send me to winter at Halifax under the orders of an officer [Brigadier Lawrence] who was but a few months before put over my head, I thought it was much better to get into the way of service and out of the way of being insulted; and as the style of your Lordship’s letter is pretty strong, I must take the liberty to inform you that … rather than receive orders in the Government [of Nova Scotia] from an officer younger than myself (though a very worthy man), I should certainly have desired leave to resign my commission; for as I neither ask nor expect any favour, so I never intend to submit to any ill-usage whatsoever.”

Many other papers in the Public Record Office have been consulted in preparing the above chapter, including the secret instructions of the King to Wolfe and to Saunders and the letters of Amherst to Wolfe and to Pitt. Other correspondence touching the same subjects is printed in Selections from the Public Documents of Nova Scotia, 441-450. Knox, Mante and Entick are the best contemporary printed sources.

A story has gained currency respecting the last interview of Wolfe with Pitt, in which he is said to have flourished his sword and boasted of what he would achieve. This anecdote was told by Lord Temple, who was present at the interview, to Mr. Grenville, who, many years after, told it to Earl Stanhope, by whom it was made public. That the incident underwent essential changes in the course of these transmissions, — which extended over more than half a century, for Earl Stanhope was not born till 1805, — can never be doubted by one who considers the known character of Wolfe, who may have uttered some vehement expression but who can never be suspected of gasconade.

From Montcalm and Wolfe, Chapter 24 by Francis Parkman

To be continued.

The below is from Francis Parkman’s Preface to this book.

A very large amount of unpublished material has been used in its preparation, consisting for the most part of documents copied from the archives and libraries of France and England, especially from the Archives de la Marine et des Colonies, the Archives de la Guerre, and the Archives Nationales at Paris, and the Public Record Office and the British Museum at London. The papers copied for the present work in France alone exceed six thousand folio pages of manuscript, additional and supplementary to the “Paris Documents” procured for the State of New York under the agency of Mr. Brodhead. The copies made in England form ten volumes, besides many English documents consulted in the original manuscript. Great numbers of autograph letters, diaries, and other writings of persons engaged in the war have also been examined on this side of the Atlantic.

I owe to the kindness of the present Marquis de Montcalm the permission to copy all the letters written by his ancestor, General Montcalm, when in America, to members of his family in France. General Montcalm, from his first arrival in Canada to a few days before his death, also carried on an active correspondence with one of his chief officers, Bourlamaque, with whom he was on terms of intimacy. These autograph letters are now preserved in a private collection. I have examined them and obtained copies of the whole. They form an interesting complement to the official correspondence of the writer, and throw the most curious side-lights on the persons and events of the time.

Besides manuscripts, the printed matter in the form of books, pamphlets, contemporary newspapers, and other publications relating to the American part of the Seven Years’ War, is varied and abundant; and I believe I may safely say that nothing in it of much consequence has escaped me. The liberality of some of the older States of the Union, especially New York and Pennsylvania, in printing the voluminous records of their colonial history, has saved me a deal of tedious labor.

The whole of this published and unpublished mass of evidence has been read and collated with extreme care, and more than common pains have been taken to secure accuracy of statement. The study of books and papers, however, could not alone answer the purpose. The plan of the work was formed in early youth; and though various causes have long delayed its execution, it has always been kept in view. Meanwhile, I have visited and examined every spot where events of any importance in connection with the contest took place, and have observed with attention such scenes and persons as might help to illustrate those I meant to describe. In short, the subject has been studied as much from life and in the open air as at the library table.

BOSTON, Sept. 16, 1884.

MORE INFORMATION