All the King’s Men, page 21
Moments later, one of his helpers glanced back at the mêlée and cried: ‘They run, see how they run!’
‘Who runs?’ asked a semi-conscious Wolfe, almost forgetting where he was.
‘The enemy, sir. Egad, they give way everywhere.’
The words returned Wolfe to the moment, and his response was typically professional. ‘Go one of you, my lads, to Colonel Burton,’ he gasped. ‘Tell him to march Webb’s regiment [48th Foot] with all speed to Charles’s River, to cut off the retreat of the fugitives from the bridge.’
Then, certain in the belief that the battle was won and his reputation secure, he turned on his side and uttered: ‘Now, God be praised, I will die in peace.’28
He expired soon after with, according to one account, a smile on his face.29
The battle, however, was far from over. Though the French regulars were no longer capable of resistance, the Canadian militiamen were fighting a stubborn rearguard action in the scrub that lined the escarpment above the Saint-Charles River, enabling many of their fleeing comrades to reach the relative safety of either Beauport, via the bridge that Wolfe had intended Webb’s Regiment to secure, or Quebec. The first British battalion to be repulsed by the Canadians’ fire was Fraser’s Highlanders, their swords still bloody from the massacre of the regulars. ‘They killed and wounded a great many of our men, and killed two Officers,’ recalled a young subaltern called Malcolm Fraser, the son of a Jacobite who had died at Culloden, ‘which obliged us to retire a little, and form again.’30
But it was only when the 58th Foot and a battalion of the Royal Americans arrived that the bush was finally cleared, and not before the Highlanders had lost 170 of their 500 men, prompting Malcolm Fraser to question the sense of attacking with cold steel. ‘I dare say [the Highlanders’ charge] increased [the French] panic,’ he wrote, ‘but saved many of their lives, whereas if the artillery had been allowed to play, and the army advanced regularly there would have been more of the enemy killed and wounded.’31
With Wolfe hors de combat, Monckton took command. But within minutes he was shot through the lungs and carried from the field, the command now devolving on Brigadier Townshend. ‘He immediately quitted the Left Wing,’ recorded Corporal Johnson of the 58th, ‘and hastened to the centre of the Line, where Brigadier General Murray commanded; and finding the Centre pursuing the Enemy, in a confused and disorderly manner, he Rallyed them again with all haste. For at this very juncture Monsieur Bougainville arrived with a Body of Two Thousand men, in the Rear of our Army.’32
The time was now well after midday and, as Wolfe had feared, Colonel Bougainville had marched from Cap-Rouge to the sound of battle with the bulk of his command, including his formidable grenadiers. Hastily forming his men for action, the colonel seemed determined to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat or perish in the attempt. But, fortunately for his men, he let discretion be the better part of valour and chose not to attack, put off by the presence of Howe’s Light Infantry and a battalion of the Royal Americans that were guarding the British rear, and the imminent arrival of two more battalions – the 35th and 48th – and two cannon that had been sent by Townshend. ‘Bougainville immediately retired at their approach,’ remembered Johnson, ‘and very prudently declined attacking a Conquering Army.’33 He withdrew the way he had come, and Townshend chose not to follow, later explaining to Pitt that he did not want to ‘risk the fruit of so decisive a day’.34 As darkness fell, the British victory was confirmed.
Compared to previous British successes (and defeats for that matter), the casualties sustained by Wolfe’s force at Quebec were relatively light. It suffered 664 killed and wounded out of a total force of 4,500 – or slightly less than 15 per cent; at Blenheim, by contrast, Allied casualties were closer to one in four. French losses of around 1,500 killed, wounded and taken prisoner out of a similar-sized force as the British were also proportionately much lighter than the 57 per cent casualties they had sustained at Blenheim. What sets Quebec apart, however, is the unprecedented loss of senior officers on both sides. The French commander, the Marquis de Montcalm, was mortally wounded during the retreat of his regular troops, struck by a shell fragment as he tried to negotiate the unruly mob at the Saint-Louis Gate to the city, and died in Quebec a day later. His second-in-command was also killed during the battle, as was the commander of the Canadian militia on the right wing. Senior British casualties included Wolfe, killed, and Monckton, Isaac Barré (quartermaster-general), Guy Carleton (adjutant-general) and Hervey Smyth (Wolfe’s aide-de-camp) all wounded. Barré lost an eye and later the sight in the other.
The news of Wolfe’s death was received by British troops with universal sadness and regret. Private Humphrys of the 28th described it as ‘an irreparable loss’.35 Lieutenant Browne, who had comforted Wolfe in his final moments, told his father that ‘even the soldiers dropped tears, who were but the minute before driving their bayonets through the French.’ He added: ‘I can’t compare it to anything better, than to a family in tears and sorrow which had just lost their father, their friend and their whole dependence.’36 Another officer wrote: ‘Our joy at this success is inexpressibly damped by the loss we sustain of one of the greatest heroes that this or any other age can boast of.’37
It was not only professional soldiers who mourned his death. ‘Thus fell a noble, a much loved, a much lamented officer,’ wrote the British volunteer to a friend. ‘Britain must regret the loss, but in the day of danger, may she never want a commander with the qualities of a Wolfe, to support her rights, and fight the battles of honour and liberty.’38
Less effusive was the mention of Wolfe in the General Orders issued by Townshend and Murray, the two unscathed generals (and Wolfe’s biggest critics in the lead-up to the battle), the following day. Having congratulated the troops for their ‘conduct and bravery’, they added a lukewarm and not entirely genuine ‘wish that the person who lately commanded them had survived so glorious a day, and had this day been able to give the troops their just encomiums’.39
A day earlier, with the fighting over, Townshend had ordered his exhausted men to fortify their position in case the French tried to counter-attack. They slept that night at their improvised barricades, muskets in hand, amidst the detritus of battle, their nostrils assailed by the stench of gunpowder and death. Most of the British wounded had been evacuated to the field hospital on the Île-d’Orléans – where medical treatment had changed little since Blenheim, and amputation without anaesthetic was still the norm for mangled limbs – but many French casualties were left to die overnight among the piles of bloodied corpses and heaps of discarded equipment.
The feared counter-attack never came, but it was certainly debated. When asked by Governor-General Vaudreuil for his advice that afternoon, the dying Montcalm gave him three options: surrender the colony; retire to the Jacques Cartier River, closer to Montreal; or attack the following day, using Bougainville’s men and the survivors of the battle. Vaudreuil opted for the last course, and argued strongly for it at a council of war in Quebec during the evening of the 13th. But he could not persuade the surviving senior officers, who, according to one witness, were ‘exaggerating somewhat the loss we had suffered’ and ‘all voted unanimously that the army should retreat.’40 At 9 p.m. the remnants of Montcalm’s army fled east along the Saint-Charles River, abandoning most of its supplies, ammunition and guns at Beauport. ‘It was not a retreat,’ recorded Montcalm’s aide-de-camp, ‘but an abominable flight.’41
Vaudreuil went with them, leaving instructions for the city commandant, Chevalier de Ramezay, to defend Quebec until he ran out of supplies. But Townshend soon forced the issue by preparing siege batteries for an assault, using naval guns dragged up the cliff at Anse-au-Foulon. ‘We got up 12 heavy 24 Pounders,’ recalled the sergeant-major of the Louisbourg Grenadiers, ‘six heavy Twelve Pounders, some large mortars, and the 48 inch Howitzers to play upon the Town, and had been employed three days, intending to make the breach, and storm the City sword in hand, but were prevented by their beating a parley, and sending out a Flag of Truce with Articles of Capitulation.’42
Menaced both by Townshend’s batteries and seven of Admiral Saunders’s biggest warships that, during the morning of the 17th, were sailed close to the Lower Town, de Ramezay asked for terms. Most had been granted by the time de Ramezay received new instructions from Vaudreuil to hold on because a relief army was rapidly approaching. He ignored them, and the terms were duly signed on the 18th. In return for surrendering the city, de Ramezay and the garrison of 600 men were given passage to France with the honours of war, while the inhabitants kept their property and their freedom to practise as Roman Catholics. That evening, British troops took possession of the city and its formidable arsenal of weapons, including no fewer than ‘250 Pieces of Cannon, a Number of mortars, from 9 to fifteen inches, Field-Pieces, Howitzers, etc., with a large Quantity of Artillery-Stores’.43
News of Wolfe’s victory and the subsequent fall of Quebec were received in London on 16 October with a mixture of delight and relief, for on that very day the London Gazette had published Wolfe’s despondent dispatch of 2 September. On reading the dispatch, Pitt had convinced himself that Quebec would not fall to British arms that year, and that his appointment of Wolfe had been a mistake. Others, like Horace Walpole, thought the expedition was bound to end in bloody failure. Pitt’s relief was palpable as he wrote to the Duke of Newcastle of ‘the joyful news, that Quebec is taken, after a signal and compleat Victory over the French army’.44
Next day, the London Gazette trumpeted this rapid change of fortune in Canada and, as the news spread through the country, celebrations erupted on a scale not seen since Blenheim: bonfires blazed, cannon boomed, bells rang out and toasts were drunk, including one in Bradford-upon-Avon to ‘our brave countrymen in America, and the immortal memory of their late brave commander General Wolfe’.45
It is easy to see why 1759 is remembered as the ‘Year of Victories’. First there was the capture of Fort Duquesne by Brigadier-General Forbes; then followed conquests at Gorée in Africa, Guadeloupe in the West Indies, and Niagara, Ticonderoga and Crown Point in North America; and finally there were triumphs over the French on land and sea in Europe, the former at Minden in Germany, on 1 August, when an unsupported force of British infantry set the tone by defeating the cream of the enemy horse (though the victory would have been even more complete if Lord George Sackville, commanding the British cavalry, had not three times refused an order to charge the beaten enemy), and the latter at Quiberon Bay, on 20 November, when Admiral Hawke destroyed the remnants of French sea power.
Yet none of these victories captured the public’s imagination like Wolfe’s triumph at Quebec. This was partly because the success was so unexpected, partly because of the bold and dramatic nature of the operation, but mainly because both commanders were mortally wounded during the battle, Wolfe dying as victory was all but certain. ‘For Britons still facing the prospect of French invasion,’ writes a recent biographer, ‘Wolfe epitomized a new mood of patriotic defiance, and a revival of national pride. His prominence in the annus mirabilis of 1759, which saw British victories on three continents, was only reinforced by the exploits of his old regiment, the 20th Foot, that August at the Battle of Minden.’46
Wolfe’s hero status was at once confirmed in print, and later in verse and on canvas. Two hastily produced articles for the London Magazine set the victory in context, emphasizing Wolfe’s excellent conduct during the War of the Austrian Succession, particularly at Lauffeldt, and later speculating what he would have done at Rochefort if given the chance, and what he did do at Louisbourg. His experience and professionalism as a soldier, they concluded, had equipped him to meet and overcome the difficulties of his greatest challenge, where ‘his abilities shone out in their brightest lustre’.47
Wolfe’s obvious attraction for the public at large was that he was young, hard-working and talented, and had, to outward appearances at least, risen in the army thanks to merit rather than interest (the truth, of course, was that he had risen thanks to both). He was also free of any overt political affiliation and had in recent years, more thanks to luck than design, distanced himself from his old and now disgraced patron, the Duke of Cumberland. As the years passed, his popularity grew. In 1763 the Marsden Street Theatre in Manchester performed an ‘Emblematical Scene’ with the ‘General expiring in the arms of Minerva … And Fame, triumphing over Death, with this Motto: He can never be lost, who saves His Country’.48 The following year the artist Edward Penny produced a fairly accurate if unremarkable painting of Wolfe’s death, with the two grenadiers in their mitre caps, and a deathly pale Wolfe being tended by a surgeon, just yards from the British firing line. But it was easily eclipsed by a more romantic depiction of Wolfe’s last moments by the Anglo-American Benjamin West, first exhibited in 1771. In it, Wolfe is lying in a posture deliberately reminiscent of Christ taken down from the cross. He is surrounded by officers, including members of his staff, who were nowhere near when he died; and in the foreground sits a Native American, though Wolfe despised them as savages and let none serve in his ranks. It is, nevertheless, a magnificent work of art and became the most reproduced painting of the eighteenth century, sealing Wolfe’s reputation as an imperial martyr in the process, and inspiring the young Horatio Nelson to emulate his deeds. Years later, the then Admiral Lord Nelson asked West why he had done no more like it. ‘Because, my Lord,’ replied West, ‘there are no more subjects.’
‘Damn it,’ said Nelson. ‘I didn’t think of that.’
‘My Lord, I fear your intrepidity may yet furnish me with another such scene, and if it should, I shall certainly avail myself of it.’
‘Will you, Mr West?’ said a delighted Nelson. ‘Then I hope I shall die in the next battle.’49
The question is: did Wolfe deserve this adulation? Many at the time thought so, including the Marquess of Granby, the British commander at Minden, who told Pitt that had Wolfe lived he ‘would have done the greater honour to his country, as he would have been of the utmost service to it, nature having endow’d him with activity, resolution and perseverance, qualities absolutely necessary for executing great plans of operations, all of which he had taken care to improve by great application’.50 As a soldier of distinction in his own right, and a future commander-in-chief of the British Army, Granby’s opinion matters. And there is no doubt that, prior to the Quebec operation, Wolfe was generally recognized as an officer of outstanding talent, a brilliant motivator of men and a tactical innovator ahead of his time. Nonetheless, he was still a young and relatively inexperienced general when he was given the onerous task of capturing Quebec, and the pressure seems to have got to him. He displayed, in particular, a shaky grasp of strategy and proved incapable of getting the best out of his three brigadier-generals, who all, at one time or another, lost confidence in him.
And yet he managed to put all this behind him by launching a bold, if extremely risky, operation that succeeded partly because of French failings, and partly because of the novel battle tactics used by his own highly trained and motivated foot soldiers, tactics that he had introduced. If he had lived, might he have emulated Marlborough? We will never know. Certainly the Quebec operation revealed some deficiencies in his generalship that might have become, in the words of one biographer, ‘even more apparent had he lived to serve in the American War of Independence, particularly in the light of his robust attitude towards civilians in general and his often unguarded antipathy towards Americans’.51
This last judgement is perhaps a little harsh. Wolfe undoubtedly made mistakes during the Quebec operation – some of them serious – but he also showed a steely resolve to overcome his many difficulties. Nor should it be forgotten that it was his first experience of independent command, and that he was ever willing to learn from his own and others’ failings. He was certainly a huge inspiration to his men on 13 September 1759 when they performed one of the great feats of arms of the eighteenth century; and if he was not yet a great general, he might in time have become one.
He left, moreover, an important legacy: the simple but effective battle tactic – a close-quarter musket volley, followed by a bayonet charge – that British infantrymen would use to sweep all (or almost all) before them for much of the next hundred years.
Wolfe is remembered today as the Conqueror of Canada; but at the time of his death there was still much to be done to extinguish French political power in North America. On 18 October, Townshend returned to Britain, leaving Murray in command at Quebec. A week earlier Amherst had launched his long-awaited naval operation to destroy the French flotilla on Lake Champlain, the precursor to a surprise assault on Montreal. But the operation was only partially successful – with three French sloops destroyed – and once again Amherst returned to Crown Point, justifying this backward step by claiming that Quebec’s fall would cause the remnants of Montcalm’s army to make for Montreal. With Brigadier-General Gage still at Oswego, and no more operations planned until the following spring, this left the British at Quebec dangerously isolated.
The Chevalier de Lévis, Montcalm’s successor, was determined to take advantage, and in the spring of 1760 he marched his revitalized army of 7,000 men – including ten regular battalions – back to Quebec, camping close to the city on 27 April. The following day, though he had fewer than 4,000 redcoats fit for action, Murray led his entire force out of the city in an attempt to deny the French the high ground of the Buttes-à-Neveu. But instead of digging in and using his superior artillery, Murray, like Montcalm before him, chose to attack – with similar results. His men fought well, but they were outflanked and almost cut off from their retreat to Quebec. British casualties that day were over a thousand killed and wounded.
