Death or Victory

by Dan Snow

  The autumn of 1759 was a glorious time for the British patriot. News of victories came in with such rapidity that there was barely time to restock ale houses and build another bonfire. Wolfe’s dismal dispatch of 2 September had arrived in London on 14 October. Pitt was furious at Wolfe and both he and Newcastle assumed that Quebec would not fall in 1759. The King remained more positive, his mood bolstered by Anson, the First Lord of the Admiralty, whose good cheer was probably due to the fact that he had not bothered reading the dispatch. It was published, with the sensitive parts omitted, on 16 October. However, by a quirk of transatlantic communications news of the triumphant victory arrived that very night. Pitt scrawled a quick message to the Duke of Newcastle, his pen unable to keep up with his euphoria. ‘Mr Secretary Pitt has the pleasure to send the Duke of Newcastle the joyful news,’ he wrote, ‘that Quebec is taken, after a signal and complete victory over the French army.’ ‘Mr Wolfe is killed,’ he continued, ‘Brig Monckton wounded but in a fair way—Brig Townshend perfectly well—Montcalm is killed + about 1500 French.’82

  As the news raced through the population there was a universal, spontaneous outburst of celebration. In London there was ‘riot and rapture’ according to Tobias Smollett.83 Candles lit every window and firecrackers exploded on the streets. Every village followed suit. A local clergyman, R. Leeke, wrote to Townshend’s mother describing the local ‘festival of joy’. ‘Our bells were set a ringing forthwith,’ he reported. ‘A great bonfire was prepared’ and two barrels of beer provided, while the sound of music and guns filled the air. The bonfire was seen for ‘ten miles around, all of the parish assembled round it; men and women danced and drunk all night before it they danced and sung all the militia songs and dances’. ‘The bells rung and guns fired,’ he continued, ‘and never ceased till daylight in the morning the field was full of people, of our own and strangers who came far and near to the new and wonderful sight.’84 Another correspondent reported to Lady Townshend from Fakenham where ‘bells have rang here since Thursday last and still continue, on Saturday when the gazette came we had public rejoicings feastings and illuminations of all kinds’. Four days later he wrote again reporting that ‘our rejoicings are not yet over’. Sheep were roasted whole, ‘barrels of beer are daily given away in every little village around us’, and ‘on Monday a bullock and a sheep were roasted whole on the beacon hill in the road’. At two other nearby towns there were ‘better illuminations than ever known’.85 At Bradbourne in Derbyshire George Burkston wrote that there was ‘frequent shouting and hearty rejoicing’.86 British troops serving with the allied army on the Continent lined up by battalion and fired a feu de joie.

  The British colonies in North America more than matched the jubilation of the mother country. Candles were placed in windows, bonfires burnt in every open space, and towns rang with the peal of church bells. The twenty-fifth of October was set aside as a day of thanksgiving in Massachusetts Bay. Monuments were planned for Boston and one erected in New York. On Manhattan Island, just west of today’s junction of 15th Street and Eighth Avenue, an obelisk stood for over a century. In the nineteenth century it was a popular destination for day-tripping New Yorkers.87 When the news reached Philadelphia a full royal salute was fired; the next evening the town was illuminated and fireworks were let off. In Rhode Island one pastor scolded his flock over their ‘carnal joy which degenerates into rioting and debauchery, into revelling and drunkenness’.88 No one doubted that this was the end of New France. Generations of hostility, competition, ambushes, and outright war had bred a visceral hatred for the French empire. In his thanksgiving sermon on 16 October, Samuel Cooper, Pastor of Brattle Street church in Boston, painted a bright picture of a future in which British America could seize the opportunities presented by the near limitless continent now that vast and threatening entity was on the brink of extinction. The French had used ‘savages to drench our borders with the blood of the unarmed’. Now the New World would see ‘peace, prosperity and unhindered commercial expansion’.89 Few did not think that they were witnessing the greatest strategic realignment of their lives and yet nobody could have guessed just how far reaching this change would be.

  On both sides of the Atlantic the active press whipped their ever expanding pool of readers into paroxysms. A young Edmund Burke wrote that ‘the effect of so joyful news, immediately on such a dejection, and then the mixture of grief and pity which attended the public congratulations and applauses, was very singular and affecting’. The loss of Wolfe was the only blemish: ‘However glorious this victory was and however important in its consequences, it must be admitted that it was very dearly bought. Soldiers may be raised; officers will be formed by experience; but the loss of a genius in war is a loss that we know not how to repair.’ In fact, his martyrdom gave the victory even more drama, and significance. In Britain panegyricists like Burke were already promoting Wolfe to the pantheon of British military greats. ‘The death of Wolfe,’ he wrote, ‘was indeed grievous to his country, but to himself the most happy that can be imagined, and the most envied by all those who have a true relish for military glory.’90

  Newspapers competed with melodramatic poetry spilling from their pages. Detailed accounts of the battle and of Wolfe’s career filled special editions. Horace Walpole believed that the circumstances of the victory and the timing of Wolfe’s death fired people’s fascination. ‘The incidents of dramatic fiction,’ he wrote,

  could not be conducted with more address to lead an audience from despondency to sudden exaltation, than accident prepared to excite the passions of a whole people. They despaired, they triumphed and they wept, for Wolfe had fallen in the hour of victory. Joy, curiosity, astonishment, were painted on every countenance; the more they enquired the higher their admiration rose. Not an incident but was heroic and affecting.91

  David Garrick’s play Harlequin’s Invasion played to packed houses in London and it featured a specially composed song, with words penned by the great thespian himself: ‘Hearts of Oak’.

  Come, cheer up, my lads, ‘tis to glory we steer, To add something more to this wonderful year; To honour we call you, as freemen not slaves, For who are as free as the sons of the waves?

  Heart of oak are our ships, jolly tars are our men, We always are ready; Steady, boys, steady! We’ll fight and we’ll conquer again and again.

  It is still the official march of the British and Canadian navies. In Chatham a First Rate ship had been laid down on a sunny July day in 1759. Following the remarkable successes on land and sea in that year the decision was made to name her Victory. Many years later she too would take her place in British imperial folklore.

  In two areas there were no bonfires, no shouts, and no muskets fired into the night sky. At Westerham in Kent and Blackheath local people mourned the fallen general. Wolfe had been born in Westerham and his mother now lived alone in Blackheath. Wolfe’s death deprived her of the company of the last of her three men. Her husband had died earlier in the year and her only other child, her son Edward, was buried in Flanders, the victim of an earlier war.

  Soon official praise was added to the spontaneous public outpourings. Parliament met in November and Pitt eulogized Wolfe’s achievement by making comparisons with those of classical warriors. He painted a picture for the House of the dark night, the precipice, and the measureless empire that, he clearly assumed, would fall into Britain’s lap following the taking of its capital. The thanks of the House were given to the admirals and generals for the ‘glorious and successful expedition against Quebec’ and an address made to the King, begging him to construct a monument in Westminster Abbey to the memory of Wolfe. ‘Pardon us, most gracious sovereign,’ it went, ‘if we suspend awhile our otherwise unclouded joy, to lament the loss of that gallant general. How gloriously he finished his short, but brilliant career.’92

  On Sunday, 17 November 1759, a stone casket was lowered down the side of the Royal William which was at anchor off Portsmouth having arrived from Canada the day before.
She had left Canada on 25 September and had hit a rock in the St Lawrence that might well have sunk her had part of it not broken off and formed a neat plug. The casket had been removed from the ruins of one of the convents in Quebec and inside it were the remains of Wolfe. It was placed in a twelve-oared barge which was taken in tow by two others and slowly made its way towards the port accompanied by a formation of twelve other barges. The flotilla took an hour to get to shore. Every minute a cannon roared out from Spithead. At 0900 hours the body was landed, watched by the old and lame infantrymen who were given the task of garrisoning Portsmouth thus freeing younger and fresher men for active duty. The coffin was placed on a hearse and two of Wolfe’s intimate friends and subordinates, both of them wounded, Captain Harvey Smyth and Captain Delaune (an officer of the light infantry that stormed up the slopes of the Anse au Foulon), accompanied it in a carriage behind as it set off for London. Through the city the soldiers accompanied the cortège with reversed arms. The muffled church bells tolled and thousands of spectators lined the route. They were bound for Blackheath where Wolfe would lie in his mother’s hall under a black pall heaped with laurel leaves.

  On 20 November his body was interred in St Alfege’s church in Greenwich beside that of his father. There were just five mourners. His mother was left in dire financial straits partly as a result of her son’s overgenerosity in his will. She made an appeal to both Pitt and the Duke of Newcastle but met with no success. The War Office even refused to pay her Wolfe’s salary as a commander in chief. Katherine Lowther, Wolfe’s fiancée, was sent the miniature that she had given Wolfe before he left for North America. His will had specified that it was to be set in precious stones and returned to her. She would go on to marry the Duke of Bolton but tradition has it that even late in life she always wore a pearl necklace given to her by her first fiancé.

  Wolfe was canonized: the first truly British, as opposed to English, hero. In death he was more useful to the British imperial project than he had been alive. He became the personification of military virtue: strategic grasp, tactical brilliance, and compassion for his men. He was turned into a shining example to all those commanders who followed. No aspect of his short life was not rewritten; even his place of birth was fair game as pamphleteers from Yorkshire and Kent claimed him as a native son. Seven books about the Quebec campaign or Wolfe himself were published before the end of 1759, including the first of many Wolfe biographies. Poems, articles, and songs were soon followed by the visual art. Allegedly Wolfe’s face was too decayed by the time his corpse arrived back in Britain to be much use to sculptors and portrait painters so a servant of Lord Gower that was said to look very like Wolfe posed instead. By the end of the eighteenth century this representation of Wolfe was the most recognized image in Britain, his collected writings sat in the luggage of all young officers, and the scene of his death had become the template for all subsequent martyrs of empire.

  One image, in particular, was to become the most reproduced piece of art in the eighteenth century and arguably ignited a revolution in the way that British art dealt with historical events. Benjamin West was 35, American, and deeply ambitious when he arrived in England for the first time in 1763. He had just finished spending three years studying classical sculpture and neo-classicism in Italy. Over the next eight years he planned and painted the definitive representation of Wolfe’s death at the moment of victory. The Death of General Wolfe was a bold modernization of the traditional form of history painting. A reverence for Greece and Rome had dictated that all heroic scenes had to use the visual idiom of that golden age of virtue and heroism. Busts of Wolfe showed him in a Roman cuirass and toga, his eyes turned heavenward in imitation of the greatest of them all, Alexander. But West painted the scene with a new ‘realism’. The figures were in contemporary dress, and though obviously idealized, there was a verity in the action and expressions. Critics suggested that this new fashion for accuracy might make it look dated when the costumes portrayed in it went out of fashion themselves. Roman dress was timeless; the central message of patriotic sacrifice could never be obscured. But their voices were ignored. By the late eighteenth century contemporary dress in paintings became the norm. West certainly took credit for this revolution, and while other artists had led the way his Death of General Wolfe was certainly the most popular expression of this new movement.

  The painting built on the classical form rather than dispensed with it. Wolfe sprawls, near death, like the great Epaminondas surrounded by his band of brothers. Ships in the background and a noble-looking Native American in the foreground place the tableau squarely in America. The crowd around Wolfe is a curious mix of people, some, like Lieutenant Browne, who were almost certainly there, and others who were certainly not such as Fraser, who was recuperating from his wound far from the battlefield, Monckton, who had been dragged off wounded, and Barré, who was nowhere near Wolfe when he died. Townshend is curiously absent and Murray refused to sit for it, so great was his dislike of Wolfe. West was not looking for precise accuracy. There was, he believed, ‘no other way of representing the death of a hero but by an epic representation of it’. A realistic painting of Wolfe, his body broken, slowly drowning in his own blood, in simple battle dress, supported by a grenadier and a lowly lieutenant would not support the Wolfe myth. ‘To move the mind,’ West insisted, ‘there should be a spectacle presented to raise and warm the mind, and all should be proportioned to the highest idea conceived of the hero.’93 What matters about West’s painting is not the minute discussions by historians as to accuracies and inaccuracies but the effect it had on Britain, America, and the world. Like Shakespeare’s rendering of so many characters from British history, West created a conception of Wolfe that has endured to this day despite determined attempts to correct it.

  It was wildly popular. Lord Grosvenor snapped up the original for £400. George III joined the party late and bought a copy for £315. It was not universally popular though. David Garrick, who was one of the first to see the canvas, thought he could improve on a hero’s death scene and acted one out in front of the painting to the delight of the considerable crowd. The engraving, when it was finally produced, was hugely successful. Around ten thousand prints were sold by 1790. European entrepreneurs issued pirated versions of the painting. Josiah Wedgwood mass-produced ceramic jugs with a version of Wolfe’s death for a burgeoning middle class to augment their tea tables. They were even sold, remarkably, in France. There François-Louis-Joseph Watteau designed a print, Mort de General Montcalm, in the early 1780s that deliberately aped the composition of The Death of General Wolfe to reflect the shared sacrifice on that epic field of battle. According to West the painting would eventually catch the eye of the great Horatio, Lord Nelson. West told Britain’s greatest admiral that ‘I fear your intrepidity will yet furnish me such another scene.’ Nelson replied, ‘Then I hope that I shall die in the next battle.’ His wish was granted and West duly painted The Death of Lord Nelson, a visual paean to another of Britain’s imperial heroes.94

  Any voice that dissented from the wave of idolization was swept aside. Those who whispered of Wolfe’s failings on the campaign were silenced by outraged commentators. A group around Townshend who agitated gently for a more realistic reappraisal of Wolfe’s role was decried as jealous, unpatriotic ingrates. Townshend eventually even challenged the Duke of Albemarle to a duel, thinking him the author of a critical anonymous pamphlet. The siege could have claimed its last victim but the dispute was peacefully resolved.

  The twenty-ninth of November 1759 was proclaimed a day of thanksgiving for Quebec; only a fortnight after another day was earmarked to celebrate the crushing naval victory at Quiberon Bay and the lifting of the threat of invasion. By year’s end Horace Walpole wrote that the church bells of Britain were ‘threadbare with ringing for victory’.95 For Britain’s enemies it was a year bereft of any comfort whatsoever. France’s navy, empire, trade, and prospects were in tatters. Even the mighty French army had been categorically defeated
on the Continent. King Charles of Spain, who had so far adopted an unfriendly neutrality and would soon declare for France, heard the news about Quebec and told the French Ambassador in Spain that his blood turned to ice.96

  One British officer wrote to a friend pondering the year’s momentous events. He believed that ‘the kingdom of France perhaps was never more reduced in its naval power than at this era of time before us’. ‘The French,’ he continued, ‘are at this instant but seldom seen upon the ocean, for this plain reason only, because they have been beat and burnt out of it by the English.’ It was ‘not for me to determine’ where this ‘superiority over the grand disturber of Europe’ had suddenly sprung from. It could have been ‘owing to the great increases of riches and commerce in England of late years’. Or it could be ‘the people in general may have taken a more martial turn’. Either way Britain’s sudden transformation into global hegemon was as welcome as it was unexpected. There was no such uncertainty about the ‘most arduous undertaking, and the most important achievement that has taken place since the beginning of this war’. It was the ‘extraordinary expedition’ to capture Quebec.97 A commemorative medal was issued, showing Britannia and her trident with ‘Wolfe’ and ‘Saunders’ written in the legend. The inclusion of Saunders’ name suggests that contemporaries were happier to remember the role of the navy than posterity has been.

  Amidst such celebrations many believed that the greatest danger now was overconfidence. Captain Augustus Hervey, who had covered himself with glory during the naval encounters of the Seven Years War thus far, hoped that the successes of the year ‘will not elate us too much, and induce our leaders to carry on a very expensive war, which in the end is always doubtful—but let it incline us to close an honourable and lasting—though perhaps less advantageous peace than uncertain victories if obtained might give us’.98