In 1758 Pitt sent out a bold new American expedition of huge dimensions and astonishing ambition. It was a three-pronged attack on Canada, France’s largest settlement, centring on Quebec. Pitt believed that once Quebec was captured, Canada would fall to the English, and French power in North America would collapse. British and American troops were to come from New York in the south, the west and the east, the latter via a seaborne landing. The eastern expedition was intended to recapture Louisbourg, the strategically important capital of Cape Breton Island, and the western operation was to take back Fort Duquesne as Braddock had failed to do. Meanwhile, under Lord Abercromby, the British were to advance up the Hudson river from New York and destroy all the French forts guarding the route north.
To the surprise of many senior military staff, the task was entrusted to the command of young officers. But they were men in whom Pitt had seen leadership qualities–an ability to think the unthinkable and improvise under fire. All the officers he plucked out to command expeditions turned out to be superb generals. And they were inspired by Pitt himself. He imbued them with his own sense of purpose, of fighting for the Protestant free world. Louisbourg, the gateway to the St Lawrence, was captured that year against all the odds, chiefly because of Brigadier Wolfe’s bravery in establishing a beachhead under fire. From then on British arms triumphed. Fort Duquesne, the site of Braddock’s ambush, which would have been the key link between the French colonies in the south and Canada, was taken by John Forbes in a single assault and renamed Pittsburg. Meanwhile Colonel Bradstreet, a celebrated New Englander soldier who was known for his rapport with the Indians, captured the important Fort Frontenac. From then on the forts on Lake Ontario fell one after another, until the capture of Fort Niagara brought the Great Lakes under British control.
But the most astonishing feat of arms in the American campaign was the capture of Quebec by the thirty-three-year-old Wolfe, now a general. Letters detailing the British plans of attack for Canada had been stolen, so the Marquis de Montcalm, the gifted French commander, had enough time to move troops down to Quebec from Montreal further upriver. The city was bristling with guns and soldiers when the British arrived. Worse still, by the time the superb sailors among Wolfe’s team had picked their way up an often dangerously shallow river (they included James Cook, soon to become famous for his discoveries in the South Seas), Montcalm and his men had positioned themselves quite perfectly above them. Quebec was built on a headland known as the Heights of Abraham, and French troops were disposed round the citadel guarding every approach.
The only possible way into the city was therefore up the sheer cliffs rising from the St Lawrence to the Heights of Abraham. These great escarpments of chalk loomed impregnably above the British. Even if they could be climbed, and in any case there seemed nowhere to land from the river below, the French would be able to pick them off as they ascended. No one even considered the possibility of getting enough men up the cliffs to fight a battle, certainly not the 5,000 British soldiers whose tents sprawled as far as the eye could see on the south bank of the St Lawrence.
The rest of the summer of 1759 was spent by the British gazing at the city as it sparkled tantalizingly above them. The situation in their camps was made more gloomy because General Wolfe was coughing blood incessantly into a bowl by his bed, a victim of consumption. It had become clear to many from his emaciated looks and hacking cough that he was not long for this world. For most of that summer, his brigadiers were near despair, as day after day passed and Wolfe could not emerge from his tent. The season was ticking on. Autumn would soon arrive and once the St Lawrence froze all plans would have to be postponed until the following year when spring melted it again. The men could not be left indefinitely outside Quebec.
The few orders Wolfe did give seemed to make no difference. The canny Montcalm would not be lured out of his eyrie to protect the villages surrounding Quebec which Wolfe ordered his men to attack. The bombardment of Quebec from below had no effect. An attempt to storm Montcalm’s camp had been hopeless. Wolfe became so ill that he could scarcely lift his head, and he asked his seconds-in-command to draw up their own plans.
Then at the end of the long hot summer, when for a short time the consumption went into remission, the old Wolfe showed himself. He had an audacious plan, a gambler’s plan, the sort of plan that Pitt banked on his commanders having as a last resort. On a trip along the St Lawrence, Wolfe had noticed a tiny inlet the river had carved into the cliffs; he believed that if his soldiers could land there at night, they could scale the cliffs under cover of darkness and surprise the French in the morning.
At dead of night, Wolfe led the 5,000 British and American soldiers with blackened faces silently downriver in rowing boats till they were opposite the Heights of Abraham. As he was borne along the treacherous river whose rocks and shoals made it a hazard to all but Quebeçois, Wolfe softly read out his favourite poem, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray, published only a few years before, a copy of which his fiancée had just sent out to him from England. His thin face, touched by moonlight, seemed to wear a beatific expression as he murmured the sonorous words whose Romantic, melancholic spirit echoed his own. As the mysterious cliffs loomed up ahead and the men rested on their muffled oars, Wolfe closed the book. ‘Well, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘I had rather have written that poem than take Quebec.’ But then he leaped overboard, into the swirling St Lawrence, and ran ahead of them until his was only one of the many tiny figures on the vast cliff face pulling themselves up by ropes.
When dawn rose over Quebec, Montcalm awoke to see on the plain behind him, above the cliffs said to be unclimbable, row after row of British redcoats. They were in battle array and far outnumbered the French, whose sentries’ mangled bodies bestrewed the cliffs or floated in the river below. It was a breathtaking, almost impossible, feat, to have put thousands of men on top of a cliff overnight, but Wolfe had done it.
In a few hours it was all over; Quebec was taken by the British and Americans, who had fought like devils under Wolfe’s inspired leadership. Despite being hit by three musket balls, Wolfe allowed his wounds only to be hastily dressed before he encouraged the line to make the final charge that ensured victory, a victory achieved with just one cannon and no cavalry against an enemy armed to the teeth. As the smoke of battle cleared, and he was fainting from loss of blood, Wolfe saw that the French retreat had been cut off as he had directed. The next minute he was dead. Montcalm, too, died from wounds received that day.
Although the actual surrender of Canada to the British crown would not take place for another year, by holding Quebec and thus commanding the St Lawrence waterway, the British prevented the new French commander from bringing his troops up to relieve Montreal. When reports of Wolfe’s gallant death reached England, George II was so inspired by the story that he commissioned Benjamin West to paint a narrative picture of the dying Wolfe which may be seen today in the National Portrait Gallery.
As Pitt had vowed, with the exception of Louisiana in the south the French had been wiped from the face of North America. Their plan of linking Canada and Louisiana and preventing the English colonists from expanding west was in ashes. The extraordinary effort Pitt had exhorted from the colonists with every last drop of his being had come good when they had fought together in the first imperial war. In what became known as the year of victories, 1759, from all parts of the globe came nothing but encouraging news: Britain had captured important French settlements on the island of Goree off west Africa and in Senegal itself. The capture of Guadeloupe, one of the West Indian sugar islands, which had been attacked when the British failed to take Martinique, raised Pitt’s reputation to new heights among his fellow countrymen, as well as bringing £400,000 in income in one year alone. In India under the extraordinary Clive there had been a series of victories, which as in North America had driven the French off the Indian subcontinent. Most important was the Battle of Plassey in 1757, which secured the large area of Bengal in the nor
th-west as a British dependency ruled on behalf of Britain by a new nawab, Mir Jaffier. Sent there from the south, with 2,000 British troops and 5,000 sepoys, Clive destroyed the 40,000-strong army of France’s ally Siraj-ud-Daula.
Like Wolfe’s triumph on the Heights of Abraham, Plassey determined the shape of the future. Adding Bengal to the Karnatic made Britain the most powerful European presence in India; those territories became the basis for the British Empire in India. Though Clive retired to England on grounds of ill-health, his work was continued by Colonel Eyre Coote, who had been at Plassey and who had a unique relationship with the sepoys. By 1761 after decisive victories against the French at Wandewash and Pondicherry, Coote had extirpated the last of French influence in southern India. In Europe too the year 1759 drew to a triumphant close for Britain, bringing nothing but victories: Ferdinand of Brunswick relieved Hanover by drawing the French army into a successful ambush at Minden.
Even the threat of a new French invasion of Britain was foiled by the exceptional bravery of Admiral Hawke, Pitt’s favourite admiral. Transport ships to take French soldiers across the Channel had collected at the mouth of the Seine. Their advance was to be covered by the Brest fleet, so the best chance of preventing it was to destroy the fleet which was anchored below Finisterre, on France’s Atlantic coast, in Quiberon Bay. Distance, and the appalling November weather, would have stopped most men from putting to sea, let alone sailing for the Bay of Biscay, but Hawke was not to be deterred. Though driving rain rendered visibility nil, and massive waves were breaking across the decks, he ordered his pilot to rush into the shallow waters of Quiberon Bay. Its rocks stuck up like needles and the long suck and swell of water presaged disaster for any ship not already at anchor. But it was there that the Brest fleet was drawn up. And it was there that Hawke shouted in words that became legendary, ‘Lay me alongside the Soleil Royale!’ The valiant British navy followed Hawke straight into the middle of the French ships and sank them, losing only forty men.
Lost in admiration at the change in Britain’s fortunes under Pitt, Frederick the Great proclaimed that ‘England was a long time in labour, but at last she has brought forth a man.’ The Prussian king himself was almost as popular in England as Pitt, as may be seen from the number of pubs still named the King of Prussia. But in the middle of all these victories in 1760, when England’s reputation had never been higher, George II died suddenly, aged seventy-seven. The throne now passed to his grandson George III. By the end of his reign George II had grown quite fond of the man who had expanded his dominions beyond recognition. Now in 1760, despite all he had done for Britain, Pitt was vulnerable to being toppled by a new court.
George III (1760–1820)
Patriot King (1760–1793)
Unfortunately the hero that Britain had at last brought forth to the admiration of Frederick II was not to the taste of the new king George III. Handsome and blond, a devoted husband to Princess Charlotte Mecklenberg-Strelitz who bore him fifteen children–all but one in Buckingham House, which he purchased as a family home in 1761–the twenty-two-year-old George had his own ideas of heroics. The conspicuous part was to be played by himself. He was enormously influenced by Bolingbroke’s writings on the ideal of the Patriot King, whose every virtue he hoped to embody. The Patriot King had as one of its particular tenets that the king should choose his ministers from the best men of all the parties. Parties led to faction, which destroyed the nation; they should be replaced by the lofty figure of the Patriot King from whom all goodness would spring.
Of a pious nature, with a rather slow and limited intellectual capacity, but with firm opinions once he had formed them, George III had a passionate distrust of the dirty arts of politicians–especially those of the great Pitt. He had complete faith in his own ability to cleanse the Augean stable of Whig patronage which had run the country since 1714. In fact, considering the formidable men ranged against him, George would be remarkably successful over the next twelve years. Blessed with a will of iron and considerable cunning, he clawed back the patronage of the crown from the Whigs and substituted his supporters, known as the King’s Friends, in the Houses of Parliament. For all his youthful ideas he soon became as adept as Walpole at using pensions to create placemen.
But by doing so George put himself on a collision course with his fellow countrymen. To British politicians of the 1760s the idea that the king should control the legislature, that is Parliament, through his Friends, was anathema. It was an article of post-revolutionary faith that there should be checks and balances in the constitution, otherwise there was a real danger of arbitrary power. The first twenty years of George III’s enormously long reign (it lasted for nearly sixty years, though he was incapacitated for his last decade) were therefore disturbed by a new struggle between Parliament and king which was expressed at its most extreme by the radical politician John Wilkes. But those two decades also saw a war to the death between the American colonies and Britain because the king refused to acknowledge America’s own Parliamentary traditions.
The legal rights and liberties of the citizen were the outstanding universal phenomenon of the second half of the eighteenth century. The spirit of the time in George III’s domains was against him. Where he viewed his role as the unifying Patriot King, on both sides of the Atlantic his reign was seen as conflicting with the rights won a century before. The interfering king was destroying liberty, which–like reason–was becoming the buzzword of the age.
George III’s reign coincided with the coming to fruition of ideas emanating from the mid-eighteenth-century Enlightenment movement in France, a system of beliefs which spread like wildfire. These ideas were popularized by the French philosophers of the time (for France ever since Louis XIV had been the cultural centre of Europe) in their hugely influential Encyclopédie, first published in 1751. Organized by the philosopher Denis Diderot and containing articles by political theorists such as Montesquieu and philosophers such as Voltaire and Rousseau, the Encyclopédie aimed at nothing less than explaining the universe. Its founders’ optimistic notion was that, if the Encyclopédie contained explanations for everything, progress would result as knowledge advanced. Newton’s discovery of the physical laws of the universe, which he began to publish from the 1680s on, the Swedish botanist Linnaeus’ classification of the natural world into species in 1737 and the scientific discoveries which proliferated in the first half of the eighteenth century convinced them that the intellectual laws of the universe could be determined by the application of human intelligence.
The most striking feature of the Enlightenment was its followers’ belief in the benevolent power of man’s reason. If every aspect of human life–institutions, laws, beliefs–were subjected to reason, man would be inspired to improve it. Its next most important aspect was that the laws which the Enlightenment philosophers, not least Jean-Jacques Rousseau, postulated about the universe by and large moved most of them away from conservative forms of government like monarchies towards the concepts of human rights and equality. Many of the political ideas that inspired the Encyclopédistes came from England. John Locke was hailed by them as one of their own, and Montesquieu cited the separation of powers in England as the model for rational government. Tradition was regarded as being almost as bad as superstition, which in the Christian Churches had been responsible for so many deaths the century before. Deism went in tandem with the Enlightenment, the belief that there was a God but that its or his laws were to be known not through established religions like Judaism or Christianity, but by discovering certain common principles. As with a scientific experiment, every belief was to be questioned and, if it was found wanting in the light of reason, abandoned.
For reason, it was believed, led to virtue. The effect that these ideas had on the world are impossible to underestimate. It was only when the French Revolution had run its course and thrown out every piece of irrational human custom in its pursuit of rational virtue that disenchantment with reason and experiment set in. But until 1789 the wes
tern world was awash with all kinds of people tearing down the old in the search of the new. The ideas the Encyclopédistes promoted, of political freedom, of social justice, of equality, would prove so powerful that they moved men to fight wars, to pull down palaces, to create a new world.
Nevertheless the compelling, the intoxicating brilliance of the Encyclopédistes’ writing was such that philosophical ideas of reform–and philosophers themselves–became the fashion even among the most conservative monarchies of Europe. If Caroline of Ansbach had corresponded with philosophers twenty years before, in the mid-eighteenth century autocratic monarchs like Catherine the Great of Russia, Frederick the Great of Prussia and Joseph II of Austria were so influenced by philosophical ideas that they wanted to put them into practice. They prided themselves on being enlightened, as did people from all walks of life all over the world. From such a standpoint eventually flowed the reform movements in England at the end of the century, which demanded religious toleration, an end to slavery, prison reform, parliamentary reform, trade reform and constitutional reform.
In his own way the young George III represented something of the spirit of the age that was determined to sweep away the old and the outworn. He believed in restoring virtue to the country. Unfortunately, when he was a little boy his autocratic mother, who had been brought up as a princess at the despotic court of a small German state and was horrified by the impudence of the English Parliament, was always saying to him, ‘George, be a king.’ He never forgot her advice. But his interpretation of kingship not only conflicted dramatically with the English political tradition. It also led him into conflict with the Whig leaders of his reign, the Earl of Shelburne and the Marquis of Rockingham.
The Story of Britain Page 54
