by Conrad Black
In London, Pitt accused the Whigs, led by Newcastle, of promoting the interests of the monarch’s native Hanover over those of Great Britain. To complicate matters, Frederick the Great was George II’s brother-in-law, but they viewed each other with no great warmth of affection, and George suspected Frederick of coveting Hanover. Newcastle played a typically devious game, negotiating and renewing Britain’s defensive treaty with Russia in 1755. Frederick feared Russia even more than George, thinking of Hanover, feared Prussia. Frederick and Newcastle negotiated a non-aggression pact in 1756, which automatically became a pact of mutual assistance should anyone “disturb the tranquility of Germany,” which was interpreted as meaning in particular an attack on Hanover or Prussia. Newcastle had outsmarted himself. Maria Theresa of Austria so hated Frederick for stealing her province of Silesia that she terminated her alliance with Britain, and Russia then declined to ratify the non-aggression agreement with Britain, and France renounced its alliance with Prussia and formed a new alliance with Austria – its rival of 250 years, since the time of Charles V and Francis I – and Russia. These gyrations were known as the Diplomatic Revolution of 1756.
In 1755, there were 15 million people in France, 6 million in Great Britain, excluding a somewhat disaffected Ireland, 3.5 million in Prussia, 2 million in the Netherlands, 1.5 million in the American colonies, and 60,000 in New France. Quebec’s population, with one to every twenty-five Americans, was still just the population of one of the smaller German principalities. But America and New France had the highest standard of living of any of these places, as well as the fastest population growth. The American colonies were receiving most of the absolute population growth of Great Britain as immigration.
In an act reminiscent of his lightning strike against Silesia in 1740, Frederick, without a word of warning, invaded the Austrian province of Saxony in July 1756, and Austria, France, and Russia declared war on Prussia. Newcastle was still trying to bribe countries into an alliance against France that would restrain that country from going to war over provocations in North America, while Pitt accused him of pusillanimity and paranoia about the status of Hanover, which was now threatened by both France and Austria. Newcastle, finally, reluctantly, declared war on France on May 18, 1756, in response to provocations in the New World, including the falsified British version of the Washington-Jumonville encounter of almost two years before.
As war broke out, a new French commander arrived in New France, the distinguished career soldier Louis-Joseph de Montcalm. Braddock was replaced by the Earl of Loudoun, a pompous, ineffectual buffer who had little experience at serious combat and was no match as a field commander or theatre strategist for Montcalm, who invested and captured Fort Oswego at the southeastern corner of Lake Ontario, taking sixteen hundred British prisoners. Loudoun had formulated a plan to take Louisbourg and left New York in a hundred-ship force carrying six thousand troops bound for that destination on June 20, 1757. It took to late July to join forces with a Royal Navy escorting and bombardment fleet and for fog to abate, and the naval commander, Admiral Francis Holburne, declared it too late and impractical to proceed, as the French now had a large naval squadron at Louisbourg.
At the same time, Montcalm, with three thousand French, three thousand militia, and two thousand Indians (who had come from up to fifteen hundred miles away and from thirty-three different tribes and nations), invested Fort William Henry on Lake George, the entrance to the Hudson Valley from Quebec. Montcalm arrived on August 3, his forces spearheaded by fifteen hundred Indians, naked, gliding swiftly and silently up the lake in their canoes. Montcalm had brought artillery, and within six days had partly smashed the fort, which, after a respectable fight, surrendered. Montcalm allowed the British to retire, leaving an officer behind as a prisoner for security, and with a guaranty not to return to the area for eighteen months. Montcalm took all the stores and artillery and arms, and promised to return the wounded as they recovered the ability to travel. This did not conform to the Indian notion of how to treat defeated enemies, especially the notion of it they entertained after getting well into the spirit issue, both authorized and looted. The Indians chased after the retreating British, killing two hundred and capturing five hundred. Montcalm personally led the parties of retribution to compel the Indians to honour his promises, and he got back all but about two hundred prisoners, who were killed or dragged off by the Indians, including the boiling and eating of an English soldier in a public ceremony near Montreal.
Montcalm and the new governor of New France, Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil, son of Philippe, knew that the Indians would now be impossible allies, as they didn’t really care which side they were on and were concerned with taking or scalping prisoners and seizing their possessions. They also realized that this outrage would be represented in America as deliberate French policy, in keeping with the worst caricatures of French popishness, treachery, and barbarity. The relatively large basic population of the British colonies, angered by this atrocity and frightened by Montcalm’s proximity at the head of eleven thousand battle-proven men, would now be much easier to mobilize than it had been. In the ten days following this massacre, the formerly sluggish Connecticut and Massachusetts mobilized and sent to Loudoun twelve thousand militiamen. The general alarm was unnecessary, as Montcalm had to withdraw, as he had run out of supplies, and his Indians, upon whom he relied for reconnaissance, deserted, resentful of their treatment, which they judged much inferior to that accorded their supposed enemies.
In Europe, the French, Swedes, Austrians, and Russians were not cooperating well on the development of a strategy to deal with Frederick, but Frederick’s invasion of Bohemia in 1757 was unsuccessful, as the Austrians prevented him from taking Prague and largely reoccupied the imperishable Silesia. In the gloom that descended with this news, Newcastle and Pitt made a joint government, and Pitt managed to reverse Hanover’s proposed withdrawal from the war following Cumberland’s defeat there, though it required a large bribe to the Hanoverians of the kind Pitt had always opposed. Frederick bounced back and defeated the French and the Austrians in the last months of 1757.
One of the most important events of that year in the war was the arrival in London of Benjamin Franklin as representative of Pennsylvania and several other American colonies. Franklin was already a famous inventor, intellectual, scientist, printer, and statesman, and he was very respected in the most influential British circles. He began at once to propose a new arrangement between Britain and America that would reflect what he was convinced would soon become the larger population of America compared with the home islands of Great Britain. There was some discussion in Britain of whether Canada, if successfully occupied, should be taken permanently as a prize of war, rather than the French islands in the Caribbean, which produced large quantities of sugar, rum, molasses, and even tobacco and cotton. Franklin’s views, though not determining, would be influential, and he articulated an emerging strategy for the English population of America.
Pitt sent nine thousand troops to help defend Hanover, and they briefly managed to cross the Rhine into France, which in this war had no general comparable to Condé, Turenne, Villars, or Saxe, the heroes of the French wars of the last ninety years. (Montcalm would have done better on the Rhine than the commanders the French had there.) Pitt seized the French slave trading operation at what is now Dakar, Senegal, and arranged an immense grant (£670,000) for Prussia. The war in Europe began with Frederick’s unsuccessful invasion of Moravia, and he had constantly to bustle around the edges of his diminutive kingdom repulsing Swedes, French, Austrians, and Russians, who took an unpardonable amount of time to agree simultaneous attacks toward Berlin on all fronts. There had been little progress by either side anywhere in the far-flung war as 1758 opened.
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It was at this point that the genius of William Pitt was first brought to bear on the 150-year Anglo-French contest in North America. Loudoun had just revealed his war plan for the new year to the New England governors
, and they were being garrulously discussed in the Massachusetts Assembly, doubtless to the delectation of the French, when Pitt responded to a letter to him from Loudoun, in which the commander-in-chief virtually accused the colonial governors of insurrection, by sacking Loudoun and replacing him with General James Abercromby “to repair the losses and disappointments of the last inactive and unhappy campaign.”3 Pitt settled long-standing grievances by ordering that colonial officers have the same rank in the British Army and that they be equipped to a serious standard. (The Americans were greatly annoyed that a lowly British lieutenant was able to command a senior American colonial officer, as Washington had become, and that American units, even if their uniforms were appropriate, were under-armed ragamuffins in military terms.) The Massachusetts legislators had balkily rejected Loudoun’s request for 2,128 men, but were now so uplifted that they voted to raise 7,000 men for the war, and within a month the colonies had raised 23,000. The combination of the Indian outrages the previous summer following the rout at Fort William Henry, and Pitt’s enlightened policy, mobilized the colonies’ pool of manpower of 1.5 million (including 150,000 slaves). The predominance of the Royal Navy assured that France would not be able to counteract the correlation of forces in Britain’s favour in North America.
Under the stolid Abercromby, Pitt had promoted strong officers who were not politically influential or close to the royal family so that Pitt’s control of the armed forces would be uncontested. Lord Ligonier, aged seventy-seven, and the greatest British general between Marlborough and Wellington (not counting Washington), became the army commander, and Admiral Lord Anson the chief of staff of the navy. The forty-one-year-old Colonel Jeffery Amherst and the thirty-one-year-old Colonel James Wolfe were put in charge of the attack on Louisbourg with fourteen thousand men; Fort Duquesne (Pittsburgh) became the target for a force of seven thousand headed by Dr. and Brigadier John Forbes; and Fort Carillon (Fort Ticonderoga) and Fort Frontenac were to be taken by forces of twenty-five thousand led nominally by Abercromby but in fact by Viscount Howe. Montcalm could not have produced more than twenty thousand able-bodied men between sixteen and sixty in his entire population. He was also suffering from food shortages because of a poor harvest and a shortage of munitions because of the British blockade, and was hampered by the separation between civic and military authority, and especially by the avarice of the intendant, François Bigot. (Bigot was eventually tried and exiled with confiscation of property for his corruption. This might partly have been a scapegoating, but in the lore of Quebec he is regarded as a monstrous crook. He would die in Switzerland, an outcast, in 1778.)
Amherst and Wolfe invested Louisbourg on June 8, 1758, and it fell on July 26, after the French garrison of 5,000 had taken 1,700 casualties. Amherst took everyone prisoner and completed the ethnic cleansing of the Acadians by deporting the entire civil population of 8,000 to France. Montcalm routed Abercromby’s inept assault at Fort Carillon (as Howe was killed by a French sniper as the British approached). Though he had only 3,600 men to the British force of 16,000, he drew Abercromby into a charge against entrenched and fortified positions and enfiladed him with sharpshooters, inflicting more than 2,000 casualties to trivial losses of his own. On the other hand, Fort Frontenac was captured by the British on August 26, as 4,000 men attacked a fort defended by only 110 Frenchmen, and the British seized all the French lake craft and a large supply of stores. The French blew up Fort Duquesne and withdrew at the approach of Forbes.
At the end of 1758, the British controlled the Gulf of the St. Lawrence and had severed the connection between New France and the ambitious network of forts and posts along the Ohio and Mississippi it had taken more than a century to build. The St. Lawrence from Tadoussac to Montreal was all that was left. Over the winter, Pitt’s forces captured the sugar-rich French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe.
As Horace Walpole, the long-serving prime minister’s belletrist son, wrote grudgingly of the Tory Pitt: “Our bells are worn threadbare with ringing for victories.”4 For 1759, Pitt ordered Amherst to proceed up Lake Champlain yet again and take Montreal, while Wolfe was to make an amphibious landing near Quebec and capture and occupy that city. In an odd diversion, Amherst proceeded to the south of Lake Ontario and captured Niagara, at the opposite end of that lake to Fort Frontenac. Wolfe landed 8,500 men on Île d’Orléans, just east of Quebec. Montcalm fought with his customary agility, skill, and courage, and Wolfe was afflicted by influenza, indigestion, and depressive attacks. Although Wolfe’s relations were not good with his brigade commanders, Robert Monckton, George Townshend, and James Murray, he asked them their advice and they recommended that he move his forces on the river past Quebec and resume the attack from the west, as the skirmishing below Quebec had yielded no advantage to the British and Montcalm had inflicted much worse casualties than he had suffered. This would separate Montcalm from reinforcements that might come from Montreal and was presumed to be a less fortified and strongly defensible side of Quebec than the ramparts of the Citadel.
Wolfe’s planning was importantly assisted by Captain Robert Stobo, originally of the Virginia militia, who had accompanied George Washington on the ill-fated trip to Fort Necessity, where Washington left him as an agreed prisoner as security to his promise to withdraw from the area around the sources of the Ohio River. Stobo had been sent back to Quebec as a prisoner and circulated easily there until he was discovered to be a spy and was imprisoned, a death sentence not having been confirmed by Paris. He escaped from prison, caught up with Wolfe, and told him minute details of the French defences, and possibly even of the access to the Plains of Abraham, west of Quebec from the landing point known since as Wolfe’s Cove. Wolfe moved 4,500 men upriver on the tide and then came back with the current on the night of September 12, 1759. He followed Stobo’s guidance in threading up the steep path to the Plains, while his forces left behind to the east of Quebec conducted a skilful ruse. Montcalm only arrived at the Plains at 9:30 a.m. on September 13, and became concerned that Wolfe would succeed in bringing up artillery from his ships and determined to attack, though he expected the arrival of two thousand of his best men from Montreal led by his capable subordinate General François de Lévis. Wolfe had entertained doubts about the British plan, which Brigadier Murray had dismissed as insane, but held to it, and Montcalm ran out of patience waiting for Lévis and attacked frontally, supported by Indians and other skirmishers on the northern flank of the British. The British repulsed the French with artillery fire and disciplined musketry and the defenders fell back toward Quebec.
As the British advance began, Wolfe was mortally wounded by snipers but was advised by his staff while still conscious that the French were withdrawing and that the battle was certainly a victory. Montcalm too had been severely wounded, and was carried from the field, dying in a delirium at four o’clock the next morning. The column from the west arrived about thirty minutes too late to be decisive in the battle, and Montcalm was succeeded as commander by the governor, the able Vaudreuil.* All the French forces were concentrated northwest of the city and retired to Montreal. Lévis quickly shaped them up and marched them crisply back to Quebec, where they arrived one day after that city, which had only a skeleton garrison, accepted the generous terms of Townshend, who had succeeded Wolfe in command of the British. Lévis and Vaudreuil retired to Montreal as the winter descended. New France was reduced to one city. Townshend took the last ship out of Quebec before ice made the St. Lawrence impassable and bequeathed command to Brigadier Murray, who bunked his seven thousand men in with seven thousand regular inhabitants of the city, which had rations for only that number. Murray became the governor of Quebec and was considerate of the French, sharing rations equally, and quickly developed an affection for the French Canadians, which was reciprocated. It was an auspicious start to new arrangements, and the British were not really a presence at all in the seigneuries along the St. Lawrence and the rivers that flowed into it.
In Britain, a thousand bonfires cele
brated the fall of Quebec, and Pitt, a florid orator, told Parliament, “Ancient history may be ransacked and ostentatious philosophy thrown into the account before an episode can be found to rank with Wolfe’s.”5 The French were not as perturbed as the British were jubilant. Louis xv’s prime minister, the Duke of Choiseul, had assembled an army of one hundred thousand men near the Channel ports and ordered the navy to come to transport it to Britain. The French leadership convinced itself that it was a clever ploy to indulge Pitt’s preoccupation with colonies and lure the British navy to distant places while France struck at the British home islands. This was hardly an unfamiliar concept to the British, who barricaded the French fleet into Toulon in the Mediterranean and then pursued it to the Bay of Biscay and into Brest. Admiral Sir Edward Hawke, one of Britain’s greatest seamen, came to grips with the French fleet in nasty weather in Quiberon Bay on November 20, 1759, and eliminated seventeen French ships for only two losses of his own. This was the effective end of the Choiseul plan, and the Anglo-French part of the Seven Years War was henceforth an unfeasible struggle between an invincible sea power and an unconquerable land power, between a shark and a lion, or a whale and an elephant. Britain was doing well in India also.
