by James Laxer
In his youth, Brock excelled at swimming and boxing. One of his favourite activities was to swim to Castle Cornet, a military strongpoint six hundred metres offshore. He attended school in Southampton when he was ten and spent a year in Rotterdam, where he was taught in French by a Protestant clergyman. After school, he devoted a great deal of time to devouring books on military tactics and science, as well as on ancient history. He grew to a height of six foot two, unusually tall in his day. At the time of his death, measurements taken from his uniform revealed an ample waist size of forty-seven inches. A few inches can be subtracted from this girth, since his uniform had to be loose fitting so he could move in it on a battlefield.
At the time, it was a common practice for men of means to purchase a rank and then sell it when they purchased a higher rank. In 1785, when Brock was fifteen, his family purchased for him the rank of ensign in the 8th (King’s) Regiment of Foot, in which his eldest brother, John, also served. In 1790, Brock purchased the rank of lieutenant. That same year, he raised his own company of soldiers, for which he was promoted to captain. Soon after, he was transferred to the 49th (Hertfordshire) Regiment of Foot, joining the unit in Barbados in 1791 and serving subsequently in Jamaica. In 1793, he contracted a fever and nearly died, only recovering fully during sick leave after his return to England in 1793.8
Captain Brock was assigned the task of recruiting men into the army, initially in England and later in Jersey. Discontent and threats of mutiny were all too common in the British forces. In 1797, by which time Brock had purchased the rank of lieutenant colonel, major mutinies broke out among Royal Navy sailors at Spithead, near Portsmouth, and Nore, in the Thames estuary. The mutinous sailors wanted their living conditions improved and they demanded a pay raise to make up for the high inflation of recent decades. At a time when Britain was at war with revolutionary France, there were fears within the upper classes and the higher ranks of the Royal Navy that the mutinies could spark a revolution in Britain.
As the mutinies gained strength, the objectives of the leaders of the movement spread beyond the typical trade-union-style demands of better working conditions and a raise in pay; they included pardons for mutineers, the election of a new parliament, and peace with France. In the end, the movement was divided and the radical elements among the mutineers lost the support of many of the sailors. The authorities prevailed and the mutinies collapsed.
Richard Parker, the leader of the Nore mutiny, was convicted of treason and piracy and was hanged from the yardarm of the HMS Sandwich, the vessel on which the uprising had begun. In all, twenty-nine leaders of the mutinies were hanged; others were flogged, and still others were sent to Australia.
In the summer of 1797, when the naval mutinies were reaching their peak, Brock’s regiment was stationed on the banks of the Thames. Many of the men in the regiment felt sympathy for the mutineers and identified with their goals. Brock acted to deal with grievances and to restore discipline. When the regiment was stationed in Jersey in 1800, Brock went on leave for several months, during which time the men were commanded by a much disliked junior lieutenant colonel. The regiment was standing at ease in front of the barracks at St. Helier when the men recognized Brock striding into view. They gave him three loud cheers. He immediately rebuked them for unmilitary conduct and sent them to their barracks, where they were confined for a week.9 Brock was popular, but he was a staunch disciplinarian.
By this time, British military strategy was devoted to the conflict with France’s rising military star, soon to be the country’s ruler, Napoleon Bonaparte. Missions across the Channel along the coast of French-dominated Europe had become a principal task of the British army.
In September 1799, in command of the 49th, Brock was sent with his regiment and other units on an expedition against the Batavian Republic (the Netherlands), where they were joined by a Russian army.** Brock and his unit did not see heavy fighting when they first came ashore. But a few weeks later, on October 2, the unit was involved in a fierce battle at Egmont-op-Zee. Brock led his men — his younger brother Savery was among them — across the sand dunes. He later wrote that the ground they covered could only be compared “to the sea in a storm.” When his men were threatened on their flank by the enemy, Brock led six companies of his regiment — the other four being led by Colonel Roger Sheaffe, who would join Brock in the defence of the Canadas — on a charge against the foe. Camouflaged French sharpshooters poured a volley of fire on the members of the 49th. During the long battle, Brock’s regiment lost thirty men. A spent bullet struck Brock in the throat. It is likely that what saved him was a thick cotton handkerchief, which he wore over a black silk cravat.10
In a letter written from London about seven weeks later to his brother John — also a lieutenant colonel, he was serving with the 81st regiment at the Cape of Good Hope — Brock reported, “I had every reason to be satisfied with the conduct of both officers and men, and no commanding officer could be more handsomely supported than I was on that day, ever glorious to the 49th.” He informed John that when he was hit by the spent bullet he “got knocked down . . . but never quitted the field, and returned to my duty in less than half an hour.” He also wrote that his brother Savery “had a horse shot under him.”11 Brock’s charge had been decisive. His adversaries panicked and withdrew from their position.
The victory at Egmont-op-Zee was reversed four days later, when enemy cavalry attacked the British and the Russians, driving them back and ultimately forcing them to evacuate their position in Holland.12 Nonetheless, Brock had discovered during his baptism of fire that he had nerve and that he could use it to rally his men and lead them to success.
By the early years of the new century, Brock had learned his trade. He was a first-rate soldier and leader of men, a professional. In 1802 he was transferred to Canada, a corner of the empire in which he would spend the rest of career.
When the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1783, the British possessed key posts that were now legally on American soil. British military units clung to Oswego, Niagara, Detroit, and Michilimackinac, strategic points from which they could supply arms and provisions to their erstwhile native allies. During the tense first decade of the nineteenth century, the British played a double game with the native peoples who had been their allies during the American Revolutionary War. Well aware of the fury of the natives against the westward march of American settlers, the British sought to maintain their ties with the native peoples whose lands lay inside the boundaries of the new republic, in order to sustain the viability of the fur trade south of the Great Lakes. But their support for the natives on the land question stopped short of backing them if they should take up arms in support of their cause; they did not want a new war with the United States.
The British kept their posts on American soil until the mid-1790s. In 1794, a new treaty was negotiated in London by an American special envoy, John Jay, the first chief justice of the United States. Even with Jay’s Treaty in effect, it took two more years for the British to abandon their posts.13
Ambitious British officers like Isaac Brock did not welcome the idea of being transferred to British North America. On the British military agenda, the interminable struggle against France topped the list of priorities. North America was of secondary importance. Despite that, the British government and military were all too aware that the expansionary ambitions of U.S. politicians could easily generate renewed conflict with native peoples, and that such conflict could spill over into Canada. They also knew that a renewal of war against France would impel Britain to adopt measures on the seas that would be deeply resented in the United States. Like it or not, one price of empire was the need to station units of the regular British army along the lengthy frontier shared with the U.S.
The British North America Brock experienced was more a collection of odds and ends left over from the vast empire that had existed before the American Revolution than the promising kernel of
a new country. The Atlantic colonies — Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island — had little to do with the sprawling colonies of Lower and Upper Canada. Indeed, Newfoundland had few commercial connections to the Maritimes. More than half the population of British North America lived in Lower Canada and was overwhelmingly francophone. Upper Canada had fewer than one hundred thousand residents of European descent. While many of them were Loyalists, a large number had come from the United States after the Revolutionary War in search of land. These newcomers often had no particular attachment to the British Crown.
The St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes imposed a powerful logic on the Canadas, despite the deep linguistic and cultural differences between the populations of Lower Canada and its younger, less populous western neighbour. The waterways of the North had long drawn the French and the English into the interior of the continent in their quest for beaver pelts. Spread across a vast territory, with their commercial centre in Montreal, the Canadas were subordinate to the political, military, and economic power of Great Britain.
In the event of an American military assault, the long frontier provided numerous possible invasion routes from the south. The farther west one journeyed in the Canadas, the sparser was the population. In Lower Canada most people lived on farms next to the St. Lawrence River between Quebec and Montreal, with the two big towns anchoring the settlements along what amounted to Lower Canada’s main street. Upper Canada was lightly populated, with a thin line of settlement on the north shore of the St. Lawrence and Lakes Ontario and Erie. Here and there, the few small towns in the colony — among them, Kingston, York, Fort Niagara, Fort Erie, Newark (today’s Niagara-on-the-Lake), Amherstburg, and Sandwich — were the nerve cells for commerce, the military, and government. In Upper Canada, most of the population lived dangerously close to the American border.
In 1802, when Brock and the 49th were first posted to Canada, they were initially quartered in Montreal. What preoccupied Brock was the prospect of a U.S. invasion. He did not know when it would come, but with the rise and fall of tensions between Britain and the United States, it was an event for which he had to prepare.
Bedevilling British regiments in Canada during those years was the ever-present temptation for men to desert and disappear across the border into the United States to begin a new life there. A posting in Canada was potentially depressing not only for British officers but for enlisted men as well.
In the summer of 1803, Brock had to deal with two serious episodes of disobedience in the ranks, the first the desertion of six men from York and the second a mutiny at Fort George, on the Niagara Frontier. In the latter case, conspirators plotted to confine officers in cells and then to cross over to New York State. The rebellious contagion spread to Chippawa and Fort Erie, also along the Niagara Frontier.
The deserters were pursued and caught in the United States and brought back to Canada in a cross-border operation that U.S. officials would have loudly protested had they known about it. Brock and his second-in-command, Colonel Roger Sheaffe — they had served together earlier in Europe — acted quickly to quell the planned mutiny. The ringleaders were arrested at Fort George. Those charged were sent to Quebec to face courts martial. Seven men — three of the deserters and four of the mutineers — were sentenced to death. On March 2, 1804, on a cold, windy morning at Quebec, with the entire garrison present, the prisoners were led to their coffins. For close to an hour they kneeled on the coffins in prayer. Then the shooting began. At first the rounds were fired from a distance of fifty yards. Some of the condemned were only wounded and had to be repeatedly shot. Finally the executioners were ordered to fire their muskets into the breasts of the sufferers.14
Upon receiving news that the men had met their deaths, Brock spoke to the soldiers at Fort George and told them of the “grief” he felt. That he won the adherence of his troops is evidenced in an 1807 inspection report praising the state of his regiment, which at that time was stationed in Lower Canada.15 Brock had that unfathomable quality that won the respect and admiration of those he led, even when he disciplined the men harshly. It was a quality that Sheaffe did not possess. Each time Brock went away and left Sheaffe in charge, discontent bubbled up in the regiment.
Following a period of leave in England in 1805–6, Brock returned to Canada, by then a colonel. For a time, he commanded all of the British soldiers in the colony. Continuing to rise through the ranks — he became a brigadier general in 1807 — he was charged with improving the defences of Canada at a time when U.S. hostility toward Britain was rising to a crisis point. Brock’s efforts included strengthening the fortifications at Quebec City, reorganizing the defences and shipping capacity of rivers and lakes, and recruiting and training Canadian militia volunteers. While militia service was long established in British North America, with fit males aged sixteen to sixty required to participate, it usually amounted to little more than showing up for meagre training once a year.16 In Brock’s mind this was far from adequate. He wanted the members of the militia to undergo serious training in preparation for war, not for an annual parade. Weighing on his mind was the enormous extent of the territory that would have to be defended in the event of an American invasion, and the paucity of British regulars on hand to defend it.
Brock’s energetic attention to duty and his efforts to improve the defences of the Canadas did not mean that he was happy to be stuck in such a backwater. In November 1808, he wrote from Quebec to two of his brothers, saying, “My object is to get home as soon as I can obtain permission; but unless our affairs with America be amicably adjusted, of which I see no probability, I scarcely can expect to be permitted to move.” He feared that he would “remain buried in this inactive, remote corner, without the least mention being made of me,” and hoped that “should Sir James Saumarez [an admiral and fellow Guernseyman] return from the Baltic crowned with success, he could, I should think, say a good word for me to some purpose.”17 In a later letter, Brock expressed pure envy to his brother Irving about the life he was leading “in the bustle of London” compared to “the uninteresting and insipid life I am doomed to lead . . .”18
The desire for respectable female companionship emerges in some of his letters. Brock was far too well-mannered to put this directly. Instead, he wrote wistfully of the arrival of officers’ wives, who bestowed a dash of glamour, beauty, and refinement to the dull Canadian social setting. He was buoyed by the excitement such women brought to army and government soirees.
In a note to his sister-in-law Mrs. William Brock, written from Quebec in June 1810, he lamented, “It was my decided intention to ask for leave to go to England this fall, but I have now relinquished the thought.” This time the problem was the “spirit of insubordination lately manifested by the French Canadian population of this colony,” which “called for precautionary measures.” He reported to his sister-in-law that Sir James Craig, the governor of Lower Canada and top British official in the Canadas, had concluded that he needed “to retain in this country those on whom he can best confide.” While flattered to be included among this group, he could not help remarking that “fate decrees that the best portion of my life is to be wasted in inaction in the Canadas.”19
This was not the first time Brock expressed concern about the loyalty of the French Canadians. In an earlier letter to his brother William, in December 1809, Brock opined that “Bonaparte, it is known, has expressed a strong desire to be in possession of the colonies formerly belonging to France. A small French force, 4 or 5000 men, with plenty of muskets, would most assuredly conquer this province.”
“The Canadians,” he remarked, “would join them almost to a man — at least, the exceptions would be so few as to be of little avail. It may be surprising that men, petted as they have been and indulged in every thing they could desire, should wish for a change. But so it is — and I am apt to think that were Englishmen placed in the same situation, they would shew even
more impatience to escape from French rule.”20 Professional realism underscored Brock’s view of the Canadas, which he regarded as imperial possessions that supplied essential primary goods to the mother country.
Brock was similarly anxious about the political outlook of recent American immigrants to Upper Canada; he regarded them much more warily than he did the original Loyalists who had arrived immediately following the conclusion of the American Revolutionary War.
Everywhere Brock looked, he saw the need for improvements to prepare for the possibility of a U.S. invasion. Harbours and forts had to be brought up to standard. Transportation had to be made efficient to ensure supplies where and when they were needed. Lakes Ontario and Erie required robust British fleets to prevent these crucial waterways from falling into American hands. Brock wanted the standards set by the British army’s Medical Department to be met in Canada. He was well aware that his units were appallingly short of medical supplies and surgeons.
In September 1810, Brock was dispatched to take over the command of British forces in Upper Canada. Sir James Craig, who had served as governor since 1807, departed for England on sick leave in June 1811. Before departing, he bestowed a very special gift on Brock. Colonel Edward Baynes, writing from Quebec on behalf of the ailing Craig, informed Brock that he was to receive the governor’s favourite horse, Alfred. Baynes wrote, “The whole continent of America could not furnish you so safe and excellent a horse. Alfred is ten years old, but being a high bred horse, and latterly but very little worked, he may be considered as still perfectly fresh.”††21
In Upper Canada and during a brief stint back in Lower Canada from June to September 1811, Brock had to deal in an official capacity with civilian officials. And while he was a born leader of men on a battlefield, he found it exasperating to work with members of an elected legislature. Democracy was not his strong suit.
