Death or Victory: The Battle for Quebec and the Birth of Empire. Dan Snow
of such officers as I should name to him he would do me a great kindness to appoint some other person to the chief direction’. He attempted to usurp London’s power of appointment because of his experience at Louisbourg the summer before. He blamed the lack of certain key people as the reason for the length of time it had taken to capture the French stronghold. He wrote that ‘so much depends upon the abilities of individuals in war, that there cannot be too great care taken in the choice of men, for the different offices of trust and impor-tance’.38 But as so often London was not prepared to surrender its vital powers of patronage to the commander in the field. It was one of the few ways in which the high command could influence the course of a campaign before the advent of telegraph, steamships, and railways. Wolfe moaned in a letter that his demand ‘was not understood as it deserved to be’.39
But he had little cause for complaint. Two of his three suggestions had been acceded to. One of them was his second in command, Robert Monckton, who was six months older than his commander. Monckton was the second son of the 1st Viscount Galway and had joined the prestigious aristocratic bevy of the 3rd Foot Guards as a boy of 15. Like Wolfe he had fought at Dettingen and he had seen action at Fontenoy as well. He had entered the House of Commons in 1752 and his strong political connections may have helped gain him a command in North America where it was clear that war could not be long avoided. When hostilities did break out he moved swiftly against two French forts on Chignecto Isthmus, Beauséjour and Gaspereau, which he captured in June 1755. It was the only real victory for British arms in three barren years of failure.
That summer Monckton carried out his orders to forcefully remove French-speaking Catholic Acadians from modern-day Nova Scotia after their refusal to take the oath of allegiance to King George II. France had ceded Acadia to Britain at the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 but the loyalties of the French settlers had remained understandably Francophile and their new British masters lacked the means or the desire to grasp the issue and coerce their allegiance. With the outbreak of war in 1755 and the arrival of troops from Britain the Governor of Nova Scotia finally had the military means to solve the problem by a wholesale removal of the settlers. Monckton’s men burnt villages, rounded the inhabitants up and herded them on board ships which transported them to the British colonies on the Atlantic coast or back to France. Some Acadians made their way to Canada where their harrowing tale of ethnic cleansing put iron into the souls of the Canadians, who now doubly feared the consequences of defeat. Some Acadians made their way to the French colony of Louisiana where their name would eventually be corrupted and become Cajun.
Monckton had gained the reputation as a serious, efficient professional. Wolfe seemed genuinely pleased to have him as second in command and wrote to him that ‘I couldn’t wish to be better supported, your spirit and zeal for the service will help me through all difficulties—I flatter myself that we set out with mutual good inclinations towards each other, and favourable opinions. I on my side shall endeavour to deserve your esteem and friendship.’40
The most junior brigadier was also the oldest. James Murray was 39 years old and had soldiered for well over half his life. He was short, his eyes burnt brightly as if with a constant grievance and he had a fiery temper. He and Wolfe had known each other for some time and that winter Wolfe requested that Murray command a brigade on the St Lawrence expedition. He was the fifth son of Lord Elibank but his aristocratic family had harmed rather than advanced his career thanks to some impolitic choices made by his brothers. Two of them had embraced the cause of the House of Stuart and ruined the family reputation. Murray’s family was one of many throughout Britain which had been split down the middle when in 1688 the Catholic Stuart King James II had been forced from the thrones of England, Ireland, and Scotland by his nephew and son-in-law William of Orange. Ever since then he and his male descendants had been barred from the throne and had launched a series of violent attempts to press their claim. Brothers had faced each other across the field of Culloden, the last stand by the Jacobite cause in Britain which saw hundreds of stunningly brave Highlanders slaughtered on a sleet-blasted moor outside Inverness in April 1746.
Wolfe had been at that battle and had stayed on afterwards as part of an army of occupation. Many of the men fighting under him at Quebec had served with the rebels or had family members who had. Murray’s brother was a close adviser to Charles Edward, the mercurial Bonnie Prince Charlie, the grandson of James II. Murray believed that his brother’s treason had stalled his career. He had joined a Scottish regiment in the Dutch army at the age of 15 and regarded it with pride as the tough crucible of his professionalism. He liked to boast that there he had ‘served in all ranks except that as a drummer’.41 He had enrolled in the British army and had served on the ill-fated Cartagena expedition in 1740. The disease that tore through British ranks helped Murray by clearing the next few rungs on the ladder of advancement and he returned a captain and still only 20 years old. He campaigned in the West Indies, Flanders, and France and by the early 1750s was a lieutenant colonel in the 15th Regiment. The size of the British army meant that most officers knew or knew of each other. Wolfe referred to Murray when they served alongside each other on the Louisbourg campaign as ‘my old antagonist’, possibly because of a falling out in Scotland in the 1740s or an altercation after the failed amphibious operation against the French town of Rochefort, the post mortem of which had divided the officer corps. However, Wolfe praised Murray during the Louisbourg campaign, writing that he ‘acted with infinite spirit. The public is indebted to him for great services in advancing by every method in his power the affairs of the siege.’42
For his final brigadier Wolfe had requested the Yorkshireman Ralph Burton, commanding officer of Webb’s 48th Regiment. Like Murray and Monckton he was a lifelong, professional soldier, although not nearly so well heeled. Both the place and exact date of his birth are unknown but he was an old friend of Wolfe’s and had served in North America from the beginning of the current war. At Monongahela he had been wounded, unsurprisingly given that only six out of twenty-four officers of the 48th had survived the battle unscathed. Lord Loudoun, a previous commander in chief in North America, had written of him: ‘Burton I did not know before, but he is a diligent sensible man, and I think will be of great use here.’43 Wolfe valued his professionalism; his ‘Family Journal’ describes him as ‘a good officer, and is esteemed a man of spirit and sense’.44
Instead of Burton, Wolfe was given a very different man altogether. A man who stood at the very socio-political zenith of the oligarchic British state: George Townshend. No man outside the Royal Family had a more illustrious name or connections. George I himself had been one of the sponsors at his baptism in 1725. His great uncle was the current Prime Minister, the Duke of Newcastle. His grandfather, Charles 2nd Viscount Townshend, had been one of the chief architects of the Georgian Whig supremacy in the early eighteenth century that had established forty years of unassailable one-party rule. The 2nd Viscount had been the closest ally of the man who had become Britain’s first Prime Minister, the mighty Sir Robert Walpole. They were so close he had even married Walpole’s sister. One of Townshend’s uncles had been an MP; the other was still one, as was he and his younger brother Charles, who would become Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Unlike his brother, George had chosen a predominantly military career, with politics as a sideline. In 1743, age 19, having breezed through Eton and Cambridge, he went on a tour of Europe which he interrupted to join the British army in Flanders as a gentleman volunteer. He saw action at Dettingen and possibly Fontenoy. His regiment was summoned back to crush the Jacobite uprising in 1745-6 and he was present at Culloden, alongside his future commanding officer, James Wolfe. He returned to Europe in the privileged role of aide-de-camp to George II’s son, the Duke of Cumberland. He saw yet more action at the battle of Laffeldt on 21 June 1747 and was given the honour of carrying the dispatch back to London, which by tradition conferred an immediate promotion. As well as receiving a captaincy in the 1st Foot Guards he was elected to the House of Commons to represent Norfolk. His military career had been brought to an end not by the onset of