Death or Victory: The Battle for Quebec and the Birth of Empire. Dan Snow
place’. Apparently, a priest who had been avidly watching the proceedings with a telescope clamped to his eye, ‘dropped down and instantly expired’.3 With an age-old ruse de guerre Durell had lured experienced Canadian pilots on board, men he desperately needed to complete his mission.
The squabbles of European monarchs had poisoned relations between their colonies in the Americas since those continents had been discovered 250 years before. The ambitions of Louis XIV in Germany, the Low Countries, and Spain had pushed England into armed opposition. Fighting had spread from Western Europe to the wildernesses of the Carolinas or northern New Hampshire as it had to West Africa and Asia. But the current conflict was different. Long the victims of Europe’s wars, the colonies now became their instigators. As their size, populations, and economies had all swelled they developed their own ambitions, interests, and points of friction with the colonies of other powers. While Europe would never lose its primacy in policymakers’ minds, by the mid-eighteenth century French and British politicians found themselves increasingly impelled by colonial considerations. In the late 1740s ambitious British colonials had crossed the Allegheny Mountains and started trading with the Native American inhabitants of the Ohio valley. The British colonies had always claimed the entire continent as far as the Pacific but the barrier of the Alleghenies and the hostility of the Native Americans beyond them had prevented them from ever making these claims a reality. Now these adventurers hoped to sell vast swathes of this fertile land to migrants from the colonies, who would then provide a market for manufactured goods that they would supply. Little attention was paid to French assertions of sovereignty in the area, and none at all to those of the Native Americans.
The French regarded these encroachments as an unacceptable violation of the strategic corridor that linked Canada, along the St Lawrence, to Louisiana, a colony that was growing along the length of the Mississippi. New France moved troops into the Ohio valley and started building a chain of forts. This represented a threat not only to the individual British colonies, who believed it their destiny to expand west to the Pacific, but also to British North America as a whole which faced being surrounded by an unbroken ring of French forts from the Gulf of Mexico to the St Lawrence River. Even the British Prime Minister, Thomas Pelham Holles, Duke of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Newcastle-under-Lyme, probably the least belligerent man in George II’s government and no friend to rascally marauders on the fringes of empire, believed that this was intolerable. ‘No war,’ he wrote to the British ambassador at Versailles, ‘could be worse than the suffering of such insults.’ Britain would lose its entire position in America if her colonies were confined to the narrow coastal strip of the eastern seaboard. ‘That,’ he wrote emphatically, ‘is what we must not, we will not, suffer.’4
With only a handful of British regular troops in North America it was left to the colonies to counter the French threat. Virginia took up the challenge and in true British style wrote a strongly worded letter to the French commander in the Ohio valley. It was delivered by eight men. Their leader was in his early twenties, a tall, hardy, rather conservative officer in the Virginia militia who owed his appointment to his connections to Lord Fairfax of Cameron, one of Virginia’s leading landowners. His name was George Washington. Given his later titanic reputation it is perhaps surprising that he stumbled rather than strode onto history’s stage. There was little sign of future greatness, indeed he was lucky to survive. He delivered his letter but the French commander was contemptuous. The following year Washington led a motley force over the mountains, planning to use gunpowder and steel where ink had failed. The first shots of the Seven Years War were fired in a glen near present-day Uniontown in Fayette County, Pennsylvania. In an action that did him no credit, on 28 May 1754, Washington ambushed a small force of French troops who were coming to warn him away from French land. Ensign Joseph Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville and nine of his men were killed. The French responded quickly, defeated Washington, sending him limping back across the Alleghenies. His actions had made war inevitable. He and his men were fortunate that they did not spend the whole of it as prisoners.
The fighting triggered the sending of reinforcements to North America by both the British and the French. Britain moved first by lunging into the Ohio country, trying to capture Fort Duquesne at the Forks of the Ohio River. A force under General Braddock was cobbled together from different units and sent out from Britain. It was raw, unused to American conditions and its men were utterly terrified of the Native Americans. Braddock made some attempt to adapt to local conditions but was unwilling to listen to colonial advice and as far as Native Americans were concerned, he told Benjamin Franklin that ‘it is impossible that [they] should make any impression’ on his disciplined troops.5 Braddock’s men wilted as they hacked their way through thick forest, travelling between three and eight miles a day. The supply train collapsed as wagons broke up on the brutal road and horses dropped dead. Dysentery tore through the ranks. It was hugely impressive that the expedition got as far as it did. On 9 July 1755, the British force of approximately fifteen hundred men crossed the Monongahela River, nine miles short of the French Fort Duquesne. Their reward for such grit was blundering straight into a terrible ambush by 108 Canadian colonial troops, 146 militiamen, and 600 Native Americans. Braddock’s force was utterly routed. The French poured fire into the thickly packed column, while sharpshooters picked off the officers. Without leadership, the men simply herded together like terrified animals desperately seeking a false sense of security in numbers. The column eventually broke and flooded back along the road they had made. Native Americans swooped down on the wounded, killing many, saving others to torture later, and claiming others as prisoners to induct into their tribes and replace fallen family members. Braddock was mortally wounded, Washington was hurt and had several horses shot from under him. Two-thirds of the British force were killed or captured. The French suffered less than fifty dead and injured. Of the 150 men in the colonial Virginia Regiment 120 became casualties. Monongahela ranks with the battle of Isandlwana of the Anglo-Zulu War and the massacre of the British army between Kabul and Jalalabad during the First Anglo-Afghan War as an epic tragedy in the military history of the British Empire. The French captured money, supplies, and artillery but the psychological consequences of the defeat were the most serious. It shook the confidence of the British army in North America for years to come and created a myth of the Native American as a superhuman savage.
The war in North America continued to go badly. In Europe the news was scarcely better. The British were forced to shoot one of their admirals, John Byng, on his own quarterdeck to, in Voltaire’s memorable words, ‘encourage the others’. A court martial determined that Byng had been insufficiently aggressive when he withdrew his fleet after an indecisive battle off Minorca, allowing a French force to capture the vital island. On the Continent Britain’s woes were added to not by an absence of aggression but by a surfeit. Britain’s ally, Frederick II of Prussia, ignited a general war by invading Saxony, thus triggering a series of alliances that united Russia, Austria, and France against him, all three determined to punish Prus-sia’s temerity with annihilation. King George II’s hereditary possession in Germany, his beloved Electorate of Hanover, was rapidly overrun by French troops.
Britain’s fortunes did slowly improve from this nadir. French colonies were picked off in West Africa and the Caribbean. The French army was driven out of Hanover and then held at bay by an allied army paid for by London but commanded by a Prussian, Frederick’s brother-in-law, Ferdinand of Brunswick. Frederick won a series of stunning victories that would earn him the epithet ‘the Great’ but even so Prussia was never far from dismemberment. There was unequivocally good news from India where Robert Clive routed the Nawab of Bengal and his French allies at the battle of Plassey in 1757. This battle turned the British East India Company’s zone of influence into an empire. Fighting moved to the Carnatic where British forces sought to wipe out French power as they had in Bengal. But in North America there were years of defeat. Regular troops were trounced as they struggled with unfamiliar terrain and enemies while the civilians of the frontier were murdered, tortured, or captured by war parties of Native Americans and Canadians. 1758 had finally seen some success when a British amphibious force had seized the French stronghold of Louisbourg perched on the rocky Atlantic coast of Cape Breton Island.
Everything suggested that 1759 would be the