by Conrad Black
The governor general of New France, the Marquis de Vaudreuil, took over. He ordered the forces Montcalm had been whipping into shape to the east of Quebec when Wolfe attacked from the west to retreat inland and westward; the remains of the army at the Plains to join them; both groups to join with the column that had arrived from the west just after they could have been decisive; Quebec to hang on as best it could; and the forces that managed to execute the maneuver to retreat toward Montreal, the final significant outpost of French rule in North America. (New Orleans was an unfortified, international crossroads of adventurers.) The French irregulars had no enthusiasm for prolonging the suspense at Quebec and accepted Townshend’s generous surrender terms on September 18. Montcalm’s deputy commander, François de Lévis, had taken over the fragmented units from Vaudreuil, had shaped them up, and was leading them crisply back to Quebec and was only a day’s march away when Quebec surrendered.
The historic importance of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, as determining the fate of Canada, and the expulsion of the French from North America, amplified by the drama of the two brave and capable commanders dying on the field, mythologically immortalized by the paintings of the death scenes by Benjamin West of Wolfe and by Louis Watteau of Montcalm, have obscured what a close and often farcical encounter it was. If Wolfe had approached Quebec more closely and quickly and put in hand the measures to start a siege, preventing westward sorties from the city, Montcalm would have been bottled up. If Montcalm had waited an hour before attacking, his relief force would have arrived in the British rear almost simultaneously. If Quebec had held out another two days, Lévis would have mauled Townshend very badly.
Because the British would now have to spend the winter in Quebec, 7,000 troops with 7,000 civilians, in a heavily damaged town with accommodation and food for the winter for just 7,000 and winter closing off the possibility of resupply, Brigadier Murray, to whom Townshend bequeathed command when he took the last ship out on October 18, formalized what would be a genuinely historic policy that would ramify constructively through centuries to come, of close and equal cooperation between the British and the French in Canada.
There would not be such rejoicing at the military capture of a town in North America until the fall of Atlanta to General Sherman 105 years later (Chapter 6), and in Britain, a thousand bonfires of celebration blazed. It was a particular relief to Pitt, as Wolfe’s last dispatches had been quite gloomy. Pitt’s eulogy of the fallen commander remains one of the classics of British parliamentary oratory: “The horror of the night, the precipice scaled by Wolfe, the empire he with a handful of men added to England, and the glorious catastrophe of contentedly terminating life where his fame began—ancient story may be ransacked and ostentatious philosophy thrown into the account before an episode can be found to rank with Wolfe’s.” A monument was raised to Wolfe in the slightly out-of-the-way place of Greenwich, only a few hundred yards from where the Meridian would be set (Chapter 7). The French were not so preoccupied with Quebec, though they found the succession of British victories very tiresome, but Choiseul’s policy of an invasion of England had gained no traction. The French fleet at Toulon, which had taken Minorca, tried to skip the Mediterranean and gather in the Channel. The ever-vigilant Boscawen saw it sneak past Gibraltar, gave chase, destroyed five of the French ships at the Battle of Lagos (Portugal, not Nigeria), and blockaded the rest into Cádiz.
9. THE WAR IN EUROPE, 1759
But the main French naval forces, at Brest in Britanny, joined with returning forces from the Caribbean and sought to take advantage of traditionally stormy weather in the autumn to slip the blockade of Admiral Sir Edward Hawke, who had developed the technique of rotating several of his ships at a time home for refit, provisioning and home leave, and maintaining the watch constantly. Hawke and the French naval commander, the Count de Conflans, came to grips on November 20 in tempestuous weather in Quiberon Bay. A wild action ensued, in which there was no effort to coordinate between different ships in each command, and in the melee and the succeeding grounding of French ships in the Vilaine River, the British lost two ships and 300 men and the French ultimately 17 ships and 2,500 men. The French navy was in no position to conduct invasion barges across the Channel, even had the weather allowed, and Quiberon Bay was a victory on the scale of Drake’s, and of Howe’s and Nelson’s to come. Pitt’s strategy was triumphant, and Choiseul’s, as designs based on the invasion of Britain inevitably are, was a complete failure.
The continental campaign had not gone well for the Anglo-Prussian alliance, however. Hanover was safe enough, but Frederick’s bellicosity had caught up with him. The Russians won some victories on the Eastern Front, the Austrians forced the surrender of a Prussian corps at Maxen (13,000 men), and at Kunersdorf on August 12, in the greatest defeat of his career, Frederick lost half his army (21,000 men) to the Russians, who, not for the last time in the history of these countries, had been completely underestimated. The Austrians occupied Dresden, and Saxony, Frederick’s initial prize in the war, was largely lost. Frederick contemplated abdication and even suicide and began frenzied importuning of Pitt to convene a peace conference. Prince Louis of Brunswick, the Dutch regent and a presentable neutral, but the brother of the British ally Prince Ferdinand, duly invited the combatants to parlay, but the Austrians and Russians were not interested. Nor, really, were the French. No one, including the British banker of Frederick’s military impetuosities (and his brother-in-law George II), much cared what happened to the Prussians.
The odd Anglo-Prussian alliance, with Pitt everywhere victorious and Frederick on the ropes, surged and staggered into 1760. Pitt was running out of French colonies to attack, but France had the largest army in Europe, and in the same measure that the British were determined to keep continental and especially French armies out of England, they had no land war capacity to do more in France than amphibious pin-pricks along the coast, which were almost always costly failures anyway. It was a stand-off, a shark and a lion. But a general peace could not be had until the Austrians and Russians wearied of the war with Prussia, which had Frederick, in a frenetic war of maneuver, endlessly showing the prowess of his well-trained troops, marching all about his frontiers repelling intruders at every hand. His opponents finally had a coordinated plan: The Austrians would again try to take Silesia and advance from Saxony, the Russians would attack from East Prussia, and whichever column encountered Frederick was to try to tie him up while the others made for Berlin.
The endless scrambling around the edges of a gradually imploding Prussia continued all year. Frederick, though outnumbered, ejected the Austrians from Silesia yet again. The Russians, with an Austrian contingent, briefly occupied Berlin in October, but withdrew as Frederick hastily returned. The Russian empress, Elizabeth, would be the only Russian leader to occupy Berlin until Joseph Stalin arrived at the Potsdam Conference in Frederick’s palace in 1945, at the head of the 360 divisions of the Red Army (Chapter 11). The year of relentless warfare in Germany ended with the Battle of Torgau on November 2, west of Dresden, which was effectively a draw between the Austrians and Frederick’s smaller army. Frederick’s resourcefulness was starting to wear down his enemies, but even now, no serious peace discussions took place. The war in India also continued well for the British, and France had no capacity at all to resupply its forces there.
10. THE END OF THE WAR IN AMERICA, 1760
In America, Montreal was effectively the last prize. Lévis made a spirited effort to retake Quebec in April but was repulsed, and Amherst encroached on Montreal over the summer and it was surrendered, at least honorably and with generous terms for the civil population, by Governor Vaudreuil, on September 8, 1760. With the fall of Quebec and Montreal to the English, the war for North America was effectively over. In London, America’s greatest intellectual, Benjamin Franklin, was back as the envoy of Pennsylvania, as of 1757, and he shared in the widespread concern in some American circles that Britain might bargain Canada back to France for Mar
tinique and trade Guadeloupe for Minorca. All his conscient life up to this time, Franklin had cherished a view of the endless growth of America, and noted early regarding the growth of the American population, doubling every 20 years or so, that “it will in another century be more than the people of England, and the greatest number of Englishmen will be on this side of the water.”8 He strongly objected to the British custom of prescribing the death penalty for far too many offenses, and of substituting for the gallows the transportation of such convicts to America. He approved the imposition of tariffs on the convicts’ admission (invalidated by the British Parliament), and even sponsored the return to Britain of a shipload of rattlesnakes as a gesture of thanks for the receipt in America of so many hardened criminals. 9
Franklin chafed at unreasonable laws imposed from overseas, but continued to regard himself as an Englishman living in America. Franklin disapproved the emigration of Germans in such numbers that they might not assimilate to the English language,10 but reasoned that the prosperity, relative absence of war, more abundant agriculture, standard of living, and general levels of nutrition and energy in America were so superior to those in Britain that America would surpass the British population without one more person embarking in Britain for America. Franklin was correct, and would have been even without the huge waves of assimilated immigration from central and southern Europe, or the famine-driven half of the entire Irish population that made ship for America and Canada in the middle of the next century. Franklin included such thoughts in his Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind. He wrote nothing of his long-term notions of political organization of relations with the home country, but when the North American victory became clear, he agitated and lobbied strenuously for the British retention of Canada. As agent for Pennsylvania, Franklin rarely met Pitt (until later, less intense times for Pitt, when they became quite friendly), but he had a close relationship with Pitt’s secretaries, Potter and Wood, and was continually pipelining in his urgings for the conquest and retention of Canada.
When this appeared to be in hand, in 1760, it was assumed in Britain that peace was near, as the British sea superiority and French land superiority made it hard to discern where the war would continue. The Earl of Bath wrote a pamphlet promoting retention of Canada, and it was widely thought, but never confirmed and now seems unlikely, that Franklin effectively ghost-wrote much of it. Edmund Burke wrote a trenchant championship of retention of Guadeloupe and the return of Canada, as Louisbourg had been returned by the Peace of Aix-la-Chappelle in 1748. Franklin openly entered this controversy, writing “I have long been of opinion that the foundations of the future grandeur and stability of the British Empire lie in America; and though, like other foundations, they are low and little now, they are nevertheless broad and strong enough to support the greatest political structure that human wisdom ever erected.... If we keep it, all the country from the St. Lawrence to the Mississippi will in another century be filled with British people ... the Atlantic sea will be covered with your trading ships; and your naval power, thence continually increasing, will extend your influence round the whole world, and awe the world. If the French remain in Canada, they will continually harass our colonies by the Indians, and impede, if not prevent their growth; your progress will at best be slow.”11 This was from a letter to Lord Kames but was reprinted in what became known as Franklin’s The Canada Pamphlet.
Franklin was certainly prescient, but he was essentially sketching out the future of America, not Britain. There is no doubt that he thought America would surpass Britain, and given his frequent bouts of irritation with the British regime in America, it is hard to doubt that he at least had a two-track option: Britain and America together become unquestionably the greatest power in the world and sort out governance between them; or America, the mortal threat of France to strangle English-speaking America in its cradle having been graciously removed, would achieve the same prodigies without the British. What he did not know, and was not generally known, was that Pitt would have fought to the last musket ball himself to keep Canada, and Louis XV and Choiseul felt themselves well shot of the unprofitable, inaccessible, unremitting New France that Jacques Cartier had allegedly called, on discovering it, “The land God gave to Cain,” and that Frederick the Great’s (and Catherine the Great’s) friend Voltaire dismissed as “a few acres of snow” (a description that rankles yet in Quebec, 250 years later). Even more improbably, the bountiful fisheries of Newfoundland caused Pitt to say that he would rather give up his right arm than a share of the fishing off the Grand Banks to France, and that he would surrender the Tower of London before he would give up Newfoundland. Pitt was not just concerned with fish, because access to fisheries was what bred sailors and created the personnel for a navy, and cutting France off from such fisheries would have severely crimped its ability to rebuild its shattered navy.12
11. THE END OF THE SEVEN YEARS’ WAR
Military fatigue and diplomatic confusion settled and thickened until the war finally ended. King George II died on October 25, 1760, and was succeeded by his young grandson, the preternaturally headstrong George III, who had no interest at all in Hanover and was opposed, partly from sharing his father’s dislike of his grandfather, to any British assistance there. It was to appease George II that Walpole and Pelham had propped up Hanover. George III achieved the appointment of his former tutor, the Earl of Bute, as northern secretary in charge of European continental relations (for which post he was completely unqualified), assuring friction with Pitt, who retained the Southern Department (all foreign affairs except Europe). Bute wanted to wind the war down and shared his master’s opposition to any involvement in continental wars.
In Europe in 1761, essentially the same familiar armies continued to mill about on the edges of Prussia in an increasing state of depletion and exhaustion. Choiseul managed in 1762 to bring Spain into the war against Britain, convincing the Spanish that now that Britain held the scepter of the seas, she would be poaching on the Spanish interests in Latin America next. (If true, that was all the more reason for Spain to have entered the war earlier, when she could have joined forces with a still navally viable France.) Faithful to a centuries-old alliance, Portugal rallied to England and declared war on Spain, which invaded its smaller neighbor. Again, the British sent an expeditionary force to help their protégé. Pitt had learned of the French-Spanish arrangement, and advocated a preemptive strike against the Spanish. The advice was rejected as improper under international law (which scarcely existed and when invoked was almost always pretextual), and from war-weariness. Pitt resigned from the government, leaving Bute preeminent under the mighty survivor, Prime Minister the Duke of Newcastle, now 36 years in cabinet. He was now having severe problems paying for the war, as the government was charged, in effect, 25 percent interest and was still two million pounds short on the last year, facing the possible requirement simply to print banknotes and endure inflation, a horrible political and social nightmare. Newcastle, too, was abruptly turned out by George III and Bute on May 26, 1762, ending the very long (41 years) dominance of the Walpole-Pelham Whigs, years of vast success for Britain, in war and peace, and all over the world.
The French army, in one of the longest droughts of victory in its history, was unable to get by or through the Hanoverians; Czarina Elizabeth died, and was replaced by her dull-witted German nephew, Peter III, who worshipped Frederick the Great and abruptly withdrew from the war, mediated peace between Prussia and Sweden, and threatened Austria, before being overthrown, imprisoned, and murdered, in 1762, with the presumed complicity of his formidable wife, Catherine the Great, in one of history’s most lop-sided marriages. She quickly restored the anti-Prussian slant of Russian policy.13 Frederick, who was a man of considerable culture, wrote a couplet about Catherine: “The Russian Messalina, the Cossacks’ whore, Gone to service lovers on the Stygian shore.”14
As negotiations dragged desultorily on, the well-traveled Monckton seized Havana on August 14, 1762. On
ce again, there were celebrations in the streets in England. Peace was finally secured by the craftiness of Choiseul, a clever negotiator and diplomat, if an unsuccessful war strategist. Spain would fight to the death rather than acquiesce in the permanent loss of Havana. Britain would have to be bought off with something comparable. An insufficiently generous peace could produce a parliamentary revolt, and bring back Pitt, who would trim France back to the Ile-de-France, if he could bribe enough European armies to do it. The national debt of Great Britain had increased from 74.5 million pounds in 1755 to 133.25 million in 1763; 10 times the year’s budget which was half deficit. This was almost more debt than Britain could bear without provoking taxpayers’ revolts in both the home islands and America, and a default and rampant inflation were both completely out of the question.
It had been a brilliant but almost Pyrrhic victory for Pitt. France was a larger and richer country than Britain, but it too had a financial problem, so the pressure was on Choiseul to produce a peace that would be accepted by Spain, which he had induced late into the war and was not gasping for money and was prepared to delay peace to get Havana back. Choiseul gave Louisiana to Spain, in exchange for Spain ceding to Britain the territory from Mississippi to Georgia in return for Havana. Since Louis and Choiseul had no interest in North America, that worked for everyone, and France took back her sugar islands, as well as the little Gulf of St. Lawrence islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon, from which to service her fishing fleet, which was guaranteed access to Newfoundland fishing. France gave back Minorca but kept Pondicherry in India and the West African slave trading stations. Britain ruled North America and India. Everyone had what he wanted most and the Peace of Paris was signed on February 10, 1763. Britain had the winning strategy, but in a perverse pattern that would be followed with other leaders who rescued it from wars that were going badly with Great Powers, it dispensed with the father of victory Pitt, as it would with his son for a brief peace with Napoleon, Lloyd George in 1922, and Churchill in 1945 (though not Palmerston after Crimea).