A History of Britain, Volume 2

by Simon Schama

  Even though Loudoun had much of his way, defeat came all the same. In India the irrepressible and brutally efficient Robert Clive destroyed Siraj-ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal, handing (whether it wanted them or not) the revenues of the richest province in Mughal India to the East India Company so that it could balance its books. But elsewhere the first two years of the war against France were a procession of disasters. In the Mediterranean Admiral Byng lost the island of Minorca, thought strategically vital for controlling the routes east to Italy and the Levant. Amid an ugly eruption of patriotic fury, Byng was sacrificed by court-martial to spare the government the odium. Worse, Admiral Boscawen’s fleet failed to blockade the mouth of the St Lawrence effectively, so that reinforcements and supplies managed to get through to the armies of New France at Quebec and Montreal. On the New York lakes, it was the French and not the British who were on the offensive, capturing Fort William Henry in 1757.

  It was the end of Newcastle. Pitt, who had raised a hue and cry for massive mobilization, had been brought into the administration, but kept (not least by the king’s mistrust) from real power. At the end of 1757, though, with the prospects looking grim, Pitt was finally given his moment, and he leapt at it with the full conviction of someone who never for a second doubted that God had personally appointed him for the job. Among his first priorities was to make it clear that he would fight an American war the American way and to repair some of the damage done by the likes of Braddock and Loudoun. The latter was ignominiously recalled, and Pitt won friends in the American assemblies by committing the British government to reimburse the colonials for any expenses laid out for equipment and pay. Over £1million would be earmarked for this. Whole-hearted collaboration instantly replaced surly assent: Massachusetts, for instance, voted for the supply of 7000 volunteer troops. Likewise Pitt repealed Loudoun’s invidious weighting of ranks between the regulars and the colonials. Then he threw good men and pots of money at the job in hand. Generals – some of them, like James Wolfe and William Howe, in their thirties – were suddenly promoted, leapfrogging over their seniors. Others, like Jeffrey Amherst in command of the frontal attack on Canada, were given unprecedented troop strength: some 14,000 alone for the attack on Louisbourg. The French in America could probably put together no more than some 16,000 of their own soldiers together with whatever Native Americans they could mobilize, but those would now be counterbalanced by Mohawks and other tribes among the Iroquois nation who, seeing the writing on the wall, had gravitated towards the British. By the end of 1757 there were nearly 50,000 British imperial troops committed to the war in Canada, almost two-thirds of the entire population of New France. Almost £5.5 million was spent on the American sector of the war alone, £1 million for the navy and another £1million on fulfilling the promise to pay for colonial troops. Pitt had succeeded in persuading the country that this time the war had to be all or nothing.

  And it was to be a British, not an English, war. The first Highland regiment in the British army to serve abroad had been raised and deployed in Europe in 1745 – the year of the Jacobite rising. But those soldiers were predominantly drawn from loyal clans like the Campbells. By the time that additional regiments were formed for the American campaign their recruiting zone was much broader. There were Munroes from Galloway and Murrays from Inverness. It has been estimated that by the time the American war began one in four officers in the imperial army were Scots. They were to undergo a murderous baptism of fire.

  In early July 1758 the portly General Abercromby (known unpromisingly to his own soldiers as ‘granny’), in command of the expedition to take Fort Carillon at Ticonderoga, decided, while a mile distant from the battle site, to send his troops on a suicidal frontal assault without first setting his artillery up on a hill where it might at least have given them covering fire. The result was predictable. The Black Watch and the Inniskillings quick-marched to the sound of bagpipes right into the tangle of sharpened tree-stumps set in front of the breastworks and never exited. A terrified officer in a battalion of Massachusetts volunteers, Archelaus Fuller, flat on the ground behind a log while French musket shot whistled past his ears, described ‘a sorful s[ight] to behold, the ded men and wounded lay on the ground having som of them Legs, their arms and other [sic] lims broken, others shot threw the body and very mortly wounded; to hear thar cris and se their bodis lay in blod and the earth trembel with the fier of smal arms was a mournfull [h]our ever I saw’. This carnage continued for eight hours. Nearly 2000 dead and grievously wounded lay around the timber palisades. At sunset, not having heard anything from their officers, the survivors who had had the sense to lie motionless between logs tentatively rose from their brushy cover and disappeared into the woods like raccoons on the run.

  Ticonderoga was, though, the first and last real catastrophe of Pitt’s war. Only glories followed: first, the fall of great Louisbourg to Amherst and his brigadier James Wolfe in a conventional siege that unloaded such devastating ordnance on the town that it capitulated before it melted. Among those who witnessed the triumph was the thirteen-year-old Olaudah Equiano, who some years before had been bought by a sea captain, Michael Henry Pascal, as his page and servant. When Pascal went to serve in the Royal Navy in 1756, Olaudah went with him and found himself aboard the same ship as Wolfe en route to Cape Breton. At the end of the siege he was flooded with a kind of terrible wonder at the strange terrors of war: ‘A lieutenant of the Princess Amelia [one of the ships] was giving the word of command and while his mouth was open a musket ball went through it and passed out his cheek. I had that day in my hand the scalp of an Indian king, killed in the engagement: the scalp was taken off by a Highlander.’ Holding the scalp of an Indian king who had been killed by a Highlander, Equiano was getting an accelerated education in the multi-national empire.

  The Native Americans would remain adversaries. But the former physician Brigadier John Forbes, yet another Scot, who had been assigned to the Ohio Country campaign, assembled representatives of the Cherokees and Delawares, as well as other tribes, and brought enough of them over in a treaty agreement to make the capture of Fort Duquesne merely a matter of time. The French removed what they could of its munitions and blew it up. The fort settlement built in its place was called Pittsburgh.

  In Europe Frederick the Great was more than holding his own against the French and their allies, which was just as well since £200,000 had been allotted annually for his subsidy! But what was a mere £200,000 when everything suddenly seemed to be going Britain’s way? Towards the end of 1758, parliament enacted a military budget for the coming year of £12.5 million – a sum that had never before been conceivable, much less granted. Half-borrowed, half-taxed, it sustained an army of 90,000, a navy of over 70,000, a territorial militia of between 30,000 and 40,000. It bought victory.

  Sitting on top of all this bounty, Pitt could play around with the world. A raid on West Africa took French slave stations at Gorée and the Gambia; an expedition to the Caribbean, after some real difficulty, ended up taking Guadeloupe with its 40,000 slaves and 350 plantations. Within a year (to the consternation of British planters in Jamaica and Barbados, who were not at all sure they wanted this particular conquest) Guadeloupe sugar was flooding into the London market. In Bengal, Clive (if not the East India Company) was drowning in ‘presents’ offered by rival Indian nawabs. And in south India, an opportunistic attempt by the Comte de Lally to re-establish a strong military presence on the Coromandel coast was undermined by the inability of the French marine to break a British blockade.

  All this, however, was but a sideshow to the main event, which, for Pitt after 1761, became the definitive conquest of Canada. Once this was accomplished, he believed there would be no stopping the future of British America, and by extension British power, which was to say, as he and the graduates of Stowe understood it, British liberty. The elements seemed to be helping, for Canada had suffered almost famine conditions in 1758, and the winter of 1758–9 was the most brutally cold in memory. With
Louisbourg and Cape Breton Island fallen to the British, its plight would be desperate unless it was somehow resupplied. In the early spring of 1759 a few ships did manage to cut a path through the ice at the mouth of the St Lawrence, sneak past the British blockade and land some reinforcements and food at Quebec. This breath of life convinced the Governor, the Marquis de Montcalm, to entrench himself on the easily defensible Heights of Abraham at Quebec along with all the manpower he could muster – perhaps 16,000, including Canadian militia – and defy the British, also suffering from shortage of supplies, to come and get him. An alternative strategy would have been to evacuate the city, disperse troops to several different centres and settle down for a partisan war in a country whose natives and settlers could be relied on to be bitterly hostile to the British. But Montcalm’s view carried the day at Versailles.

  Amherst’s was always the main army. But back in London James Wolfe succeeded in persuading Pitt to let him attempt an assault from the St Lawrence. Giving Wolfe 20,000 troops, Pitt perhaps felt he had nothing to lose. But for Wolfe destiny was calling. Sick with consumption, he was already seeing himself carved in marble on a patriot’s tomb. But en route to passion play on the Plains of Abraham he very nearly failed in his plan for immortality. Hungry or not, Montcalm refused to be drawn from his massive defences around Quebec, his own bastions reinforced by the precipitous 200-foot bluffs on one side to the river and an equally sheer rock face on the inland side. Thwarted, Wolfe let his soldiers and Native Americans loose on a campaign of ferocious ‘cruelty and devastation’ on the surrounding countryside. If this were meant to goad Montcalm into emerging, out of concern or anger, it was an abysmal failure. All the French commander had to do was sit tight through the autumn and wait for the ice to close in on the river, trapping Wolfe or forcing him to retreat.

  Something desperate was called for, so desperate that no one, not even Wolfe, seriously imagined it could work: a night-time ascent straight up the cliffs along a ravine trail identified by one Robert Stobo, who had been captured during Washington’s failed attack on Fort Necessity and had lived in Quebec under easy half-imprisonment for some years before escaping to the British lines. It was only on the eve of the attack that Wolfe deigned to let his brigadiers, with whom he was barely on speaking terms, know what he had in mind. The idea was to feint downstream east of the city but sail in the opposite direction west, then allow the tide to drift thirty flat-bottom landing boats back down to the landing point. At five in the morning, the first hundreds of men scrambled up the slopes. There was a skirmish at the top, but not the all-out battle Wolfe had been assuming. The French soldier who brought news to the garrison at Quebec was unsure whether the British had stayed or gone back the way they came – the venture seemed so bizarre. Wolfe himself was astonished at getting 4800 troops and two cannon atop the Plains, where he lined them up, a scarlet ribbon extending half a mile across the plateau from one cliff to the other. He was set right between Montcalm and his supply lines and reinforcements, all now west of Wolfe. With food and munitions running out, and absolutely no room to manoeuvre around the rear of the British without dropping off the edge, Montcalm was dumbfounded by what had happened. Listening to the British drums and fifes, he realized he had no choice but to engage in something seldom seen in America: a formal battle. But if the troops he had sent west could be recalled in time, the advantage would suddenly be reversed. Wolfe’s line would be trapped between two French forces with no route for retreat except back over the cliff.

  By nine o’clock there was no sign of French troops from the west, and the cannon Wolfe had brought were doing damage to the French line. Highland pipes were skirling in the rain. Montcalm could wait no longer. His own numbers matched Wolfe’s, but half of them were Canadian militia. They were supposed to advance in drill-order at a steady pace towards the British, halt at about 150 yards and then fire; but when given the order, the militia ran virtually at will towards the thin lines of immobile British troops, making any kind of coordinated advance, let alone reforming after the inevitable counter-volley, impossible. Wolfe, whose wrist had been shattered by a musket ball, used his other arm to hold his soldiers back until the French had reached as close as 40 yards. The British couldn’t miss. An immense volley of fire, ‘like cannon’, both sides said, tore huge holes in both the white-coated French regulars and the militia. When the smoke cleared they were in full retreat. Wolfe took shot in his guts and another in his chest, realizing the hero’s consummation he had been so determined to achieve. He would get his marble sepulchre in the Abbey. As soon as the news reached England, wrote Horace Walpole, people ‘despaired – they triumphed – and they wept – for Wolfe had fallen in the hour of victory! Joy, grief, curiosity and astonishment were painted in every countenance.’ His cult was a gift to Pitt, who in the House of Commons delivered an oration that was, in effect, an elegy over the bier of a fallen hero from antiquity. Only – as the Stowe ‘patriot boys’ always wanted – this was better than Rome.

  There were other more prosaic, but more decisive, events to come, none more so than Admiral Hawke’s destruction in Quiberon Bay off Brittany of a French Brest fleet still capable of threatening a Britain defended mostly by militiamen. The French held out in Canada much longer than anyone supposed after the battle on the Heights of Abraham. It was only the following year, in the summer of 1760, that, finally robbed of any chance of reinforcement and supply, the French Governor, Vaudreuil, capitulated to Amherst at Montreal. Part of his incentive to do so, rather than fight on, was the fairly generous terms offered by Amherst. The 70,000-odd Canadians were required to remain neutral in any future conflict between Britain and France, but in return were to be allowed free practice of their Roman Catholic religion and even the guaranteed appointment of a diocesan bishop for Quebec. As Vaudreuil must have correctly calculated, French-Canadian culture and identity, if not its political existence, would be preserved for generations to come.

  Voltaire may have written Canada off as ‘a few acres of snow’. But its conquest utterly transformed the sense of the future for the British Empire. Franklin, for one, who since 1757 had been living in London as the commissioner of the Pennsylvania Assembly, was exhilarated and campaigned furiously against any thought of its return. Taking in the storm of patriotic celebrations, the bonfires and the bell-ringing, the feasts and the renderings of Garrick’s ‘Hearts of Oak’ that erupted throughout the country – especially in Scotland – Franklin was utterly convinced of the momentous righteousness of the war. ‘If ever there was a national war,’ he wrote, ‘this is truly such a one, a war in which the interest of the whole nation is directly and fundamentally concerned.’ In the annus mirabilis of 1759, when triumph followed triumph, and, as Horace Walpole boasted, ‘our bells are worn threadbare with ringing of victories’, Franklin travelled to Scotland where he made friends with the learned nobleman and writer on political economy and agriculture Henry Home, Lord Kames. To Kames Franklin must have confided his bursting pride on what had happened and the prospect it opened up of the realization of the indivisible empire of liberty. Had he not signed his petition to parliament ‘A Briton’? To Kames, he wrote, ‘I have long been of the 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 seen, they are nevertheless broad and strong enough to support the greatest political structure human wisdom ever yet erected.’ Just seventeen years later he would put his signature to the Declaration of Independence. What happened?

  Peace, in 1763, brought disenchantment. Olaudah Equiano had spent his adolescence on Royal Navy warships as one of the boys who ran for powder for the guns while colossal ships of the line burst into flames. He had watched boys and men torn apart by cannon-balls or pierced by splintering timbers ‘and launched into eternity’. At the siege of Belleisle he saw ‘above sixty shells and carcasses in the air at once’. Alternately terrified and elated, baptized a Christian, learning to read and w
rite, acquiring books and a Bible, Olaudah had been led by his master, Pascal, to believe that when it all ended he was going to walk away from the terror and slaughter a free man. Instead he found Pascal first accusing him of attempting to run away and then, over his tears and angry grievance, reselling him to a captain who took him to the West Indies. ‘Thus, at the moment I expected my toils to end, was I plunged . . . into a new slavery.’ Pascal had robbed him of his books, his personal belongings, his only coat – and his hard-won dignity. In bitter distress – and knowing he was bound for the West Indies – Equiano wrote, ‘I reproached my fate and wished I had never been born.’

  William Pitt was in less extreme straits, but he too was angry, sick and miserable much of the time. On 25 October 1760, George II, who at the very end of his life had finally come to appreciate, rather than despise, Pitt, had finally died of a heart attack. Only good things were expected from his grandson and successor. He had been tutored by a friend of Pitt’s, the Scot Lord Bute, in the precepts of Bolingbroke’s Patriot King. The influence of his mother, the Dowager Princess Augusta, was equally obvious. Unlike his excessively Hanoverian predecessors, George III proudly and publicly ‘gloried in the name of Briton’. His apparent artlessness seemed the very model of a Patriot. Doubtless his bust would shortly join the pantheon at Stowe. But in no time at all, Pitt was disabused of virtually all these assumptions. The friend Bute turned into an unfriendly rival, more sympathetic to those who wanted an exit from a war now thought cripplingly expensive. Pitt’s obsessive determination to see the French not merely damaged and humiliated but annihilated as a potential imperial competitor, and his goal of destroying Spanish power in the Caribbean as well, looked increasingly irrational. The young king, it seemed, was listening to his tutor and shared his view of the ‘mad’ Pitt. Worse, the Stowe family was breaking up. When Pitt was forced out in 1761, the new Viscount Temple and one of his brothers-in-law, James Grenville, went with him, but George Grenville, who had become Bute’s and Newcastle’s poster boy in the Commons, did not. Pitt treated this as a betrayal, and for the next decade the two would be harsh political enemies. In 1763, when the Peace of Paris was signed, Pitt believed that Bute had sold out the interests of the Empire by returning Martinique, Guadeloupe and St Lucia to France, Havana and Manila to Spain, and by restoring the right of the French to fish the precious cod banks off Newfoundland, safeguarded by their possession of St Pierre and Miquelon in the St Lawrence.