Montcalm and Wolfe: The Riveting Story of the Heroes of the French & Indian War (79 page)

Vaudreuil continues thus: “I am in despair, Monseigneur, to be under the necessity of painting you such a portrait after death of Monsieur the Marquis of Montcalm. Though it contains the exact truth, I would have deferred it if his personal hatred to me were alone to be considered; but I feel too deeply the loss of the colony to hide from you the cause of it. I can assure you that if I had been the sole master, Quebec would still belong to the King, and that nothing is so disadvantageous in a colony as a division of authority and the mingling of troops of the line with marine [
colony
] troops. Thoroughly knowing Monsieur de Montcalm, I did not doubt in the least that unless I condescended to all his wishes, he would succeed in ruining Canada and wrecking all my plans.”

He then charges the dead man with losing the battle of Quebec by attacking before he, the Governor, arrived to take command; and this, he says, was due to Montcalm’s absolute determination to exercise independent authority, without caring whether the colony was saved or lost. “I cannot hide from you, Monseigneur, that if he had had his way in past years Oswego and Fort George [
William Henry
] would never have been attacked or taken; and he owed the success at Ticonderoga to the orders I had given him.”
²
Montcalm, on the other hand, declared at the time that Vaudreuil had ordered him not to risk a battle, and that it was only through his disobedience that Ticonderoga was saved.

Ten days later Vaudreuil wrote again: “I have already had the honor, by my letter written in cipher on the thirtieth of last month, to give you a sketch of the character of Monsieur the Marquis of Montcalm; but I have just been informed of a stroke so black that I think, Monseigneur, that I should fail in my duty to you if I did not tell you of it.” He goes on to say that, a little before his death, and “no doubt in fear of the fate that befell him,” Montcalm placed in the hands of Father Roubaud, missionary at St. Francis, two packets of papers containing remarks on the administration of the colony, and especially on the manner in which the military posts were furnished with supplies; that these observations were accompanied by certificates; and that they involved charges against him, the Governor, of complicity in peculation. Roubaud, he continues, was to send these papers to France; “but now, Monseigneur, that you are informed about them, I feel no anxiety, and I am sure that the King will receive no impression from them without acquainting himself with their truth or falsity.”

Vaudreuil’s anxiety was natural; and so was the action of Montcalm in making known to the Court the outrageous abuses that threatened the King’s service with ruin. His doing so was necessary, both for his own justification and for the public good; and afterwards, when Vaudreuil and others were brought to trial at Paris, and when one of the counsel for the defence charged the late general with slanderously accusing his clients, the Court ordered the charge to be struck from the record.
¹
The papers, the existence of which, if they did exist, so terrified Vaudreuil, have thus far escaped research. But the correspondence of the two rivals with the chiefs of the departments on which they severally depended is in large measure preserved; and while that of the Governor is filled with defamation of Montcalm and praise of himself, that of the General is neither egotistic nor abusive. The faults of Montcalm have sufficiently appeared. They were those of an impetuous, excitable, and impatient nature, by no means free from either ambition or vanity; but they were never inconsistent with the character of a man of honor. His impulsive utterances, reported by retainers and sycophants, kept Vaudreuil in a state of chronic rage; and, void as he was of all magnanimity, gnawed with undying jealousy, and mortally in dread of being compromised by the knaveries to which he had lent his countenance, he could not contain himself within the bounds of decency or sense. In another letter he had the baseness to say that Montcalm met his death in trying to escape from the English.

Among the Governor’s charges are some which cannot be flatly denied. When he accuses his rival of haste and precipitation in attacking the English army, he touches a fair subject of criticism; but, as a whole, he is as false in his detraction of Montcalm as in his praises of Bigot and Cadet.

The letter which Wolfe sent to Pitt a few days before his death, written in what may be called a spirit of resolute despair, and representing success as almost hopeless, filled England with a dejection that found utterance in loud grumblings against the Ministry. Horace Walpole wrote the bad news to his friend Mann, ambassador at Florence: “Two days ago came letters from Wolfe, despairing as much as heroes can despair. Quebec is well victualled, Amherst is not arrived, and fifteen thousand men are encamped to defend it. We have lost many men by the enemy, and some by our friends; that is, we now call our nine thousand only seven thousand. How this little army will get away from a much larger, and in this season, in that country, I don’t guess: yes, I do.”

Hardly were these lines written when tidings came that Montcalm was defeated, Quebec taken, and Wolfe killed. A flood of mixed emotion swept over England. Even Walpole grew half serious as he sent a packet of newspapers to his friend the ambassador. “You may now give yourself what airs you please. An ambassador is the only man in the world whom bullying becomes. All precedents are on your side: Persians, Greeks, Romans, always insulted their neighbors when they took Quebec. Think how pert the French would have been on such an occasion! What a scene! An army in the night dragging itself up a precipice by stumps of trees to assault a town and attack an enemy strongly intrenched and double in numbers! The King is overwhelmed with addresses on our victories; he will have enough to paper his palace.”
¹

When, in soberer mood, he wrote the annals of his time, and turned, not for the better, from the epistolary style to the historical, he thus described the impression made on the English public by the touching and inspiring story of Wolfe’s heroism and death: “The incidents of dramatic fiction could not be conducted with more address to lead an audience from despondency to sudden exaltation than accident prepared to excite the passions of a whole people. They despaired, they triumphed, and they wept; for Wolfe had fallen in the hour of victory. Joy, curiosity, astonishment, was painted on every countenance. The more they inquired, the more their admiration rose. Not an incident but was heroic and affecting.”
²
England blazed with bonfires. In one spot alone all was dark and silent; for here a widowed mother mourned for a loving and devoted son, and the people forbore to profane her grief with the clamor of their rejoicings.

New England had still more cause of joy than Old, and she filled the land with jubilation. The pulpits resounded with sermons of thanksgiving, some of which were worthy of the occasion that called them forth. Among the rest, Jonathan Mayhew, a young but justly celebrated minister of Boston, pictured with enthusiasm the future greatness of the British-American colonies, with the continent thrown open before them, and foretold that, “with the continued blessing of Heaven, they will become, in another century or two, a mighty empire”; adding in cautious parenthesis, “
I do not mean an independent one
.” He read Wolfe’s victory aright, and divined its far-reaching consequence.

N
OTE
.—The authorities of this chapter are, in the main, the same as those of the preceding, with some additions, the principal of which is the
Mémoire du Sieur de Ramezay, Chevalier de l’Ordre royal et militaire de St.-Louis, cy-devant Lieutenant pour le Roy commandant à Québec, au sujet de la Reddition de cette Ville, qui a été suivie de la Capitulation du
18 7
^bre
, 1759 (Archives de la Marine). To this document are appended a number of important “pièces justificatives.” These, with the
Mémoire,
have been printed by the Quebec Historical Society. The letters of Vaudreuil cited in this chapter are chiefly from the Archives Nationales.

If Montcalm, as Vaudreuil says, really intrusted papers to the care of the Jesuit missionary Roubaud, he was not fortunate in his choice of a depositary. After the war Roubaud renounced his Order, abjured his faith, and went over to the English. He gave various and contradictory accounts of the documents said to be in his hands. On one occasion he declared that Montcalm’s effects left with him at his mission of St. Francis had been burned to prevent their falling into the hands of the enemy (see Verreau,
Report on Canadian Archives,
1874, p. 183). Again, he says that he had placed in the hands of the King of England certain letters of Montcalm (see
Mr. Roubaud’s Deplorable Case, humbly submitted to Lord North’s Consideration, in Historical Magazine,
Second Series, VIII. 283). Yet again, he speaks of these same letters as “pretended” (Verreau,
as above
). He complains that some of them had been published, without his consent, “by a Lord belonging to His Majesty’s household” (
Mr. Roubaud’s Deplorable Case
).

The allusion here is evidently to a pamphlet printed in London, in 1777, in French and English, and entitled
Lettres de Monsieur le Marquis de Montcalm, Gouverneur-Général en Canada, à Messieurs de Berryer et de la Molé, écrites dans les Années
1757, 1758,
et
1759,
avec une Version Angloise
. They profess to be observations by Montcalm on the English colonies, their political character, their trade, and their tendency to independence. They bear the strongest marks of being fabricated to suit the times, the colonies being then in revolt. The principal letter is one addressed to Molé, and bearing date Quebec, Aug. 24, 1759. It foretells the loss of her colonies as a consequence to England of her probable conquest of Canada. I laid before the Massachusetts Historical Society my reasons for believing this letter, like the rest, an imposture (see the
Proceedings
of that Society for 1869-1870, pp. 112-128). To these reasons it may be added that at the date assigned to the letter all correspondence was stopped between Canada and France. From the arrival of the English fleet, at the end of spring, till its departure, late in autumn, communication was completely cut off. It was not till towards the end of November, when the river was clear of English ships, that the naval commander Kanon ran by the batteries of Quebec and carried to France the first news from Canada. Some of the letters thus sent were dated a month before, and had waited in Canada till Kanon’s departure.

Abbé Verreau—a high authority on questions of Canadian history—tells me a comparison of the handwriting has convinced him that these pretended letters of Montcalm are the work of Roubaud.

On the burial of Montcalm, see
Appendix J
.

Notes - 1

1
Daine au Ministre,
9
Oct
. 1759.

Notes - 2

1
Vaudreuil au Ministre,
21
Sept
. 1759.

2
Ibid
., 5
Oct
. 1759.

Notes - 3

1
Confirmed by
Journal tenu à l’Armée,
etc.
“Divers officiers des troupes de terre n’hésitèrent point à dire, tout haut en présence du soldat, qu’il ne nous restoit d’autre ressource que celle de capituler promptement pour toute la colonie,”
etc.

2
Bougainville à Bourlamaque,
18
Sept
. 1759.

Notes - 4

1
Bigot, as well as Vaudreuil, sets Bougainville’s force at three thousand. “En réunissant le corps de M. de Bougainville, les bataillons de Montréal [
laissés au camp de Beauport
] et la garnison de la ville, il nous restoit encore près de 5,000 hommes de troupes fraîches.”
Journal tenu à l’Armée
. Vaudreuil says that there were fifteen hundred men in garrison at Quebec who did not take part in the battle. If this is correct, the number of fresh troops after it was not five thousand, but more than six thousand; to whom the defeated force is to be added, making, after deducting killed and wounded, some ten thousand in all.

2
Vaudreuil au Ministre,
5
Oct
. 1759.

3
Mémoires sur le Canada,
1749-1760.

Notes - 5

1
Livre d’Ordres, Ordre du
13
Sept
. 1759.

2
Foligny,
Journal mémoratif
.

Notes - 6

1
I am indebted to Abbé Bois for a copy of this note. The last words of Montcalm, as above, are reported partly by Johnstone, and partly by Knox.

2
Ursulines de Québec,
III. 10.

3
See
Appendix J
.

4
Mémoire du Sieur de Ramesay
.

5
Mémoire pour servir d’Instruction à M. de Ramesay,
13
Sept
. 1759. Appended, with the foregoing notes, to the
Mémoire de Ramesay
.

Notes - 7

1
The English returns give a total of 615 French regulars in the place besides sailors and militia.

2
Copie du Conseil de Guerre tenu par M. de Ramesay à Québec,
15
Sept
. 1759.

3
Lévis à Bourlamaque,
15
Sept
. 1759. Lévis,
Guerre du Canada
.

4
Bigot au Ministre,
15
Oct
. 1759.
Malartic à Bourlamaque,
28
Sept
. 1759.

5
“Je fus bien charmé,”
etc.
Vaudreuil au Ministre,
5
Oct
. 1759.

Notes - 8

1
Lévis au Ministre,
10
Nov
. 1759.

2
Livre d’Ordres, Ordre du
17-18
Sept
. 1759.

3
Lévis à Bourlamaque,
18
Sept
. 1759.

Notes - 9