Montcalm And Wolfe: Two Men Who Forever Changed the Course of Canadian History

1

A castle, a river, and so many wars

Wolfe and Montcalm were both descended from families in service to their kings.

The Montcalm family, an ancient house of Rouergue (Aveyron), had been known from the end of the thirteenth century, the time of Simon de Montcalm, seigneur of Viala & Cornus. In the fifteenth century, a member of the Montcalm family was chief judge for the court in Nîmes, a Montcalm was highly placed at the Holy See in Rome, and another was the maître d’hôtel for Charles VIII and then for Louis XII. In the sixteenth century, François de Montcalm was a ship’s captain.

Several members of the Montcalm family had shed blood for their king. Captain Louis de Montcalm, born in 1563, died in 1587 of a wound he had received at the siege of Marguerittes, a town being defended by Protestants. In 1629, after surrendering in a besieged La Rochelle, Cardinal Armand du Plessis de Richelieu sought help from another Louis de Montcalm, born in 1583, to negotiate peace terms with the Protestants. In Lombardy, while trying to stop German troops from coming to the aid of Spaniards on whom Richelieu had declared war, Maréchal François de Montcalm died in 1632 in the region of Valtellina, in northern Italy. Eleven years later, the infantry captain Jacques de Montcalm was killed in the same place. Maurice de Montcalm, twenty-five years old, a captain in the regiment of the Grand Condé during the war with Holland, was injured by a cannonball during the siege of Naarden. When the Spanish occupied the fort of Bellegarde in 1674, in the Pyrenees on the border between France and Spain, Louis de Montcalm (the fourth of that name) was wounded during an attempt to dislodge them. He died the following year. In 1677, at the Battle of Cassel in Holland, where the troops of William of Orange faced off against those of Philippe d’Orléans, brother of Louis XIV, Gaspard de Montcalm, a cavalry captain, was seriously hurt. The same day, his brother Daniel was killed at the age of thirty-two.

The Montcalms, like many Languedoc nobles, were fervent partisans of the Protestant faction in the Cévennes, but Jean-Louis de Montcalm, at the age of seventeen, renounced his Protestantism in the chapel of the Bishop of Grenoble. Appalled, his parents disinherited this wayward son. Louis-Daniel de Montcalm, born in 1676, also wanted to become a Catholic. He had met a fetching Catholic woman. As she was also a very rich heiress, their son’s conversion was forgivable in his parents’ eyes. Louis-Daniel de Montcalm married his fiancée in 1708.

A first child was born to them in 1710: a daughter, Louise-Françoise-Thérèse. The future lieutenant-general who would be defeated at Quebec, Louis-Joseph de Montcalm, came into the world in Candiac, near Nîmes, on February 28, 1712. Like his ancestor Jean de Montcalm, born in 1407, he would hold, among other titles, that of seigneur of the hamlet of Saint-Véran. His mother saw to it that her son was baptized as soon as possible in the Catholic Church. The next year, the Treaty of Utrecht brought relative peace to France, which had agreed to cede the land of Acadia, in New France, to the English.

Little Louis-Joseph, who now had a second sister, Louise-Charlotte, born in 1714, was delicate. His godmother, who was his maternal great-grandmother, watched over him with doting tenderness during his first years, at the castle of Roquemaure. Louis-Joseph would never forget this home with its crenellated walls built atop a black rock, nor the Rhone River, beside whose banks he took his first steps. It was near another great river, in Quebec, far from his little village, that he would take his last.

2

Snails and ground-up earthworms, whisked into milk with cloves

The Woulfes, ancestors of James Wolfe, lived in southern Wales. In the sixteenth century, they immigrated to western Ireland, where they acquired lands and possessions. Having converted to Catholicism, the Woulfes were prominent citizens in Limerick. James Woulfe became one of the city’s overseers. Sir Edward Seymour, an uncle of King Edward VI of England, married the daughter of Morgan Woulfe.

James I of England, opting for the Anglicans as his power base, banished the Catholics in 1604. On November 5, 1605, a band of Catholics tried to explode thirty or so barrels of gunpowder in the House of Lords, where the king was presiding over the opening of Parliament. The persecution of Catholics intensified. In Ireland, George Woulfe, then sheriff of Limerick, refused to swear allegiance to James I. He did not recognize the authority of this king newly arrived from Scotland, and as a Catholic, he could not accept that the Pope would no longer be his religious leader. James I relieved him of his responsibilities in 1613.

Politics and religion created discord among George Woulfe’s three sons. In 1649, Oliver Cromwell and three thousand Ironsides, fanatic cavalry troopers, descended on Ireland, putting "the women and children of Drogheda to the sword with the Bible text God is love pasted around the mouth of his cannon," in the words of James Joyce. Lieutenant-Colonel Edward Woulfe was at Cromwell’s side. His two brothers, George and Francis Woulfe, were in the opposite camp. George, the great-grandfather of the future Major-General James Wolfe, was one of the key defenders of Limerick when the city was besieged in 1651. Francis was a Franciscan monk. Each in his own way offered resistance to the English army, but Limerick fell into the hands of its enemies. Francis was hanged. George was able to escape. The Catholic families were dispossessed. A good thirty members of the Woulfe families sought refuge on the continent, some in Paris and elsewhere in France.

Captain George Woulfe, for his part, chose Yorkshire in the north of England, a region that offered commercial opportunities. The weaving industry was growing rapidly in this agricultural county. The fugitive changed the spelling of his name, becoming a Wolfe, and he embraced Protestantism. His wife bore him two sons. Edward became an officer in the army, but when King James II of England converted to Catholicism, the king took away his commission. Shortly thereafter, William of Orange ousted James II, and Edward Wolfe became a captain in 1690. For thirteen years, he served the king throughout the Mediterranean and in the Low Countries, where he was wounded. His commission was renewed once more in 1702, by Queen Anne. Then, having retired to York, he urged his two sons to follow in his footsteps.

The elder, Edward, who would be Major-General James Wolfe’s father, received an ensign’s commission in a regiment of navy fusiliers in 1702, while his brother, Walter, became an ensign in an Irish infantry regiment. Edward fought in Flanders under John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough. In 1706, he took part in the defeat of Franco-Spanish troops at Ramillies (Belgium), then served in Scotland in 1715. Despite his youth, his qualities and experience earned him a promotion to the rank of lieutenant-colonel in 1717.

In 1720, after the scandal-ridden collapse of the South Sea Company, which had held the monopoly for trade with the Spanish colonies in America, England enjoyed twenty years of peace. Edward Wolfe was employed building roads in the countryside. In 1724, he married Henrietta Thompson. The daughter of a good Yorkshire family, she had an imposing dignity and a great beauty. After living with Henrietta’s parents for two years in York, Edward and his wife bought a three-gabled house on a modest property in Westerham, amid wooded, rolling hills. Forty kilometres from London, the lieutenant-colonel would be closer to where decisions were being made.

Their son, James Wolfe, was born on January 2, 1727, in the Westerham presbytery because the family home was undergoing repairs. Henrietta, his mother, was alone at the moment of birth. His father was away with his regiment. The news of the day, in the gazettes, was that a woman in the countryside had given birth to six rabbits! Two years later, James had a little brother: Edward.

As their father was almost always absent on account of his military obligations, the two children were raised by a demanding mother. Ambitious, she made no secret of the fact that she had more respect for a family that made its own fortune than for one that inherited its social rank.

The two sons of this strong woman had fragile constitutions. Both were often sick despite the precautions their mother took, keeping them indoors to protect them from airborne perils. She devised medicines to cleanse their humours: snails and ground-up earthworms, whisked into milk and mixed with bear’s foot, angelica, and cloves.

When their father came home, his conversation naturally revolved around military matters. The children listened to stories describing a world unknown to them.

3

Obedience, docility, and a wholehearted compliance

At the age of six, in 1718, Louis-Joseph de Montcalm was placed with a tutor in Grenoble; Louis Dumas, born out of wedlock, was the half-brother of his pupil’s father. He was a learned man who was always studying. He had lived in England and maintained close ties with Dutch correspondents. The child was introduced to French, Greek, Latin, philosophy, the exact sciences, and music. The little one tired easily, and his mind often wandered. As soon as Louis-Joseph had learned to write, Dumas insisted that he compose weekly reports for his parents concerning his activities, his progress, and the recent happenings in the city and at court.

In 1719, a little brother made his appearance in the Montcalm family: Jean-Louis-Pierre. At the age of two and a half, the child knew the alphabet, and at three, he was reading Greek and Latin. At five, he was translating from Hebrew.

Once Louis-Joseph de Montcalm had reached the age of twelve, in 1724, he was enlisted, with the rank of ensign, in the Hainaut Infantry Regiment where his father was lieutenant-colonel. The tutor, who found that his pupil had an aversion to writing, was concerned for his future: I have been thinking about Monsieur de Montcalm’s limited aptitudes and talent, he wrote to the father. What will become of him? Where will he excel?

Reacting a little later to this verdict, Louis-Joseph wrote to his father: In a few words, I pride myself on the following: 1) being an honest man, of good habits, a virtuous and good Christian; 2) being a middling reader, knowing the Greek and Latin languages as well as most people in this world, mastering the four rules of arithmetic, having some knowledge of history, geography, and French and Latin literature, valuing sound judgment, even if I have it not, and cherishing in particular the sciences and arts of which I am ignorant; 3) what I set above all else: obedience, docility, and a wholehearted compliance to your orders and those of my dear mother, along with a deference for the counsels of Monsieur Dumas; 4) where the body is concerned, to take up arms and mount horseback as much as my meagre talents will permit me.

At the age of twenty, Captain Louis-Joseph de Montcalm did not neglect his studies. He was determined to further his education. Louis Dumas had him read Aristophanes’s The Birds. In this play, two Athenians weary of the conflicts dividing the city’s citizens escape to the realm of the birds to found a new city between heaven and earth. It was essential to know the classic Greek texts, Dumas believed, in a time when an aristocracy of the sword was being embraced by a well-educated bourgeoisie. Montcalm also took lessons in riding, fencing, sword, and foil, before being posted to the garrison of Fort-Louis, in Alsace. He was then transferred to Strasbourg. In this fortress built by the engineer Vauban, Montcalm was one of the 6,000 soldiers protecting the 26,000 inhabitants of that city, most of them Protestants. Shortly afterward, he was sent to Mézières, on the Meuse River, then to the garrison of Charlemont at Givet in the Ardennes, where he became an officer.

Stanisław I Leszczyński of Poland, who lost his crown after being defeated by Peter the Great of Russia in 1709, had been replaced by Augustus II. Upon the latter’s death in 1733, Stanisław I was called upon by the Polish diet to remount the throne. Supported by Austria and Russia, Augustus III, the son of Augustus II, laid claim to the crown of Stanisław I, whose daughter, Marie Leszczyńska, was now the wife of the King of France. Louis XV came to the aid of his father-in-law. The French army marched through Lorraine, Germany, and Italy. The Hainaut Regiment, to which Montcalm belonged, formed part of this army of the Rhine. In October 1733, it surrounded the town of Kehl, opposite Strasbourg, which surrendered.

Back with his family, Montcalm attended the marriage of his sister Louise-Charlotte to Gilbert de Massilian, chief judge in Montpellier. Montcalm had two other sisters: Louise-Françoise, his elder, who in 1728 married Baron Antoine Jean Viel, seigneur of Lunas, advisor to the king at Languedoc’s finance and revenue court, and his youngest sister, Macrine, born in 1723.

In the spring of 1734, the Hainaut Regiment took part in the siege of Philippsburg in Germany, a campaign the young Captain Montcalm judged to be premature. He complained to his brother-in-law Antoine Viel, a man of substance and influence, that he had no tent, no bed, no equipment. Fortunately, he said, I have two horses, twelve shirts, and a pair of tin trunks. On June 3, the French began to dig their trenches in front of the city. A month and a half later, on July 18, the enemy army’s commander, Prince Eugène de Savoie-Carignan, a Frenchman fighting for Austria, was forced to surrender. Montcalm relished the victory. The town was rubble, he told his father, not a house worth living in; … nothing but stench and infection.

The Rhine army fought no other battle. Montcalm, capitalizing on the inactivity, read Greek writers and began to learn German. But not all was study: there was this young Calvinist girl he was thinking of marrying in hope of making a conversion, he said ironically to his father, who had himself converted in order to marry his mother.

After his father’s death in September of 1735, Louis-Joseph saw that a new chapter in his life was beginning. He would soon be twenty-four years old. Was that not a time to start a family? Given his class, Montcalm was expected to forge an advantageous union, but he also wanted to experience love. A friend of the family, the Marquis Philippe-Charles de La Fare, offered him useful advice and became his intermediary.

On the night of October 2, 1736, in a ceremony lit by hundreds of candles, Captain Louis-Joseph de Montcalm married Angélique Louise Talon du Boulay, daughter of the Marquis Antoine Omer Talon du Boulay, colonel in the Orléans Regiment. Cardinal André Hercule de Fleury, former tutor of Louis XV and now prime minister, appended his signature to the bottom of the marriage contract. Young Captain Montcalm would for some years lead a peaceful life on his rural property in Candiac, in the company of his young wife and his dear mother.

4

I am very sorry, dear Mamma, that you doubt my love

James Wolfe was eleven years old when his family moved to Greenwich in 1738. A pastor named Samuel Swindon had opened a school there for the sons of army and navy officers. If James, very tall for his age, played games with his comrades, he took little pleasure in it. He preferred to be alone and to lose himself in tales of ancient wars. Pastor Swindon, who had his eye on James, saw in the young man the qualities of a future officer.

At that time, the English people were outraged at the brutality with which the Spanish were attacking their ships. King George II strengthened his navy’s presence in the West Indies and Latin America. The Spanish shored up their fortresses. In 1739, Admiral Edward Vernon seized control of their naval base at Portobelo, on the north of the Isthmus of Panama. Suddenly, thanks to this victory, the English saw the Spanish as vulnerable. The English Admiralty immediately decided to send a fleet, first to Jamaica, where it would join that of Admiral Vernon and bolster it: the goal was to deal a final blow to the Spanish in the West Indies.

James’s father, Edward Wolfe, now an adjutant-general, took part in the expedition with his First Infantry Regiment for the navy.

One of the privileges of senior officers was to be accompanied by volunteers. James begged his father to take him along. In that, the father saw the answer to his prayers! His son would follow in his footsteps and those of his forebears. But Henrietta Wolfe feared for the health of her frail adolescent. Using emotional blackmail, she tried in vain to turn her son away from his obsession with distant seas.

For the red-uniformed soldiers, called lobsters by the populace, the pay was poor, the discipline harsh, the lodgings wretched; they often shared stables with animals. If you enlisted in the army, it was because you were desperate … or the son of a military man. Those privileged by class or good fortune bought officers’ commissions, which were for sale. James’s father, however, felt that a soldier, without title, penniless, but courageous, had a chance to set his foot on the promotional ladder.

In July 1740, with his rough and ready companions, the gangly adolescent found himself in camp, in a tent. To preclude the anticipated desertions, the members of the expedition had to be assembled on an island, the Isle of Wight in the English Channel.

The equipment was late arriving, the conscripts were late reporting, the officers had not yet shown up. The arms had not been delivered, and the ships were not yet refitted. After waiting two months, they were at last ready to cast off, but the winds were unfavourable. Meanwhile, the Spanish in the West Indies had received warnings that the expedition was in the offing, and they were making their own preparations to defend against it.

James Wolfe was unhappy. His mother accused him of not loving her, because he had left home. That left him shaken. At the beginning of August, the son replied to his mother: I am very sorry, dear Mamma, that you doubt my love. Commiserating, he added: I’m sorry to hear that your head is so bad. Mother and son were never so close as when they spoke of their respective maladies.

The fleet didn’t take to sea until October. The soldiers were crammed into transport vessels where they would live and sleep one on top of the other for the long crossing, surviving on meat and salt fish. The ship that would bear him to the Caribbean had not even weighed anchor when James Wolfe became paler than usual. If he risked a mouthful of food, his stomach rejected it. The adolescent was already seasick—so sick that he had to disembark at Portsmouth. What a disaster for the young dreamer! What a humiliation for his father, the adjutant-general Edward Wolfe!

5

Bloody and memorable affairs

Peace has a very short season. France, in 1741, joined a coalition with Prussia, Spain, and Bavaria to try to prevent Maria Theresa from succeeding her father, Charles VI, to the Austrian throne. Marquis de La Fare, lieutenant-general of the French army, marched on Bohemia. Captain Louis-Joseph de Montcalm asked the marquis, his protector, who had advised him in the matter of his marriage, if he would grant Montcalm the favour of taking him on as his aide-de-camp. The marquis granted the request.

In 1742, the French army succeeded in entering the city of Prague, which was soon surrounded by eighty thousand soldiers. During a sortie against these many enemies, Captain Montcalm was injured by an exploding bomb. The French army, plagued by bad weather, shortages, and illness, beat a retreat. This time, aide-de-camp Montcalm got a taste of defeat.

In the autumn, having learned of the death of his brother-in-law Antoine Viel, he showed himself to be a responsible head of the family. Your children, if God grants me life, will be as dear to me as my own, he wrote to the widow, his sister Louise-Françoise.

Having been promoted, in March of 1743, to the rank of colonel in the Auxerrois Regiment, Montcalm was honoured, the next year, with the title of Chevalier of the Order of Saint-Louis, founded by Louis XIV. This distinction was conferred only after ten years of distinguished service, and the recipient had to be Catholic.

When hostilities were renewed, the Austrian and Sardinian forces in Italy went to ground. After months of frustrating inaction, the French and Spanish worked together to force the Sardinian king to retreat. During their advance, more than five hundred men were killed or wounded. There were many desertions. As the enemy closed in, the Sardinians emptied out their houses; furniture, food, fodder, tools were all spirited away on the backs of mules. At the end of this inglorious campaign, Montcalm settled in Montpellier for the winter.

In March 1744, Colonel Montcalm returned to his regiment. Twenty kilometres from the French border, six thousand Sardinians were blocking Spanish and French access to the Château-Dauphin valley, the only route to the valleys of Piedmont that lay farther on. The Sardinians had built low stone walls and cut down fifty thousand trees whose trunks, scattered pell-mell, broke up the enemy ranks. They had mined the rocks to make them more jagged and had spread the debris over the fields to make marching more difficult. In April, the thirty thousand Frenchmen of Louis François de Bourbon, Prince of Conti, drove the Piedmontese from the fort at Mont Alban, and made off with their animals and the enormous quantity of food they needed for themselves. In July, the Franco-Spanish troops occupied Château-Dauphin, even though it was defended by the Austrians, the English, 35,000 foot soldiers of the King of Sardinia, twenty-four battalions of mercenaries, and a cavalry of ten thousand horses. In the month of August, the French took the citadel of Saint-Elme at Villefranche after bombarding it for three days. During this campaign, which dragged on until December 20, Colonel Montcalm was charged with a number of duties, but he did not participate, he reported, in bloody and memorable affairs.

After these events, Montcalm was assigned with his men to a garrison in Menton. Several times, he had to interrupt the winter truce to go off and punish Barbets, Sardinian militias that rose up and provoked skirmishes in the Genoese countryside. In the spring of 1745, his regiment was responsible for making sure that information, instructions, food, forage, animals, tools, arms, and munitions were delivered to the appropriate units.

The following year, the Barbets were positioned near Acqui, a small Piedmont town known for its sulphur spring. As Montcalm’s four battalions approached to drive them off, the Barbets slipped away. Montcalm and his men, on difficult terrain, gave chase, surprised them, and took 150 prisoners. They then rejoined the Franco-Spanish army, which on June 16 suffered a costly defeat at the hands of the Austrians at Piacenza. Among the many soldiers who lost their lives was Montcalm’s nephew, the son of his elder sister, who was already a widow. As for Montcalm, he received sabre blows to his forehead, the back of his head, and a shoulder blade, and suffered a severed artery. Covered in blood, he was captured by the Austrians. His regiment, which was wiped out, he reported to his mother, did badly, but less badly than the others. It was the last to take flight. Our religion served us well, he explained.

When the foes exchanged prisoners, Montcalm was freed and returned to France. Despite the defeat, Louis XV, at a ceremony in Paris, promoted him to the rank of brigadier.

In 1747, Montcalm joined the staff of Louis Charles Armand Fouquet, Chevalier of Belle-Isle, who was commander of the Franco-Spanish army in Italy. At Assietta, a high plateau in the Alps, the King of Sardinia’s troops once again repelled the French, cutting down four thousand men. The Chevalier of Belle-Isle and several officers were killed. Montcalm’s forehead was split open by a ball.

During these campaigns in territory that was uneven, mountainous, bristling with woodland, carved out by rivers, Brigadier Montcalm learned to identify locations that provided natural protection for camps, to choose the best routes for convoys, to recognize openings from which the adversary might appear, to take advantage of possibilities offered by a particular terrain, to assess the strengths and weaknesses of enemy positions: all vital knowledge for a general who had to make crucial decisions.

6

The deadly encounter with a one-eyed, one-armed, one-legged hero

Suffering from seasickness, James Wolfe was thus unable to join his father on his campaign to the West Indies. When Admiral Vernon appeared before Cartagena, Colombia, in March 1741, with 160 ships, his soldiers were weakened by seasickness and long inaction. Many were suffering from scurvy. On April 20, the assault was finally launched against Fort Saint-Lazare. The English found that their ladders were too short to scale the ramparts. And the grenades they launched didn’t explode: their shells were too thickly moulded. The defenders’ bombardments scattered the troops. In the course of a desperate rout, six hundred redcoats were felled by English muskets. A few days later, from island to island, the indigenous populace spread the news that Blas de Lezo, a warrior who had only one eye, one arm, and one leg, had with his 2,500 men repelled 24,000 Englishmen!

Enfeebled by their wretched physical condition, the English could not fight off yellow fever, dysentery, and malaria. More than ten thousand soldiers and crew members fell victim to tropical diseases. Planned attacks against other Spanish outposts, such as the post in Cuba, were put off. In his letters written from the West Indies, James Wolfe’s father told the story of the sad campaign and swore never again to participate in a mission where naval and land troops would have to combine their efforts. Edward Wolfe would return home only two years later.

The expedition to Cartagena represented a humiliating failure for James Wolfe as well. His merciless schoolmates at the Swindon Academy poured scorn on this warrior who wanted to conquer exotic lands but who became seasick at the very sight of his vessel! All his life, James Wolfe would be haunted by his awareness of how fragile he was at sea. Salt water and he were bitter enemies, he confessed. And he would never forget the tales his father told of the Cartagena fiasco; they would dog his memory.

Even if he feared not having the right stuff to be a navy fusilier, he dared not shatter the paternal dream. On November 14, 1741, at the age of fourteen, he joined the regiment of his father, Adjutant-General Edward Wolfe, as a fusilier.

For his mother, Henrietta, it was hard to accept that her son, whose health was so delicate, would have to live on ships rocked by waves, among men ridden with illnesses. His father soon began to suspect that when hostilities ended, this regiment formed for a specific purpose would likely be dissolved. Would not an older, well-established infantry regiment offer his son a more promising future?

In her efforts to have her son’s commission changed, Henrietta Wolfe sought support from members of her family and influential