Читать книгу Death or Victory: The Battle for Quebec and the Birth of Empire - Dan Snow - Страница 9

AT DUSK ON 22 MAY 1759 the keel of a small boat crunched into the sand and mud of the beach and a group of Frenchmen clambered over the sailors, who had shipped their oars, and jumped over the bows. They had made the 150-mile trip from Montreal in just thirty-six hours. With great urgency the group walked into the so-called Basse Ville or Lower Town. They passed a battery of ten cannon, huddled behind a three-feet-thick stone wall with wide embrasures lined with less brittle red brick, and into the chaotic huddle of buildings, clustered at the base of the cliff and penned in by the sweep of the river. On every side of them were the houses of prosperous merchants squeezed in among the storehouses that held their fortunes and numerous taverns that dotted the unpaved roadsides. The houses were all brick built, and nearly all were three storeys or more. Every one of them was coated in whitewashed mortar to protect the brick and give them a veneer of respectability. All had imposing, tall, sloping roofs to keep the winter snow from crushing them. Their windows were large but tightly latticed; made up of many small panes of glass that were easier to ship from France than large squares. Not an inch of land was wasted; the only real open space was the marketplace that dated back almost to the foundation of the city. There was a bust of Louis XIV in the middle and at its southern end a fine church: Notre Dame des Victoires, ‘Our Lady of Victories’, built and named to celebrate earlier failed attempts by the hereditary Anglo-American enemy to seize the town.

After just 100 paces the Lower Town ended abruptly at an almost vertical face of rock with only two real roads winding up it, besides a couple of paths that were almost too steep for carts. At the top of the slope, more than two hundred feet high, two principal batteries of fifty cannon and ten squat mortars perched on the edge, their mouths threatening the St Lawrence River. Up here, in the Haute Ville or Upper Town, the aspect of the buildings changed. The very wealthiest inhabitants had built magnificent homes, almost palaces, designed to the latest French architectural styles but with substantial adaptations to allow their inhabitants to survive one of the most extreme climates in the world. For months every winter Canada froze. The arterial St Lawrence, link to the outside world, was sheathed in ice. Temperatures plunged to minus thirty degrees. Generations of Canadians had feared the climate more than the English. In early summer, however, the horrors of winter could be forgotten. Formal gardens abounded in the Upper Town, giving it a fragrant, spacious, genteel ambience. Without the pressure for space of the Lower Town the houses were lower to the ground, usually only one or two storeys high. As the group of men ascended the steep road they passed the Bishop’s palace on the right, perched on the cliff; straight ahead was the cathedral and to their left the Château St Louis, the Governor’s palace. Cannon, Catholicism and Command: the pillars on which French power in North America rested. From the magnificence of the buildings, the dress and manners of the people in the street, visitors could have been in one of the finest towns in France. In fact, they were in Quebec, stronghold of empire, capital of the vast territories of New France.¹

Quebec was the nucleus of Canadian life. It had been the very first seed of settlement planted in the barren turf of Canada and it had flourished. It was Canada’s political, religious, educational, and social centre, its link to the outside world, the depository for the wealth of an empire. It occupied the best natural defensive position in North America and it was the continent’s most powerful fortress. One of Canada’s greatest governors, Louis de Buade, Comte de Frontenac, wrote to Colbert in France in 1672 that ‘nothing has seemed to me so beautiful and magnificent as the site of the city of Quebec, it cannot be better situated, and is destined to one day become the capital of a great empire’.² That prophecy had certainly come true.

Louis-Joseph, Marquis de Montcalm-Gozon, Seigneur of Saint-Véran, Candiac, Tournemine, Vestric and Saint-Julien-d’Arpaon, Baron de Gabriac, Lieutenant General in the army of Louis XV, and commander in chief of French forces in Canada, had arrived in Quebec. He was short, stocky, and energetic. Within minutes of the group installing themselves in Montcalm’s accommodation on the north of Upper Town overlooking the St Charles River, messages, requests, and orders started pouring out. An already febrile city was stirred up to new heights. Since 10 May the ships that had evaded Durell had been arriving from France. They represented salvation. The vast cereal producing areas of modern Canada were not settled in the eighteenth century. The land of the populated valley of the St Lawrence was far from ideal for growing wheat, and while enough was grown to feed the civilian population, the addition of several thousand hungry and unproductive soldiers brought the colony to the edge of starvation. New France had a slim industrial base, there was only one iron forge and the dawning of total war overwhelmed indigenous capabilities. The ships’ holds were packed with food, alcohol, and the stuff of war, including barrels of gunpowder and cannonballs that acted as ballast. Not least, the convoy had also brought news of Wolfe’s expedition, gleaned from intelligence sources in Europe and papers found aboard a captured British ship. Montcalm had spent the winter in Montreal, where he was better placed to strike out in the direction of the first attack that the British would launch on the colony. It was now clear that, despite threats on other fronts, he would be needed in Quebec.

Montcalm was 47 years old. His dark brown eyes were full of life and he had a passionate drive that could occasionally tip into a fiery temper. Contemporaries called him a typical southerner. He was born in the ancestral chateau of Candiac near Nîmes in southern France and his was an impeccably aristocratic, if not a wealthy line. His ancestors had been raised, lived and killed on the battlefield. Few of the Montcalms had died in their beds. He had been commissioned an officer at the age of 9 and by 17 was a captain. He saw active campaigning in the 1730s under the great Marshal de Saxe and was left in no doubt as to the dangers of high command when he was close to the Duke of Berwick as he was blown to pieces by a cannonball at Philippsburg in Germany in 1734. He had made the all-important advantageous marriage to Angelique Louise Talon de Boulay, daughter of the Marquis de Boulay, a well-connected colonel. Their marriage was a love match and of ten children six had survived, two boys and four girls. His poignant letters to his wife, enquiring after his children and full of longing for his native Provence, have made him an attractive figure to later biographers.

He had bled for France. Montcalm had been wounded during the defence of Prague in his late twenties and then almost starved to death on the infamous retreat from Bohemia during the War of Austrian Succession. As a colonel he had led his men from the front and twice rallied his fleeing regiment during the crushing French defeat at Piacenza. He ended the battle a pathetic prisoner in Austrian hands, his unit annihilated and his body savaged with no less than five sabre cuts. He was exchanged for an Austrian prisoner of equal rank only to be wounded in another French defeat in a ravine in the Alps. Just after the inconclusive peace that ended the War of Austrian Succession he petitioned the Minister of War for a pension, citing his thirty-one years, eleven campaigns, and five wounds. He was given an annual stipend of 2,000 livres in 1753.³ He could have easily seen out his days as a stout provincial nobleman, a pillar of Montpellier society, finding good matches for his daughters and regiments for his boys, but that was never the fate of the Montcalms.

Given the jingoistic enthusiasm for empire that swept across the world in the late nineteenth century, it is perhaps surprising that the idea of trans-oceanic empire was unfashionable and unpopular for much of the time since its inception in the sixteenth century. Colonies were often seen as expensive millstones around the neck of the mother country, enriching bourgeois merchants or propping up royal egos. Colonies were lethal to the health of Europeans, peopled by new men on the make who sought opportunities denied them in the stratified societies of Europe. They were crucibles of immorality. Colonists often proved willing to adopt the habits and the women of the Natives. ‘Civilized’ values were eroded and social barriers scaled as turbulent young societies coalesced and fragmented. Above all, for military men, there was nothing glorious about a war of ambush, stockades, river crossings, and forests. The eighteenth-century officer regarded the plains of northern Europe as the natural theatre for war. Here honour was to be won, in battles of foot, cavalry, and artillery which were fought as their fathers, and grandfathers, had done, under the eyes of royal dukes or perhaps even the sovereign himself. Even Wolfe dreamt about commanding a cavalry regiment on the Continent, in the Anglo-Pruss-ian force that was defending George II’s small German Electorate of Hanover from the armies of Louis XV. French policymakers and military men also regarded this as the primary theatre. Traditionally British gains in West Africa, India, the Caribbean, or North America were wiped out at the peace table as long as French armies occupied strategically important Channel ports or German cities.

The capture of the Baron Dieskau, commander of French forces in Canada, in a skirmish on the banks of Lake George at the very fringe of empire was a case in point. Few senior officers were willing to replace him and serve in the New World. It was a forgotten theatre of war, and one in which the imbalance was slowly increasing as every spring more reinforcements were sent from Britain than from France. Montcalm’s name was chosen from the list of junior field officers. It was ‘a commission that I had neither desired nor asked for’, he recorded in his journal. But ‘I felt I had to accept this honourable and delicate commission’, because it ‘ensured my son’s fortunes’. Like many a proud, noble but impecunious family, the Montcalms depended solely on the crown for patronage. Part of the package was a promise that ‘the King would give my regiment to my son’. He was also promoted to Maréchal de camp, a Major General in British parlance, with a 25,000 livres salary, resettlement money, and living expenses. He would receive a pension of 6,000 livres a year, and half for his wife if he failed to return. This last provision was ‘dear to my heart’, he wrote and ‘touched me because I owe Madame de Montcalm so much’. On 11 March 1756 he had gone to Versailles, to collect his commission and present his son to the King, who duly made the teenager a colonel. Having guaranteed the social, military, and financial stability of his line, he had ridden for Brest on the fifteenth where he met his staff and boarded ship for Canada.⁴

The crossing had taken five weeks. Like Wolfe, he tired of being cooped up aboard ship and he disembarked as soon as he could, below Quebec, travelling up the last thirty miles of the St Lawrence to the town on horseback. As he rode he no doubt cast his practised eye over the shoreline, placing artillery batteries and forts in his mind’s eye to impede the progress of the British fleet that he knew one day would try to penetrate up the river. He had arrived in Quebec in May 1756 and stayed a week. Long enough to realize that this was ‘a country and a war where everything is so different from European practice’.⁵ It was not a compliment.

Three years later he had not changed his mind. He never came to love Canada nor its rugged inhabitants. The deeply conservative aristocrat could not bring himself to embrace the mobility of Canadian culture. Skilled labourers or fur traders could amass fortunes, buy enough land to become seigneurs, obtain military commissions for their sons, who could then build the family’s reputation on the battlefield and eventually acquire noble rank. Soldiers could make fortunes from the massive funds that were earmarked for the colony. Montcalm complained that Le Mercier, the commandant of the artillery for Quebec, ‘came out twenty years ago a simple soldier, [but] will soon be worth about six or seven hundred thousand livres, perhaps a million if these things continue’.⁶ ‘He does not care for much,’ Montcalm confided to his journal, ‘other than his own interest.’⁷ One of his aides wrote that ‘one must agree that this spirit of greed, of gain, of commerce, will always destroy the spirit of honor, of glory, and military spirit’. He worried about the effect of this brave new world on the men under their command. ‘Soldiers,’ he wrote, ‘corrupted by the great amount of money, [and] by the example of the Indians and Canadians, breathing an air permeated with independence, work indolently.’ He concluded that ‘this country is dangerous for discipline’.⁸

The art of war was another area in which Montcalm found himself deeply at odds with Canadian thinking. He saw warfare only through the lens of a regular officer, unable to escape the mindset in which he had been immersed all his life. He regarded war in America as barbaric. For generations Canada had defended herself from the Native Americans and British settlers alike by adopting the tactics of the former. Raids, ambushes, massacres, and farm burning were the norm for Canadians, much to the horror of regular officers sent out from France. In Europe the behaviour of armies was tightly circumscribed. Rules and conventions protected women, civilians, the wounded, and prisoners of war. Enemy commanders wrote shocked letters to each other, always in impeccable French, if any of their subordinates broke this code. No commander could ever ask a junior officer to obey an order that conflicted with his duty as a gentleman. Indeed, the officers of all the ancien régime armies counted themselves as members of a supranational group espousing the principles of honour and gentility. They would even socialize freely during the regular truces or breaks in fighting. The prospect of total war was anathema; it was believed that it would destroy religion and property, and invert the social order. Anarchy of this sort threatened to be catastrophic for the combatant powers and would certainly outweigh any short-term military advantage gained.

In North America war had none of this refined veneer. War was total, and cold-blooded slaughter was common. Communities, French or British, white or Native, faced utter annihilation at the hands of the enemy. Native Americans routinely enslaved prisoners or tortured them to death with excruciating exactness. Settlers on both sides faced an existence of scarcity and brutality with no reward for civility. Faced with the bloody realities of life on the frontier Montcalm was appalled. Yet Canadians were certain that their strongest weapon against the encroachments of the far more populous British settlers from the south had always been their Native American allies. Native raids could throw back British colonists almost to the coastal cities, as time and again they were hopelessly outmatched by tribes bred to fight among the rivers, lakes, and forests of the backcountries of New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Armed with French muskets, powder, and knives, fed when necessary with French provisions and paid in brandy and gold, the Native war parties terrorized vast swathes of frontier. Among them were handfuls of Canadian colonial soldiers, fluent in their language, dressed and painted like Natives so that it was hard to tell the difference. These men attempted to channel Native American aggression along avenues that would serve the cause of New France. Montcalm and many French officers regarded the Native Americans with at best suspicion, but usually utter disdain. As for the Canadians who served alongside them, men who chose to live like the ‘savages’ even when presented with the opportunities of Christian civilization, they were worse than the ‘savages’ themselves. Traders, the voyageurs, travelled to the far west adopting the attitudes, dress, language, and women of the Natives. Louis Antoine de Bougainville, one of Montcalm’s aides-de-camp, wrote of these men, that ‘one recognizes them easily by their looks, by their size and because all of them are tattooed on their bodies with figures of plants or animals’. Tattooing in New France was a ‘long and painful’ process with burning gunpowder poured into holes pricked in the skin. Bougainville observed that ‘one would not pass for a man among the Indians of the Far West if he had not had himself tattooed’.⁹

Montcalm argued strongly that a new era of warfare had dawned in North America. No longer would small numbers of tough, tattooed fighters and their Native American allies protect New France. Since the outbreak of this round of fighting, the scale of the resources sent by the French and the British had brought modern warfare to the continent. ‘The war had changed character in Canada,’ he wrote to France in the spring of 1759, ‘the vast forces of the English’ meant that the Canadian way of making war was obsolete. Previously, ‘the Canadians thought they were making war, and were making, so as to speak, hunting excursions’. Once, ‘Indians formed the basis; now, the accessory.’ He made little attempt to disguise his disdain; apparently he had tried to tell the Canadians, ‘but old prejudices continue’.¹⁰ In 1758, he asserted that ‘it is no longer the time when a few scalps, or the burning [of] a few houses is any advantage or even an object. Petty means, petty ideas, petty councils about details are now dangerous and waste material and time.’¹¹ Bougainville loyally agreed with his commander. ‘Now war is established here on the European basis,’ he wrote. ‘It no longer is a matter of making a raid but of conquering or being conquered. What a revolution! What a change!’ The effect of Montcalm’s dismissal of the traditional tactics of Native Americans and Canadians was malignant. As the war progressed rifts between French regulars sent out from Europe and the home-grown defenders of New France grew ever wider. Regular troops robbed the habitants and their officers snubbed their opposite numbers in the militia. Both Montcalm and Bougainville were withering in their criticism of Canadians. New France ‘will perish’ predicted Bougainville, ‘victim of its prejudices, of its blind confidence, of the stupidity or of the roguery of its chiefs’.¹² To Montcalm, one man personified Canadian attitudes, and, in his view, failings. He sat at the pinnacle of New French society: the Canadian-born Governor and Lieutenant General, Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil de Cavagnial, Marquis de Vaudreuil.

Vaudreuil’s father had been sent out from France at the end of the seventeenth century to command the royal troops in the colony, and had then been appointed Governor General of New France. Vaudreuil had been enrolled as an ensign at the grand old age of 6, was a captain at 13, and a major at 27. He had campaigned in the west against the Fox Indians during the 1720s and from 1743 to 1753 he was Governor of the portion of New France called Louisiana: the lands from New Orleans at the mouth of the Mississippi up the river to the Great Lakes. He was appointed Governor General in 1755, the first to have been born in Canada. In 1759 he was 60.

Vaudreuil was proud, indecisive and deeply defensive about the abilities of Canadians. Like many colonial soldiers, he was extremely keen not to be seen as inferior to French-born officers. Vaudreuil had tried to convince the Minister of Marine in France that he did not need to send out a commander for the regular troops. Vaudreuil himself knew how to save Canada; he just needed an infusion of regular troops. But the army were having none of it. French regulars would fight under their own officers, not Canadians.

Vaudreuil was disliked by the influx of French officers. Montcalm regarded him as a meddling amateur. Bougainville described him as a ‘timid man and who neither knows how to make a resolution nor to keep one once made’.¹³ For three years Montcalm and Vaudreuil had clashed over strategy. In 1758 Bougainville noted in his journal: ‘I see with grief the growing misunderstanding between our leaders.’¹⁴ Vaudreuil lacked the stomach for direct confrontation but his letters to his masters at the French court in Versailles are full of complaints about Montcalm and reveal a great sensitivity over his position within the colony. At the end of the campaigning season of 1758 he informed Versailles of the ‘indecent observations made by the officers of the regular troops of which I had the largest share’. He feared they had ‘even become so public that they form the conversation of the soldiers and the Canadians’. He knew full well who was to blame: Montcalm, who had given ‘too great liberty’ to his officers who were ‘giving an unrestrained course to their expressions’. The situation was clearly grave, but ‘I pass the matter by in silence, I even affect to ignore it, in the sole view of the good of the king’s service, already aware of the consequences which might attend an open rupture with the Marquis’.¹⁵ In this Vaudreuil was right, Montcalm made no secret of his dislike of the Governor General. He talked openly of it with his junior officers and his official journal is littered with snide comments. It was unprofessional and deeply harmful to relations between the French and the Canadians.

Vaudreuil’s policy of raids deep into British-held territories had proved remarkably successful in the first few years of the war. A smattering of French officers brought gold, trade goods, and brandy to the Native Americans along the British frontier from the Great Lakes down to Georgia, to encourage them to hurl back vulnerable British settlements. The British sphere of influence had been shrunk by a hundred miles as Native raids had burnt homes and scalped farmers deep into Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New York. Fort Granville, in modern Lewistown, Pennsylvania, just over one hundred miles from Philadelphia, was captured and burnt by Native Americans and Canadians. All the resources, manpower, and treasure of the wealthy and populous central colonies, in particular of Virginia and Pennsylvania, were poured into protecting their own frontiers, largely without success.

In northern New York, the other front between the British and French zones of influence in North America, along the traditional invasion route of Lake George, or Lac du Saint-Sacrement as the French called it, the lumbering red-coated armies of King George II had been fought to a standstill over three consecutive campaigns. Raids by the mixed war parties of Natives and Canadians had slowed British movements to a crawl, terrified the British soldiers and commanders alike and destroyed convoys of supplies on which any thrust up towards Canada depended. In 1756, Vaudreuil had sent a reluctant Montcalm to attack the British fort of Oswego, their toehold on Lake Ontario. It had fallen but Montcalm was appalled by the behaviour of the Natives who massacred some of the British prisoners after the surrender of the fort. In 1757, a massive force of Native Americans from as far away as the western prairies gathered south of Montreal, recruited by the promise of scalps, slaves, and plunder on a huge scale. Montcalm took Fort William Henry at the foot of Lake George and desperately tried to prevent an even larger massacre by Native Americans furious that the Europeans had made peace between themselves, while not a scalp had been taken. He was only partially successful; despite his personal intervention and that of Bougainville and other officers, unarmed British soldiers were enslaved or slaughtered and their corpses maimed. This infamous incident, gruesomely exaggerated in the British press at the time, poisoned relations between the British and French. Montcalm could have followed up his success with a drive towards Albany but blamed the Canadians’ desire to return to collect the harvest and withdrew. In 1758, a British attack on Fort Carillon at the north end of Lake George ended in slaughter as the British threw themselves time and again on a barricade through which the French kept up a regular, terrible musketry. The British commander, Abercrombie, squandered a very favourable situation with this bizarre head-on attack, and then compounded his mistake by panicking and retreating south in headlong flight, leaving much heavy equipment behind. Again Montcalm was cautious. Rather than march south to pursue his stricken enemy he stayed put. He did not want to risk his small force on offensive operations so for the third year running there was no follow-up to a successful encounter.

In the winter of 1758/9 reports from prisoners suggested that the relentless build-up of British forces for an assault on Canada was continuing. The British seemed likely to strike in no less than three places. There was Wolfe’s attack up the St Lawrence. A major overland invasion would move up Lake George, aiming for Montreal. Last, there would be a strike at the forts of the west, with Fort Niagara being the most obvious target. Niagara was the vital link in the chain that led from the main body of the colony on the St Lawrence River to the vast hinterland of forts and trading posts that stretched to the Mississippi and up into present-day Alberta. This was the pays d’en haut, the upper country, an area under the strong influence, if not the control, of France. Both the French and the Native Americans regarded themselves as sovereign. The Natives accepted French forts as a necessary evil to ensure the flow of gunpowder, muskets, and metal work which the French exchanged for furs and without which life was indescribably hard. Were the Frenchmen guests or masters? The answer could wait until after the common British enemy was defeated.

Faced with this triple attack the debate over strategy grew ever fiercer. Vaudreuil wanted to hold the British everywhere; every yard of his precious Canada ceded to the British was too great a sacrifice. He urged the use of irregular troops, Native Americans and Canadians, to launch pre-emptive attacks to sow confusion among the British as they prepared for the invasion. Montcalm took entirely the opposite view. ‘Considering our inferiority,’ he wrote to Versailles, they ought to ‘contract our defensive [perimeter], in order to preserve at least, the body of the colony, and retard its loss’. He was thinking as a European statesman of bargaining chips on an eventual peace table, not of hunting and fishing grounds that were part of the Canadians’ DNA. He was fatalistic about Canada’s chances, and increasingly melodramatic about his own role: ‘prejudice’ or ‘councils of quacks are followed’, he complained, but he would play the martyr, ‘I shall none the less exert myself, as I have always done’ even if it meant he must ‘sacrifice myself for the [public] good’.¹⁶

Montcalm and Vaudreuil had reached such an impasse that at the end of 1758 the French court was petitioned to arbitrate. In case Versailles doubted the seriousness of the issue Montcalm effectively offered his resignation by requesting his own recall to France. Two emissaries were sent, one from the Governor, the other from the General. Both carried letters and dispatches brimming with opprobrium towards the other and pleas to ignore whatever they wrote. Montcalm made the wiser choice of messenger; his letters were carried by his 29-year-old aide-de-camp, Captain Bougainville. The young ADC had enjoyed an unusual career. Born into a glittering family he showed an early aptitude for mathematics and in his mid-twenties had published a treatise on integral calculus for which he was elected to the Royal Society in London. He had also established a reputation as a brilliant lawyer. On first meeting Bougainville, Montcalm described him as ‘witty and well educated’.¹⁷ This bright, young star would prove an able diplomat for Montcalm, while Vaudreuil’s emissary was ignored.

Bougainville had joined the army at the age of 21, which was far too old to get ahead. However, his unusual talents secured him a series of appointments as ADC to senior officers. He had been assigned to Montcalm and had joined him in Brest before they had sailed for Canada together in 1756. He did not look like a soldier; he was short, overweight, and asthmatic. But he did not flinch during his first battle, at Oswego, where he served alongside Montcalm, and subsequently proved himself an able student of war. Montcalm wrote that his young ADC,

exposes himself readily to gunfire, a matter on which he needs to be restrained rather than encouraged. I shall be much mistaken if he does not have a good head for soldiering when experience has taught him to foresee the potential for difficulties. In the meantime there is hardly a young man who, having received only the theory, knows as much about it as he.¹⁸

He was an adept handler of the Native Americans too. He sat on councils, sang the war songs and had even been adopted into the Nipissing tribe. Despite being wounded during the French victory at Carillon in the summer of 1758, Bougainville was the obvious choice to return to France that winter to plead for more military assistance for Canada. Bougainville’s passage was not a pleasant one. Battered by gales as soon as they left the St Lawrence he wrote that ‘we suffer in this wretched machine beyond anything words can express. The rolling is horrible and unceasing…an imagination most prolific in troublesome ideas could not come within a hundredth of outlining the unbearable details of our position.’¹⁹ In fact, their actual position was worse than he thought; the captain was mistaken in his navigation and sailed his ship into the Bristol Channel, home to a nest of privateers. Luckily, they realized their mistake, turned round and soon arrived in Morlaix. Within hours Bougainville was on the road to Paris.

In the French capital he received compliments, promotions, and fine parties but little substance. Louis XV’s armies had been defeated in Europe and his fleet was being slowly strangled at sea. The state was rudderless. France was still an autocratic monarchy. All lines of government converged only in the person of the king. Louis’ greatgrandfather, the mighty Louis XIV, had created this system and he alone had had the self-discipline and intelligence to control it. Despite insisting that, ‘in my person alone resides the sovereign power, of which the essence is the spirit of counsel, wisdom, and reason…to me alone belongs the legislative power, independent and entire…public order emanates from me; I am its supreme guardian,’ Louis XV was unequal to the task.²⁰ He was a man of honour who genuinely desired to do good, but he lacked the charisma and the confidence to defend his policies when they came under criticism, and the gargantuan work ethic of his great-grandfather. He hated confrontation and attempted to rule by stealth, becoming ever more secretive and suspicious. He also found it difficult to apply himself to hard work, preferring the company of his many lovers or indulging his passion for hunting. A government that was designed to respond to a forceful central figure slowly became paralysed. Ministers competed to fill the void. There were constant changes of personnel. One dominant figure was Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour, once the King’s favourite mistress; she now supplied women of low status for the King’s bed, who would satisfy his lust without challenging her political power. Beautiful and clever, cultured and astute, she played a much debated role in French government throughout the war. Although accused at the time, and subsequently by some historians of dominating the affairs of state, she was not a shadowy dictator. A weak and inconstant king ensured that no one figure was able to amass that much power in the dysfunctional hierarchy of the French government. Pompadour did, though, have a powerful voice in policymaking, in particular the appointment and dismissal of key officers in the army and the state. She kept up correspondences with many of the field commanders although the letters consisted mainly of encouragement and promises to look after any family members that wanted jobs.

Had Pompadour or any other strong figure emerged to usurp the power of the King, it may well have been better for France. Instead, half-hearted royal government staggered on. Louis’ great enemy, the energetic, commanding Frederick II, ‘Frederick the Great’, of Prussia wrote in his memoirs that his adversary’s ‘zeal was extinguished within a few days, and France was governed by four subaltern kings, each independent of the other’. France was ‘a vessel sailing without a compass on a stormy sea, simply following the impulsion of the wind’. A contemporary French historian famously commented that ministers changed ‘like scenery at the opera’. During the war France would get through four ministers of foreign affairs and five ministers of marine, who had responsibility for the colonies and the navy. Just before Bougainville’s visit in November 1758 Pompadour had secured the appointment of one of her favourites, Nicolas-René Berryer, as Minister of Marine; he was the fourth man to take the job. His qualifications for the position were dubious. He had been the Chief of Police of Paris and he treated his new job as an investigation into what would happen in Canada should it fall to the British rather than throwing himself into its defence.²¹

Bougainville quickly realized that Versailles was preparing itself for the worst in Canada. Attention was fixed on central Europe where Frederick II had inflicted a stunning series of defeats on the forces of Austria, Russia and France. The threat to the colonies could wait. The honour of France’s armies and the situation in Europe were more important. French policy for 1759 was to drive into western Germany to threaten King George II’s Electorate of Hanover and Frederick’s western front, while conserving its naval resources for an all-out invasion of Britain. King George’s government would be forced to negotiate. British subsidies which were the lifeblood of Frederick’s war effort would be cut off, and any losses overseas could be restored to Louis with the stroke of a pen. In the meantime Canada would have to look to her own defence. In the words of Berryer in his audience with Bougainville, ‘Sir, one does not try to save the stables when the house is on fire.’ Bougainville shot back bravely, ‘Well, sir, at least, they cannot say that you speak like a horse.’²² Meetings with Pompadour and other key figures proved just as fruitless. The pessimism seeping out of Montcalm’s and Bougainville’s own depositions only convinced government belief that the situation in Canada was hopeless. Montcalm’s one, rather odd request was that Canada could be saved by an amphibious assault on the Carolinas. The French fleet would meet no opposition since the British ships would be concentrating on northern waters. Montcalm informed Versailles that the Cherokee would join the French as would the German settlers throughout the central colonies. The Quakers of Pennsylvania would not fight and the huge slave populations would rise up and support the French, hoping for their freedom. Ministers praised the plan and shelved it.

A king in want of ships, guns, and men was generous with the one resource in which he was rich. Promotions, honours, and decorations flowed to the personnel in Canada. Bougainville was made a colonel, Montcalm, a lieutenant general, with a salary of 48,000 livres, and Vaudreuil received the Grand Cross of the Order of Saint Louis. The newly promoted Montcalm now outranked Vaudreuil. Rather than resolving the crisis of leadership, Versailles had exacerbated it. Over the winter the court seems to have wavered over a solution to this bitter quarrel. Ministerial minutes record that they were well aware of the problem, acknowledging that ‘the Marquis de Vaudreuil and the Marquis de Montcalm lived on such indifferent terms…This estrangement had exercised an influence over all minds.’²³ They recognized that Montcalm wished to be brought home, especially now that it would be beneath the dignity of a lieutenant general to answer to a governor.

Montcalm’s second in command, who had also received a promotion, was the very able Maréchal de camp, François-Gaston de Lévis, who was on good terms with Vaudreuil and had in the past praised Canadian military commanders for their skill. He would have been an ideal candidate to succeed Montcalm in an attempt to reconcile the French army with the Canadian colonial soldiers and militiamen. Having discussed this plan the document ends with an entry on 28 December 1758 saying simply, ‘on mature reflection, this arrangement cannot take place, as M de Montcalm is necessary at this present conjuncture’. Montcalm would stay on; Vaudreuil would defer to him in decisions relating to the defence of the colony, although he would continue to command the colony’s militia.²⁴ It was a disastrous compromise. Instead of a firm decision, the bickering over precedence was to continue. Montcalm was instructed to get along with Vaudreuil; meanwhile, ‘M. Berryer writes to the same effect to M. Vaudreuil and directs him to conduct himself with the greatest harmony towards you; you must both feel all its necessity and all its importance.’ Strategically at least the French court had sided unambiguously with Montcalm; the focus of operations was to defend the core of the colony, forces should be stationed so as to be ‘always enabled mutually to help one another, to communicate with and to support each other. However trifling the space you can preserve, it is of utmost importance to possess always a foothold in Canada, for should we once wholly lose that country, it would be quite impossible to enter it again.’ In conclusion Montcalm was told that, ‘the recollection of what you have achieved last year makes His Majesty hope that you will still find means to disconcert their projects. M Berryer will cause to be conveyed to you as much provisions and ammunition as possible; the rest depends on your wisdom and courage, and on the bravery of the troops.’²⁵

Ships of the line would be hoarded in France to prepare to knock Britain out of the war by direct invasion. Instead, frigates were sent and fast private ships paid for at exorbitant rates to take supplies out to Canada. Bougainville travelled to Bordeaux where a flotilla of ships was being assembled. Even though France’s army was at least twice the size of that of Britain, no new units of regulars were sent out. There was a fear, partly thanks to Montcalm’s gloomy predictions, that they would be intercepted by the British. There was also the consideration that if they did arrive in Canada they would place too much strain on the colony’s limited food supply. Montcalm was informed that, ‘you must not expect to receive any military reinforcements’.²⁶ Altogether around four hundred recruits, of mixed quality, were sent to bring the regular units up to strength together with sixty specialists such as engineers and sappers. Apart from the men, the ships carried food, gunpowder, and other provisions to Quebec. Bougainville boarded the frigate, La Chézine, and set sail on 20 March. A few ships crept out from other ports; in mid-March the Atalante, thirty-four guns, and the Pomone, thirty, left the Channel. All the captains hoped they would enter the gulf before the blockading squadron.

La Chézine sailed into the basin of Quebec on 10 May, the first of twenty-three supply ships from France to do so. Its arrival provoked a blizzard of rumours in a town cut off from supplies and news for months. Nearly all of the rest of the fleet trickled in over the next week. The vast majority of ships sent had beaten Durell’s British blockade. Montcalm’s pessimism had been misplaced. There was huge rejoicing by the townspeople who had been haunted by the prospect of starvation. One diarist, Jean-Claude Panet, who had arrived in New France as a 20-year-old soldier and was now approaching his fortieth birthday as a notary in a Quebec court, wrote that, ‘you cannot doubt the joy that this news gave to us’.²⁷ Canada had been jolted by a series of poor harvests, partly caused by the inclement weather and partly by the absence of the farmers who had been called into the colony’s militia and sent to distant frontiers. To add to the discomfort of the Canadians, the winter had been awful. The same low temperatures suffered by the men at Halifax and Louisbourg had been felt right across Canada as well. ‘The winter has been one of the coldest…the ice has backed up to such an extraordinary degree and with such violence, as to throw down a house,’ wrote one officer.²⁸ Now the arrival of the supplies ensured that Canada could fight another campaign. Vaudreuil had told Versailles that ‘of all enemies the most redoubtable is the famine to which we are exposed’. This had been averted although the man responsible for feeding the army and the colony, François Bigot, the short, red-haired, ugly Intendant, calculated that he had received about eighty days’ rations for the regular army, ‘at the rate of half a pound of flour and half a pound of pork per head’, which was less than ‘the proper ration’. Canada received about a third of the food that the colonial authorities had asked for.²⁹ She would have to find the rest herself: cows were requisitioned; two families would have to share one beast to pull their ploughs. Montcalm dramatically announced to Vaudreuil that despite the disappointing supplies from France, ‘trifles are precious to those who have nothing…I shall entirely devote myself towards saving this unfortunate country and if necessary, die in the attempt.’³⁰

The many threats to Canada had meant that Montcalm had spent the winter in Montreal near the centre of the colony and best placed to react to whichever proved to be the most pressing. He had informed the aged Duc de Belle Isle, the Minister for War, that ‘the rest of the troops remain in their quarters; they hold themselves in readiness to march on the first notice’. He would stay in Montreal until it became clear ‘to what point it will be necessary to proceed; that will depend on the enemy’s movements; their superiority forces us to receive the law from them in regard to our movements’.³¹ Early rumours brought to him at the beginning of May by ‘several English prisoners…unanimously concurred in reporting, that great preparations were in making in the British colonies for the invasion of the whole of Canada; and that the intention of making three simultaneous attacks was spoken of, in which more than 60,000 men were to be employed’.³² These wildly inflated reports were swallowed whole by Montcalm and did nothing to lighten his sense of doom.

The arrival of the intelligence which was brought by the flotilla from France had left him in no doubt that Quebec was where his duty now lay. Within hours of arriving in Quebec, Montcalm, in his own words had ‘already given activity to many necessary arrangements’. He went to bed on 24 May but was awoken at midnight with the first reliable intelligence of the British movements. The couriers informed him ‘of the arrival of 15 large ships of the line’, an exaggerated account of Durell, and Montcalm rightly assumed that ‘it’s assuredly the vanguard of the English army destined to attack Quebec’. He finished his letter in typical style, half bellicose, half defeatist, ‘I fear not tell you, My Lord, that our arrangements here are somewhat tardy…whether strong or weak, we shall fight somewhere or other, and perhaps be fortunate.’³³

The news was corroborated by beacons which burnt brightly on the southern bank across the narrows from the city of Quebec. The chain of beacons ended with the ‘fires on Point Lévis’, which pierced the darkness. The guns of the town fired as if in receipt of the signal. Their deep booms rolled across the basin of Quebec; it was a grim augury. ³⁴

There was consternation. It was a universally embraced axiom of Canadian life that the St Lawrence was an impenetrable obstacle. Vaudreuil had airily assured Versailles that ‘I do not presume that the enemy will undertake coming to Quebec.’ One journal records flatly that, ‘the rumour in regard to [an attack on] Quebec was not generally credited; because the river, from the difficulty of its navigation, was considered an impenetrable barrier’. Yet here were the British little more than fifty miles from the town. It was ‘astounding’ to launch ‘an enterprise apparently so daring, and at a time when the season was so little advanced’. The diarist blamed the ‘North East wind, which had constantly blown for several days’. With a ‘favourable wind’ the ‘whole of the enemy’s fleet…might be before Quebec, in less than three days’. He describes the sense of helplessness: ‘the alarm was general throughout the country—there was no troops in Quebec—the town was open on every side—no plan of operation, or of defence had been formed;—every body hastened to pack up, and to place their effects in securityby sending them to Trois Rivières, or to Montréal’.³⁵

Montcalm threw himself into preparing Quebec for a siege. The winter before Governor General Vaudreuil had rather pompously informed Versailles of his plans: ‘on the first news I shall receive of the enemy being in the river, I shall provide for the security of the frontiers of this government. I shall go down, in person, to Quebec.’ He would take with him the militias of Montreal and Trois Rivières to get them building defences. He assured Versailles that ‘I shall always feel great pleasure in communicating to them [Montcalm and Lévis] all the movements I have ordered, and even in making use of such reflections as place and circumstances will suggest to them.’ This does not suggest that Vaudreuil was preparing himself for a campaign season of constructive cooperation. News from France of Montcalm’s promotion and orders to defer to him in military matters cannot have improved his attitude.³⁶

True to his word Vaudreuil hurried to the capital where he and Montcalm would spend the rest of the summer bickering over who was responsible for what. Montcalm wrote to his second in command, Chevalier de Lévis, that ‘I have still less time, my dear Chevalier, for writing since the arrival of the Marquis de Vaudreuil, for I have to allow him to play the role of general. I act as secretary and major for him, and greatly long to have you with us.’ At least one journal agreed, ‘in the midst of this chaos, M le Marquis de Vaudreuil arrived, council upon council was held, at which every person who chose to assume airs of importance was invited to assist—but at these councils no decisive measures were resolved upon’. They were unruly affairs, people crushed in ‘pell mell…whatever may be their stations’. Whatever Vaudreuil’s strengths or weaknesses as a strategist he was certainly no chairman. The councils were chaotic with people ‘squeezing [and] elbowing—and where persons of low stature, slip under the arms of taller ones to gain the front row;—where they all scream and interrupt each other’s speeches; and talk loudly all at the same time, and upon matters, totally irrelevant to the subject of the debate—such is the council chamber—such the form of the council!’³⁷

One of Vaudreuil’s priorities was the well-being of the civilian subjects of Louis XV. With the British fleet already at Bic he needed to decide quickly how he would respond to the calls for assistance from the Canadian settlers along the banks of the river. Everyone had a plan; many of them involved aggressive counter-attacks aimed at the British ships. However, as Vaudreuil made clear right away, ‘owing to the position of the enemy and lack of provisions’, it was impossible to move a serious body of troops down the river. Instead of waiting for succour the habitants must evacuate. Vaudreuil’s commands raced down the extensive postal network, carried by horse and carriage, typically nine miles between each post. They ordered old men, women and children to retreat as far as Quebec. Forage was to be destroyed in the evacuated areas and valuables left behind in caches. Cattle were to be brought with them, to feed the hungry mouths of Quebec. An officer, de Léry, was sent to instil the necessary urgency and to arrest those who refused to cooperate. Two scouts each with three fast horses would stay behind from every deserted parish to report on British movements. The young men would form militia units and oppose enemy attempts to land; anyone capable of bearing arms was to be included, ‘none must be left from 15 years upwards’.³⁸ Unsurprisingly many of the habitants proved unwilling to abandon their land, cattle, and crops to the British. It took a lifetime of toil to clear the strip of land on which families depended for their survival. For generations Canadians had defended it tenaciously against all comers. Abandonment was a grave decision. Vaudreuil was forced to compromise. On 31 May he acknowledged that ‘the difficulties made by the inhabitants have multiplied to that degree that he has been obliged’ to allow them to take to the woods, staying with their possessions and cattle and lying low. Despite this concession he told de Léry to impress upon the habitants the gravity of the situation and the importance of denying the British anything that could be of use to them. By early June Vaudreuil was recommending exemplary punishment to those habitants who resisted his orders.³⁹

De Léry’s journal hints at the struggle involved in prising Canadians from their farms. They ‘refused to believe’ him at first, then told him that they had not started ‘seeding the oats’ yet and they declined to leave. By 6 June he records that large numbers of Canadians were deserting the ranks of the militia.⁴⁰ Back in Quebec, Vaudreuil’s letters grew more hysterical. While cursing the unseasonable regularity of the north-east wind that was pushing the British ships closer to the city, he threatened everyone with disciplinary action. He apologized for having to use such language but men and food were required to save Quebec. De Léry had to make it clear to the foot-dragging habitants that ‘the enemy are out to destroy everything that calls itself Canada’.⁴¹

The author of one journal was scathing about the evacuation: ‘these hurried and ill-judged orders…caused much greater injury to thousands of the inhabitants, than even the enemy could have inflicted upon them—numbers of families were ruined by these precipitate measures—three fourths of the cattle died’.⁴² The whole operation was far too hurried; the British ships, of course, had been only the advance guard and had not pushed on towards Quebec. But in the rushed flight supplies of grain and herds of cattle were abandoned. Panet commented that the operation was conducted ‘with such a haste that no honour can be given to those who were charged with its execution’.⁴³ Marguerite Gosselin lived on the tip of the Île d’Orléans on a prosperous farm and had a horde of children. She obeyed orders to evacuate, which turned out to be a ‘real nightmare’. ‘If it had been more carefully planned,’ she wrote, ‘we would never have lost our cattle.’⁴⁴ Another journalist wrote that ‘several of the inhabitants, women and children unhappily perished…Without any means having been previously taken of providing food for their sustenance, boats for their conveyance or places to which they could retire.’⁴⁵

Around Quebec huge preparations were underway to prepare the city for a siege. Montcalm hoped that ‘the navigation of the River St Lawrence, often difficult, may afford him time to take those precautions which have been neglected, and might, in my opinion, have been taken beforehand’.⁴⁶ He had a large body of soldiers of many different varieties available for its defence. Every kind from the grenadiers of his regular army battalions, who had stood motionless on battlefields in Europe as muskets and cannon tore down their comrades beside them, to young boys with no training, scarcely strong enough to carry a firearm. He had eight battalions of French regular troops, troupes de terre, which roughly translates as ‘soldiers of the land’; so named because French battalions were raised from certain geographical parts of France. They had been shipped over since the outbreak of hostilities and now numbered in all 3,200 men. There were also full-time colonial soldiers or ‘regulars’, the Compagnies franches de la marine, so called because they were provided by the Ministry of Marine which oversaw the colonies. They were largely recruited in France and answered to Canadian-born officers. They served in Canada for their whole careers and usually settled in the colony when they were discharged. Montcalm calculated that they could put ‘at most, fifteen hundred men in the field’. As well as these full-time, professional regulars, every Canadian man was made to serve in the militia. Many nations had some kind of arrangement for raising amateur soldiers in times of crisis. These part-time warriors were generally despised by professional officers all around the world for their inexpert fumbling. But in Canada, despite Montcalm’s sneering, things were different. Wolfe himself, the arch professional snob, wrote that ‘every man in Canada is a soldier’.⁴⁷ Generations of warfare, combined with the tough life of a trapper or hunter, had produced a strong military ethos among all Canadians that was unique.

Canada was vast but empty. Although the European population was doubling every generation, in 1759 it numbered just over seventy thousand people. The prospect of a dangerous North Atlantic crossing, cold winters, isolated settlements, and almost continual war had discouraged mass migration. Nor were conditions suitable for growing a cash crop like tobacco which had financed the population explosions in British colonies like Virginia and Pennsylvania. Montcalm estimated at the beginning of the campaign that 12,000 Canadians were capable of bearing arms. He deducted from this figure those away trapping furs on the frontier and those involved in the movement of supplies by road and boat and estimated that he could muster around five thousand militia. But even if he was able to, it would take too many people away from the land, nothing would get planted and ‘famine would follow’. In all he expected to face the enemy with just over ten thousand troops. ‘What is that,’ he wailed, ‘against at least fifty thousand men which the English have!’⁴⁸

Typically Montcalm underestimated his own strength and exaggerated that of his enemy. The British had 20,000 regular soldiers in North America but they were parcelled out in different groups. Wolfe’s army was one of these but it was badly understrength; most of his battalions numbering between five hundred and eight hundred men. Colonial levies would be mobilized but the British colonies showed little enthusiasm, especially if the men were to be used outside their native colony. Virginia raised one rather than two battalions, and the other southern colonies did not come close to recruiting their quota of men. In all less than twenty thousand British Americans signed up for the campaign of 1759.

Montcalm would face less than forty thousand men, and these were divided into three major thrusts. The French force was outnumbered but not overwhelmingly so. They had many other advantages too. Warfare in the vast, inhospitable spaces of North America was quite unlike anything that the British had encountered in their campaigns at home or in the Low Countries. Every European soldier was struck by the scale and majesty of the terrain. Bougainville wrote while travelling through the lands above Montreal that ‘the navigation is very difficult, but there is the most beautiful scenery in the world’.⁴⁹ It was a glorious spectacle indeed, but a logistical nightmare, especially for anyone seeking to invade Canada. Separated by hundreds of miles of virtually impenetrable forest and lakes, each thrust was unsupported and each risked being defeated in detail by French forces operating over internal lines of communications, using familiar routes along rivers that could see huge numbers of men transferred from front to front with great speed. Vaudreuil had summed it up during the winter by saying that if the enemy attempted to attack Quebec they must be defeated quickly, ‘a single battle gained saves the colony; the fleet departs, and we return to oppose the enemy’s progress’⁵⁰ up through Lake George. One British marine officer pondered the challenges of attacking ‘so remote, uncultivated, inhospitable a country as that of Canada; where rivers, woods, and mountains break off all communication’. It was a land ‘where the very face of nature is set against the invader, and is strong as the strongest barrier; where uncommon heats and cold are in alliance with and fight for the adversary’.⁵¹ And that was in the summer. Between November and March or April all sizeable military operations of whatever kind had to be suspended. Troops fought hard merely to stay alive. During Bougainville’s first winter he wrote, ‘it is impossible to conceive of a viler sort of weather…one could not understand how frightful this country is if he has not been here’.⁵²

Montcalm enjoyed all the advantages of geography but he was also stronger than he had assumed, even though not every one of his men was available for the protection of Quebec. Montcalm was forced to send three of his eight French army battalions to protect the southern invasion route into the colony, which was threatened by General Amherst from Lake George. Joining them were eight companies of colonial regulars and 1,200 militiamen; about three thousand men in all. He also had to send troops to garrison Fort Niagara to protect the gateway to Canada’s vast western lands. For the defence of Quebec, one officer estimated that there were the five battalions of the French army, ‘about 1600 men’, ‘about 600 colonial’ regulars and ‘10,400 Canadians, and sailors distributed throughout the batteries’. New France could also call upon allied groups of Native Americans, from the Christianized Abenaki of St François to the more mercenary distant tribes from the west who joined for money, adventure, and booty. Estimates differ on the number of Native Americans present during the summer of 1759, and no doubt the number fluctuated as they came and went much as they pleased, but the same officer counted ‘918 Indians of different nations’. Last, there was ‘a troop of cavalry composed of 200 volunteers taken from different corps and to be posted promptly wherever the enemy should show themselves, to be attached to the general’s suite and to convey orders’. In all he gave the rather precise figure of 13,718 men. The journal comments that

so strong an army was not anticipated, because it was not expected that there would be so large a number of Canadians…but such an emulation prevailed among the people, that old men of 80 and children of 12 and 13 were seen coming to the camp, who would never consent to take advantage of the exemption granted to their age.⁵³

A witness comments that the habitants ‘assembled themselves with so much activity and zeal that, on the field, we make up a body of eleven to twelve thousand men’.⁵⁴ The people of New France were flocking in unprecedented numbers to help with the defence of their capital.

It was an empire dependent on its capital. Montcalm had told Versailles during the winter, that Canada would fall ‘without a doubt’ if Quebec did. ‘There is not’ he wrote, ‘a second line any place of strength, any spot having in depot any warlike stores or provisions’. Nor could Canada ‘sustain herself by herself and without succours from France’, and Quebec was Canada’s only port. Montcalm was as clear as Wolfe that it was in front of the walls of Quebec that the decisive clash for domination of the North American continent would take place.⁵⁵

Quebec was derived from Kebec, which in the local Native American dialect meant ‘narrows’. At Quebec the St Lawrence River rapidly shrinks from being more than ten miles wide to just two-thirds of a mile. Here also the St Charles River joins the St Lawrence and in between the two there is a promontory of land surrounded on three sides by steep cliffs and water and on the fourth by an open patch of scrub known as Les Plaines d’Abraham or the Plains of Abraham. On this natural bastion sat the Upper Town of Quebec. Below it a thin strip of land at the bottom of the cliff was, in some places, around a hundred yards wide and was the site of the Lower Town, a few crowded blocks of buildings. Downriver from the narrows the St Lawrence widens out into a basin, the edges of which are very shallow. Large ships were unable to get close in; Quebec was not a natural harbour.

In 1535 the French explorer Jacques Cartier arrived and immediately realized that this was the place to dominate this vast new continent and, he hoped, the route to China. Large ocean-going ships could penetrate this far but little further, and the river was narrow enough to control who came and went. Added to this the site was almost impregnable. Cartier named the cliff which soared more than two hundred feet out of the river, Cap Diamant or Cape Diamond. It is still easy to see why he chose to spend his first winter in Canada on top of this peak. The small French party held out through a vicious Canadian winter in a little stockade protected by a moat built on top of Cap Diamant, the first European fort in Canadian history. Decimated by scurvy and threatened by Native attacks, Cartier abandoned the site in the spring. Several more attempts were made to settle the area, each of which was abandoned as the failure to find valuable raw materials or the hoped for sea-routes to China meant that the will evaporated to overcome the challenges of distance, climate, and the local inhabitants. A permanent settlement was finally established on 3 July 1608 by the father of Canada, Samuel de Champlain, who landed and built a trading post where the Lower Town of Quebec now stands. He promised his king that Quebec was the gateway to the continent and possession of it would make France the most powerful nation on earth.

The experiment in global supremacy did not get off to a great start. The early town was blockaded and captured without a fight in 1629 by the Kirke brothers, two English corsairs who ransacked the town so that when it was returned to the French in the treaty of 1632 it had to be rebuilt again from scratch. In 1690 when the Acadian town of Port Royal, near modern-day Annapolis Royal in Nova Scotia, fell to an English fleet, it was decided that Quebec needed a wall on its western landward side to protect the town from its only vulnerable approach, on the Plains of Abraham, the raised plateau of rolling ground to the west. A wooden palisade was built, protecting the city from an enemy simply capturing it coup de main with the simplest of attacks.

The building work could not have been timelier. On 16 October 1690, thirty-four New English ships arrived off Quebec with around two and a half thousand men on board. They were led by Sir William Phips, an adventurer who had become fabulously wealthy after he salvaged the wreck of a Spanish galleon. These New Englanders were flushed from successes against the French settlements on the Atlantic seaboard and were now intent on conquering New France. Massachusetts had optimistically paid for the expedition on credit to be redeemed with the booty from Quebec. Few, if any, New Englanders had ever seen the stronghold before the expedition; its dominant position must have come as an unpleasant surprise. A messenger was sent to issue an ultimatum to the French governor. The Comte de Frontenac, a proud, aristocratic soldier of France, had to be restrained from hanging him for his impertinence. He gained control of his temper and told the messenger, ‘Tell your master I will answer him with the mouth of my cannons!’ This message of defiance against the piratical New English seamen became a Canadian motto for the next hundred years.

Phips’ assault carried vital lessons for future operations against Quebec. The obvious place for a force to land was along the north shore of the St Lawrence, east of the town on its downriver side. From the St Charles River, which marked the town’s eastern edge, the shoreline ran for five miles to the Montmorency River with its spectacular waterfall. In the centre lay the village of Beauport; the Beauport shore offered numerous low lying coves and beaches on which to land men. This is where Phips sent his troops. They were carried from their transports in ships’ boats, the sailors pulling hard at the oars. As they waded ashore the New Englanders were harassed by Canadians and allied Native Americans. Both of these two groups were highly skilled in the arts of bush fighting and used the woodland as cover from which to launch lightning attacks. Meanwhile, the larger ships attempted to batter the defences of Quebec with their cannon but came off distinctly second best in their duel with the batteries on shore.

Having landed, the New Englanders attempted to march westward along the Beauport shore towards the St Charles River, force a crossing and storm the town. They never made it to the riverbank. The Canadian and Native irregulars kept up a withering fire from the cover of the woods and so demoralized the New Englanders that they retreated in near panic back to the beaches and onto their ships. Around one hundred and fifty of them were killed or wounded, while the Canadians suffered nine dead and perhaps fifty wounded. Sickness swept through the fleet and the shortening nights terrified the sailors of the expedition, who imagined being trapped by ice in the St Lawrence. On 23 October Phips and his fleet weighed anchor and made for Boston. They suffered heavy losses at sea on the way back. It would take more than a fortnight and more than a handful of ships and men to take Quebec.⁵⁶

Frontenac knew that his defences would not prove as impregnable against a force armed with modern siege artillery; cannon that could hurl a thirty-two-pound ball at 485 yards per second would brush aside a wooden stockade half a mile away as if it were paper. Work started on modern fortifications but soon got bogged down into a bewildering quagmire caused by shortage of funds and a rapid succession of engineers who all without fail utterly condemned their predecessor’s work. Nothing dramatic was achieved until war broke out again with the British in 1744. Louisbourg fell in the summer in 1745 and the government of New France was once again faced with an urgent need to protect their capital. Every able-bodied man from 14 to 60 within forty miles of the city was forced to help with the construction. They built a modern stone wall, with an earth filling, designed to withstand cannon fire. Four half octagonal bastions jutted out from the wall, allowing the cannon on them to produce an ‘enfilading’ fire—sideways down the length of the wall. At either end the wall was anchored on the top of the cliffs that surrounded the city with another demibastion. On the southern end a redoubt was built on the very highest point of Cap Diamant.

It was advanced for North America but war on the continent was changing fast. New forts were being built to the latest European designs. For any fortress to survive the hammering of an artillery bombardment it had to be surrounded by low lying stone and earth walls yards thick arranged in geometric patterns to allow cannon to sweep every angle. Soon North American fortifications would look more like state of the art complexes in Flanders than the old stockades of just a generation before. Quebec never reached this level of sophistication. There were a couple of serious drawbacks. High ground on the rolling Plains of Abraham allowed cannon to be placed that would look down on the wall. Also the cost and effort of completing the landward defences was simply too much. When Britain and France made peace in 1748 Louisbourg was returned to Louis in exchange for Madras in India, which had been captured by a French expedition. The work petered out at Quebec. The all-important ditch with a ‘glacis’ or gently sloping, raised earthwork to stop artillerymen getting a clear line of sight to the walls was never completed. One observer later wrote that because the walls were ‘constructed before any ditch was sunk and the soil is of a slaty rock, the blowing of it for that purpose must undoubtedly shake the whole mass of the works’.⁵⁷ Blasting a ditch would have brought the walls down. Instead, a shallow ditch and a glacis seem to have stretched down from the north end for only a quarter of the wall. In addition the fifty-two cannon on the wall were mounted on the flanks of the bastions to produce a lethal enfilading fire at attacking infantry but this meant they could not fire out over the Plains of Abraham directly away from the city.

By the Seven Years War it was widely accepted, especially by the disdainful French regulars, that if a large modern force could get troops to the west of the city and bring their large siege cannon to bear on the wall it would be only a matter of days before they had pounded a breach and poured infantry into the city itself. The 42-year-old Chief Engineer of New France, Nicolas Sarrebource de Pontleroy, described by Montcalm as ‘an excellent man’ declared that the city ‘is not capable of useful defence in case of siege, having neither ditches, nor counterscarps nor covered way, and being dominated by heights behind which there is cover facilitating the approaches’. Bougainville wrote that Quebec ‘was without fortifications…if the approaches to the city were not defended, the place would have to surrender’.⁵⁸ Montcalm agreed, a journal relates that ‘he was persuaded that an army, which can get near to the walls of a town, is sure, sooner or later to compel its surrender, whatever may be the numbers engaged in its defence; and must in an especial manner be the case with Quebec, which not being fortified, was merely secured against being taken by surprise’.⁵⁹ With his usual vitriol for Canadians, he described de Pontleroy’s predecessor as Chief Engineer as ‘a great ignoramus in his profession (you need only look at his works) who robbed the king like the others’. The defences at Quebec, he wrote, were ‘so ridiculous and so bad that it would be taken as soon as besieged’.⁶⁰

Montcalm’s simple solution was to do everything he could to stop the enemy seizing the Plains of Abraham to the west of the city. The best way to do that was to stop them landing on the north shore at all. As he had written to Versailles that winter, ‘all our hopes depend on preventing the landing’.⁶¹ To this end he erected temporary fortifications right along the Beauport shore, ensuring that Wolfe’s men would be unable to simply march ashore as Phips’ men had. One French officer recorded, ‘Quebec, the only barrier of this colony on the river side, being, from the nature of its fortifications, incapable of sustaining a siege, attention was directed…to putting it at least beyond the danger of a coup de main.’ Some work had been progressing over the winter but the news that the British were in the river ‘roused the men from their languor’.⁶² Montcalm did not let his pessimism erode his determination to prepare Quebec for a siege. He threw himself into improving the defences with huge energy and in the words of one officer, ‘made the necessary dispositions for a vigorous defence’.⁶³ He made his headquarters at the village of Beauport and spent his time inspecting every inch of riverbank with Pontleroy and together they sited cannon batteries, redoubts, and lines of trenches. They both knew that in the open field their part-time soldiers could not face Wolfe’s trained killers on equal terms, but positioned behind fixed defences they could be relied upon to stand firm. Also they would be supported by a massive amount of firepower. In all ‘234 pieces of cannon, 17 mortars, and 4 howitzers’ were available to Montcalm and if even some of these could be brought to bear at the critical moment Wolfe’s army could be pulverized.⁶⁴ Bougainville was more optimistic than his general. Two years before he had written that ‘defensive lines…which three or four thousand men could hold, would…make the city entirely safe’. Any British attempt on the city would be ‘foolish’.⁶⁵

Jean Baptiste Nicholas Roch de Ramezay was the King’s Lieutenant (Lieutenant de Roi) in Quebec. He was 50 years old, born in Canada and an embodiment of New France’s interconnected web of military and trading oligarchs. Since the age of 11 he had campaigned for his king against the Fox in Illinois and the British in Acadia. He was now paid 18,000 livres a year to protect Quebec, or more correctly, the Upper Town. Only a year into the job, he was now about to earn his salary as no other King’s Lieutenant had ever done. His account of the siege describes how men hammered stakes into the ground to enclose open areas and placed ‘some cannon on the top of the road that leads from the Lower to the Upper Town’.⁶⁶ For two weeks thousands of men, the sailors from the merchant and naval ships, regular soldiers and members of the militia, carried, dug, and hacked at the earth. Houses along the Beauport shore were evacuated, barricaded, and had loopholes punched through the walls. Montcalm made it clear that the entire colony would be involved in a supreme effort to ensure its survival; ‘the monks, priests, civil officers and women will perform the field labor’.Women were allowed to stay for the time being but Montcalm did not want to feed the extra mouths when the siege began and gave orders that all the ‘women, children, magistrates and all those persons that embarrass the defense [were to] be immediately sent to Trois Rivières’.⁶⁷ Angélique Renaud d’Avène des Méloizes de Péan was the wife of one of New France’s richest, and most corrupt, merchants. She wrote that ‘most of the nobles and gentry of Quebec have taken refuge at Trois Rivières or Montreal, but I refused to follow their lead. I will not leave my dear husband.’ The beautiful Madame Péan had less to fear than most. François Bigot was entirely smitten with the young woman and, as she admitted, ‘my house has been transformed into a veritable fortress because he fears for my safety’. ‘Those of an envious disposition,’ she continued gaily, ‘say that all available resources should rather be used to improve the city’s fortifications.’⁶⁸ There were other young women rather less fortunate than Madame Péan. Quebec had no less than three nunneries, the Ursuline Convent, the Hôtel Dieu, and the General Hospital. The majority of nuns were of noble birth and the rest were from well to do merchant families. Families paid a huge 3,000 livres for the privilege of installing a daughter in the nunnery so only the wealthy could even dream about joining. This was more than fathers paid in all but the most fashionable convents in France.⁶⁹ The nuns would stay through the siege and provide vital healthcare to the wounded. One kept a journal of the summer and describes the flight of ‘all the families of distinction, merchants, etc’ who were ‘capable of sustaining themselves’. They were ‘removed to Three Rivers and Montreal, thereby relieving the garrison during the siege’.⁷⁰

Some people stayed, many left. One French officer recorded that ‘all persons who could be of no service in the siege, such as ladies and others, were desired to withdraw from the city; this request being considered by most people as an order, was submitted to, but not without reluctance’.⁷¹ In fact, many ignored it; there were certainly women left in Quebec right through the summer. Those who remained helped the soldiers and militiamen as they carried out Montcalm’s orders. Two fully armed ships were scuttled in the mouth of the St Charles River to act as forts and block the entrance. A wooden boom was also run across the mouth, attached with chains to either side, to prevent raids by small boats. The two sides of the river were connected by a bridge of boats with either end protected by an earthwork. Beyond them on the Beauport shore work continued ‘to line the crested bank from the River St Charles to the Falls of Montmorency with entrenchments’.⁷² Every few hundred metres, a redoubt was built containing three or four cannon each, with infantry positions dug in alongside and behind. In all just under forty cannon swept the coastline. In the city itself new batteries were constructed along the waterfront of the Lower Town. These guns, numbering over a hundred in all, would have the absolutely vital task of stopping the British ships getting through the narrows of the St Lawrence and upriver or ‘beyond’ the town. Once there they could cause havoc with Quebec’s communications with the rest of the colony and potentially land troops on the all-important north shore. It was imperative that the British fleet was kept below the town. Just as the Beauport entrenchments covered the French position to the east, the cannon of the town would stop the British opening a front to the west. A French officer noted in his journal that ‘batteries were erected on the Quay du Palais, and those on the ramparts, and in the lower town, were repaired, completed, and considerably enlarged’.⁷³ Four shore batteries called ‘Royal’, ‘King’s’, ‘Queen’s’, and ‘Dauphin’s’ (the heir to the French throne) were all either built or augmented. As a result, although some defences were built further upriver, in places like L’Anse des Mères and Sillery, ‘that quarter was deemed inaccessible’. Houses that backed onto the water had their walls strengthened. Passageways from the Lower to the Upper Town were barricaded. The Scottish Jacobite, Chevalier Johnstone, was given this job; ‘I was employed for three weeks upon it with miners and other workmen, to render all the footpaths impracticable.’⁷⁴ His work made a direct assault on the Lower Town with a view to storming the Upper a very difficult prospect. Cannon were mounted in small boats designed to harass any ships who ventured into the basin of Quebec. Innovative new ideas jostled for funding. Panet describes ‘two boats, armed with four 24 pound cannon’, which he says were called tracassiers, literally ‘harassers’.⁷⁵ Monsieur Duclos, captain of the frigate Chézine which had brought Bougainville back from France, ‘proposed the construction of a floating battery’. It was agreed to and he was given command. Known as La Diable, ‘The She-Devil’, she was described as a ‘pontoon of a hexagonal figure; capable of bearing 12 guns of large calibre’. Six ‘gunboats each carrying a 24 pounder’ were built and each placed under the command of one of the captains of the merchant ships recently arrived in Quebec. Finally, eight small boats were each given an eight-pound gun. All these boats were able to operate in the shallow water off Beauport and would serve ‘the purpose of preventing the landing of the English’. An officer records that these boats would ‘send bark canoes ahead, which patrolling throughout the night, would be able to give notice of the slightest movement on the part of the enemy’.⁷⁶

Councils of war were held and radical ideas debated. One was to destroy the Lower Town to allow clear fields of fire if the British tried to assault it directly. A diarist says that this plan was dismissed because Quebec was ‘in fact nothing if the Lower Town was destroyed’.⁷⁷ Montcalm did knock down the odd warehouse to improve fields of fire for his cannon and deny any assaulting force cover as they tried to land but he was against wholesale destruction. ‘If the success of the colony could be assured by the destruction of the houses, we should not hesitate,’ he wrote to his artillery commander, Le Chevalier le Mercier, ‘however there is no point destroying houses and ruining poor people without good cause.’⁷⁸

The Plan of Operations for the army stated that the ‘general disposition’ of the troops was to ‘oppose a landing between St Charles River and Montmorency falls, as well as for retirement behind this river in case the landings were effected’. Troops were spread out along the north shore of the St Lawrence. They were supported by the Native Americans although one diarist points out that ‘the savages were dispersed according to their own inclinations, it being found impossible to reduce them to any state of subordination or discipline’. Montcalm ordered his force to ‘entrench itself along its whole front for protection against cannon fire, and work will be set about to fortify the places which appear to offer the readiest facilities for landing’. In the city itself he left 800 militiamen, just over a hundred colonial regulars, and all the seamen who had come over with the fleet, perhaps seven hundred men. They manned the all-important artillery batteries which would shut off the upper river.⁷⁹

If the British did try to bludgeon their way ashore, ‘no precise directions can be given for such a time. Everything will depend on the circumstances and the manner in which the enemy attacks. The army leaders must apply themselves to use every means to repel the enemy, and not to expose themselves to a total defeat by failing to secure a path for retreat.’ If withdrawal became necessary, cannon which were too heavy to drag away in a hurry should be ‘spiked’, rendered useless by driving a nail through the touch-hole on top of the barrel, so that the British could not use French cannon against them. If the French retreated across the St Charles then that line must be held at all costs; once it was crossed then the weaknesses of Quebec’s western fortifications would be exposed. In fact, if the British crossed the St Charles, Montcalm signalled his intention to abandon Quebec, rather than endure a siege. If Quebec was abandoned, the orders warned, ‘the colony is in extremis’. However, the tone of the orders was upbeat, and the commanders assured the troops that ‘in the situation in which we are, it is the only position we can take. It is both audacious and military.’⁸⁰

As for the town, the command of the garrison in the Upper Town was given to de Ramezay, the King’s Lieutenant, and the Lower Town had a subordinate commander because Ramezay ‘could not be everywhere at once’. One French officer said there were ‘in all about 2000’ men in the garrison of the town, ‘composed of the Burghers and seamen’. But he claimed that they were ‘relieved every four days from the camp’. It is possible that Montcalm tried to keep his troops alert by rotating them through various positions.⁸¹

For those who were worried about the British braving the cannon fire and pushing through the narrows to probe above the town, the Plan gave contained reassurance. The combination of the town’s batteries and the French frigates above the town was being counted on to hold back the British: ‘there is no reason to believe that the enemy is thinking of attempting to pass in front of the town and landing at L’Anse des Mères, and so long as the frigates are active, we have at least nothing to fear on that side’.⁸²

In this febrile fortnight Montcalm made several decisions that would have a momentous impact on the defence of Quebec and Canada. While he strengthened the fortifications he also planned for defeat. Canada clung to the banks of the St Lawrence. At many places the colony merely stretched inland the length of one farm. Nearly every settlement had river frontage and all the major towns were sited along the river. A gap of 110 miles separated Quebec from the next principal town, Trois Rivières, and Montreal was almost exactly the same distance further upriver. As a result the contingency for defeat was obvious: to withdraw along the St Lawrence. A journal recorded that ‘it was doubtful what might be the issue of a battle; after the English had made good a landing, it was determined to construct ovens, all the way up from Quebec to Trois Rivières; and to establish storehouses, and small magazines in different places, for securing a retreat’. Troops were also ‘ordered to retain the smallest quantity of baggage possible and to send the rest away into the interior’. Despite Montcalm’s insistence that Canada was lost if Quebec fell, he was clearly preparing for continued resistance should Wolfe capture the town, in accordance with the instructions from the French court to keep hold of a scrap of territory no matter how small. One decision in particular was to have a major impact on the campaign. He decided that ships carrying much of the essential supplies for the colony would be moved just over fifty miles upriver from Quebec to Batiscan. This was above the Richelieu rapids, which only very shallow-draught ships could negotiate and only at certain times. Here the ships and stores would be safe from Saunders. It also meant that if Quebec fell, the colony’s entire supply of food and powder would not fall with it and there was hope for further resistance. Montcalm’s army would be supplied by a regular flow of food and stores that would come in small boats down the St Lawrence from Batiscan to Quebec. It was a long supply line and therefore vulnerable. The danger was that in planning for the aftermath of the fall of Quebec he risked weakening his position and thus hastening that eventuality. His plan for the defence of Quebec now relied on the assumption that he could stop the British from passing the narrows and operating above the town, where they would be able to intercept his supplies.⁸³

Having waited in vain for the mighty river to swallow up the British fleet, the French resorted to that other traditional instrument of salvation, the raid and ambush. On 30 May, as so often before in the bloody history of Canada, a party of between two hundred and fifty and three hundred Canadians and Native Americans ‘was sent…to the coast of the Ile aux Coudres to skirmish with the English who had landed there, and to lay in ambush for them under cover of the woods, with which the island was almost wholly overgrown’. A French army officer, with a scorn of their Native allies typical of his class, said that on seeing the British the Native Americans refused to continue ‘and the expedition had to be abandoned’. But it seems that a small group of Canadians insisted on pressing on and lay in wait on the island. Three young British naval officers blundered into the trap and triggered the first contact of the 1759 campaign. It was a quick and easy Canadian success. The war party ‘killed the horses which they rode, without hurting the riders who they brought away’. The three men were midshipmen, the most junior naval officers, and they had been ‘placed as sentinels to make signals when they described any vessels to the southward’. They were brought back to Quebec. Another journal recorded that they were as young as 14. No less than three sources agree that, remarkably, one of the teenagers was a relative of Rear Admiral Durell, probably a grandson. According to Panet they ‘were treated honourably’ during their time in Quebec where they spoke freely about the British fleet, somewhat exaggerating its size, and of the British expectation that Quebec would fall without too much resistance. Indeed, Panet thought they sounded like ‘they considered this operation already accomplished’. After just over a week they were sent further inland to Trois Rivières, to keep them out of mischief but not before they had ‘praised the skill of the Canadians for having killed their horses without having harmed them’.

Despite the unorthodox methods of the Canadians and Native Americans they proved on this first foray that they had huge potential as irregular troops, in this instance gaining the first real intelligence about the British fleet. Our scornful French officer refused to be impressed. In his journal he pointed out that the midshipmen told their captors that another 600 men were unarmed and milling about on the beach. He regretted this missed opportunity, writing that they could all have been ‘destroyed’ by the ‘smallest detachment’.⁸⁴

Even so, it was no doubt a morale-boosting success. By the beginning of June a cautious optimism had replaced the panic occasioned by the fiery beacons. A journal recounted that ‘by the end of the month [May] the palisades were fixed, the batteries completed, and Quebec secured against a coup de main’.⁸⁵ The number of men present for the defence of the city was far greater than people had dared hope for. The walls of the city and the north bank of the St Lawrence bristled with cannon. Supplies of food and powder were sufficient, if not plentiful. In fact, there was an odd feeling of anticlimax. The whole population had believed that the British would land within days of their appearance at Bic. They had thrown themselves into the task of protecting the city but as June plodded on there was no sign of the British and ‘the delay…gave leisure for that ardour to cool’. After all, the Canadians were ‘by nature impatient’.⁸⁶

Their desire to meet the enemy stemmed from a conviction that they would beat any British force. Importantly, people believed that Quebec would hold out. The history of Canada, from Cartier’s first pathetic attempts to survive the winter, was one of struggle against the climate, the Native Americans, and invasions by land and sea. Time and again grave threats to the colony had been overcome. Quebecers believed that their town was impregnable and had been protected by the Virgin Mary herself against pagans and heretics for hundreds of years.

One myth fast being demolished, however, was that of the impassable St Lawrence. While Montcalm’s men dug, built, and sweated under the increasingly warm early summer sun it seemed to them that the north-east wind blew with depressing regularity. This is not entirely corroborated by the more objective logs of the British ships but the British were certainly blessed with fairly benign conditions. The news that the British ships had arrived at the Île aux Coudres ‘renewed the consternation, for no doubt was now entertained, that the whole English fleet was closely following’. It was particularly embarrassing for the French sailors: ‘our seamen, who had always represented the navigation of the river to be extremely difficult (which indeed the very frequent accidents that befell our ships, gave every reason to believe was true) had cause to blush at seeing the English ships accomplish it, without incurring any loss or danger’.⁸⁷ Voices in the colony had for some time demanded manmade defences for suitable points on the river. Despite everyone blaming each other it seems the main reason for these not being put into action was simply the vast cost and considerable logistical effort in building forts and batteries on inaccessible headlands and islands. The French were not totally downcast, however. They knew that the toughest stretch of navigation in the whole river still lay ahead of the British. Although the river was still around fourteen miles wide at the Île aux Coudres, the navigable channel was narrow and ran tight along the north shore, between Coudres and the awesome Cap Tourmente, thirty miles away, with its steep, heavily wooded sides. From here the passage crossed diagonally to the south between rocks, sand spits, and reefs. The ebb tide tears through the passage at up to six knots, even with a light contrary wind it will kick up such steep waves that small boats can be swamped and lost. It was uncharted, had never been passed by a large ship and the French had removed all the navigation marks. It was the final and most formidable navigational hurdle before the fleet reached Quebec. It was known simply as ‘the Traverse’.