GENERAL WOLFE AND THE

CAPTURE OF QUEBEC

1759

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea,

The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,

And leaves the world to darkness, and to me.

GENERAL JAMES WOLFE WAS FAR FROM home on the night of 12-13 September 1759 as he quietly read the opening lines of Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. The general was with his officers in a flat-bottomed boat, according to the young midshipman who later recounted the tale, drifting under cover of darkness down the ebb tide on Canada’s St Lawrence River.

‘I can only say, gentlemen,’ declared Wolfe (who was not widely known as a poetry lover), ‘that if the choice were mine, I would rather be the author of these verses than win the battle that we are to fight tomorrow morning.’

After months of inconclusive sparring, the British general had decided on a daring stroke to outwit the Marquis de Montcalm, commander of the troops defending Quebec, the capital of French Canada. By the light of a pale quarter-moon, the British general had embarked his 4600 red-coated soldiers on a flotilla of vessels that made their way silently downriver with muffled oarstrokes – to land at the foot of cliffs so steep that the French had not seriously fortified them.

As Scottish troops scrambled up the cliffs, a French sentry challenged them. Fortunately the leading Highlander was able to reply in convincing French, and his companions scrambled over the clifftop to surprise the hundred or so guards, most of whom were asleep. As dawn rose on the Heights of Abraham, the flat green plateau extending to the walls of Quebec, Montcalm was confronted by no less than seven battalions of British soldiers drawn up in order, ready to attack.

The battle for Quebec was part of the Seven Years War (1756-63), later described by Winston Churchill as the first ever ‘world’ war, since Britain, allied in Europe with Prussia, spread her battles with France, Russia, Spain and Austria beyond Europe and the Mediterranean to India, Africa, North America, the Pacific and the Caribbean. James Wolfe had learned his soldiering as an officer in the army of the Duke of Cumberland, seeing action in 1746 at Culloden, then playing his part in the merciless subduing of the Scottish Highlands that followed. Self-assured, flamboyant, and almost manic in his will to win, Wolfe was once accused of madness by George II’s Prime Minister, the Duke of Newcastle.

‘Mad, is he?’ retorted the King. ‘Then I hope he will bite some others of my generals.’

The high-flying 33-year-old got engaged to be married shortly before he embarked for Canada in 1759, and his fiancée Katherine Lowther presented him with a sixpenny copy of Thomas Gray’s Elegy as a going-away present. Gray was the most popular poet of the age: his reverie among the gravestones of a country churchyard, ‘far from the madding crowd’, had caught the imagination of a society that, now on the cusp of industrialisation, was coming to value the countryside it had once taken for granted. ‘Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,’ ran one couplet, ‘And waste its sweetness on the desert air.’

Wolfe himself was anything but a shrinking violet – so cocky and disdainful, in fact, that he was barely on speaking terms with many of his principal officers. His reference to ‘the battle that we are to fight tomorrow morning’ was the first that some of them had heard of his plan. He was also capable of indecision. When he got to the top of the cliff with an early wave of soldiers, he seems to have lost his nerve, according to one source, and impulsively sent down an order to unload no more soldiers in the cove.

But down on the beach his officers kept the boats coming – and up on the Heights of Abraham the French panicked. Instead of waiting for reinforcements who might have outflanked the exposed line of redcoats, Montcalm attacked in a rush. As his Canadian irregulars advanced, they were mown down by British musket-fire, and Montcalm himself sustained a fatal wound to his stomach.

By this stage of the battle, Wolfe also lay dying, shot down after he had stood on a rise in clear view and easy range of the enemy. The general had been ill for weeks, suffering severe bladder pains. High on opium, he was also weakened by bloodletting, the primitive duo of remedies that his physicians had prescribed for his fever and his tubercular cough, and it was hardly surprising if his behaviour was erratic. The evidence suggests that James Wolfe may have deliberately exposed himself to danger on the Heights of Abraham, knowing that he did not have long to live.

The general received the hero’s death that he had yearned for – immortalised some years later by Benjamin West’s epic painting The Death of General Wolfe. The capture of Quebec crowned a year of triumphs in a war that would lay the foundations of Britain’s overseas empire, and the victor’s embalmed body was honoured with a glorious state funeral and burial in Westminster Abbey. Wolfe’s will gave instructions that five hundred guineas be spent on framing the portrait of his fiancée with jewels as his farewell present to her, and among his personal effects was the copy of Gray’s Elegy that had been Katherine’s parting gift. The little booklet reposes today in the archives of Toronto University, where you can see the underlinings the general made while he was planning the daring coup that brought him fame and victory. One underlining seems especially poignant: ‘The paths of glory lead but to the grave.’