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Montcalm and Wolfe by Francis Parkman

F >> Francis Parkman >> Montcalm and Wolfe




If politics had run to commonplace, so had morals; and so too had
religion. Despondent writers of the day even complained that British
courage had died out. There was little sign to the common eye that under
a dull and languid surface, forces were at work preparing a new life,
material, moral, and intellectual. As yet, Whitefield and Wesley had not
wakened the drowsy conscience of the nation, nor the voice of William
Pitt roused it like a trumpet-peal.

It was the unwashed and unsavory England of Hogarth, Fielding, Smollett,
and Sterne; of Tom Jones, Squire Western, Lady Bellaston, and Parson
Adams; of the "Rake's Progress" and "Marriage a la Mode;" of the lords
and ladies who yet live in the undying gossip of Horace Walpole,
be-powdered, be-patched, and be-rouged, flirting at masked balls,
playing cards till daylight, retailing scandal, and exchanging double
meanings. Beau Nash reigned king over the gaming-tables of Bath; the
ostrich-plumes of great ladies mingled with the peacock-feathers of
courtesans in the rotunda at Ranelagh Gardens; and young lords in velvet
suits and embroidered ruffles played away their patrimony at White's
Chocolate-House or Arthur's Club. Vice was bolder than to-day, and
manners more courtly, perhaps, but far more coarse.

The humbler clergy were thought--sometimes with reason--to be no fit
company for gentlemen, and country parsons drank their ale in the
squire's kitchen. The passenger-wagon spent the better part of a
fortnight in creeping from London to York. Travellers carried pistols
against footpads and mounted highwaymen. Dick Turpin and Jack Sheppard
were popular heroes. Tyburn counted its victims by scores; and as yet no
Howard had appeared to reform the inhuman abominations of the prisons.

The middle class, though fast rising in importance, was feebly and
imperfectly represented in parliament. The boroughs were controlled by
the nobility and gentry, or by corporations open to influence or
bribery. Parliamentary corruption had been reduced to a system; and
offices, sinecures, pensions, and gifts of money were freely used to
keep ministers in power. The great offices of state were held by men
sometimes of high ability, but of whom not a few divided their lives
among politics, cards, wine, horse-racing, and women, till time and the
gout sent them to the waters of Bath. The dull, pompous, and irascible
old King had two ruling passions,--money, and his Continental dominions
of Hanover. His elder son, the Prince of Wales, was a centre of
opposition to him. His younger son, the Duke of Cumberland, a character
far more pronounced and vigorous, had won the day at Culloden, and lost
it at Fontenoy; but whether victor or vanquished, had shown the same
vehement bull-headed courage, of late a little subdued by fast growing
corpulency. The Duke of Newcastle, the head of the government, had
gained power and kept it by his rank and connections, his wealth, his
county influence, his control of boroughs, and the extraordinary
assiduity and devotion with which he practised the arts of corruption.
Henry Fox, grasping, unscrupulous, with powerful talents, a warm friend
after his fashion, and a most indulgent father; Carteret, with his
strong, versatile intellect and jovial intrepidity; the two Townshends,
Mansfield, Halifax, and Chesterfield,--were conspicuous figures in the
politics of the time. One man towered above them all. Pitt had many
enemies and many critics. They called him ambitious, audacious,
arrogant, theatrical, pompous, domineering; but what he has left for
posterity is a loftiness of soul, undaunted courage, fiery and
passionate eloquence, proud incorruptibility, domestic virtues rare in
his day, unbounded faith in the cause for which he stood, and abilities
which without wealth or strong connections were destined to place him on
the height of power. The middle class, as yet almost voiceless, looked
to him as its champion; but he was not the champion of a class. His
patriotism was as comprehensive as it was haughty and unbending. He
lived for England, loved her with intense devotion, knew her, believed
in her, and made her greatness his own; or rather, he was himself
England incarnate.

The nation was not then in fighting equipment. After the peace of
Aix-la-Chapelle, the army within the three kingdoms had been reduced to
about eighteen thousand men. Added to these were the garrisons of
Minorca and Gibraltar, and six or seven independent companies in the
American colonies. Of sailors, less than seventeen thousand were left in
the Royal Navy. Such was the condition of England on the eve of one of
the most formidable wars in which she was ever engaged.

Her rival across the Channel was drifting slowly and unconsciously
towards the cataclysm of the Revolution; yet the old monarchy, full of
the germs of decay, was still imposing and formidable. The House of
Bourbon held the three thrones of France, Spain, and Naples; and their
threatened union in a family compact was the terror of European
diplomacy. At home France was the foremost of the Continental nations;
and she boasted herself second only to Spain as a colonial power. She
disputed with England the mastery of India, owned the islands of Bourbon
and Mauritius, held important possessions in the West Indies, and
claimed all North America except Mexico and a strip of sea-coast. Her
navy was powerful, her army numerous, and well appointed; but she lacked
the great commanders of the last reign. Soubise, Maillebois, Contades,
Broglie, and Clermont were but weak successors of Conde, Turenne,
Vendome, and Villars. Marshal Richelieu was supreme in the arts of
gallantry, and more famous for conquests of love than of war. The best
generals of Louis XV. were foreigners. Lowendal sprang from the royal
house of Denmark; and Saxe, the best of all, was one of the three
hundred and fifty-four bastards of Augustus the Strong, Elector of
Saxony and King of Poland. He was now, 1750, dying at Chambord, his iron
constitution ruined by debaucheries.

The triumph of the Bourbon monarchy was complete. The government had
become one great machine of centralized administration, with a king for
its head; though a king who neither could nor would direct it. All
strife was over between the Crown and the nobles; feudalism was robbed
of its vitality, and left the mere image of its former self, with
nothing alive but its abuses, its caste privileges, its exactions, its
pride and vanity, its power to vex and oppress. In England, the nobility
were a living part of the nation, and if they had privileges, they paid
for them by constant service to the state; in France, they had no
political life, and were separated from the people by sharp lines of
demarcation. From warrior chiefs, they had changed to courtiers. Those
of them who could afford it, and many who could not, left their estates
to the mercy of stewards, and gathered at Versailles to revolve about
the throne as glittering satellites, paid in pomp, empty distinctions,
or rich sinecures, for the power they had lost. They ruined their
vassals to support the extravagance by which they ruined themselves.
Such as stayed at home were objects of pity and scorn. "Out of your
Majesty's presence," said one of them, "we are not only wretched, but
ridiculous."

Versailles was like a vast and gorgeous theatre, where all were actors
and spectators at once; and all played their parts to perfection. Here
swarmed by thousands this silken nobility, whose ancestors rode cased in
iron. Pageant followed pageant. A picture of the time preserves for us
an evening in the great hall of the Chateau, where the King, with piles
of louis d'or before him, sits at a large oval green table, throwing the
dice, among princes and princesses, dukes and duchesses, ambassadors,
marshals of France, and a vast throng of courtiers, like an animated bed
of tulips; for men and women alike wear bright and varied colors. Above
are the frescos of Le Brun; around are walls of sculptured and inlaid
marbles, with mirrors that reflect the restless splendors of the scene
and the blaze of chandeliers, sparkling with crystal pendants. Pomp,
magnificence, profusion, were a business and a duty at the Court.
Versailles was a gulf into which the labor of France poured its
earnings; and it was never full.

Here the graces and charms were a political power. Women had prodigious
influence, and the two sexes were never more alike. Men not only dressed
in colors, but they wore patches and carried muffs. The robust qualities
of the old nobility still lingered among the exiles of the provinces,
while at Court they had melted into refinements tainted with corruption.
Yet if the butterflies of Versailles had lost virility, they had not
lost courage. They fought as gayly as they danced. In the halls which
they haunted of yore, turned now into a historical picture-gallery, one
sees them still, on the canvas of Lenfant, Lepaon, or Vernet, facing
death with careless gallantry, in their small three-cornered hats,
powdered perukes, embroidered coats, and lace ruffles. Their valets
served them with ices in the trenches, under the cannon of besieged
towns. A troop of actors formed part of the army-train of Marshal Saxe.
At night there was a comedy, a ballet, or a ball, and in the morning a
battle. Saxe, however, himself a sturdy German, while he recognized
their fighting value, and knew well how to make the best of it,
sometimes complained that they were volatile, excitable, and difficult
to manage.

The weight of the Court, with its pomps, luxuries, and wars, bore on the
classes least able to support it. The poorest were taxed most; the
richest not at all. The nobles, in the main, were free from imposts. The
clergy, who had vast possessions, were wholly free, though they
consented to make voluntary gifts to the Crown; and when, in a time of
emergency, the minister Machault required them, in common with all
others hitherto exempt, to contribute a twentieth of their revenues to
the charges of government, they passionately refused, declaring that
they would obey God rather than the King. The cultivators of the soil
were ground to the earth by a threefold extortion,--the seigniorial
dues, the tithes of the Church, and the multiplied exactions of the
Crown, enforced with merciless rigor by the farmers of the revenue, who
enriched themselves by wringing the peasant on the one hand, and
cheating the King on the other. A few great cities shone with all that
is most brilliant in society, intellect, and concentrated wealth; while
the country that paid the costs lay in ignorance and penury, crushed and
despairing. Of the inhabitants of towns, too, the demands of the
tax-gatherer were extreme; but here the immense vitality of the French
people bore up the burden. While agriculture languished, and intolerable
oppression turned peasants into beggars or desperadoes; while the clergy
were sapped by corruption, and the nobles enervated by luxury and ruined
by extravagance, the middle class was growing in thrift and strength.
Arts and commerce prospered, and the seaports were alive with foreign
trade. Wealth tended from all sides towards the centre. The King did not
love his capital; but he and his favorites amused themselves with
adorning it. Some of the chief embellishments that make Paris what it is
to-day--the Place de la Concorde, the Champs Elysees, and many of the
palaces of the Faubourg St. Germain--date from this reign.

One of the vicious conditions of the time was the separation in
sympathies and interests of the four great classes of the
nation,--clergy, nobles, burghers, and peasants; and each of these,
again, divided itself into incoherent fragments. France was an aggregate
of disjointed parts, held together by a meshwork of arbitrary power,
itself touched with decay. A disastrous blow was struck at the national
welfare when the Government of Louis XV. revived the odious persecution
of the Huguenots. The attempt to scour heresy out of France cost her the
most industrious and virtuous part of her population, and robbed her of
those most fit to resist the mocking scepticism and turbid passions that
burst out like a deluge with the Revolution.

Her manifold ills were summed up in the King. Since the Valois, she had
had no monarch so worthless. He did not want understanding, still less
the graces of person. In his youth the people called him the
"Well-beloved;" but by the middle of the century they so detested him
that he dared not pass through Paris, lest the mob should execrate him.
He had not the vigor of the true tyrant; but his langour, his hatred of
all effort, his profound selfishness, his listless disregard of public
duty, and his effeminate libertinism, mixed with superstitious devotion,
made him no less a national curse. Louis XIII. was equally unfit to
govern; but he gave the reins to the Great Cardinal. Louis XV. abandoned
them to a frivolous mistress, content that she should rule on condition
of amusing him. It was a hard task; yet Madame de Pompadour accomplished
it by methods infamous to him and to her. She gained and long kept the
power that she coveted: filled the Bastille with her enemies; made and
unmade ministers; appointed and removed generals. Great questions of
policy were at the mercy of her caprices. Through her frivolous vanity,
her personal likes and dislikes, all the great departments of
government--army, navy, war, foreign affairs, justice, finance--changed
from hand to hand incessantly, and this at a time of crisis when the
kingdom needed the steadiest and surest guidance. Few of the officers of
state, except, perhaps, D'Argenson, could venture to disregard her. She
turned out Orry, the comptroller-general, put her favorite, Machault,
into his place, then made him keeper of the seals, and at last minister
of marine. The Marquis de Puysieux, in the ministry of foreign affairs,
and the Comte de St.-Florentin, charged with the affairs of the clergy,
took their cue from her. The King stinted her in nothing. First and
last, she is reckoned to have cost him thirty-six million
francs,--answering now to more than as many dollars.

The prestige of the monarchy was declining with the ideas that had given
it life and strength. A growing disrespect for king, ministry, and
clergy was beginning to prepare the catastrophe that was still some
forty years in the future. While the valleys and low places of the
kingdom were dark with misery and squalor, its heights were bright with
a gay society,--elegant, fastidious, witty,--craving the pleasures of
the mind as well as of the senses, criticising everything, analyzing
everything, believing nothing. Voltaire was in the midst of it, hating,
with all his vehement soul, the abuses that swarmed about him, and
assailing them with the inexhaustible shafts of his restless and
piercing intellect. Montesquieu was showing to a despot-ridden age the
principles of political freedom. Diderot and D'Alembert were beginning
their revolutionary Encyclopaedia. Rousseau was sounding the first notes
of his mad eloquence,--the wild revolt of a passionate and diseased
genius against a world of falsities and wrongs. The _salons_ of Paris,
cloyed with other pleasures, alive to all that was racy and new,
welcomed the pungent doctrines, and played with them as children play
with fire, thinking no danger; as time went on, even embraced them in a
genuine spirit of hope and goodwill for humanity. The Revolution began
at the top,--in the world of fashion, birth, and intellect,--and
propagated itself downwards. "We walked on a carpet of flowers," Count
Segur afterwards said, "unconscious that it covered an abyss;" till the
gulf yawned at last, and swallowed them.

Eastward, beyond the Rhine, lay the heterogeneous patchwork of the Holy
Roman, or Germanic, Empire. The sacred bonds that throughout the Middle
Ages had held together its innumerable fragments, had lost their
strength. The Empire decayed as a whole; but not so the parts that
composed it. In the south the House of Austria reigned over a formidable
assemblage of states; and in the north the House of Brandenburg,
promoted to royalty half a century before, had raised Prussia into an
importance far beyond her extent and population. In her dissevered rags
of territory lay the destinies of Germany. It was the late King, that
honest, thrifty, dogged, headstrong despot, Frederic William, who had
made his kingdom what it was, trained it to the perfection of drill, and
left it to his son, Frederic II. the best engine of war in Europe.
Frederic himself had passed between the upper and nether millstones of
paternal discipline. Never did prince undergo such an apprenticeship.
His father set him to the work of an overseer, or steward, flung plates
at his head in the family circle, thrashed him with his rattan in
public, bullied him for submitting to such treatment, and imprisoned him
for trying to run away from it. He came at last out of purgatory; and
Europe felt him to her farthest bounds. This bookish, philosophizing,
verse-making cynic and profligate was soon to approve himself the first
warrior of his time, and one of the first of all time.

Another power had lately risen on the European world. Peter the Great,
half hero, half savage, had roused the inert barbarism of Russia into a
titanic life. His daughter Elizabeth had succeeded to his
throne,--heiress of his sensuality, if not of his talents.

Over all the Continent the aspect of the times was the same. Power had
everywhere left the plains and the lower slopes, and gathered at the
summits. Popular life was at a stand. No great idea stirred the nations
to their depths. The religious convulsions of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries were over, and the earthquake of the French
Revolution had not begun. At the middle of the eighteenth century the
history of Europe turned on the balance of power; the observance of
treaties; inheritance and succession; rivalries of sovereign houses
struggling to win power or keep it, encroach on neighbors, or prevent
neighbors from encroaching; bargains, intrigue, force, diplomacy, and
the musket, in the interest not of peoples but of rulers. Princes, great
and small, brooded over some real or fancied wrong, nursed some dubious
claim born of a marriage, a will, or an ancient covenant fished out of
the abyss of time, and watched their moment to make it good. The general
opportunity came when, in 1740, the Emperor Charles VI. died and
bequeathed his personal dominions of the House of Austria to his
daughter, Maria Theresa. The chief Powers of Europe had been pledged in
advance to sustain the will; and pending the event, the veteran Prince
Eugene had said that two hundred thousand soldiers would be worth all
their guaranties together. The two hundred thousand were not there, and
not a sovereign kept his word. They flocked to share the spoil, and
parcel out the motley heritage of the young Queen. Frederic of Prussia
led the way, invaded her province of Silesia, seized it, and kept it.
The Elector of Bavaria and the King of Spain claimed their share, and
the Elector of Saxony and the King of Sardinia prepared to follow the
example. France took part with Bavaria, and intrigued to set the
imperial crown on the head of the Elector, thinking to ruin her old
enemy, the House of Austria, and rule Germany through an emperor too
weak to dispense with her support. England, jealous of her designs,
trembling for the balance of power, and anxious for the Hanoverian
possessions of her king, threw herself into the strife on the side of
Austria. It was now that, in the Diet at Presburg, the beautiful and
distressed Queen, her infant in her arms, made her memorable appeal to
the wild chivalry of her Hungarian nobles; and, clashing their swords,
they shouted with one voice: "Let us die for our king, Maria Theresa;"
_Moriamur pro rege nostro, Maria_,--one of the most dramatic scenes in
history; not quite true, perhaps, but near the truth. Then came that
confusion worse confounded called the war of the Austrian Succession,
with its Mollwitz, its Dettingen, its Fontenoy, and its Scotch episode
of Culloden. The peace of Aix-la-Chapelle closed the strife in 1748.
Europe had time to breathe; but the germs of discord remained alive.

The American Combatants

The French claimed all America, from the Alleghanies to the Rocky
Mountains, and from Mexico and Florida to the North Pole, except only
the ill-defined possessions of the English on the borders of Hudson Bay;
and to these vast regions, with adjacent islands, they gave the general
name of New France. They controlled the highways of the continent, for
they held its two great rivers. First, they had seized the St. Lawrence,
and then planted themselves at the mouth of the Mississippi. Canada at
the north, and Louisiana at the south, were the keys of a boundless
interior, rich with incalculable possibilities. The English colonies,
ranged along the Atlantic coast, had no royal road to the great inland,
and were, in a manner, shut between the mountains and the sea. At the
middle of the century they numbered in all, from Georgia to Maine, about
eleven hundred and sixty thousand white inhabitants. By the census of
1754 Canada had but fifty-five thousand.[1] Add those of Louisiana and
Acadia, and the whole white population under the French flag might be
something more than eighty thousand. Here is an enormous disparity; and
hence it has been argued that the success of the English colonies and
the failure of the French was not due to difference of religious and
political systems, but simply to numerical preponderance. But this
preponderance itself grew out of a difference of systems. We have said
before, and it cannot be said too often, that in making Canada a citadel
of the state religion--a holy of holies of exclusive Roman Catholic
orthodoxy,--the clerical monitors of the Crown robbed their country of a
trans-Atlantic empire. New France could not grow with a priest on guard
at the gate to let in none but such as pleased him. One of the ablest of
Canadian governors, La Galissoniere, seeing the feebleness of the colony
compared with the vastness of its claims, advised the King to send ten
thousand peasants to occupy the valley of the Ohio, and hold back the
British swarm that was just then pushing its advance-guard over the
Alleghanies. It needed no effort of the King to people his waste domain,
not with ten thousand peasants, but with twenty times ten thousand
Frenchmen of every station,--the most industrious, most instructed, most
disciplined by adversity and capable of self-rule, that the country
could boast. While La Galissoniere was asking for colonists, the agents
of the Crown, set on by priestly fanaticism, or designing selfishness
masked with fanaticism, were pouring volleys of musketry into Huguenot
congregations, imprisoning for life those innocent of all but their
faith,--the men in the galleys, the women in the pestiferous dungeons of
Aigues Mortes,--hanging their ministers, kidnapping their children, and
reviving, in short, the dragonnades. Now, as in the past century, many
of the victims escaped to the British colonies, and became a part of
them. The Huguenots would have hailed as a boon the permission to
emigrate under the fleur-de-lis, and build up a Protestant France in the
valleys of the West. It would have been a bane of absolutism, but a
national glory; would have set bounds to English colonization, and
changed the face of the continent. The opportunity was spurned. The
dominant Church clung to its policy of rule and ruin. France built its
best colony on a principle of exclusion, and failed; England reversed
the system, and succeeded.

[Footnote 1: _Censuses of Canada_, iv. 61. Rameau _(La France aux
Colonies,_ ii. 81) estimates the Canadian population, in 1755, at
sixty-six thousand, besides _voyageurs_, Indian traders, etc. Vaudreuil,
in 1760, places it at seventy thousand.]

I have shown elsewhere the aspects of Canada, where a rigid scion of the
old European tree was set to grow in the wilderness. The military
Governor, holding his miniature Court on the rock of Quebec; the feudal
proprietors, whose domains lined the shores of the St. Lawrence; the
peasant; the roving bushranger; the half-tamed savage, with crucifix and
scalping-knife; priests; friars; nuns; and soldiers,--mingled to form a
society the most picturesque on the continent. What distinguished it
from the France that produced it was a total absence of revolt against
the laws of its being,--an absolute conservatism, an unquestioning
acceptance of Church and King. The Canadian, ignorant of everything but
what the priest saw fit to teach him, had never heard of Voltaire; and
if he had known him, would have thought him a devil. He had, it is true,
a spirit of insubordination born of the freedom of the forest; but if
his instincts rebelled, his mind and soul were passively submissive. The
unchecked control of a hierarchy robbed him of the independence of
intellect and character, without which, under the conditions of modern
life, a people must resign itself to a position of inferiority. Yet
Canada had a vigor of her own. It was not in spiritual deference only
that she differed from the country of her birth. Whatever she had caught
of its corruptions, she had caught nothing of its effeminacy. The mass
of her people lived in a rude poverty,--not abject, like the peasant of
old France, nor ground down by the tax-gatherer; while those of the
higher ranks--all more or less engaged in pursuits of war or adventure,
and inured to rough journeyings and forest exposures--were rugged as
their climate. Even the French regular troops, sent out to defend the
colony, caught its hardy spirit, and set an example of stubborn fighting
which their comrades at home did not always emulate.

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