The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (57 page)

The new prime minister was his brother Thomas Pelham, Duke of Newcastle. Despite his reputation for being the great fixer of elections, Newcastle did not have his brother Henry’s social gifts and could do nothing to smooth relations among the Whigs. His rudderless government drifted hopelessly from crisis to crisis, with the whole previously secure basis for British life unravelling. The country was thrown into what can only be described as a blind panic: the City of London and many other cities sent deputations to the king begging him to do something about Britain’s grave lack of defences. The government, desperate to be seen in control and to find a scapegoat for their hopelessness, had Admiral Byng shot on the quarterdeck of his own ship. As Voltaire said dryly, it was ‘pour encourager les autres’.

There was just one man who the nation believed could save them, and that was the universally popular Pitt. As Dr Johnson observed, while Walpole was ‘a minister given by the king to the people’, Pitt was the ‘minister given by the people to the king’. Pitt had been harping on for twenty years about the need to increase the numbers and training of the militia at home and to stop relying on German mercenaries. But he was still only a minor minister and, as far as the king was concerned, one who had irredeemably blotted his copybook by his past attacks on British involvement in the War of the Austrian Succession. Pitt’s Parliamentary speeches decrying money spent on continental quarrels had guaranteed his sovereign’s unrelenting hatred. ‘It is now too apparent that this great, this powerful, this formidable kingdom is considered only as a province of a despicable electorate,’ Pitt had memorably said, and George II could not forget it.

Pitt never bothered to dress up his contempt for George II’s Hanoverian commitments nor to conceal his belief that Britain should be absolved from having any part in them. The taxpayers’ money would be much better employed on defending the American colonists from the French. Pitt had been furious when the war against Spain had been superseded by the War of the Austrian Succession. Britain’s war should be on the sea, traditionally her most successful element, and the battles fought for trade.

Despite the almost insuperable enmity of the king, it began to be clear as the government’s reputation disintegrated that only Pitt could restore its authority. Pitt alone, the Great Commoner, as he was nicknamed for calling ministers to account in the House of Commons, still possessed a reputation, as he had done since he first denounced Walpolean jobbery and sleaze. Though cities all over the country were calling for Pitt, still the king hesitated. He gave in only when his sensible mistress Lady Yarmouth, on whom the sight of mobs drilling in London had a chilling effect, said that he must choose Pitt or lose his throne. Pitt’s terms were quite unpalatable to George–he insisted that he personally be responsible for policy–but the resignation of Newcastle over Minorca in 1756 forced the king’s hand. The Duke of Devonshire took over the government, but it was Pitt who in effect became head of it.

Though Pitt’s weakness was that he did not command a sufficiently large faction in the House of Commons, as Newcastle did, his strength was the overwhelming personal support for him in the country at large. He had complete confidence in himself and in his ability to breathe that confidence back into the nation. ‘I know that I can save the country and that no one else can,’ he said.

Unlike the rest of the government, Pitt had a comprehensive plan for the war. For the previous eight years he had been paymaster-general under Henry Pelham, because the king would not have him as war minister. Traditionally this post was a way, as Walpole expressed it, of ‘putting a little fat on your bones’: in other words, the paymaster-general made money by creaming a percentage off each government transaction. But Pitt had refused to take anything other than a ministerial salary. Instead he used the office to accrue information about British trade and settlement abroad. Everything he read over those eight obscure years consolidated his beliefs about the need for war with France to defend Britain’s trade.

If Walpole was the great eighteenth-century minister for peace, Pitt was the great minister for war. In his breadth of knowledge, his daring and his success, he is comparable only to leaders on the scale of Marlborough or Churchill. It was Pitt’s vision that pulled a triumphant war effort out of a country which had forgotten how to fight after years of reliance on German mercenaries. Pitt breathed new life into services that had decayed under Walpole’s placemen in ministries, whose neglect long after he was gone had left Britain’s ships rotting at quaysides.

A Bill for a National Militia was passed to raise soldiers to defend the country against the French invasion and beef up the numbers of an army which was pitifully small compared to the French, thanks to the British fear of a standing army in peacetime. Pitt ignored question-marks over the Scots’ loyalty in order to take advantage of the fact that they were the best natural soldiers in the country and raised two Highland regiments. He believed that, if their native aggression was given an outlet against Britain’s enemies, it would prevent a repeat of the Forty-five. These new troops should be used to assault the coast of France to distract the French from their fierce attacks on Prussia. Prussia herself was to be given an enormous subsidy for troops, as well as a British army in Hanover to protect her from the French. Under the generalship of Frederick the Great, Prussia was the one power which could keep the French at bay and the only German state worth subsidizing.

However, one of the army’s most senior commanders, the Duke of Cumberland, was, like his father the king, allergic to Pitt. When told that he was to take the orders of a man who had spent twenty years insulting the sacred name of Hanover, he refused to serve under him. This gave George II the excuse he needed to get rid of Pitt, whom he continued to loathe. But when the king attempted to form a ministry without either Pitt or Newcastle, he found that it was impossible, for the one was supported by the voice of the people and the other by a majority in the House of Commons. As George prevaricated for eleven weeks, from all over Britain the most important corporations sent Pitt boxes of gold as symbols of their support.

In the end the king bowed to the inevitable. Pitt was back in, with Newcastle running the House of Commons for him with his patronage and his majority. Technically Newcastle was prime minister and Pitt secretary of state, but the real prime minister who took all the decisions (frequently over the heads of the chiefs of staff) was the Great Commoner himself. It was not a moment too soon for Pitt to return to the helm. Finally his plans began to pay off. The King of Prussia rewarded Pitt’s faith in him when he heroically defeated the assembled might of those European colossuses the French and the Austrians, and held off the Russians. Ferdinand of Brunswick, meanwhile, in charge of the allied forces in Hanover, protected his western flank. To those who now complained about the vast expense of the German continental campaign, Pitt replied that it was for once justified: the French had to be tied down in Europe so that they could not send too many troops to America and India. ‘I will conquer America for you in Germany,’ he told the House of Commons.

Pitt believed that with sufficient encouragement Britain’s much larger colonial population in America could even the odds vis-à-vis France, which was four times her size and whose army was in mint condition. In order to drive the French off the North American continent, every colony should be organized for total war. All the state assemblies from Georgia to New England would be encouraged to raise their own militias and send men to fight. Tactfully Pitt gave high commands to American soldiers, though they had had none of the professional military training of the British. A propaganda campaign was launched at the American colonies to create a spirit of mutual endeavour between them and the mother country, without which Pitt knew the war would be lost–hitherto the colonies had considered themselves to be quite unconnected to one another.

In 1758 Pitt sent out a bold new American expedition of huge dimensions and astonishing ambition. It was a three-pronged attack on Canada, France’s largest settlement, centring on Quebec. Pitt believed that once Quebec was captured, Canada would fall to the English, and French power in North America would collapse. British and American troops were to come from New York in the south, the west and the east, the latter via a seaborne landing. The eastern expedition was intended to recapture Louisbourg, the strategically important capital of Cape Breton Island, and the western operation was to take back Fort Duquesne as Braddock had failed to do. Meanwhile, under Lord Abercromby, the British were to advance up the Hudson river from New York and destroy all the French forts guarding the route north.

To the surprise of many senior military staff, the task was entrusted to the command of young officers. But they were men in whom Pitt had seen leadership qualities–an ability to think the unthinkable and improvise under fire. All the officers he plucked out to command expeditions turned out to be superb generals. And they were inspired by Pitt himself. He imbued them with his own sense of purpose, of fighting for the Protestant free world. Louisbourg, the gateway to the St Lawrence, was captured that year against all the odds, chiefly because of Brigadier Wolfe’s bravery in establishing a beachhead under fire. From then on British arms triumphed. Fort Duquesne, the site of Braddock’s ambush, which would have been the key link between the French colonies in the south and Canada, was taken by John Forbes in a single assault and renamed Pittsburg. Meanwhile Colonel Bradstreet, a celebrated New Englander soldier who was known for his rapport with the Indians, captured the important Fort Frontenac. From then on the forts on Lake Ontario fell one after another, until the capture of Fort Niagara brought the Great Lakes under British control.

But the most astonishing feat of arms in the American campaign was the capture of Quebec by the thirty-three-year-old Wolfe, now a general. Letters detailing the British plans of attack for Canada had been stolen, so the Marquis de Montcalm, the gifted French commander, had enough time to move troops down to Quebec from Montreal further upriver. The city was bristling with guns and soldiers when the British arrived. Worse still, by the time the superb sailors among Wolfe’s team had picked their way up an often dangerously shallow river (they included James Cook, soon to become famous for his discoveries in the South Seas), Montcalm and his men had positioned themselves quite perfectly above them. Quebec was built on a headland known as the Heights of Abraham, and French troops were disposed round the citadel guarding every approach.

The only possible way into the city was therefore up the sheer cliffs rising from the St Lawrence to the Heights of Abraham. These great escarpments of chalk loomed impregnably above the British. Even if they could be climbed, and in any case there seemed nowhere to land from the river below, the French would be able to pick them off as they ascended. No one even considered the possibility of getting enough men up the cliffs to fight a battle, certainly not the 5,000 British soldiers whose tents sprawled as far as the eye could see on the south bank of the St Lawrence.

The rest of the summer of 1759 was spent by the British gazing at the city as it sparkled tantalizingly above them. The situation in their camps was made more gloomy because General Wolfe was coughing blood incessantly into a bowl by his bed, a victim of consumption. It had become clear to many from his emaciated looks and hacking cough that he was not long for this world. For most of that summer, his brigadiers were near despair, as day after day passed and Wolfe could not emerge from his tent. The season was ticking on. Autumn would soon arrive and once the St Lawrence froze all plans would have to be postponed until the following year when spring melted it again. The men could not be left indefinitely outside Quebec.

The few orders Wolfe did give seemed to make no difference. The canny Montcalm would not be lured out of his eyrie to protect the villages surrounding Quebec which Wolfe ordered his men to attack. The bombardment of Quebec from below had no effect. An attempt to storm Montcalm’s camp had been hopeless. Wolfe became so ill that he could scarcely lift his head, and he asked his seconds-in-command to draw up their own plans.

Then at the end of the long hot summer, when for a short time the consumption went into remission, the old Wolfe showed himself. He had an audacious plan, a gambler’s plan, the sort of plan that Pitt banked on his commanders having as a last resort. On a trip along the St Lawrence, Wolfe had noticed a tiny inlet the river had carved into the cliffs; he believed that if his soldiers could land there at night, they could scale the cliffs under cover of darkness and surprise the French in the morning.

At dead of night, Wolfe led the 5,000 British and American soldiers with blackened faces silently downriver in rowing boats till they were opposite the Heights of Abraham. As he was borne along the treacherous river whose rocks and shoals made it a hazard to all but Quebeçois, Wolfe softly read out his favourite poem,
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
by Thomas Gray, published only a few years before, a copy of which his fiancée had just sent out to him from England. His thin face, touched by moonlight, seemed to wear a beatific expression as he murmured the sonorous words whose Romantic, melancholic spirit echoed his own. As the mysterious cliffs loomed up ahead and the men rested on their muffled oars, Wolfe closed the book. ‘Well, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘I had rather have written that poem than take Quebec.’ But then he leaped overboard, into the swirling St Lawrence, and ran ahead of them until his was only one of the many tiny figures on the vast cliff face pulling themselves up by ropes.

When dawn rose over Quebec, Montcalm awoke to see on the plain behind him, above the cliffs said to be unclimbable, row after row of British redcoats. They were in battle array and far outnumbered the French, whose sentries’ mangled bodies bestrewed the cliffs or floated in the river below. It was a breathtaking, almost impossible, feat, to have put thousands of men on top of a cliff overnight, but Wolfe had done it.