Montcalm and Wolfe — Chapter 1, Part 1

The Combatants The latter half of the reign of George II.

was one of the most prosaic periods in English history.

The civil wars and the Restoration had had their enthusiasms, religion and liberty on one side, and loyalty on the other; but the old fires declined when William III.

came to the throne, and died to ashes under the House of Hanover.

Loyalty lost half its inspiration when it lost the tenet of the divine right of kings; and nobody could now hold that tenet with any consistency except the defeated and despairing Jacobites.

Nor had anybody as yet proclaimed the rival dogma of the divine right of the people.

The reigning monarch held his crown neither of God nor of the nation, but of a parliament controlled by a ruling class.

The Whig aristocracy had done a priceless service to English liberty.

It was full of political capacity, and by no means void of patriotism; but it was only a part of the national life.

Nor was it at present moved by political emotions in any high sense.

It had done its great work when it expelled the Stuarts and placed William of Orange on the throne; its ascendency was now complete.

The Stuarts had received their death-blow at Culloden; and nothing was left to the dominant party but to dispute on subordinate questions, and contend for office among themselves.

The Troy squires sulked in their country-houses, hunted foxes, and grumbled against the reigning dynasty;

yet hardly wished to see the nation convulsed by a counter-revolution and another return of the Stuarts.

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 à 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 Condé, Turenne, Vendôme, 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 Château, 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 Elysées, 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.