



Produced by Gardner Buchanan.









CHRONICLES OF CANADA

THE WINNING OF CANADA

A Chronicle of Wolfe

By William Wood

Edited by George M. Wrong and H. H. Langton

In thirty-two volumes

Volume 11

TORONTO, 1915




AUTHOR'S NOTE

Any life of Wolfe can be artificially simplified by treating his purely
military work as something complete in itself and not as a part of a
greater whole. But, since such treatment gives a totally false idea
of his achievement, this little sketch, drawn straight from original
sources, tries to show him as he really was, a co-worker with the
British fleet in a war based entirely on naval strategy and inseparably
connected with international affairs of world-wide significance.
The only simplification attempted here is that of arrangement and
expression.

W.W.

Quebec, April 1914.




LIST OF CONTENTS

     I.    THE BOY
     II.   THE YOUNG SOLDIER
     III.  THE SEVEN YEARS' PEACE
     IV.   THE SEVEN YEARS' WAR
     V.    LOUISBOURG
     VI.   QUEBEC
     VII.  THE PLAINS OF ABRAHAM
     VIII. EPILOGUE--THE LAST STAND

     BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE




CHAPTER I -- THE BOY, 1727-1741

Wolfe was a soldier born. Many of his ancestors had stood ready to fight
for king and country at a moment's notice. His father fought under the
great Duke of Marlborough in the war against France at the beginning of
the eighteenth century. His grandfather, his great-grandfather, his
only uncle, and his only brother were soldiers too. Nor has the martial
spirit deserted the descendants of the Wolfes in the generation now
alive. They are soldiers still. The present head of the family, who
represented it at the celebration of the tercentenary of the founding
of Quebec, fought in Egypt for Queen Victoria; and the member of it
who represented Wolfe on that occasion, in the pageant of the Quebec
campaign, is an officer in the Canadian army under George V.

The Wolfes are of an old and honourable line. Many hundreds of years ago
their forefathers lived in England and later on in Wales. Later still,
in the fifteenth century, before America was discovered, they were
living in Ireland. Wolfe's father, however, was born in England; and,
as there is no evidence that any of his ancestors in Ireland had married
other than English Protestants, and as Wolfe's mother was also English,
we may say that the victor of Quebec was a pure-bred Englishman. Among
his Anglo-Irish kinsmen were the Goldsmiths and the Seymours. Oliver
Goldsmith himself was always very proud of being a cousin of the man who
took Quebec.

Wolfe's mother, to whom he owed a great deal of his genius; was a
descendant of two good families in Yorkshire. She was eighteen years
younger than his father, and was very tall and handsome. Wolfe thought
there was no one like her. When he was a colonel, and had been through
the wars and at court, he still believed she was 'a match for all the
beauties.' He was not lucky enough to take after her in looks, except
in her one weak feature, a cutaway chin. His body, indeed, seems to have
been made up of the bad points of both parents: he had his rheumatism
from his father. But his spirit was made up of all their good points;
and no braver ever lived in any healthy body than in his own sickly,
lanky six foot three.

Wolfe's parents went to live at Westerham in Kent shortly after they
were married; and there, on January 2, 1727, in the vicarage--where
Mrs Wolfe was staying while her husband was away on duty with his
regiment--the victor of Quebec was born. Two other houses in the little
country town of Westerham are full of memories of Wolfe. One of these
was his father's, a house more than two hundred years old when he was
born. It was built in the reign of Henry VII, and the loyal subject
who built it had the king's coat of arms carved over the big stone
fireplace. Here Wolfe and his younger brother Edward used to sit in the
winter evenings with their mother, while their veteran father told them
the story of his long campaigns. So, curiously enough, it appears that
Wolfe, the soldier who won Canada for England in 1759, sat under the
arms of the king in whose service the sailor Cabot hoisted the flag of
