case of Queen Anne's husband, Prince George of Denmark, nature solved
the difficulty by not encumbering his Royal Highness with any brains.
But Prince Albert had brains, and it was morally impossible that he
should not exercise a power not contemplated by the Constitution. He did
so almost from the first, with the full knowledge and approbation of the
Ministers, who had no doubt the sense to see what could not be avoided
had better be recognised and kept under control. But in 1851 the Court
quarrelled with Palmerston, who was dismissed from office, very
properly, for having, in direct violation of a recent order of the
Queen, communicated to the French Ambassador his approval of the coup
d'etat, without the knowledge of Her Majesty or the Cabinet. In 1854
came the rupture with Russia, which led to the Crimean war. Palmerston,
in correspondence with his friend the French Emperor, was working for a
war, with a separate French alliance. Prince Albert, in conjunction with
Aberdeen, was trying to keep the Four Powers together, and by their
combined action to avert a war. Palmerston and his partizans appealed
through the press to the people, among whom the war feeling was growing
strong, against the unconstitutional influence of the Prince Consort and
his foreign advisers. Thereupon arose a storm of insane suspicion and
fury which almost recalled the fever of the Popish Plot. Thousands of
Londoners collected round the Tower to see the Prince's entry into the
State Prison, and dispersed only upon being told that the Queen had said
that if her husband was sent to prison she would go with him. Reports
were circulated of a pamphlet drawn up under Palmerston's eye, and
containing the most damning proofs of the Prince's guilt, the
publication of which it was said the Prince had managed to prevent, but
of which six copies were still in existence. The pamphlet was at last
printed _in extenso_ in the _Times_, and the bottled lightning
proved to be ditchwater. Of course Stockmar, the "spy," the "agent of
Leopold," did not escape denunciation, and though it was proved he had
been at Coburg all the time, people persisted in believing he was
concealed about the Court, coming out only at night. The outcry was led
by the _Morning Post_, Lord Palmerston's personal organ, and the
_Morning Advertiser_, the bellicose and truly British journal of
the Licensed Victuallers; but these were supported by the Conservative
press, and by some Radical papers. A debate in Parliament broke the
waterspout as quickly as it had been formed. The people had complained
with transports of rage that the Prince Consort exercised an influence
unrecognised by the Constitution in affairs of State. They were
officially assured that he _did_; and they at once declared
themselves perfectly satisfied.
Our readers would not thank us for taking them again through the
question of the Spanish marriages, a transaction which Stockmar viewed
in the only way in which the most criminal and the filthiest of
intrigues could be viewed by an honest man and a gentleman; or through
the question of German unity, on which his opinions have been at once
ratified and deprived of their practical interest by events. The last
part of his life he passed in Germany, managing German Royalties,
especially the Prince and Princess Frederick William of Prussia, for
whom he had conceived a profound affection. His presence, we are told,
was regarded by German statesmen and magnates as "uncanny," and Count
K., on being told that it was Stockmar with whom an acquaintance had
just crossed a bridge, asked the acquaintance why he had not pitched the
Baron into the river. That Stockmar did not deserve such a fate, the
testimony cited at the beginning of this paper is sufficient to prove.
He was the unrecognised Minister of Constitutional Sovereigns who
wanted, besides their regular Parliamentary advisers, a personal adviser
to attend to the special interests of royalty. It was a part somewhat
clandestine, rather equivocal, and not exactly such as a very proud man
would choose. But Stockmar was called to it by circumstances, he was
admirably adapted for it, and if it sometimes led him further than he
was entitled or qualified to go, he played it on the whole very well.
THE EARLY YEARS OF THE CONQUEROR OF QUEBEC
A discussion which was raised some time ago by a very pleasant article
of Professor Wilson in the _Canadian Monthly_ disclosed the fact
that Wright's "Life of Wolfe," though it had been published some years,
was still very little known. It is not only the best but the only
complete life of the soldier, so memorable in Canadian annals, whom
Chatham's hand launched on our coast, a thunderbolt of war, and whose
victory decided that the destiny of this land of great possibilities
should be shaped not by French but by British hands. Almost all that is
known about Wolfe is here, and it is well told. Perhaps the biographer
might have enhanced the interest of the figure by a more vivid
presentation of its historic surroundings. It is when viewed in
comparison with an age which was generally one of unbelief, of low aims,
of hearts hardened by vice, of blunted affections, of coarse excesses,
and in the military sphere one of excesses more than usually coarse, of
professional ignorance and neglect of duty among the officers, while the
habits of the rank and file were those depicted in Hogarth's _March to
Finckley_ that the life of this aspiring, gentle, affectionate, pure
and conscientious soldier shines forth against the dark background like
a star.
Squerryes Court, near Westerham, in Kent, is an ample and pleasant
mansion in the Queen Anne style, which has long been in the possession
of the Warde family--they are very particular about the _e_. In
later times it was the abode of a memorable character in his way--old
John Warde, the "Father of Fox-hunting." There it was that the greatest
of all fox-hunters, Asheton Smithe, when on a visit to John Warde, rode
Warde's horse _Blue Ruin_ over a frozen country through a fast run
of twenty-five minutes and killed his fox. On the terrace stands a
monument. It marks the spot where in 1741, James Wolfe, the son of
Lieut-Col. Wolfe, of Westerham, then barely fourteen years of age, was
playing with two young Wardes, when the father of the playmates
approached and handed him a large letter "On His Majesty's Service"
which, on being opened, was found to contain his commission in the army.
We may be sure that the young face flushed with undisguised emotion.
There cannot be a greater contrast than that which the frank, impulsive
features, sanguine complexion, and blue eyes of Wolfe present to the
power expressed in the commanding brow, the settled look, and the evil
eye [Footnote: The late Lord Russell, who had seen Napoleon at Elba,
used to say that there was something very evil in his eye.] of Napoleon.
James Wolfe was a delicate child, and though he grew energetic and
fearless, never grew strong, or ceased to merit the interest which
attaches to a gallant spirit in a weak frame. He escaped a public
school, and without any forfeiture of the manliness which public schools
are supposed exclusively to produce, retained his home affections and
his tenderness of heart. He received the chief part of his literary
education in a school at Greenwich, where his parents resided, and he at
all events learned enough Latin to get himself a dinner, in his first
campaign on the Continent, by asking for it in that language. He is
grateful to his schoolmaster, Mr. Stebbings, and speaks of him with
affection in afterlife. But no doubt his military intelligence, as well
as his military tastes, was gained by intercourse with his father, a
real soldier, who had pushed his way by merit in an age of corrupt
patronage, and was Adjutant-General to Lord Cathcart's forces in 1740.
Bred in a home of military duty, the young soldier saw before him a
worthy example of conscientious attention to all the details of the
profession--not only to the fighting of battles, but to the making of
the soldiers with whom battles are to be fought.
Walpole's reign of peace was over, the "Patriots" had driven the nation
into war, and the trade of Colonel Wolfe and his son was again in
request. Before he got his commission, and when he was only thirteen
years-and a-half old, the boy's ardent spirit led him to embark with his
father as a volunteer in the ill-fated expedition to Carthagena.
Happily, though he assured his mother that he was "in a very good state
of health," his health was so far from being good that they were obliged
to put him on shore at Portsmouth. Thus he escaped that masterpiece of
the military and naval administration of the aristocracy, to the horrors
of which his frail frame would undoubtedly have succumbed. His father
saw the unspeakable things depicted with ghastly accuracy by Smollett,
and warned his son never, if he could help it, to go on joint
expeditions of the two services--a precept which the soldier of an
island power would have found it difficult to observe.
Wolfe's mother had struggled to prevent her boy from going, and appealed
to his love of her. It was a strong appeal, for he was the most dutiful
of sons. The first in the series of his letters is one written to her on
this occasion, assuring her of his affection and promising to write to
her by every ship he meets. She kept all his letters from this one to
the last written from the banks of the St. Lawrence. They are in the
stiff old style, beginning "Dear Madam," and signed "dutiful;" but they
are full of warm feeling, scarcely interrupted by a little jealousy of
temper which there appears to have been on the mother's side.
Wolfe's first commission was in his father's regiment of marines, but he
never served as a marine. He could scarcely have done so, for to the end
of his life, he suffered tortures from sea-sickness. He is now an Ensign
in Duroure's regiment of foot. We see him a tall slender boy of fifteen,
in scarlet coat, folded back from the breast after the old fashion in
broad lapels to display its white or yellow lining, breeches and
gaiters, with his young face surmounted by a wig and a cocked hat edged
with gold lace, setting off, colours in hand, with his regiment for the
war in the Low Countries. If he missed seeing aristocratic management at
Carthagena, he shall see aristocratic and royal strategy at Dettingen.
His brother Ned, a boy still more frail than himself, but emulous of his
military ardour, goes in another regiment on the same expedition.
The regiment was accidentally preceded by a large body of troops of the
other sex, who landing unexpectedly by themselves at Ostend caused some
perplexity to the Quartermaster. The home affections must have been
strong which could keep a soldier pure in those days.
The regiment was at first quartered at Ghent, where, amidst the din of
garrison riot and murderous brawls, we hear the gentle sound of Wolfe's
flute, and where he studies the fortifications, already anxious to
prepare himself for the higher walks of his profession. From Ghent the
army moved to the actual scene of war in Germany, suffering of course on
the march from the badness of the commissariat. Wolfe's body feels the
fatigue and hardship. He "never comes into quarters without aching hips
and thighs." But he is "in the greatest spirits in the world." "Don't
tell me of a constitution" he said afterwards, when a remark was made on
the weakness of a brother officer, "he has good spirits, and good
spirits will carry a man through everything."
All the world knows into what a position His Martial Majesty King George
II., with the help of sundry persons of quality, styling themselves
generals, got the British army at Dettingen, and how the British soldier
fought his way out of the scrape. Wolfe was in the thick of it, and his
horse was shot under him. His first letter is to his mother--"I take the
very first opportunity I can to acquaint you that my brother and self
escaped in the engagement we had with the French, the 16th June last,
and, thank God, are as well as ever we were in our lives, after not only
being canonnaded two hours and three quarters, and fighting with small
arms two hours and one quarter, but lay the two following nights upon
our arms, whilst it rained for about twenty hours in the same time; yet
are ready and as capable to do the same again." But this letter is
followed by one to his father, which seems to us to rank among the
wonders of literature. It is full of fire and yet as calm as a dispatch,
giving a complete, detailed, and masterly account of the battle, and
showing that the boy kept his head, and played the part of a good
officer as well as of a brave soldier in his first field. The cavalry
did indifferently, and there is a sharp soldiery criticism on the cause
of its failure. But the infantry did better.
"The third and last attack was made by the foot on both sides. We
advanced towards one another; our men in high spirits, and very
impatient for fighting, being elated with beating the French Horse, part
of which advanced towards us, while the rest attacked our Horse, but
were soon driven back by the great fire we gave them. The Major and I
(for we had neither Colonel nor Lieutenant-Colonel), before they came
near, were employed in begging and ordering the men not to fire at too
great a distance, but to keep it till the enemy should come near us; but
to little purpose. The whole fired when they thought they could reach
them, which had like to have ruined us. We did very little execution
with it. As soon as the French saw we presented they all fell down, and
when we had fired they got up and marched close to us in tolerable good
order, and gave us a brisk fire, which put us into some disorder and
made us give way a little, particularly ours and two or three more
regiments who were in the hottest of it. However, we soon rallied again,
and attacked them again with great fury, which gained us a complete
victory, and forced the enemy to retire in great haste."
Edward distinguished himself, too. "I sometimes thought I had lost poor
Ned, when I saw arms and legs and heads beat off close by him. He is
called 'The old Soldier,' and very deservedly." Poor "Old Soldier," his
career was as brief as that of a shooting star. Next year he dies, not
by sword or bullet, but of consumption hastened by hardships--dies alone
in a foreign land, "often calling on those who were dear to him;" his
brother, though within reach, being kept away by the calls of duty and
by ignorance of the danger. The only comfort was that he had a faithful
servant, and that as he shared with his brother the gift of winning
hearts, brother officers were likely to be kind. James, writing to their
mother, some time after, shed tears over the letter.
Though only sixteen, Wolfe had acted as Adjutant to his regiment at
Dettingen. He was regularly appointed Adjutant a few days after. His
father, as we have seen, had been an Adjutant-General. Even under the
reign of Patronage there was one chance for merit. Patronage could not
do without adjutants. From this time, Wolfe, following in his father's
footsteps, seems to have given his steady attention to the
administrative and, so far as his very scanty opportunities permitted,
to the scientific part of his profession.
Happily for him, he was not at Fontenoy. But he was at Laffeldt, and saw
what must have been a grand sight for a soldier--the French infantry
coming down from the heights in one vast column, ten battalions in front
and as many deep, to attack the British position in the village. After
all, it was not by the British, but by the Austrians and Dutch, that
Laffeldt was lost. We have no account of the battle from Wolfe's pen.
But he was wounded, and it is stated, on what authority his biographer
does not tell us, that he was thanked by the Commander-in-Chief. Four
years afterwards he said of his old servant, Roland: "He came to me at
the hazard of his life, in the last action, with offers of his service,
took off my cloak, and brought a fresh horse, and would have continued
close by me had I not ordered him to retire. I believe he was slightly
wounded just at that time, and the horse he held was shot likewise. Many
a time has he pitched my tent and made the bed ready to receive me, half
dead with fatigue, and this I owe to his diligence."
But between Dettingen and Laffeldt, Wolfe had been called to serve on a
different scene. The Patriots, in bringing on a European war, had
renewed the Civil War at home. Attached to the army sent against the
Pretender, Wolfe (now major), fought under "Hangman Hawley," in the
blundering and disastrous hustle at Falkirk, and, on a happier day,
under Cumberland at Culloden. Some years afterwards he revisited the
field of Culloden, and he has recorded his opinion that there also
"somebody blundered," though he refrains from saying who. The mass of
the rebel army, he seems to think, ought not to have been allowed to
escape. These campaigns were a military curiosity. The Roman order of
battle, evidently intended to repair a broken front, was perhaps a
lesson taught the Roman tacticians on the day when their front was
broken by the rush of the Celtic clans at Allia. That rush produced the
same effect on troops unaccustomed to it and unprepared for it at
Killiecrankie, and again at Preston Pans and Falkirk. At Culloden the
Duke of Cumberland formed so as to repair a broken front, and when the
rush came, but few of the Highlanders got beyond the second line.
Killiecrankie and Preston Pans tell us nothing against Discipline.
There is an apocryphal anecdote of the Duke's cruelty and of Wolfe's
humanity towards the wounded after the battle,--"Wolfe, shoot me that
Highland scoundrel who thus dares to look on us with such contempt and
insolence." "My commission is at your Royal Highness's disposal, but I
never can consent to become an executioner." The anecdotist adds that
from that day Wolfe declined in the favour and confidence of the
Commander-in-Chief. But it happens that Wolfe did nothing of the kind.
On the other hand, Mr. Wright does not doubt, nor is there any ground
for doubting, the identity of the Major Wolfe who, under orders,
relieves a Jacobite lady, named Gordon, of a considerable amount of
stores and miscellaneous property accumulated in her house, but
according to her own account belonging partly to other people; among
other things, of a collection of pictures to make room for which, as she
said, she had been obliged to send away her son, who was missing at that
critical juncture. The duty was a harsh one, but seems, by Mrs. Gordon's
own account, not to have been harshly performed. If any property that
ought to have been restored was kept, it was kept not by Wolfe but by
"Hangman Hawley." Still one could wish to see Wolfe fighting on a
brighter field than Culloden, and engaged in a work more befitting a
soldier than the ruthless extirpation of rebellion which ensued.
The young soldier is now thoroughly in love with his profession. "A
battle gained," he says, "is, I believe the highest joy mankind is
capable of receiving to him who commands; and his merit must be equal to
his success if it works no change to his disadvantage." He dilates on
the value of war as a school of character. "We have all our passions and
affections roused and exercised, many of which must have wanted their
proper employment had not suitable occasions obliged us to exert them.
Few men are acquainted with the degrees of their own courage till danger
prove them, and are seldom justly informed how far the love of honour
and dread of shame are superior to the love of life." But now peace
comes, the sword is consigned to rust, and in promotion Patronage
resumes its sway. "In these cooler times the parliamentary interest and
weight of particular families annihilate all other pretensions." The
consequence was, of course, that when the hotter times returned they
found the army officered by fine gentlemen, and its path, as Napier
says, was like that of Satan in "Paradise Lost" through chaos to death.
Wolfe would fain have gone abroad (England affording no schools) to
complete his military and general education; but the Duke of
Cumberland's only notion of military education was drill; so Wolfe had
to remain with his regiment. It was quartered in Scotland, and besides
the cankering inaction to which the gallant spirit was condemned, Scotch
quarters were not pleasant in those days. The country was socially as
far from London as Norway. The houses were small, dirty, unventilated,
devoid of any kind of comfort; and habits and manners were not much
better than the habitations. Perhaps Wolfe saw the Scotch society of
those days through an unfavourable medium, at all events he did not find
it charming. "The men here," he writes from Glasgow, "are civil,
designing, and treacherous, with their immediate interest always in
view; they pursue trade with warmth and a necessary mercantile spirit,
arising from the baseness of their other qualifications. The women
coarse, cold and cunning, for ever enquiring after men's circumstances;
they make that the standing of their good breeding." Even the sermons
failed to please. "I do several things in my character of commanding
officer which I should never think of in any other; for instance, I'm
every Sunday at the Kirk, an example justly to be admired. I would not
lose two hours of a day if it would not answer some end. When I say
'lose two hours,' I must complain to you that the generality of Scotch
preachers are excessive blockheads, so truly and obstinately dull, that
they seem to shut out knowledge at every entrance." If Glasgow and Perth
were bad, still worse were dreary Banff and barbarous Inverness. The
Scotch burghers, their ladies, and the preachers are entitled to the
benefit of the remark that the Scotch climate greatly affected Wolfe's
sensitive frame, and that he took a wrong though established method of
keeping out the cold and damp. When there is nothing in the way of
action to lift the soul above the clay his spirits, as he admits rise
and fall with the weather and his impressions vary with them. "I'm sorry
to say that my writings are greatly influenced by the state of my body
or mind at the time of writing and I'm either happy or ruined by my last
night's rest or from sunshine or light and sickly air; such infirmity is
the mortal frame subject to."
Inverness was the climax of discomfort, coarseness and dulness, as well
as a centre of disaffection. Quarters there in those days must have been
something like quarters in an Indian village, with the Scotch climate
superadded. The houses were hovels, worse and more fetid than those at
Perth. Even when it was fine there was no amusement but shooting
woodcocks at the risk of rheumatism. When the rains poured down and the
roads were broken up there was no society, not even a newspaper, nothing
to be done but to eat coarse food and sleep in bad beds. If there was a
laird in the neighbourhood he was apt to be some 'Bumper John' whose
first act of hospitality was to make you drunk. "I wonder how long a man
moderately inclined that way would require in a place like this to wear
out his love for arms and soften his martial spirit. I believe the
passion would be something diminished in less than ten years and the
gentleman be contented to be a little lower than Caesar in the list to
get rid of the encumbrance of greatness."
It is in his dreary quarters at Inverness at the dead of night perhaps
with a Highland tempest howling outside that the future conqueror of
Quebec thus moralizes on his own condition and prospects in a letter to
his mother:
"The winter wears away, so do our years and so does life itself, and it
matters little where a man passes his days and what station he fills or
whether he be great or considerable but it imports him something to look
to his manner of life. This day am I twenty five years of age, and all
that time is as nothing. When I am fifty (if it so happens) and look
back, it will be the same, and so on to the last hour. But it is worth a
moment's consideration that one may be called away on a sudden unguarded
and unprepared, and the oftener these thoughts are entertained the less
will be the dread or fear of death. You will judge by this sort of
discourse that it is the dead of night when all is quiet and at rest,
and one of those intervals wherein men think of what they really are and
what they really should be, how much is expected and how little
performed. Our short duration here and the doubts of the hereafter
should awe the most flagitious, if they reflected on them. The little
taken in for meditation is the best employed in all their lives for if
the uncertainty of our state and being is then brought before us who is
there that will not immediately discover the inconsistency of all his
behaviour and the vanity of all his pursuits? And yet, we are so mixed
and compounded that, though I think seriously this minute, and lie down
with good intentions, it is likely I may rise with my old nature, or
perhaps with the addition of some new impertinence, and be the same
wandering lump of idle errors that I have ever been.
"You certainly advise me well. You have pointed out the only way where
there can be no disappointment, and comfort that will never fail us,
carrying men steadily and cheerfully in their journey, and a place of
rest at the end. Nobody can be more persuaded of it than I am; but
situation, example, the current of things, and our natural weakness,
draw me away with the herd, and only leave me just strength enough to
resist the worst degree of our iniquities. There are times when men fret
at trifles and quarrel with their toothpicks. In one of these ill-habits
I exclaim against the present condition, and think it is the worst of
all; but coolly and temperately it is plainly the best. Where there is
most employment and least vice, there one should wish to be. There is a
meanness and a baseness not to endure with patience the little
inconveniences we are subject to; and to know no happiness but in one
spot, and that in ease, in luxury, in idleness, seems to deserve our
contempt. There are young men amongst us that have great revenues and
high military stations, that repine at three months' service with their
regiments if they go fifty miles from home. Soup and _venaison_ and
turtle are their supreme delight and joy,--an effeminate race of
coxcombs, the future leaders of our armies, defenders and protectors of
our great and free nation!