History can be fickle. Take Samuel de Champlain, for example. Four centuries after the French explorer founded Quebec City, his remains a household name in Canada. His image and spirit will be widely feted this year, as Quebec City celebrates its 400th birthday.
Now compare his fate to that of James Wolfe, the 32-year-old British major-general who masterminded the defeat of the French at the Plains of Abraham and died while he was at it. Despite contributing at least as much to the course of events in this country, Wolfe and his achievement are as little celebrated on these shores as they are in his native England.
Wolfe’s victory marked a major turning point in history. It thwarted France’s colonial ambitions in America, bolstered British international supremacy, and inadvertently paved the way to the American Revolution.
Yet, as writer Stephen Brumwell notes in his stirring biography of Wolfe, “visitors to Quebec must search long and far for concrete evidence that the siege of 1759 yielded a British success.”
In Paths of Glory, Brumwell explores the reasons behind Wolfe’s latter-day obscurity. The author, whose previous books include Redcoats and White Devil, nearly waxes sentimental when he declares that Wolfe “no less than Horatio Nelson, merits the ‘immortal memory.’”
Despite being a self-described “independent historian working outside the academic mainstream,” the author is fastidious with his material, which abounds with primary resources, archival documents (many of them stored in Canada), Wolfe’s “direct and forceful” official correspondences, informal letters to his mother, the correspondence of his contemporaries (some of which, the author says, are published here for the first time), and works of commemorative art.
Wolfe’s reputation enjoyed better days for the century or so after his death. His victory over General Montcalm was at first regaled in story and song. He was immortalized in The Death of General Wolfe, Benjamin West’s breathtaking painting, which, Brumwell writes, “shaped the enduring popular perception of Wolfe as imperial martyr, and indeed fired the young Horatio Nelson to emulate him.”
That’s not to say the commander is entirely spared by the author. Wolfe’s imperfections are underscored early in the timeline of this story, when he appears to be complicit in an unjust looting in Scotland. But for all his flaws, Wolfe comes across as his father’s good son, a paragon of an officer, and a paternal figure to the men under his command.
The publishers are billing this as the first full-length biography to appear on Wolfe in half a century. It is also a portrait of “rough and lawless” Georgian England and the British army while it was coming of age. However, the story never strays far from Wolfe himself. We learn of his hobbies, his temperament, his family and education, his burning ambition and accelerated career. We learn of his love and heartbreak, his moral and carnal lapses, the wounds he earned fighting, and his physical and emotional problems.
Besides exploring the many challenges Wolfe faced upon the St. Lawrence, Brumwell takes particular aim at the French-Canadian historians who have accused the general of needless cruelty, particularly in the destruction of an estimated 1,400 farmhouses and the dispersal of many rural settlements. He shows that, when French guerrilla tactics were at their fiercest during the summer of 1759, Wolfe reissued an earlier directive that women and children were “not to be molested on any account whatsoever.” Claims that Wolfe or his men did otherwise are mere speculation, Brumwell writes.
In the end, Wolfe’s legacy to the people of Britain and throughout the Empire, “outlasted not only the loss of America [to subsequent revolution], but also the victorious climactic bout of the ‘Second Hundred Years War’ — the titanic and protracted struggle against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France.”
Wolfe’s immense deeds continue to echo to this day. Perhaps he deserves a little celebration, too.
— J.D. Gravenor (Read bio)
A Montreal-based freelance writer and translator, and co-author of Montreal: The Unknown City.