Why is the Queen of Great
Britain also the Queen of Canada? The answer …thanks to
General James Wolfe!
 General Wolfe was very young
when he died …only 32 …but he managed to pack more into
his short life than many who lived much longer.
Born in Westerham, Kent, in
1727, Wolfe entered the army at the age of 14. He proved
himself a brilliant soldier despite suffering from
tuberculosis, but even this debilitating disease didn’t
stop him from achieving several great victories as a
Brigadier General in the service of the army.
He was the eldest son of
Lieutenant General Edward Wolfe, and was initially
commissioned into the Royal Marines before transferring
to the 12th Foot.
He was on active service
constantly until the end of the War of the Austrian
Succession. In 1743 he fought at
Dettingen, and later in Scotland at Culloden in 1746,
helping to successfully squash the
Jacobite Rebellion.
Someone complained to
King
George II that General Wolfe was mad; King George
retorted ‘Then I wish he would bite some of my other
generals’!
In 1758 Wolfe was dispatched
to Canada, sent by William Pitt (the Elder), the Prime
Minister of England, to capture the city of
Quebec.
This was not going to be
easy as the French, led by the Marquis de Montcalm, were
strongly entrenched along the cliffs that bounded the
city’s river frontage.
By 1759, Wolfe with his army
of about 9000 troops reached the island of Orleans,
which lay opposite Quebec on the Saint Lawrence River.
On July 31st, Wolfe ordered a frontal assault
on the Beauport shore, to the east of the city, but this
proved to be an expensive failure.
Wolfe then laid siege to the
city, which dragged on through August, and by now Wolfe
was extremely ill with tuberculosis and in great pain. Sick and
frustrated he decided to try another, more daring, way
to get into Quebec.
On the night of 12th
September Wolfe landed 5000 of his men across the river
west of Quebec, and under the cover of darkness he and
his troops scaled the steep cliffs, known as the
‘Heights of Abraham’. To ensure the element of surprise,
Wolfe had ordered that his men remove their shoes and
boots before the climb, and they reached the cliff-top
without the French defenders even being aware of their
presence!
On the following day, during
the battle that followed, Wolfe was wounded three times
and died at the peak of the battle. The French
commander, Marquis Louis Joseph de Montcalm de
Saint-Veran, died the next day.
The French fled and Quebec
surrendered on September 18th 1760 to Major
General Amherst, who had taken over the army after
Wolfe’s death.
Montreal did not hold out
for long, and the rest of Canada surrendered.
Strange to note that there
is little to remind the modern day visitor to Quebec
City of the influence that General Wolfe’s victory had
on the history of the city, province, country and
ultimately the continent of North America itself – a
rather large statue of the defeated Montcalm is
prominently displayed!
In Greenwich Park, London,
however, next to the Observatory, a large bronze statue
of Wolfe looks out over London. He is buried a short
distance away in the Greenwich parish church of St.
Alfege’s.
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