Biography of General Wolfe GENERAL JAMES WOLFE was a young man of only thirty-two years of age at the time of his heroic death on the historic Plains of Abraham, in 1759; and yet within that short span he had filled out in his person the career of a soldier which is rich enough in incident to fill a goodly-sized volume of close biographic detail. No school-day poem is any better known, perhaps, than The Burial of Sir John Moore; and the signature at the end of that poem takes us back to the story of James Wolfe's Irish ancestry in a very direct way, since the Rev. Charles Wolfe, once curate in a County Tyrone parish, who wrote these memorial lines on the hero of Corunna, was no other than the great-granduncle of the hero of Quebec. As early as 1346, it is said that there were two families of the name of Wolfe in the south of Ireland, namely, the Wolfes of Kildare and the Wolfes of Limerick; and, in 1641, when Oliver Cromwell was making anything but popularity for himself among the Irish, it is on record that two brothers, George and Francis Wolfe, took a prominent part in the resistance to the cross-grained Protector during the siege of Limerick, in 1650. After the fall of Limerick, death by hanging was the fate that hung over those who had openly taken part in the siege as leaders. Among those con demned were the two brothers, George and Francis Wolfe, the former being a soldier, the latter a friar in training for the priesthood. Francis, the priest, was hanged, but George escaped to the north of England, and it was from him there sprang General James Wolfe, the son of General Edward Wolfe, second in descent from the escaped Limerick soldier. Not content to trace the heroic General back to a good and safe Irish origin, some of his biographers claim that the Kildare Wolfes and the Limerick Wolfes had a common Welsh origin. Be this as it may, at the time of the Quebec Tercentennial Celebration, one of the invited guests was a Lieutenant Wolfe, the surviving nearest male relative of the distinguished James Wolfe. This representative of the Wolfe family was of the Kildare side of the family, from which there have sprung many prominent men tracing themselves back to the Irish branch of the family that still has its country-seat at Forenaught, in the county of Kildare, and another known as Cahivcondish, in the county of Limerick. Nevertheless, though James Wolfe can be proven to have come from a good Irish stock, it would be idle to attempt to locate any racial traces, either of his far-away Irish origin or farther away Welsh origin, in his character as an English soldier or citizen. He was an Englishman in his life and bearing, born of an English father and an English mother in 1727, in the village of Westerham, in the county of Kent, and within easy distance of London, where, during the latter part of his eleven years' residence, he attended the village school and enjoyed the comradeship of a certain George Warde, from whom he seems to have been grounded in his belief that there was no life for him but the soldier's life of his father, and that which the same George Warde had decided to take up with for himself. When the family removed from Westerham to Greenwich, and when young James Wolfe had had a year or two of a school training under the tuition of the Rev. Mr. Swindon, and further companionship with another schoolmate of the name of John Jervis, who afterwards became Lord St. Vincent of the British Admiralty, he was only too ready to join his father when, as adjutant-general, the latter was called to embark, with an army of ten thousand men, to take part in the Spanish war. The lad was only thirteen years of age at the time, and it is all but certain that he would have gone on that expedition, even at that early age and despite his mother's remonstrances, had there not been delay in the setting out of his father's troops. As it was, he returned home to Greenwich to spend another eighteen months or so with his mother and schoolmaster. There was nothing in his schoolboy days to indicate that the lad had in him what might help him to his after fame. He had made up his mind to be a soldier, and had his wish fulfilled even before he had reached his fifteenth year. It was while he was spending his Christmas holidays out at Squerryes Court, Westerham, with his former schoolmate, George Warde, that he received his first commission as ensign in his father's division, which was all but ready to set out for the continent. From step to step, always upward and with exceptional distinction, the young officer advanced in his military career, which may thus be told in brief, up to the time he became second in command at Louisbourg and commander-in-chief at Quebec. |