[86] The general view seems to have been that Chambly might have held out longer, and that the commander, Major Stopford, was shielded by his aristocratic connexions, but the Annual Register for 1776 (p. 5) says that it ‘was in no very defensible condition’, and Carleton seems to have found no fault with its surrender. See the entry on p. 110 of Parliamentary Paper, Cd. 2201, 1904, Historical MS. Commission, Report on American manuscripts in the Royal Institution of Great Britain, vol. i. Sir Guy Carleton to (Lord Barrington), May 21, 1777, ‘has nothing to charge either the garrison of Chamblee or St. John’s with.’
[87] The Annual Register for 1776, p. 12, makes Montgomery’s advance from Montreal to Quebec a kind of repetition of Arnold’s march. ‘Their march was in winter, through bad roads, in a severe climate, beneath the fall of the first snows, and therefore made under great hardships.’ He seems, on the contrary, to have come down the river in the captured British vessels.
[88] There is or was a dispute about the date. Kingsford makes it the night of December 31 to January 1, but there seems no doubt that the attack took place on the previous night, that of December 30-1. See Sir James Le Moyne’s Paper on the Assault on Quebec in 1775, in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Canada, 1899.
[89] Letter to Sir Horace Mann, June 5, 1776.
[90] Letter to Sir Horace Mann, August 11, 1776. It is not clear why Horace Walpole thought poorly of Carleton’s writing. His dispatches are as clear and straightforward as could be wished.
[91] Horace Walpole to Sir H. Mann, March 22, 1776.
[92] p. 15.
[93] Parliamentary History of England, vol. xxix, p. 379. Debate of May 6, 1791.
[94] Annual Register as above.
[95] The letter, in which Montgomery complained of personal ill-treatment of himself by Carleton, concluded—‘Beware of destroying stores of any kind, public or private, as you have done in Montreal and in the river; if you do, by Heavens there will be no mercy shown.’