The monument is an elaborate one, and the eulogy is obviously exaggerated. Horace Walpole would evidently have had it otherwise. In his ‘Short Notes of My Life’ he tells us, ‘I gave my Lady Townshend an epitaph and design for a tomb for her youngest son, killed at Ticonderoga; neither was used.’ He also gives us to understand that the mother was not so disconsolate as the monument asserts:
‘My Lady Townshend, who has not learning enough to copy a Spartan mother, has lost her youngest son. I saw her this morning—her affectation is on t’other side; she affects grief—but not so much for the son she has lost, as for t’other that she may lose.’
And again, ‘Poor Roger, for whom she is not concerned, has given her a hint that her hero George may be mortal too.’ Whatever may have been the mother’s preferences, the two brothers loved each other dearly. A few weeks before he was killed, Roger Townshend wrote to George Townshend’s wife to tell her of her husband’s safe arrival at Halifax from England in the best of health, and how he had sent him supplies of fresh vegetables to make up for the long sea-voyage. The letter continues:
‘My opinion of General Amherst as an honest good man, and my attachment to him as a soldier I thought would never allow me to wish that I might serve under any other person in America, but the tie of brother and friend united is too powerful, and I confess nothing ever gave me more real concern than not being employed on the same expedition.’
In turn we have George Townshend writing sadly before the fall of Quebec of the news of his brother’s death; and after Quebec had fallen, on the eve of his return to England, he writes to Amherst:
‘I hear I have got Barrington’s regiment. Alas, what a Bouquet this had been a year or two hence for poor Roger. I assure you I return thoroughly wounded from America. I loved him sincerely.’
George Townshend, the eldest son, whom Walpole clearly did not love, was Wolfe’s well-known brigadier, to whom Quebec capitulated, and around whom so much controversy gathered. He ended as a Marquess and a Field-Marshal, and there is no reason to doubt that he was a competent soldier. So also evidently was the younger brother. Amherst appointed him to be one of the two Deputy Adjutant-Generals of his army, his own brother, Colonel Amherst, being the other. We read of him in connection with the training of the Provincial regiments, and as commanding a detachment of Rangers sent to reconnoitre along Lake George. Amherst wrote to Wolfe that he had intended to send him home with dispatches after the fall of Ticonderoga, that his loss ‘marred the enjoyment I should otherwise have had in the reduction of the place.’ We may set him down as one of the might-have-beens, and Dean Stanley would presumably have classed him as the unsuccessful brother. If he had marked military ability, it has assuredly remained in the family; for those who read the epitaph upon his monument in Westminster Abbey, with its reference to a comprehensive war and upholding the majesty of these kingdoms, will carry their thoughts across the seas from North America to Mesopotamia, from Ticonderoga to Kut.[1]
FOOTNOTES
[1] All who are interested in the personalities of the Seven Years’ War, as far as North America was concerned, owe a deep debt of gratitude to Dr. Doughty, the Government Archivist of the Dominion of Canada, for the immense amount of material which he has collected and made accessible in ‘The Siege of Quebec’ (Doughty and Parmelee), and in his edition, for the Champlain Society, of Knox’s Historical Journal.