Note 1507 — Chapter VIII · (continued 3)

In this last there seems to be an allusion to a book which appeared in London in 1777, in French and English, published by Almon, called Lettres de Monsieur le Marquis de Montcalm à Messieurs de Berryer et de la Molé, écrites dans les années 1757, 1758, et 1759. (Sabin, xii. p. 305; Barlow’s Rough List, no. 1,095.) The letters were early suspected to be forgeries, intended to help the argument of the American cause in 1777 by prognosticating the resistance and independency of the English colonists, to follow upon the conquest of Canada and the enforced taxation of the colonies by the crown. These views came out in what purported to be a letter from Boston, signed “S. J.,” to Montcalm, and by him cited and accepted. The alleged letters were apparently passed round in manuscript in London as early as Dec., 1775, when Hutchinson (Diary and Letters, p. 575) records that Lord Hardwicke sent them to him, “which I doubt not,” adds the diarist, “are fictitious, as they agree in no circumstance with the true state of the colonies at the time.” Despite the doubt attaching to them, they have been quoted by many writers as indicating the prescience of Montcalm; and the essential letter to Molé is printed, for instance, without qualification by Warburton in his Conquest of Canada (vol. ii.), and is used by Bury in his Exodus of the Western Nations, by Barry in his Hist. of Mass., by Miles in his Canada (p. 425), and by various others. Lord Mahon gave credence to it in his Hist. of England (orig. ed., vi. 143; but see 5th ed., vi. 95). Carlyle came across this letter in a pamphlet by Lieut.-Col. Beatson, The Plains of Abraham, published at Gibraltar in 1858, and citing it thence embodied it in his Frederick the Great. Ten years later Parkman found a copy of the letter among the papers of the present Marquis de Montcalm, but inquiry established the fact that it was not in the autograph of the alleged writer. This, with certain internal evidences, constitutes the present grounds for rejecting the letters as spurious, and Parkman further points out (vol. ii. 326) that Verreau identifies the handwriting of the suspected copy of the letter as that of Roubaud.