George Monro

George Monro commanded Fort William Henry and surrendered it on terms that were not kept. He was a Scottish officer of the 35th Regiment, elderly by the standards of active command, holding a wooden fort at the southern end of Lake George with a garrison of roughly two thousand three hundred men, many of them sick. In August 1757 Montcalm arrived with about eight thousand French regulars, Canadian militia and nearly two thousand allied warriors from a dozen nations, some from as far as the upper Great Lakes. Monro held out for five days of bombardment, his guns bursting one by one, and sent repeatedly to General Webb at Fort Edward for the relief force sitting fifteen miles away. Webb wrote back advising him to negotiate the best terms he could, and the French intercepted the letter and handed it to Monro themselves. He surrendered on 9 August. The terms were the conventional honours of war: the garrison to march out with its colours, parole not to serve for eighteen months, safe escort to Fort Edward. Montcalm's allied warriors had come a great distance for plunder and captives and had agreed to nothing of the kind; they attacked the column as it left, killing and seizing somewhere between a hundred and two hundred people, including the sick left behind. The number is disputed and was inflated at the time into a massacre of a thousand. Monro reached Fort Edward and died three months later of a stroke. Fenimore Cooper used the siege in The Last of the Mohicans and gave Monro a daughter he never had, which is how most people encounter the episode. The French burned the fort after taking it and withdrew rather than advancing on Fort Edward. Montcalm was criticised in Versailles for failing to control his allies, and the breach made it harder for the French to recruit western warriors in the campaigns that followed.

• Nationality: Scottish
• Roles: military