Worn out by his worries, Schuyler fell ill and was sent to command the base at Albany.  Montgomery then succeeded to the command of the force destined for the front.  The plan of invasion approved by Washington was, first, to sweep the line of the Richelieu by taking St Johns and Chambly, then to take Montreal, next to secure the line of the St Lawrence, and finally to besiege Quebec.  Montgomery’s forces were to carry out all the preliminary parts alone.  But Arnold was to join him at Quebec after advancing across country from the Kennebec to the Chaudiere with a flying column of Virginians and New Englanders.

Carleton opened the melancholy little session of the new Legislative Council at Quebec on the very day Montgomery arrived at Ticonderoga—­the 17th of August.  When he closed it, to take up the defence of Canada, the prospect was already black enough, though it grew blacker still as time went on.  Immediately on hearing the news of Ticonderoga, Crown Point, and St Johns at the end of May he had sent every available man from Quebec to Montreal, whence Colonel Templer had already sent off a hundred and forty men to St Johns, while calling for volunteers to follow.  The seigneurial class came forward at once.  But all attempts to turn out the militia en masse_ proved utterly futile.  Fourteen years of kindly British rule had loosened the old French bonds of government and the habitants were no longer united as part of one people with the seigneurs and the clergy.  The rebels had been busy spreading insidious perversions of the belated Quebec Act, poisoning the minds of the habitants against the British government, and filling their imaginations with all sorts of terrifying doubts.  The habitants were ignorant, credulous, and suspicious to the last degree.  The most absurd stories obtained ready credence and ran like wildfire through the province.  Seven thousand Russians were said to be coming up the St Lawrence—­whether as friends or foes mattered nothing compared with the awful fact that they were all outlandish bogeys.  Carleton was said to have a plan for burning alive every habitant he could lay his hands on.  Montgomery’s thousand were said to be five thousand, with many more to follow.  And later on, when Arnold’s men came up the Kennebec, it was satisfactorily explained to most of the habitants that it was no good resisting dead-shot riflemen who were bullet-proof themselves.  Carleton issued proclamations.  The seigneurs waved their swords.  The clergy thundered from their pulpits.  But all in vain.  Two months after the American exploits on Lake Champlain Carleton gave a guinea to the sentry mounted in his honour by the local militia colonel, M. de Tonnancour, because this man was the first genuine habitant he had yet seen armed in the whole district of Three Rivers.  What must Carleton have felt when the home government authorized him to raise six thousand of His Majesty’s loyal French-Canadian subjects for immediate service