Details
The à Cleeve family came from Devon, with lands in the upper reaches of the River Dart, below the south-east rim of Dartmoor. They were recusants, apparently of French or Norman-French origin, who successfully retained their lands during the time of the Reformation and the Civil War, but only at the expense of isolation from their neighbours. According to Mark Stoyle in Loyalty and Locality (1994, pp. 21 and 205) there were fewer than 100 Catholics in Devon in the 1640s out of a population of about 72,000.
References to the à Cleeves and Devon in Fort Amity: Chapters I, II, V, XII, XIX and XXVI.
The recent Genome Project of DNA testing has established the population of Devon as Celtic but of a different sort of Celt than the Cornish. Q's mother came from the same area as the fictitious à Cleeves and it is not impossible that Q had an actual Catholic family in mind. John à Cleeve was educated at home before being sent to the seminary in Douai, his elder brother having inherited the estate (Chapter I, II, IV, VII, XI and XII).
John à Cleeve’s training for the priesthood was aborted following the reading of Voltaire and other sceptical writers. With his father dead, his brother obtained ensigncy for John in the 46th Regiment of Foot and he was shipped to Cork where his cousin was an ensign in the 17th Regiment of Foot. They spent the winter of 1757-8 at Halifax, Nova Scotia, so as to participate in a three-pronged attack on New France as planned by William Pitt the Elder and destined to take place in the spring.
Initially, Pitt planned for Louisbourg on Cape Breton to be taken as it was the key to the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Secondly, he desired an advance up the Hudson River, to take Fort Carillon at Ticonderoga. Thirdly, he wanted the capture of Fort Duquesne, the key to the Great Lakes and the far west. From these points he envisaged his forces converging on Quebec and Montreal, the administrative and military centre of New France. The plot of Fort Amity is based on Pitt’s strategy, although it did not work out as planned. For the first two attacks the British forces were gathered at Halifax, as the novel relates.
While the historical Richard Montgomery took part in the successful taking of Fort Carillon in 1759, the fictional John à Cleeve took part in the repulse in 1758. The British forces marched up from Albany, the home of the Schuyler family (Chapter I), in June 1758, reached Fort Carillon in July, with John à Cleeve serving in the 46th Regiment of Foot under Murray (Chapers I and XXVI). The third attack, of Fort Duquenne by Brigadier John Forbes in November 1758, lies outside of the scope of the novel: except that it led to the Indians questioning their allegiance to the French, hence the Reveille in Chapter XX of the novel.
Q uses Richard Montgomery, in Chapter I, as a vehicle for delineating the character of John à Cleeve, as they are fundamentally opposites. Montgomery is an extrovert, practical and efficient, sure of his opinions and untroubled by deeper issues. À Cleeve is an introvert, who questions himself and his place in the world, yet is capable of considerable exertions. The relationship, hero worship on one side, is similar to that of George Vyell and Taffy Raymond in The Ship of Stars. And it is ultimately Vyell and Montgomery who come to grief.
À Cleeve’s reflective, even mystical nature, is revealed to the reader on a number of occasions: while lying wounded in a canoe on the Richelieu River he reflects on Cleeve Court and the Catholic Church (Chapter V); when climbing the ridge in Adirondack he becomes conscious of the ancient gods and their contempt for men (Chapter VII); and when at Fort Amitié he wrestles with fate, conscience and moral insincerity (Chapter XII). His reflective and morally sensitive nature, however, does not prevent him from acts of considerable courage on occasions of great carnage, as at Ticonderoga (Chapter III) and the Près-de-Ville (Chapter XXVII). Montgomery possesses the courage and the activity, but not the reflectiveness.
John à Cleeve has a number of relationships. Firstly, with Richard Montgomery, which commences in Chapter I, and then disappears until Chapter XXVI. The most significant is with the Ojibwas chief Menehwehna which commences in Chapter I and continues until the close of Chapter XX. There are two romantic relationships, with Diane des Noel-Tilly of Boisveyrac and the Ojibwas squaw Azoka – a re-run of the relationships of Jack Marvel with Delia Killigrew and Joan of the Tor in The Splendid Spur. Diane does not appear until after Chapter XIII, and then as a former convent-educated adolescent who becomes infatuated with a wounded soldier. While remaining at Fort Amitié à Cleeve is trapped between Diane’s ardent hero worship and his own sense of duplicity, further complicated by his growing feelings for her (Chapters XIII and XV). As Diane matures John à Cleeve morally disintegrates until he is forced to confess his true identity to Diane and to flee to Indian Territory (Chapter XVI). The final union of John à Cleeve and Diane does not come until the end of Chapter XXVI.
John à Cleeve’s time in Indian Territory is far from unbelievable because Parkman gives many parallel examples. Q is surely trying to show that Europeans and Indians are equally human although from different cultures. Q’s description of Indian life and à Cleeve’s part in it is taken from Parkman’s own experience of living with the Indians in the 1840’s. The reader is also directed to Parkman’s chapter ‘The Wilderness and its Tenants at the Close of the French War, 1755 – 1763’ from The Conspiracy of Pontiac, Chapter V. Richard Montgomery, for all his extroversion and activity, could never have settled amongst the Indians in the way that the introvert and more fastidious John à Cleeve manages to do.
The problem with John à Cleeve as a central character is his passivity. As with Taffy Raymond in A Ship of Stars, he is the recipient of events rather than the master of affairs. He responds to what happens, he does not shape events. Even Diane des Noel-Tilly has better powers of decision although she is younger and recently from the convent. In terms of the plot Richard Montgomery would have made a better central character and maybe Q originally intended him for a more major part. However, à Cleeve’s failure to dominate the page enables the writer to explore the political and military aspects of his thinking in a way that would not have been the case if a strong character like Montgomery had strode through each chapter. À Cleeve leaves room for others to act and react. Nor is à Cleeve a totally convincing lover. Although Diane appears on certain occasion only in the novel, her feelings and developments of her heart touch the reader at a deeper level.