Parliament, he congratulated them on the prevailing peace,
and assured them that he should improve it to promote the trade of his
subjects, "and protect those possessions which constitute one great
source of their wealth." America was not mentioned; but his hearers
understood him, and made a liberal grant for the service of the
year.[182] Two regiments, each of five hundred men, had already been
ordered to sail for Virginia, where their numbers were to be raised by
enlistment to seven hundred.[183] Major-General Braddock, a man after
the Duke of Cumberland's own heart, was appointed to the chief command.
The two regiments--the forty-fourth and the forty-eighth--embarked at
Cork in the middle of January. The soldiers detested the service, and
many had deserted. More would have done so had they foreseen what
awaited them.

[Footnote 182: Entick, _Late War_, I. 118.]

[Footnote 183: _Robinson to Lords of the Admiralty, 30 Sept. 1754.
Ibid., to Board of Ordnance, 10 Oct. 1754. Ibid., Circular Letter to
American Governors, 26 Oct. 1754. Instructions to our Trusty and
Well-beloved Edward Braddock, 25 Nov. 1754_.]

This movement was no sooner known at Versailles than a counter
expedition was prepared on a larger scale. Eighteen ships of war were
fitted for sea at Brest and Rochefort, and the six battalions of La
Reine, Bourgogne, Languedoc, Guienne, Artois, and Bearn, three thousand
men in all, were ordered on board for Canada. Baron Dieskau, a German
veteran who had served under Saxe, was made their general; and with him
went the new governor of French America, the Marquis de Vaudreuil,
destined to succeed Duquesne, whose health was failing under the
fatigues of his office. Admiral Dubois de la Motte commanded the fleet;
and lest the English should try to intercept it, another squadron of
nine ships, under Admiral Macnamara, was ordered to accompany it to a
certain distance from the coast. There was long and tedious delay.
Doreil, commissary of war, who had embarked with Vaudreuil and Dieskau
in the same ship, wrote from the harbor of Brest on the twenty-ninth of
April: "At last I think we are off. We should have been outside by four
o'clock this morning, if M. de Macnamara had not been obliged to ask
Count Dubois de la Motte to wait till noon to mend some important part
of the rigging (I don't know the name of it) which was broken. It is
precious time lost, and gives the English the advantage over us of two
tides. I talk