Neither King nor Imperial Government was slow to recognize our hero's achievements. The Prince Regent, who expressed his appreciation of Brock's "able, judicious and decisive conduct," bestowed upon him an _extra_ knighthood of the Order of the Bath, in consideration, so ran the document, "of all the difficulties with which he was surrounded during the invasion of the Province, and the singular judgment, firmness, skill and courage with which he surmounted them so effectually."
When the glittering insignia of his new rank reached Canada, Sir Isaac Brock's eyes were closed in death. His inanimate body, from which one of the noblest souls of the century had fled, lay rigid in its winding-sheet at Fort George.
To Major Glegg, who bore the General's despatches from Canada, the Prince Regent remarked that "General Brock had done more in an hour than could have been done in six months by negotiation." The fulfilment of Isaac's favourite maxim, "Say and do," was being demonstrated in a most remarkable manner.
[Illustration: "PORTRAIT OF MAJOR-GENERAL BROCK, 18 X 6"]
General Sheaffe, the only field officer available, and junior colonel of the 49th, of whom the reader has already heard, had been brought from the East to take command at Niagara in Brock's absence. Like Prevost, he was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1763, a son of the deputy collector of that port. There the two had been school-fellows, and both found it difficult to engage in vigorous diplomatic or military conflict with the Americans. To Sheaffe's credit, it should be said that he applied for another station.
It was Sheaffe, however, who acceded to General Dearborn's specious demand that the _freedom of the lakes and rivers_ be extended to the United States Government during the armistice. This was done while Brock was in the West. Sheaffe it also was who, with hat in hand and strange alacrity, later agreed, despite his first terrible blunder, to repeat the offence. On the very afternoon that the British defeated the Americans at Queenston, and when the moral effect of that victory, followed up by vigorous attack, would have saved Canada from a continuance of the war, and deplorable loss of life and trade, Sheaffe actually agreed to another armistice. For this _second_ truce, like his first, "no valid reason, military or civil, has ever been assigned." As far as the British were concerned, neither of these two was necessary, but, on the contrary, directly to their disadvantage. Isaac Brock, alas! was not made in duplicate.