John A (52 page)

In Macdonald's circumstances—he knew by now he would soon be invited formally to become the first prime minister of the new nation—many would have gloated or at least have celebrated. Instead, Macdonald stayed close to Carnarvon, fussing and worrying over the last details. His one celebratory gesture was to slip over to France for a few days' holiday when things had quieted down.

Once the delegates had finished their last fixes, Francis Reilly, the legal draftsman, worked overtime through the first week of February to render it into proper parliamentary form. The bill was set in type under conditions of strict confidentiality through the nights of February 6 and 7. On February 12 it was introduced into the House of Lords—there, rather than the Commons, because that's where Carnarvon had his seat. The debate was scheduled for February 19, 1867.

 

TWENTY-THREE

Two Unions

My diaries as Miss Bernard did not need such precautions but then I was an insignificant spinster & what I might write did not matter; now I am a great premier's wife & Lady Macdonald & “Cabinet secrets and mysteries” might drop unwittingly from the nib of my pen. Lady Macdonald, in the first entry of her new diary, July 5, 1867

I
n the brief gap between the last few days of haggling over the clauses of the constitution and the document's actual introduction into the Parliament at Westminster in the form of the British North America Bill, Macdonald found time for one other assignment. He got married. His second wife was Susan Agnes Bernard, the sister of Hewitt Bernard, his principal civil service aide, originally his private secretary, and now head of his staff at the Attorney General's Department—and also his friend and apartment mate at the “Quadrilateral,” a house on Daly Street in Ottawa.

Their marriage was a union of mutual self-interest. He, now on the verge of becoming prime minister of the Dominion of Canada, would soon need a hostess and a chatelaine. She, by now aged thirty-one, needed to escape a future of ever-diminishing choices. Besides asymmetric needs, they possessed in common one defining quality: each revelled in the exercise of power. Agnes, in the diary that she began right after the first Dominion
Day,
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expressed her addiction the more self-critically: “I also know that my love of Power is strong, so strong that I sometimes dread it; it influences me when I imagine I am influenced by a sense of right.” To Macdonald, power was like a comfortable old suit he had no need to apologize for wearing. “I don't care for office for the sake of money, but for the sake of power; for the sake of carrying out my own view of what's best for the country,” he once said.

Susan Agnes Bernard. She is still five years away from marrying Macdonald, young and slender here, unlike in later photographs. She appears to be wearing a costume.

They differed in quite a few respects, from religiosity, of which Agnes possessed an excess, and he little if at all, to her far greater capacity for physicality, as in the epic ride she would take through the tunnels and curves of the Rocky Mountains on the cowcatcher of a Canadian Pacific Railway engine while, most of the time, her grumpy husband, the prime minister, remained rooted in his seat in the special car laid on for them.

The difference between them that defined their relationship was that, while Macdonald respected Agnes, was always polite and considerate, and never deviated in his loyalty, she adored him, if not at the start of their union, which was in no sense a love match, then soon after, and ever after, completely and joyously and defencelessly. Although strong and confident in so
many respects, as Agnes Bernard most certainly was, at times not merely cajoling him but outright bullying him, and later ruling Ottawa society like a moralizing martinet, she, in her relationship with Macdonald, seemed always to be running to catch up to him while trying never to show how hard she was trying. “I have found something worth living for—living in—my husband's heart and love,” she wrote in the diary. Her most revealing comment about herself to herself was “I often look in astonishment at him,” referring, surely, both to astonished delight in his almost infinite variety, and even more to her delighted amazement that he should be hers.

Although the marriage was arranged with speed, the courtship between them extended over more than a half-dozen years and may have included an earlier offer of marriage. The original obstacle to any union was, of course, Macdonald's drinking. Bernard would later tell his fellow deputy minister Edmund Meredith that he had done “everything to dissuade his sister from the marriage.” To resolve the obstacle, Bernard got Macdonald to sign a marriage contract that committed him to pay sixteen thousand dollars into a trust for Lady Macdonald, thereby protecting her and any children of theirs, but also benefiting Macdonald, since this money could no longer be claimed by his creditors.
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To raise the initial funds, Macdonald sold one hundred acres of land in Kingston and deposited his life-insurance policy into the trust. As dowry, Lady Macdonald brought neither money nor looks. A contemporary described her as “tall, tawny, and…rather ‘raw-boned' and angular.”

In later photographs, particularly as she became, at one and the same time, stouter and more commanding, she comes across as stern and censorious. In the one early photograph taken before their marriage, she is much slimmer and, if not exactly attractive, wholly agreeable rather than the gorgon she came to be. One photograph of her inclining backwards over a chair conveys not just her physical exuberance but a clear awareness of her own sexuality. (Mid-nineteenth-century photographs showed women to disadvantage: the long period of motionlessness required for the exposure invested men with a portentous gravitas but diminished women's natural animation.) She was highly intelligent, well travelled, well read, accustomed to social situations and fluent in French. Bilingualism, though, didn't cause Agnes to share Macdonald's partiality to French Canadians: “The French seem always wanting everything, and they get everything,” she wrote crossly. She was also strong, determined and thoroughly bossy.

She was born in Jamaica in 1836, the only daughter among the four sons of a wealthy sugar-plantation owner, Thomas Bernard.
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Following her father's death from cholera, Agnes and her mother moved to England and then, in 1854, to Barrie, Ontario, where her brother Hewitt was practising law. There, just turned twenty, she revealed her fearlessness about physical adventure by ice-fishing and by tobogganing even at night, “tearing down a steep forest roadway and scudding away, breathless, disheveled and nearly shaken to death, over the frozen surface of some lonely pine-fringed lake,” as she later portrayed it in a magazine article. Agnes may have been describing here one of her attractions to Macdonald: her physical boldness and athleticism would have
reassured him that she would not turn into another wifely invalid like Isabella. The decisive influence on her girlhood had surely been her mother, Theodora, a deeply religious woman of demanding and domineering piety. Theodora's death, in 1875, caused the minister who broke the news to a distraught Agnes to “fear for [her] sanity.”

In 1858, Hewitt had become Macdonald's secretary, and the future couple—Macdonald by now a newly bereaved widower—had a brief encounter at a concert in Toronto. Agnes's later recollection was acute: “A forcible, yet changeful face, with such a mixture of strength and vivacity, and his bushy, dark peculiar hair as he leaned on his elbows and looked down.” Macdonald's recollection had about it a distinct dollop of his “soft sawder”: he praised her “very fine eyes,” while taking care to avoid getting their colour wrong by not mentioning it. (Agnes's eyes, like her hair, were in fact a striking jet black.)

When the government moved to Quebec City, the Bernards moved with it. They both attended the Valentine's Day Ball that Macdonald organized with such panache in 1860. Some kind of relationship appears to have developed as a result, with Macdonald later calling on Theodora at Hewitt's suggestion that he meet his mother—his unmarried sister being of course the real reason for the arranged encounter. There were rumours of a marriage proposal made but rejected. While Macdonald was by now famous and powerful, besides being charming and witty, he was also a notorious drunk. It's easy to guess that Theodora put her foot down and that Hewitt, despite his loyalty to Macdonald, confirmed the damning reports. Anyway, Macdonald had no pressing need then for a chatelaine and hostess. In 1865 the distaff Bernards moved on to London, where they occupied a grand house on Grosvenor Square. Of life in England, Agnes commented shrewdly that it was “a delicious country for the rich, but I should hate it
for the poor,” while the middle class had to “toady and fawn.”

She and Macdonald met by happenstance, on December 8, 1866, while both were sauntering down Bond Street. However it happened, the relationship developed with lightning speed, much as it had between Macdonald and Isabella. By Christmas they were engaged.

Registration record of the February 16, 1867, marriage of John A. Macdonald, “widower,” and Susan Agnes Bernard, “spinster,” both being of “full” age.

They wed six weeks later, at St. George's Anglican Church in Hanover Square, on February 16, 1867. (It was a most fashionable church. Two British prime ministers were married there, Disraeli and Asquith, and one American president, Theodore Roosevelt). It was all done so quickly that there was no time for reading the banns, for which a special dispensation had to be secured from the Archbishop of Canterbury. For the occasion, Macdonald wore a “Superfine Black Dress Coat with sleeve linings [and] corded silk
breast facing,” as well as a sword. Agnes wore a long dress of white satin and a veil of Brussels lace. The bridesmaids included the daughters of three of the Fathers of Confederation. After the service, Hewitt Bernard hosted a breakfast for ninety at the Westminster Palace Hotel; the
Ottawa Citizen
reported that “a bunch of violets and snow-drops” adorned each plate. In his speech, Macdonald compared his union with Agnes with the one he was on the verge of completing with the provinces. In the marriage register, Macdonald changed his “profession” from that of “cabinet-maker,” as he'd given in Charlottetown. Here, with surely a twinkle in his eye, he listed it as “Hon-ble”—Honourable.
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The happy couple honeymooned in Oxford. Then they returned hurriedly in time to hear the British North America Bill being introduced into the House of Lords.

Agnes and John A. were always husband and wife, rather than partners in the manner of the Disraelis
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or of George and Anne Brown. But they connected intimately at two vital points. Macdonald possessed a first-rate mind: he read omnivorously, had an exceptional memory and would quote in the legislature and Parliament from novelists such as Dickens and Trollope, from Shakespeare, and from parliamentary greats such as Pitt and Peel and Sheridan and Walpole. Agnes, similarly, was highly intelligent and read at least as much (certainly more novels, often reading them while waiting in his office for him at the end of a long
day in the Commons). In the provincial Canada of those days, there weren't many like this pair. Agnes provided Macdonald with an opportunity to stretch his intellectual wings beyond the usual politician's fare of government reports and newspapers and campaign anecdotes. She gave him someone he could talk to about ideas and literature, and about such un-Canadian topics as beauty. They were partners as well in another joint enterprise. It took Agnes a long time, it wasn't in the least easy, and there were many setbacks, but because of her care and watchfulness and bullying, Macdonald eventually broke the grip of alcohol on himself. If the biographer E.B. Biggar is right, Agnes may have extended his life by two decades.