The White and the Gold (19 page)

As an understanding of the situation in France is necessary to any familiarity with what was to happen in Canada, it may be of interest to tell more of the cardinal and the background he was developing for himself. He had become already an enormously wealthy
man as well as a powerful one. The house where he lived and carried on the affairs of state was known as the Hôtel de Richelieu, but it would not serve him much longer. Some part of his keen and active brain was already occupied with the planning of a magnificent new establishment on the same busy site: across from the Louvre where the Rue des Bons Enfants turned into the Rue St. Honoré, directly across from the inconspicuous stone building where that equally remarkable man (but in a far different way), Monsieur Vincent, conducted his little college. To obtain the room he needed, the cardinal would tear down two other buildings, the Hôtel de Mercoeur and the Hôtel de Rambouillet, and on the enlarged site he would erect the imposing building now known as the Palais-Royal but which in his lifetime was called the Palais-Cardinal. This four-storied proof of the importance of its founder would contain
La Galerie des Hommes Illustres
, with twenty-four portraits of the great figures of French history, including Jeanne d’Arc, the brave Dunois, Bertrand du Guesclin, Olivier de Clisson, the cardinal himself, and two kings, Henry IV and Louis XIII, the balance of the kings being deemed worthy of no more than representation in a row of small busts.

Inasmuch as the King had a company of musketeers (including in their ranks a certain Monsieur d’Artagnan) as his personal bodyguards, it had seemed fitting to the cardinal that he also should be adequately protected; and so young guardsmen in the scarlet and meline livery of Richelieu stood always at the front entrance, on the staircase, and in the anterooms, an air of vigilance and suspicion about them, long swords clanking against their muscular calves. In these crowded anterooms the old nobility rubbed shoulders with vulgar place-hunters and exchanged confidences with mere merchants and lowly priests; confidences which invariably were expressed in whispers because it was well known that spies were everywhere. The cardinal had come a long way since his unhappy days in the palace at Luçon where all the chimneys smoked and the cold rooms were dirty and filled with malarial odors rising from the sea fens.

Richelieu was creating for himself and for his master, the King, and the kings who would succeed him, the absolute power in which he believed. The nobility had ceased to carry weight. Concentrated authority for a long time thereafter would be vested in the King, to be exercised by the ministerial departments organized around the throne. Canada was to be governed by rules laid down in the cabinets
of the new autocracy. Documents signed with the flourish of busy and supercilious pens would determine the lives of the men and women who braved the rigors of pioneering across the seas. Every step would be charted, every detail of existence dictated. Free will was to be denied to governor and trader, to explorer and habitant.

Champlain’s reaction to the formation of the new company was, naturally, one of complete accord and delight in the magnitude of the new conception of things. With the news of the sweeping changes Richelieu had initiated came word that a fleet of twenty transports was being gathered and that four ships of war, under the command of Admiral de Roquemont, would convoy this large flotilla to Quebec. The transports were to be filled with the right kind of settler—family men with wives and children and trained to a trade or to work on the soil—and loaded with supplies of all kinds. Cannon to the number of one hundred and fifty were to be sent out for the protection of new settlements. Here indeed was a realization of the dreams which had always filled his mind.

It is doubtful that he had any conception of the disadvantages in this turn of events, that he perceived dangers in the ambitious planning of the cardinal. What Richelieu had done was to fix a pattern from which France would never thereafter deviate in the handling of New France. Regimentation would go hand in hand with colonization. The habitant would never be allowed to work out his own destiny, to do with his life as he pleased. Instead he would be an automaton, jerked this way and that by strings in the hands of bureaucrats, every detail of his ways determined by writ and provision, unable to think for himself, even subject in marrying and giving in marriage to king-made restrictions and controls.

Richelieu was unequaled as a statesman and organizer, but he lacked in knowledge of the human heart. He did not realize that the impetus to great deeds springs from the spirits of men who control their own destinies, that the feet of strong men who go out to reclaim the wilderness and win the far frontiers of the earth must be unfettered. He had misled himself into thinking that the miracle of success in the New World could be achieved by the remote control of men of thin blood sitting behind comfortable desks.

W
HILE the pioneers of Quebec were still fighting for an existence around the great rock, dependent on the support of profit-mad merchants, the English had been establishing themselves in the South. In 1607 the London Company, operating under a charter granted by that great dispenser of charters, James I of England, landed a party of settlers at a place in what is now Virginia and which they loyally named Jamestown. After a rigorous first year the colony came under the direction of one John Smith, sailor, soldier, and adventurer extraordinary with a penchant for writing books. Smith is best remembered through the association of his name with that of Pocahontas, the daughter of an Indian chief. A captive of the tribe, Smith was rescued from death by the intercession of the lovely Pocahontas. He was a brisk and efficient administrator, and the little colony prospered under his hand. Even at this early stage there was a realistic note to the colonial operations of the English, a determination to consolidate their holdings and to concern themselves more with driving the Indians out than in catering to their immortal souls.

The second great venture in colonization came thirteen years later, by which time the Virginians were firmly established. The same John Smith had voyaged along the rock-bound coast of Massachusetts in 1614 and had made maps of it which were much more accurate than those Champlain had drawn some years before. It was by chance, however, that a landing of settlers was made in the Land of the Cod. A party of religious Separatists, now called Pilgrims, had been driven from England by the intolerance which developed during the reign of James and had taken refuge in Holland. Being granted permission to settle in Virginia by the London Company, they set sail from
Holland in the year 1620 in a ship called the
Mayflower
, an earnest and utterly inexperienced body of men and women numbering no more than a hundred. Bad weather drove them off their course and they landed at what is now Provincetown on the long arm of Cape Cod. Despairing of reaching their objective, they decided to remain in this northern part to which, it seemed possible, the hand of Providence had directed them. They settled themselves across the bay at Plymouth. Upheld by a faith which survived every trial, here they clung to their precarious base in spite of the most bitter hardships and the continuous menace of the hostile Indians.

The next point settled was Salem, and then a third sinking of the roots of colonization occurred on the peninsular arm which formed the land protection on the north of what is now Boston Bay. The town of Boston, so named in 1630, grew with more rapidity than any of the other settlements and gradually became the center of the ever-widening effort to take over and break to the plow the lands which are now New England. Thus, at the time of Champlain’s death, Quebec had a flourishing rival. Boston, small and stern and determined, faced Quebec, which shared all these qualities; and it was inevitable that in the course of time the two would clash.

The United Netherlands claimed the country along the Hudson in 1609 as a result of the explorations of Henry Hudson in the
Half Moon
. In 1615 the first efforts at colonization were made by the Dutch with the settlement of a trading post on Castle Island near Albany, but it was not until 1624 that they went seriously about the task. In 1626 Peter Minuit bought Manhattan Island from the Indians, and Fort Amsterdam was erected there. The arrival of the Dutch made the rivalry for possession of North America a triangular one. As they had been farseeing enough to make a treaty with the Iroquois in 1617, there was a period when it seemed possible that the sturdy Dutchmen would pre-empt all of the New World which is now included in the states of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.

King James of England had a way (which he shared with the French) of granting vast claims to such of his subjects as desired to venture into the west. On the authority of one such charter an English sea captain named Samuel Argall (the same commander who abducted Pocahontas in Virginia and allowed a member of his crew, John Rolfe, to marry her) cruised up the coast from Massachusetts with the intention of expelling the French from their Acadian
possessions. He had no difficulty in capturing them, as the French were taken by surprise. The buildings at Port Royal were burned and some fourteen members of the colony, including the Jesuit priest, Father Biard, were carried off as prisoners, to be released later. The rest scattered and lived as well as they could off the land.

The Argall raid was the first open conflict between the English and the French. The war would go on, never completely quiescent even when the mother countries were at peace, for a century and a half. Much blood would be shed and many gallant deeds would be performed (and many black and terrible deeds as well) on both sides before the struggle came to an end when Wolfe captured Quebec.

The Argall raid had been a minor clash. It remained for two pedantic Scots to bring about the first fighting on a large scale. One was James I, the other Sir William Alexander; and of the pair, it was said that “James was a king who tried to be a poet and Alexander was a poet who tried to be a king.” It may be stated at the outset that both failed.

James I was the son of Mary Queen of Scots and succeeded to the throne of England on the death of Elizabeth in 1603. He had already won for himself a reputation that culminated in the description, “the wisest fool in Christendom.” Riding eagerly away from the poverty of his native Scotland, he took with him into England a whole train of Scots whose heads were filled with knowledge and ambition but whose pockets were woefully empty. One of these was William Alexander of Menstrie, whose patrimony was not large and who had been acting as tutor to Prince Henry, the oldest of the royal children. He was the most prolific of poets (his
Doomes-Day
ran to eleven thousand lines, most of them very dull indeed), and this brought him into close contact with the pawky monarch who thought he could do great things with words also. It was Alexander who sat at the royal elbow when James began to compose his metrical version of the Psalms. The attempt was not a very happy one and it was not until after the death of James that the royal version was published. The King’s son, who succeeded him as Charles I, granted permission to Alexander “to consider and reveu the meeter and poesie thereof,”
but it is not known to what extent he availed himself of the opportunity.

Alexander, being a man of vision, was unwilling to spend his life in the writing of verses and tutoring of princes. His eyes had become fixed on the west, and it was partly as a result of his urging that King James elected to make his liberal gestures of annexation. In 1621 the King made a grant to Alexander of all Nova Scotia, which was assumed at the time to include Newfoundland, Cape Breton, Acadia, Maine, New Brunswick, and a large slice of Quebec. In a later confirmation Alexander was empowered to “erect cities, appoint fairs, hold courts, grant lands and coin money.”

It remained for the poet-tutor, thus royally endowed, to find the wherewithal to take possession of his vast domain and to build the cities where the fairs would be held and the courts convened. King James had a favorite device for raising funds, to make baronets out of men who could pay a fat price for the honor. On his journey to London to claim the crown, he had created them with as lavish a hand as a queen of the May tossing posies. Now he decided to adopt the same plan in the occupation of North America. A new order was created, the Knights Baronet of Nova Scotia. Any man of property who could make a voyage to that country, or pay down instead the sum of one hundred and fifty pounds sterling, would get his title and a grant of land six miles by three. He would have the right to wear about his neck “an orange tawney ribbon from which shall hang pendant in an escutcheon argent a saltire azure with the arms of Scotland.”

Nothing much came of this save the settling of small groups here and there around the Bay of Fundy and the creation of much ill feeling between the newcomers and the French at Port Royal. After the death of James the Company of Merchant Adventurers was founded in London by Sir William and a number of London financiers and merchants. One of the members was Gervase Kirke, who had married a Frenchwoman and had always taken a great interest in matters concerning North America. The company had an ambitious purpose, the seizure by force of arms of all Canada. War had started between England and France because of Richelieu’s determination to break the back of Huguenot solidarity. The new dictator of France struck at the heart of Calvinism by besieging La Rochelle. In the reign of James there had been a handsome court favorite named George Villiers who gained such an ascendency over
the bumbling old monarch that he was created Duke of Buckingham. “Steenie,” as James had affectionately called him, had continued to wield a great influence over the new King. He even succeeded in persuading Charles to take the part of the Huguenots. War accordingly had been declared on France and Charles had sent a fleet under Buckingham to relieve La Rochelle. Buckingham was a man of glittering personality and an almost diabolical degree of charm, but he possessed neither military capacity nor experience. The expedition was a signal and dismal failure.