Rise to Greatness

by Conrad Black

  The national governments of the major powers profited from the discomfort of the Holy See, and Charles v even had the papal domains sacked by one of his generals in 1527 when he considered Clement VII guilty of ingratitude. This, not the theological niceties, which the Holy See would customarily overlook if the petitioner was one of the most powerful kings in Christendom, was the background to Henry VIII quitting the Church of Rome and establishing himself as supreme governor of the national Church of England. As he had previously enjoyed the title of Defender of the Faith, accorded him by the pope because of a learned paper the ecclesiastic Erasmus had written for him, Henry caused the British Parliament to confer on him the same title, and the monarch of the United Kingdom (and Canada) bears it yet.

  The Western world’s four most powerful leaders were Henry VIII, Francis I, Charles V, and the Turkish potentate, Suleiman the Magnificent. When the Turks pressed the Holy Roman Empire very hard, the French and British would support it. Otherwise, the French were constantly nibbling at the Empire and effecting divisions between the constituent Austrians, Spanish, and Dutch, distinct nationalities which had little in common except the consequences of dynastic coincidence.

  Two of the most decisive naval engagements in history came later in the sixteenth century: the Venetian and Imperial defeat of the Turks at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, which announced the failure of the Turks to seize dominance of the Mediterranean; and the British defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, which signalled the beginning of Spanish decline. Francis Drake, the British deputy commander against the Spanish Armada, and long a dangerous adversary of the Spanish empire on both sides of the Atlantic, completed Britain’s first circumnavigation of the world, from 1577 to 1580 (and the first of any country where the same person commanded the entire journey).

  Well before these epochal events, the scramble to find a way through northern waters to the Orient had been very ambitiously pursued. Francis I had not been pleased with the meagre results of Verrazano’s mission in 1524, and sent his own countryman Jacques Cartier, who had already been to Brazil and Newfoundland, on a return voyage across the North Atlantic. Cartier was sponsored by his bishop, of Saint-Malo in Normandy, the abbot of Mont Saint-Michel, and Francis charged him with discovering the most direct route to the Far East across the western ocean. Cartier had seen the mouth of the St. Lawrence, and probably thousands of European fishermen had also, but no European, as far as is known, had ventured into the river (which Cartier named after St. Lawrence). Cartier set forth in the spring of 1534 and reached Newfoundland in the astonishingly short time of only twenty days (a steady speed of almost five knots). He went through the Strait of Belle Isle and along the north shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, which he found so rugged and barren he called it “the land God gave to Cain.” He was more positive about the Magdalen Islands, Prince Edward Island, the Baie des Chaleurs (which, as the name implies, he found reassuringly warm), but in August he returned to France in respect for autumn storms on the North Atlantic not having got farther upstream than Anticosti Island in the mouth of the St. Lawrence River.

  While this was not all Francis had hoped for, Indians that Cartier met on the Gaspé Peninsula (where he erected a large cross and claimed all of North America for his king) gave him some furs, and told him of the vastness of the waterways into the interior up the St. Lawrence. It did not appear to presage the approaches to China, but it did appear to be an immense and rich country. The gigantic scale of the mouth of the St. Lawrence, far greater than any other river mouth in the world, inspired great hope of something rivalling or surpassing Mexico and Brazil.

  Cartier brought back two Indians whom he wished to train as translators, and the king was sufficiently interested to send him back the following year. He sailed upriver past his former limit to Tadoussac, where the Saguenay River rushes, six hundred feet deep, into the St. Lawrence, and on to Stadacona, the imposing site of present-day Quebec City, and then to Hochelaga, site of Montreal. The Lachine Rapids west of Mont Royal, as Cartier christened the mountain at Hochelaga, were so named by him in the hope that beyond them was China (la Chine). Cartier spent the winter at Stadacona, where 25 of his 110 men suffered from scurvy until a liquid derived from spruce proved to be a remedy. The Indians continued to talk of the vast riches up the Saguenay and the Ottawa and beyond Lachine, but declined to assist in any way any French liaison with the natives they might encounter. Cartier took the local chief, Donnacona, with him back to France, where the chief, emboldened by the splendours of Paris and the outlying royal precincts, gave voice to his burgeoning imagination as he waxed lyrical on the boundless wealth of his homeland to King Francis and all within earshot.

  Francis authorized a return by five ships commanded by Cartier in 1541, followed by three more ships under the corsair Jean-François Roberval. The Spanish were concerned at any other power seeking to establish itself in the New World, but the Portuguese monarch assured Charles v that Francis would not find anything of the slightest interest in the area Cartier would be exploring. (On the basis of this information, Charles assured visitors that the land along and up the St. Lawrence was “of no value, and if the French take it, necessity will compel them to abandon it.”1) Francis instructed Cartier to establish a permanent settlement and carry his explorations as far as he could, including investigating what Donnacona assured the king were the abundant gold, silver, and “cloves, nutmeg, and pepper” of the Saguenay, preposterous claims given the northern clime.2 (Donnacona died in France, and would never be held accountable for his outrageous liberties with the truth.) Cartier’s colonists were largely composed of prisoners who had been released for the occasion, but he also had three hundred soldiers. He wintered at Cap Rouge, upriver from Quebec. Roberval had detoured to raise money for the mission by seizing British ships as prizes, though the countries were at peace, and arrived in mid-summer of 1542 at Newfoundland. By this time, Cartier had lost confidence in the colonizing mission but had what he thought to be diamonds and gold to inspire the king with the riches of the new country, and he returned to France, disobeying Roberval’s instruction to go back up the St. Lawrence. (The riches proved to be quartz and iron pyrite. The phrase “not worth a Canadian diamond” was long a dismissal of worthlessness in Paris.) Cartier remained at or near Saint-Malo after 1542, in reasonable comfort, until he died there on September 1, 1557, aged sixty-six. His modest home survives, almost unchanged.

  This first effort at establishing a colony was a fiasco. More successful was the fur trade, which caught a fashion in France and started to respond to sharply rising demand for fur coats and hats. Private sector French traders made direct contact with the Indians and forged alliances with the Algonquin and Huron (from huré, meaning “bristly,” after their Mohawk hairstyles, as they are now known), forming what became known as the Laurentian Coalition, which continued through the seventeenth century and all of the eighteenth. The profits from the fashionable French fur trade and what the profits could buy for the recently savage and isolated Indians drove them to hunt down the fur-bearing animals of the Canadian interior, as the depredations of the world’s fishing countries would ultimately strain even the fisheries of Newfoundland’s Grand Banks. (Canada was so-called because kanata was the Indian word for a meeting place, but Cartier had initially thought the natives used the word in reference to the specific place Stadacona.) Eventually, after the death of Francis in 1547 (two months after Henry VIII), France dissolved in conflict between the Catholics and Protestants (Huguenots), as the Reformation and Counter-Reformation got into high gear.

  In 1588, the year of the Spanish Armada, Étienne Chaton and a nephew of Jacques Cartier, Jacques Noël, gained a monopoly on the fur and copper (more an ambition than a fact at this point) industries for twelve years, which was quickly reduced to copper only when competing Breton merchants agitated at court. Chaton and Noël brought in sixty convicts a year, but the project gained no traction. From 1576 to 1578, Sir Martin Frobisher made three voyages in search
of the Northwest Passage, landing at Baffin Island and what is now Frobisher Bay, and returning with 1,400 tons of, as he imagined, gold ore, which eventually proved, after being assayed in London, to be as worthless as Cartier’s “gold” and diamonds turned out to be twenty-five years before. There was a half-hearted effort by the inept Marquis de la Roche in 1578 to bring some convicts to Canada to begin to colonize, but the convicts mutinied and were deposited on Sable Island, where they lived off cattle left there years before by the Portuguese and, as there was no wood or stone, “lived like foxes underground.”3 They were returned by fishermen to France in 1603. That any of them survived was an eloquent testament to man’s capacities of survival. A new effort, by Pierre Chauvin, a Huguenot, accompanied by the accomplished fur trader François Gravé Du Pont and the Sieur de Mons, gained a new monopoly on the fur trade for ten years from King Henry IV in 1594, conditional on a serious effort at colonization, a project that France had been ineffectually making gestures toward for fifty years. Chauvin put down fifty settlers at Tadoussac, where the Saguenay flows into the St. Lawrence, but the weather was so inhospitable through the first winter that only sixteen survived to the spring. Again, the agitation of competing merchants, Norman and Breton, challenged this monopoly, and Chauvin died in 1602.

  British commercial interests sent the adventurer and half-brother of Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, to Newfoundland in 1583 to establish a colony from which to explore for the Northwest Passage, and to establish British authority over the fishing rights and fish processing there. He brought a motley group of misfits, convicts, and declared lunatics and is generally credited with founding the British Empire when he proclaimed British sovereignty over Newfoundland, but the colony was not a success as there were no follow-up supplies. On the way home, Gilbert travelled on the smallest ship of his squadron, sitting on the fan deck reading St. Thomas More’s Utopia. His last known words as he declined to transfer to the Golden Hind from his little ship the Squirrel, which foundered with all hands, were that “We are as close to heaven by sea as by land.”

  France was able, after the Reformation, and over nearly two hundred years, from the time of Richelieu in the 1620s to the departure of Napoleon in 1815, to consolidate its position in Europe, assure the division of the German-speaking centre of the continent, and aggravate the strains in the Holy Roman Empire to its profit, dealing separately and successfully with the Austrians, Spanish, and Dutch. But France was never really able to determine whether it wished to direct its ambitions across the Rhine or the English Channel, the Alps and Pyrenees being less tempting goals.

  Britain’s great minister Thomas Cardinal Wolsey (lord chancellor from 1515 to 1529) had perfected the technique of exploiting Britain’s insular status, without adversaries that could invade it on land, to manipulate the balance of power and assist now one country and now another on the continent. He aided the French and the Spanish and Habsburgs as required to prevent one side attaining superiority over the others and to make the Spanish-American empire vulnerable and keep the French empire, ultimately, to Britain’s leavings. Under Henry VIII and his second daughter, Elizabeth I, who between them reigned almost a century (from 1509 to 1547, and from 1558 to 1603), England entrenched its national church with the monarch at the head of it; developed the world’s most powerful navy; detached itself from European loyalties, as opposed to mere interests; united with Scotland; and perfected Wolsey’s balance of power strategy that served it through the pre-eminence of Spain (until the rise of Richelieu), of France (to the end of Napoleon), of Bismarck’s united Germany (to the defeat of Hitler in 1945), and of the Russian-dominated Soviet Union until its implosion at the end of the twentieth century. By then, the sceptre of world influence and the power to manipulate local correlations of forces had passed in peaceful alliance from Great Britain and its Empire to the United States. From the early sixteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century, the ebb and flow of power in Europe would depend on Britain’s ability to prevent any power, France for most of that time, from becoming so predominant in Europe that it could threaten the British in their home islands. France was the richest and most populous of the European powers until Bismarck united the Germans and, seventy-five years later, Russia had been industrialized and somewhat efficiently organized under the Communists.

  This system of continental alliances and overseas imperialism was just starting to emerge, and would take some decades to be thoroughly imposed, as Britain and France sent explorers to the east coast of North America, soon landed settlers, and fanned out into the new continent, claiming it for the home country. With a treaty of solidarity with Suleiman, Francis began the tactic, frequently invoked in the future, of reaching outside Western and Central Europe to try to balance intra-European conflicts, as Richelieu would, a century later, more successfully, with King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden. Both were controversial moves for Catholic France, and would presage the impulses for startling modern volte-faces, such as the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 and President Richard Nixon’s visit to China’s Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai in 1972. Canada would eventually evolve from being a pawn to a player in this long-running great power chess game.

  * As described by Jacques Cartier on first seeing it (the north shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence), 1534.

  PART I

  Colony:

  1603–1867

  Samuel de Champlain (c. 1570–1635), successively exploration leader, lieutenant to governors and viceroys of New France, and captain general and commander “in the absence of my Lord the Cardinal de Richelieu” of New France, 1603–1635; founder of Quebec. Champlain was a soldier, navigator, cartographer, colonial administrator and builder, writer, and courtier of astonishing versatility, courage, and determination. He crossed the Atlantic more than thirty times and went over many dangerous rapids but never learned to swim. He was one of history’s great propagators of European civilization.

  CHAPTER 1

  Champlain, the French Monarchy, New France, and the Maritime Colonies, 1603–1754

  1. The Rise of the French Bourbons: Henry IV

  Francis I’s son, Henry II, had died in 1559 when he shattered an opponent’s lance in a joust, causing a splinter to strike him in the eye. Henry was succeeded by a sickly fifteen-year-old, Francis II, who was dominated by his mother, Mary Queen of Scots. The Valois dynasty was clearly unstable, and there were contentious factions among the great nobles. The Catholic House of Guise in eastern France, the Protestant House of Condé in the west, and the less exalted, more moderate and uniformly sectarian Catholic southern houses of Bourbon and Montmorency all aspired to take over the kingdom. Under the zealous impulsion of Queen Mary, Protestants were persecuted, tried as heretics, and, if they refused to recant, tortured to death. Francis II died in 1560, just a year after his succession, and was nominally replaced by his ten-year-old brother, Charles IX, but the head of the state was his mother, Catherine de’ Medici, who tried to impart moderation from her splendid chateau at Chenonceau. Her policy failed to appease the Protestants but outraged the papists, and after the personal guard of the Duke of Guise killed more than a hundred Protestant worshippers and burned down a prominent church in March 1562, France erupted in denominational civil war of extreme brutality. The Condés raised a Protestant army and sought assistance from the English and German Protestants. The Catholic factions imported Swiss and Spanish soldiers to assist them, and there were terrible atrocities and assassinations, including of the Duke of Guise, and twenty-five thousand people died in the clash of contending armies at Dreux, followed by more than a thousand civilians in the sack of Rouen. The truce of the Edict of Amboise of 1563 lasted uneasily for four years, and then a second war broke out from 1567 to 1568, which was tamped down by the Peace of Longjumeau. This too collapsed as the most violent phase of the religious wars engulfed France.

  It was into this atmosphere of almost constant and general violence that Samuel de Champlain was born, in 1570, and baptized a Protestant. The y
oung king’s mother, Catherine de’ Medici, conceived a plan to end the strife through the time-honoured method of dynastic alliance by marriage, and the king’s sister, Marguerite de Valois, was given in marriage to the Protestant Prince Henry of Navarre. The wedding, in Paris, on August 17, 1572, was a great occasion, but four days later a leading Huguenot, Admiral de Coligny, was seriously wounded in an assassination attempt, and the following day Charles IX, twenty-two years of age, and with the full authority of a king, approved closing the city gates and chaining the boats in the Seine to their moorings. Prince Henry and the current Duke of Guise were arrested, Coligny was murdered in his convalescent bed, and the king ordered a bloodbath of the Huguenots. In what became known as the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, about two thousand Protestants, including many prominent nobles, were murdered. The able future prime minister Maximilien de Béthune, Duke of Sully, just twelve years old and a Protestant boarding school student in Paris, only escaped with his life by walking back to his residence with a Catholic liturgical book under his arm. Prince Henry, less than a week after his wedding, was informed by his brother-in-law the king that he could convert to Roman Catholicism or be put to death at once. This was the swift demise of his mother-in-law’s policy of toleration. He made the life-saving choice and spent three years as a thorough debauchee in luxurious captivity in the Louvre Palace.

  Charles IX died in 1574 of tuberculosis, only twenty-three years old, and was succeeded by his brother, Henry III, who had just been elected king of Poland. (In a novel arrangement, Poland, which was being gradually reduced by its more powerful neighbours, had its always-fractious nobles elect an outsider king.) Henry returned to Paris, pursued a conciliatory policy, and allowed his brother-in-law Prince Henry of Navarre to depart. The Huguenots had been shattered by the massacre of their leaders who had come to Paris for the wedding of national unity and religious peace, but they retrenched into strongholds, such as La Rochelle. Prince Henry went to La Rochelle and renounced Catholicism, but was coolly received by the Huguenot leaders and trusted by no one. But he raised an army of moderates, both Catholic and Protestant, and famously wrote a Catholic officer that all who “unswervingly follow their conscience are of my religion, as I am of all who are brave and virtuous.”1 He was widely, and perhaps not unjustly, suspected of opportunism, but he believed that atrocities committed for religious reasons were unchristian crimes as well as political mistakes. And he had judged accurately, as some of his more talented successors did, the point at which the French become alarmed at chaos and violence and require the restoration of security. He became a unifying figure. He also proved a very competent military organizer and a brave and inspiring commander.