by Conrad Black
In his extraordinary versatility, Champlain had a try at ardent court politicking, working on previous contacts, and, at the age of forty, taking a well-connected wife, Hélène Boullé. It was not one of French history’s many riveting romances, but they got on well enough for some years, and Champlain, both by the nature of his person and of his avocation, was quite faithful, if not, perforce, very attentive. (Madame had little ambition for the rugged challenges of early seventeenth-century Quebec.) Champlain also tried to emphasize the Christianizing mission of his project and generate support among the leaders of the clergy, but they were as complicated and politically factionalized as the secular court entourage, and Champlain was not altogether believable in this role. Much of his adult life was a scramble for favour from the court; merchants and other commercial interests; the bishops and religious congregations; the military and navy; and the imagination of the literati. With uncertainty rampant on both sides of the great western ocean, he returned to New France in the spring of 1611.
For some years from this point, New France survived only because of the will and ingenuity of Samuel de Champlain. He worked tirelessly to promote the vision in France and to broaden the base of the colony and expand its population and ambit. He was fighting an uphill battle on both sides of the Atlantic. On his exploratory visit in the summer of 1611, he shot the Lachine Rapids in the company of the Indians, an exercise this fearless man found terrifying (bearing in mind that, despite his immense talents as a mariner, he could not swim). In Paris, he lobbied all his contacts and finally got to the young king. Marie de’ Medici was hopeless, from Champlain’s standpoint, but Louis XIII would be able to assert himself in a few years. De Mons retired as the chief backer of New France, as he was now old and tired, in body, soul, and pocket book. De Mons also felt that as a Protestant he would have little chance of making it work with the queen regent. Champlain recruited the Count of Soissons, Bourbon governor of Normandy, as governor of New France, but a month after the count’s formal installation, he abruptly died. Undaunted, Champlain moved on and recruited the Prince of Condé, one of France’s greatest nobles, who insisted on being viceroy of New France, which Champlain eagerly promoted in the hope that Condé would secure the colony the return of the fur trade monopoly. He did, and the monopoly was restored for twelve years.
Triumphant again, Champlain returned to New France in the spring of 1613. It had been a mild winter and the colony was healthy, but still painfully small. Champlain’s project this spring was to go up the Ottawa River to, as he imagined to be at the end of it, Hudson Bay. (This was named after the Englishman Henry Hudson, who between 1607 and 1611 was engaged by the English to find a passage to China in the north, did discover Hudson Bay, and then tried to thread his way to China through North America on behalf of the Dutch and discovered the Hudson River. He was back in the Arctic in 1611 on behalf the English, but conditions became so difficult, there was a mutiny and he and his son were put in an open boat and never seen again.) Champlain and his party got about fifty miles upriver from the present city of Ottawa, more than a hundred miles from the St. Lawrence, before Champlain’s misinformant confessed under pressure from the local Indians that his claims of a temperate passage to the East were false. Champlain released the scoundrel, who walked into the woods. His fate is unknown.
Champlain returned to France and quickly formed a new investment company, the Compagnie du Canada. Champlain published another well-written book, accompanied by excellent maps, The Voyages of the Sieur de Champlain, dedicated to the king and the queen regent. Champlain was more successful than ever in drumming up support for his project from commercial interests, but his marriage wobbled badly and his wife tentatively left him.
For his 1615 return to Quebec, Champlain brought a group of Récollet fathers (Franciscans) to get the Christianizing mission going and broaden his support for New France at home. His motive was not entirely cynical and avaricious. He was disgusted by the barbarity of the Indians, even as a veteran of the terrible religious strife in France in the previous century, and believed in the need for and value of the civilizing mission of France. He also hoped that at least some of the Indians could eventually become bona fide citizens of New France, that there could be some intermarriage, and that the population might, accordingly, grow more quickly than it would from the meagre propensity of the French to emigrate. Once returned to the colony, Champlain gave the friendly Indians a tutorial in the strategy and tactics of war: that it should only be conducted for a defined and attainable objective, not from boredom or habit, and that it should depart the formalism of Indian war-making and be based on surprise and the application of overwhelming force at the decisive point, not just a general melee. He also warned against violation of civilians and enunciated the objective of defeating the warriors and war-making capacity of hostile tribes but encouraging their civilians to be comfortable, unthreatened, and quiescent in the arrangements France’s Indian allies established.
This time he undertook an ambitious and strenuous exploration up the Ottawa River, west past Lake Nipissing to Georgian Bay, southeast to Lake Ontario, and then south to what is now the site of Syracuse, New York. He was impressed at Huron towns of thousands of people, with palisades thirty-five feet high, wooden buildings, and relatively sophisticated agriculture based on the harvesting of corn. The plan was to penetrate to the heart of Iroquois country, defeat them decisively in a surprise engagement, and then withdraw. He had thirteen arquebusiers and several hundred Indian braves for this foray, but battle was joined by an advance party ahead of him and he had to discharge his sinister and astounding weapons to prevent his allies from being defeated and missed the chance to massacre the main Onondaga (Iroquois) force, which quickly retired within its fort. The Indians accompanying him declined to follow Champlain’s advice about how to seize the fort and, after an unsuccessful attempt to set fire to it, withdrew. Champlain considered it a defeat, but the effect was useful: it was not such an outrage that the whole Iroquois coalition of tribes felt compelled to retaliate, but it put them on warning that the Algonquin, reinforced by the French, were not to be trifled with. Champlain ended up spending the winter with the Huron, which enhanced his knowledge of them and strengthened his hopes that they could be civilized to Christianity, a gentler life, and the benefits of citizenship in New France. He returned in August 1616 to a France that was soon to come under the sway of one of the greatest and most powerful statesmen in the history of Europe.
3. Canada under Richelieu and Champlain, 1616–1635
Champlain and the faithful Gravé Du Pont returned to Paris in September 1616 to discover that Marie de’ Medici was fighting for her political life. He learned on landing at Honfleur that the viceroy of New France, the Prince de Condé (father of the illustrious army commander), was in the Bastille, charged with treason, rebellion, and lèse-majesté. The Marquis de Cadillac had replaced him as viceroy and governor, and Champlain’s position as lieutenant-governor was purportedly awarded to someone else. The great nobles, led by Condé, disliked the Spanish and Italian influence at the court and over the queen regent, and the Estates General presumed to meet to express discontent. The twenty-nine-year-old bishop of Luçon, Armand Jean du Plessis, who would soon enough become known to the world as the Cardinal and Duke de Richelieu, had distinguished himself at the Estates General as a champion of the Church and supporter of the queen regent, and was asked to give the address there summarizing the findings of the assembly, and then was appointed chaplain to the queen. He attached himself to the flickering star of the queen’s favourite, Concini, but when the queen proposed to marry her son, Louis XIII, and daughter off to the daughter and son of the king of Spain, there was such unrest in official French circles it led to factional skirmishing verging on civil war. And when Condé arrived in Paris to attend the Royal Council, where he was next in line to the throne after the adolescent king, Queen Marie had him arrested. Condé’s wife insisted on sharing his imprisonment and in the Bastill
e gave birth to a stillborn child. Like many of Marie’s late husband’s senior advisers, Nicolas Brulart de Sillery, a patron of Champlain and chancellor of France, was banished from court, and on taking leave of the fifteen-year-old Louis, he suggested that the king could assert his majority. This theme was taken up by the grand falconer, the king’s friend Charles d’Albert, Duke of Luynes. Louis did so and had Luynes seize Concini on the bridge of the Louvre. When Concini supposedly resisted, he was impaled, and his wife was imprisoned, tried, and convicted (in a spurious proceeding) of witchcraft and summarily executed by fire. The queen regent was banished to Blois, and Richelieu departed with her. But conditions were unstable, and the outcome of the acute tension in the royal family and upper nobility was not clear. It was a rough-and-tumble climate of intrigue, where the fortunes of all the participants fluctuated wildly and any misstep could be fatal.
Champlain was reinstated, as was Sillery, and Champlain returned to Quebec in the summer of 1617 for only about ten days before rushing back to the teeming conspiratorial atmosphere of the French court. He did bring to New France with him and install there the apothecary Louis Hébert, Poutrincourt’s brother-in-law and a member of the expedition to Acadia in 1606. He is reckoned the first settler of New France, and is a folk figure and an honoured name in Quebec to this day. Champlain directed that his work crew build Hébert and his family a solid stone house. By now, there were about seventy Frenchmen living at Quebec, but few of them had any intention of remaining there. In France, Champlain conducted his usual hustling and selling job on the merchants of the coastal cities, emphasizing fisheries, furs, aspirant Christian souls among the natives, even the possibilities of forestry and lumber for shipbuilding and residential construction, whatever seemed to work. The king approved his efforts and renewed his commission, but with an instruction not to interfere with the fur trade. The unpromisingly divided nature of the French enterprise in Canada continued: the fur-seekers would ignore Champlain, who would not benefit from this principal source of revenue in the New World, and colonization alone would not lure many from the temperate and cultivated glories of France to the stern winters of this transoceanic extremity. Louis Hébert and others were soon complaining, with good reason, that the commercial interests were exploiting the settlers. The clergy were soon also raising very vocal objections to the tactics of the fur traders, especially in bartering brandy for furs and swindling and degrading the native people.
In 1619, the queen escaped from Blois and began promoting a rebellion against her son, whose adviser, the falconer Luynes, advised the recall of Richelieu with a mandate to try to settle down the dowager queen. Richelieu did so, in an early sequel to his success at the Estates General in 1614 and in what would become a long and astonishing sequence of diplomatic master strokes. And he produced the Treaty of Angoulême, which ended the internecine hostilities and gave the queen freedom of movement and a seat of honour on the Royal Council, but confirmed the absolute power of the king. There was some continuing armed dissent from this, but it was suppressed without unusual difficulty. Condé was released and restored to all his offices and properties, including the ultimate authority over New France, but he had lost interest during his sojourn in prison and sold that office to his brother-in-law, the Duke of Montmorency.
Richelieu was now a figure of relentlessly increasing power, the master of intrigue as well as of national strategy. He believed that the greatness of France depended on an absolute monarchy that would be too powerful for any faction to depose or ignore or for sectarian or regional squabbling, and that only an omnipotent royal dictatorship could organize France successfully and make it the greatest power in the world. To this end, he naturally enjoyed the increasing support and even gratitude of the king. Louis was nineteen in 1620 and not a physically strong or well-adjusted young man. His father had been disappointed in his puny physique and respiratory ailments and diffident nature, and to impart toughness and manliness to him, his parents directed governesses and tutors to whip him as often and harshly as practical. This was in accord with pedagogical concepts of the time, in France and elsewhere. Montaigne decried the education of boys that generally involved “horror and cruelty … violence and compulsion … until classes be strewn with bloody stumps of birch-rods.”12 The results of this policy were mixed. Louis was morose and was thought to be bisexual, as he was regularly surrounded with pretty girls and boys, but he was also cunning, calculatedly unpredictable, and extremely conscious and protective of his own authority, and proved a competent commander of troops.
In these ever-shifting circumstances, Richelieu was insuperable. He transferred his loyalty from the queen mother to the king, but used his influence with the queen to calm spirits. He became the indispensable person for the avoidance of civil strife, and when Luynes died of scarlet fever in 1621 he became the king’s most influential adviser. For Louis, Richelieu was a providential source of wise and imaginative advice and its ruthless execution, and for Richelieu the king was a reasonably permissive master who embodied the state that Richelieu wished to create for every patriotic and personal reason. Louis XIII successfully commended Richelieu to Pope Gregory XV as a cardinal in 1622, and Richelieu joined the Royal Council in 1624 and replaced Charles de La Vieuville as the head of it in that year. At thirty-nine, he became history’s first prime minister, and would retain the position until he died in 1642. Many subsequent relationships, such as Joseph II and Metternich, Frederick William II and Bismarck, and even Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, bore some resemblance to this one.
Champlain returned to Quebec in 1620 with an enhanced mandate, some officials to assist him in the administration, and the beginnings of royal enthusiasm for a durable colony that would be commercially self-sustaining and a centre of missionary proselytizing. On his arrival at Tadoussac, he had to dodge illegal traders in larger and more heavily armed ships than his. He found Quebec “in a desolate and ruinous condition.”13 He ordered a complete reconstruction of Quebec, starting with a serious fort, and the replacement of the tumbledown buildings and tenements that the settlement had become. The king had restored the pension that his father had granted Champlain, and Montmorency, as reports poured in from the senior officials in Quebec of the reconstruction being effected, doubled his salary as lieutenant-viceroy and commandant. The king and his advisers did discourage the dispatch of Protestants to New France, which, although it reduced the sectarian ambiguity of the colony, also probably deprived it of many highly motivated settlers, as flight from religious persecution of both puritans and Roman Catholics spurred much colonial activity in the British colonies to the south. Champlain had largely completed his ambitious building plans by the autumn of 1624, and had detained his purposeful wife for four uninterrupted years in the colony. They returned to France so he could renew his agitation for more generous patronage from the monarch he served, aware that almost unlimited power now rested in the hands of the Cardinal and Duke de Richelieu, who had completed the transfer of his flag to the king from the queen mother, whose former affection had turned to hatred, embittered, it was widely alleged, by unrequited passion.
Montmorency also tired of this responsibility and sold on the viceregal office of New France to his nephew, the Duke of Ventadour, for one hundred thousand livres. (It need hardly be emphasized that the fact that such positions were virtually articles of commerce denominated for their potential profitability to the incumbent did not augur well for the prospects of good government.) The new viceroy was only twenty-eight, a fervent Roman Catholic, and a believer in the colonizing and civilizing mission of a French empire. This conformed neatly to the views of the king and his cardinal prime minister, and Ventadour confirmed Champlain as lieutenant-viceroy and commandant of New France and asked him to remain a year with him in Paris to advise him of Canadian affairs and help him sort out his affairs generally. Champlain and his wife were happy to do this, as he lumbered determinedly into his third decade as France’s M. Canada.
Venta
dour gave the businessmen of Caen a monopoly on the fur trade provided they hired only Roman Catholics as captains of their ships, and fishing remained open to all. Living conditions and relations with the Indians had deteriorated since Champlain left in 1624, and by 1626 there were only forty-three French residents of New France. Champlain returned in the spring of 1626 and took the colony in hand yet again. He founded a farm at Cap Tourmente, about thirty miles from Quebec, and put in train the beginnings of Quebec’s agricultural self-sufficiency.
Despite the small numbers of people in New France, religious squabbling descended even to complaints at noisy psalm-singing by Protestant ship crews on the St. Lawrence, and Champlain had to impose reduced decibel levels on such moments of sectarian exultation.
In 1627, Richelieu decreed a new regime for the colony in an attempt to resolve the endless backbiting that reverberated even in Paris. He retired Ventadour, abrogated existing arrangements, and gave a commercial monopoly and a composite colonial and commercial and ecclesiastical mission to the Compagnie de la Nouvelle France, also known as the Canada Company and as the Company of One Hundred Associates. The cardinal himself subscribed as Associate Number 1, and Champlain was Associate Number 52. Everyone invested three thousand livres. The company claimed all of North America from Florida to the Arctic Circle, which was preposterous given the activities of the British from Maine into what are now the Carolinas, and the Dutch in what is now New York. In early 1628, there were just 55 French in Quebec, whereas in 1630 there were 270 Dutch in the New Netherlands (New York), 300 Pilgrims at Plymouth, and 1,275 English settlers with 22 African slaves in Virginia.
