Rise to Greatness

by Conrad Black

  The French and British attempted a reconciliation in 1625 with the marriage of Louis XIII’s sister, Henrietta Maria, to the incoming king of England, Charles I, so that both countries could concentrate on besting the Spanish and the Habsburgs. Unfortunately, the English king and his new wife got off to a bad start and quarrelled rather fiercely, and Louis left half of the promised 2.4-million-livre dowry owed to Charles unpaid. At the same time, the Huguenots, with British connivance, were making rebellious noises, and Richelieu famously described them as “a state within a state.” Louis and Richelieu attacked the Huguenot stronghold at La Rochelle, which Charles sought to assist, and after closing the port by building a breakwater across its channel of access, Richelieu, in his new capacity as a grand admiral (he had already had himself proclaimed director of navigation and commerce), sealed off the besieged town and starved the Huguenots into submission. The population was reduced from twenty-seven thousand to about five thousand, by famine, disease, and inflicted casualties, when La Rochelle finally surrendered in 1628, after being starved and bombarded for fourteen months. In revenge, Charles and his advisers determined to seize the French colonies in North America and the fisheries of Newfoundland. Money was so tight that Charles privatized this part of the war, and English buccaneers and freebooters proved to be very effective. The Alexanders and Stewarts seized Acadia, and in 1628 the swashbuckling Kirke family, Englishmen who lived in France, began intercepting French shipping on the St. Lawrence. Richelieu ignored the concerns of some of his partners in the Company of One Hundred Associates and had the king order the resupply of New France as if there were no naval war in progress. The mission got to Anticosti Island, where its leader, Admiral Claude Roquemont de Brison, “erected a cross among the seals and polar bears.”14 The Kirkes burned down Champlain’s farm and its crops at Cap Tourmente and blocked all traffic on the river at Tadoussac. Champlain beat off their attempted assault on Quebec, but he was obliged to go through another winter without being resupplied with food, gunpowder, or stores of any kind. Kirke’s squadron was larger and more heavily armed than Roquemont’s, which attempted to come upriver hugging the south shore. Kirke was too alert for that. Both sides fought valiantly in a fifteen-hour firefight, but Kirke overpowered Roquemont eventually, killing the French admiral and about a hundred others, including many prominent settlers. Every vessel in the French fleet was annihilated gallantly or compelled to strike its colours and surrender. The Kirkes returned the survivors to France.

  It was a desperate winter for Champlain and his fellow Quebecois, and he led them with his customary courage, sharing to the least crumb the uniform rations of all. They struggled through to the spring, managed to barter some food from the Montagnais, and replanted their gardens. The Kirkes returned in overwhelming force on July 20, 1629, and after extensive negotiation skilfully conducted by Champlain, with both he and Lewis Kirke addressing each other with exquisite courtesy, Champlain salvaged what he could but had no choice but to surrender Quebec. The Kirkes brought everyone back to Britain on the way to France, and the French were well-treated, though dysentery swept the ships and even eleven of Kirke’s men died of it. To Champlain’s considerable irritation, Étienne Brûlé and Nicolas Marsolet, now skilled interpreters of the Indian languages and astute traders, changed sides to the British. Champlain had heard that peace had been negotiated between the home governments, but Kirke assured him that there was no truth to this. Champlain reminded him that if the report was correct, the seizure of Quebec by the British was illegal. Once in London, Champlain ascertained from the French ambassador that the war had indeed been ended and that the British takeover of New France was illegal. Champlain waited in London on the assumption that he could return almost immediately to Quebec if the weather did not close in, but nothing happened and finally he departed for Paris on November 30. He was unaware that Louis had still not paid the second half of the promised dowry for his sister as King Charles’s bride. Champlain arrived in Paris without a position and with nothing to govern, having lost his investment in Richelieu’s Company of One Hundred Associates, and was informed by his wife that she no longer wished to live with him or be his wife. In Catholic France of that era, a divorce or annulment was out of the question, but it was a heavy blow to Champlain, now in his sixtieth year.

  Undaunted by this avalanche of bad news and improvident events, Champlain attended upon the king and the cardinal and gave them one of his eloquent sketches of the brilliant future of New France and the vocation of France to span the ocean, be a power in world commerce, lead Europe in the exploration of the whole world, spread Catholic Christianity, and demonstrate its capacity to build and create. Everything from the route to China to the “infinite number of savages who could be brought to Christ” was trotted out in Champlain’s torrential sales pitch.15 His principals were pretty jaded, but they generally subscribed to the nationalistic aspects of his vision and assured Champlain they would push matters with the British king, who was Louis’s brother-in-law, after all. But they became distracted by a successfully conducted war in Italy and were in no hurry to pay another 1.2 million livres to the grumpy newlywed king of England, and the matter languished, despite Champlain’s perfervid lobbying, for three years. Champlain was his usual energetic self and wrote his ambitious and most successful book, Voyages of New France, dedicated to “Monseigneur le Cardinal Duc de Richelieu.” It was a mighty tract of promotional puffery for the potential of North America and the virtues of the American Indian, and in a master stroke of lobbying, Champlain published a lengthy and effusive summary of the merits of New France as a national French project in an influential magazine, Le Mercure Français, which he entrusted for its editing and final presentation to the original éminence grise, Father Joseph du Tremblay, the Capuchin friar who was Richelieu’s closest (in fact, only) confidant and had already entered the history and folklore of France with his chief. The book and article were accompanied by Champlain’s greatest feat of cartography.

  The Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 1632 ratified the peace, paid off the dowry, and restored French overseas possessions. The Company of One Hundred Associates sent the prominent and successful transatlantic merchant Émery de Caën to Quebec to regain possession of New France, and he boldly did so, as the British handed over and departed in July 1632. Richelieu appointed his cousin, Isaac de Razilly, to command in Quebec with a commission in which the name was left blank, but his cousin filled in the name Samuel de Champlain instead of his own, explaining to his illustrious relative that Champlain was the obvious person to resume command. And this was done; Razilly took over the restoration of Acadia.

  Champlain returned to New France in March and April 1633, bringing two hundred people with him, including some women and children and four Jesuit priests. The Jesuit superior of France blessed the ships of Champlain’s flotilla. It was ninety-nine years since the first arrival of Jacques Cartier, and the French were finally taking steps to generate a permanent colonial community. Quebec had become a frontier town of roustabout French and British traders and adventurers, and the Kirkes had burned down Champlain’s habitation and fort. Once again, Champlain set his men to work building the sinews of what he intended to raise up, as he had promised the king: a grand capital, Ludovica, of a great French empire in the New World. He started with a new chapel that he named Notre-Dame-de-la-Recouvrance (Our Lady of Recovery).

  The dispute over alcohol was now raging. The British had made the chief introduction of alcohol to the Indians, and as they were less preoccupied with Christianizing them, and as the reverent clergy played a more secondary role in the British colonies than in New France, the British had fewer qualms about this form of inducement, to which the Indians continued to show themselves very susceptible. It gave the British a trade advantage that aroused much resentment in French commercial quarters, though at this point Champlain was sentencing French violators of the prohibition on selling alcohol to the Indians to flogging.

  The greatest p
roblem was the deterioration in relations between the pro-French Algonquin and the Iroquois in Champlain’s absence from New France. The Algonquin were not naturally inclined to peace with their ancient foe, and the Iroquois were much less inclined to leave them in peace in the absence of Champlain or a strong French replacement for him. Champlain outlined these issues in lengthy letters to Richelieu and sought the cardinal’s authorization to conduct an aggressive war against the Iroquois. Richelieu was apparently unconvinced, as he did not, so far as is known, reply. Richelieu did not like wars anyway, though he was prepared to subsidize others to make war in the common cause, as he was already doing in the Thirty Years War, which was raging in Central Europe. Champlain waxed rhapsodic over his plans for New France in these letters to Richelieu, who was in favour of the empire and was promoting French colonization in the Caribbean and south and west Africa, and in India as well. But the cardinal was preoccupied with more pressing business than Canada. In 1635, Richelieu finally intervened directly in the Thirty Years War, and thus had only very modest resources available for New France or other colonial undertakings. The long struggle for control of Germany between the Habsburgs and the Bourbons was reaching a climax. Richelieu recognized, as did all astute European statesmen for the next several centuries, that the key to maintaining France as the greatest European power was to assure the division of the German-speaking areas. Richelieu’s objective was to leave Germany divided into dozens of small principalities, with France as the guardian of the independent German states, to prevent the Habsburgs from combining all of them under the direction of Vienna in what Richelieu (more or less accurately) considered the confidence trick of the Holy Roman Empire. Richelieu had built a great French state and founded the French Academy to direct the country’s cultural initiatives, and his chef-d’oeuvre would be the consolidation of French power with an overlordship protecting the fragmentation of the German states whose unity all Europe had feared since Roman times.

  Richelieu was more forthcoming on the matter of peopling the New World. Champlain found seventy-seven French in Quebec, whom he supplemented with his shiploads. Louis Hébert had died from a fall on the ice in 1627, but his widow married a ship’s carpenter and they had started the first French family of the New World. The next family was that of Abraham Martin, a Scot married to a French woman, who became a master pilot and fishing captain on the St. Lawrence and a farmer on what are known to history as the Plains of Abraham. In 1634, in accord with Richelieu’s policy as prime minister and director of navigation and commerce, as well as founder and premier shareholder in the Company of One Hundred Associates, two hundred more settlers of both sexes arrived, and the following year three hundred more. A thousand more immigrants would arrive between 1636 and 1640; 3,500 between 1640 and 1659; and 9,000 between 1660 and 1699. Champlain laid out the seigneurial domains in elongated strips of land abutting the St. Lawrence and the other great rivers of the colony, especially the Richelieu and the Ottawa.

  More than two-thirds of the present eight million French Canadians are descended from the eleven hundred French women who came to New France between 1630 and 1680. The largest share of immigrants, perhaps a quarter, came from Normandy.16 The nasalized form of speaking that became familiar in Quebec, with flattened vowels and a profusion of religious words as curses, arose from western and central-western France in the early seventeenth century. Since 1950, as contact with metropolitan France was reopened, the gap that developed between France and Quebec in the previous three centuries has substantially narrowed, and is now not too much greater than the corresponding differences between English as spoken in the British Isles and North America.

  Richelieu’s nephew, Isaac de Razilly, was as ambitious for the Acadian colony that he repossessed from the British as Champlain was for New France. Sir William Alexander had tried to set up a British colony in what was called Nova Scotia in 1621, and made a profit centre from selling local baronetcies to Scots, but the project failed after a year. Razilly brought in fifteen French families to relaunch the colony in 1632. (They were astounded to find “lobsters as big as little children,” with claws that could “hold a pint of wine.”17) Richelieu funded this project through the Company of One Hundred Associates also, and in 1633 Razilly brought in more than one hundred settlers. The same astounding demographic fecundity as in Quebec obtained in Acadia. Razilly built several fortifications, but this very capable and principled man, who had many of the best qualities of his illustrious uncle but was not the devious master of intrigue that Richelieu was, died of natural causes aged forty-eight. He was widely mourned, including by his uncle, whom he had motivated to set up a French fort in Morocco, where it was the beginning of the French takeover of that country finally completed nearly three hundred years later. The death of Razilly brought on a rending struggle for Acadia between two robust adventurers, Charles de La Tour and Charles de Menou d’Aulnay, which was only resolved after d’Aulnay seized La Tour’s headquarters in his absence and hanged his followers (La Tour’s wife died slightly more decorously as d’Aulnay’s prisoner), whereupon La Tour fought back, outlasted d’Aulnay, consolidated his position by marrying d’Aulnay’s widow in 1653, and soldiered on to 1665.

  In 1634, Champlain began the chain of fortified posts at intervals westward and south and northwest from Quebec that would eventually connect New France to the Gulf of Mexico and to Hudson Bay and the Great Plains. The first of these was at Trois-Rivières, where the Saint-Maurice River flows into the St. Lawrence.

  The two interpreters that Champlain had brought from France in 1610, Étienne Brûlé and Nicolas Marsolet, who defected to the English during the Kirke era, had very different fates. Brûlé had to take refuge with the Indians but eventually quarrelled with them, allegedly because of his womanizing, and the Huron executed him, relatively humanely by their standards. This was thought to be the only Frenchman the Huron killed, and Champlain did not reproach them for it. Brûlé was forty-one. Marsolet eventually made his peace with the French and conducted a very profitable trade with the Montagnais. He married a French woman, they had ten children at Tadoussac, where he was known as “the little king,” and he lived to the age of ninety, a seigneur several times over, dying in 1677 prosperous, a legend to French, English, and Indian, and full of years and honours.

  Other noteworthy graduates of Champlain’s interpretation service were Olivier Letardif, Champlain’s principal interpreter on his major explorations and reconnaissances in the 1620s, who lived on to 1665 and became a seigneur and eminence of the Company of One Hundred Associates, and Jean Nicollet, who became an explorer in his own right and discovered Wisconsin, imagining the present site of Green Bay, a meatpacking and football centre, to be the gateway to China. He narrowly missed the discovery of the upper Mississippi. He drowned in the St. Lawrence in 1642 while racing to rescue an Iroquois brave from being tortured to death by the Huron. Both Letardif and Nicollet married daughters of Louis Hébert’s wife and her second husband and became rather gentrified by the rustic standards of New France.

  A word should also be added about Champlain’s policy of encouraging intermarriage with Indians, creating the Métis section of the population, which eventually numbered, officially, about three hundred thousand people by the beginning of the twenty-first century, but probably, if all such melanges are taken into account, must really stand at one to several million Canadians. Tragically, the susceptibility of Indians to Western illnesses sharply reduced their life expectancy, and as the French population of New France rose, that of the Indians declined.

  Samuel de Champlain died on Christmas Day 1635, aged sixty-five, in his habitation at Quebec. He left most of his considerable means to the inhabitants of Quebec, stipulating various endowments and works he wished constructed, and his French assets to his wife, who lived on for many years in a convent (though the will was contested by avaricious relatives in France). He had been largely immobilized by a stroke in October 1635, and gave a prolonged general confession, goin
g through his entire life, to the senior Jesuit in the colony. He again sketched out to secretaries and clergy at his bedside in grand detail his brilliant vision for New France, all of which and much more came to pass, except that, while remaining French, New France eventually ceased to be associated with France. He grasped early and entirely the grandeur of the new continent and the permanence of a French community on the St. Lawrence. Every man, woman, and ambulatory child in Quebec – Stadacona as it had been when he first saw it more than thirty years before – attended Champlain’s funeral. His grave, under the Quebec basilica, was burned in a fire in 1640 and has not been exactly rediscovered.

  Champlain was a man of astonishing determination, intelligence, imagination, and integrity, a founder of Canada who well-earned the pride and the gratitude of all his future countrymen of every ethnicity, including the natives, whom he loved and esteemed with unfeigned respect. As a founder of a country and nationality, he bears comparison with the very most distinguished, not excluding the illustrious father, 140 years later, of the American republic.

  4. The Great Intendant and the First Bishop, 1635–1672

  The missions to the Indians were slowly taking root and confirm again the power of the Christian message and the determination of the messenger. The “black robes,” as the Jesuits were known, vanished for a year or more into the bowels of the continental wilderness with the Algonquin tribes that had agreed to accept them, and endured the smokehouses, lack of hygiene, constant noise and loneliness. Their hosts, though suspicious of them, did not harm them. Among the most interesting documentary records of the time were The Jesuit Relations, which were collected, edited, and published. Initially, they only gave the sacrament of the dying as a supplement to the indigenous rites, but, as was the Jesuits’ experience with the heathen in other places, even in China, eventually some of the adult natives converted and despite the censure of their fellow tribesmen accepted the Christian yoke. The objective continued to be to rally the Indians to the faith and then to the Crown and the laws of France, and – in addressing these lamentable absences summarized by Champlain in the phrase “ni foi, ni roi, ni loi” (neither faith nor king nor law) – to make New France one community of two peoples united in the same faith. It was always a very optimistic scenario.