by Conrad Black
The ambiance began to heat up again in September 1675 when the newly installed Bishop Laval returned after an absence of four years. Rarely has authority in a small place been shared by two personalities as strong and certain to disagree as these two men. Frontenac had not been in Quebec three months when he began sending messages back to France, of which Laval, still in France, was quickly apprised, reporting that the Jesuits were over-profiting from the fur trade and were more interested in pelts than souls, were unreasonably blocking the sale of brandy, and in the guise of missionary work were ignoring pastoral duties. There was only one resident priest and Laval did handle the money the Church collected from all sources, which Frontenac judged avaricious and the cause of injustices. Laval responded that the governance of the Church was no legitimate concern of the secular leaders of the colony. The bishop and the governor even quarrelled over the extent of deference to be shown to the governor during religious services, and finally Louis XIV had to resolve this also, imposing the example of the honours shown the governor of the French province of Poitou. Frontenac didn’t care for the Sulpicians either, but conciliated the Récollets and was an observant Roman Catholic himself. At bottom, Frontenac was a Gallican who thought the king and his representatives should control civil matters and that the king should influence the choice of bishops and abbots, and Laval was an ultramontanist who believed that the Pope and his bishops were autonomous and had a right to interfere in secular issues with moral implications. This discord would continue in Quebec for nearly three hundred years, to the time of Richelieu’s namesake and distant relative, Premier Maurice Duplessis in the 1950s.
The brandy issue was very divisive. Laval believed that it reduced the Indians to the level of beasts and was wicked, and he punished vendors of alcohol to the Indians with excommunication. Frontenac and the traders pointed out that the colony would die without the fur trade, which would go entirely to the British if the French did not barter with brandy (which was called the King of France’s “milk” and which the Indians preferred to English rum and whisky). The king finally had to choose between Laval, the Jesuits and Sulpicians, the Sorbonne, the archbishop of Paris and his own chaplain, Père La Chaise (after whom the famous Paris cemetery is named), on the one side, and Frontenac, Colbert, the University of Toulouse, and a wide range of commercial interests on the other. Frontenac also battled with Talon’s successor as intendant, Jacques Duchesneau, starting with Frontenac’s rather puerile objection to the intendant chairing the meetings of the Sovereign Council. This absurd dispute dragged on for five years, in which there were terrible scenes at the meetings (every Monday morning), and Frontenac countered the numerical predominance of the Laval-Duchesneau faction by regularly ordering the physical removal of several of the councillors, which, as governor and commander of the military and the police, he could do. The intendant and governor quarrelled over almost everything, including reciprocal allegations of skimming the fur trade for their own benefit (charges that were probably not unfounded in either case). Frontenac even imprisoned Duchesneau’s son for composing an impudent couplet about him. These issues too were referred to France, and finally Colbert became so exasperated that in 1682 he recalled both Frontenac and Duchesneau. As historian Charles W. Colby wrote of Frontenac when he sailed for home in 1682, “He had guarded his people from the tomahawk and the scalping knife. With prescient eye he had foreseen the imperial greatness of the West. Whatever his shortcomings, they had not been those of meanness or timidity.”27
Laval was almost as impossible a character as Frontenac, but less hot-tempered and vain, and Marie de l’Incarnation described him as “saintly and apostolic.”28 Many of these disputes were the result of Frontenac’s simply unreasonable personality, but they do not, and ultimately did not, obscure the fact that at his most important task, keeping the colony safe and keeping marauding Indians well away, Frontenac was entirely successful. There were no skirmishes with the Iroquois throughout these ten years, and New France was free to prosper and grow, which it did. Along with this was Frontenac’s great success in extending trading posts and sending explorers out to the north, west, and south. He was also an ambitious builder of public works, including a sewage system and the conversion of Quebec’s market into a royal square, with a bronze bust of Louis XIV. He laid out a plan for Quebec to become a majestic capital, which was largely followed.29 The explorer René-Robert Cavalier de La Salle proved a powerful ally of Frontenac. Accompanied by Frontenac’s influential wife, he carried a letter from Frontenac to the king and came back with a patent to explore the entire continent between the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico, and did so, not with a great organization or a blank cheque from the French government, but with the slender resources he was able to muster privately, and by his own superhuman determination and courage, with his valiant friend, Henri de Tonty.* Unfortunately, without guidance from Frontenac, La Salle took progressive leave of his senses and pursued a private scheme for the fortification of the Mississippi delta. He lost control of his men, some of whom murdered him in March 1687, stripping his corpse and leaving “him to the mercy of the wolves and other wild animals.” It was a cruel fate for any authentic hero.30
Another great figure of the era was the leader of the coureurs de bois, Daniel Greysolon Dulhut. He was the explorer of the Sioux country and the guardian of the French interest at Michilimackinac, near the coming together of lakes Huron, Michigan, and Superior. The coureurs were an immense asset for the French, unlike any comparable group of wilderness and Indian experts available to the English, and the intendant Duchesneau was trying to ban them from the woods, largely because he considered them agents of Frontenac. The governor successfully resisted this, but it was another argument that went to the king for adjudication. Frontenac had seen at once the merits of Dulhut and was his champion throughout. Where Frontenac saw the forts and trading posts along the rivers and lakes in the interior as essential to establishing the French claim to much of North America, the Jesuits saw these posts as centres of debauchery and exploitation of the Indians. Both were correct, and this conflict, closely connected to the dispute over the issue of trading brandy to the Indians, exposed the severe division between the French objectives in the New World and the clerical and secular elements that pursued them.
In the War of Devolution (1667–1668), Louis had secretly secured British and Dutch neutrality and struck the Spanish Netherlands when Spain was distracted in war with Portugal, and gained appreciably in annexed territory. In the Third Dutch War (1672–1674), he had secretly bribed Sweden to remain neutral and Charles II to support him. Unfortunately for this design, Charles took this occasion to issue a Declaration of Indulgence relieving Roman Catholics and non-Anglican Protestants of many restrictions, and Parliament rebelled, passed the Test Act against Catholics in 1673, and withheld funding for the war effort alongside France in 1674. But Louis’s armies under marshals Condé and Turenne, and his navy under Admiral Abraham Duquesne, prevailed and it was a very successful war, though a costly one. The war with Holland distracted France and reduced assistance to New France. But the Peace of Nijmegen, a series of treaties signed in 1678 and 1679, ended, satisfactorily from the French perspective, the wars between France, the Dutch Republic, Spain, Brandenburg, Sweden, Denmark, Munster, and the Holy Roman Empire, and pushed the northeastern French frontier almost to its present extent. Thereafter, Louis did not make equivalent diplomatic efforts to reinforce his military initiatives, and the balance of his wars (which never abated for long) were not overly successful.
England had seized New Amsterdam in 1664 and began to populate the Hudson Valley from Manhattan to Albany. The English governor, Sir Edmund Andros, sought to build an alliance with the Iroquois, although good relations persisted between the cousins Louis XIV and Charles II and James II. The Iroquois were too wily not to see the potential of playing the European powers against one another, and the English were soon visibly much more formidable than the Dutch, and, of course, were alrea
dy well-established in New England, Virginia, and the Carolinas. The new governor of New France succeeding Frontenac, Joseph-Antoine Le Febvre de La Barre, shortly showed himself to be personally avaricious and incompetent at dealing with the Iroquois. The Iroquois attacked the Illinois Indians, with considerable effect, in 1680, but were careful to steer clear of the French and the Indian allies of the French. Frontenac, seeing the danger, had asked the king for another six hundred troops, but did not receive them. The blandishments and encouragements of the English steadily raised the ambitions and provocations of the Iroquois. As Governor La Barre saw himself as an entrepreneur in the fur trade, he saw La Salle and Tonty as competitors, and schemed to sabotage their efforts, which were undertaken altogether for the greater glory of the king of France.
In July 1684, La Barre made the disastrous error of trying to overawe the Iroquois with a force of only two hundred Frenchmen and several hundred more Indian allies at a council with the Iroquois at the southeastern corner of Lake Ontario. It was “a ghastly joke.”31 La Barre threatened the Iroquois with war against a united front of French and English, a challenge which the Indians knew to be pure conjuration. La Barre was replied to by Grangula – “Big Mouth,” as the French aptly called him – who, in keeping with the Indian custom of formal orations at such encounters, noted the weakness of the French and was dismissive of La Barre virtually as an interloper and a mendicant, and as a poseur. These not completely inaccurate characterizations heaped before the ranks of both sides on the French governor, who had come a great distance to parlay, was an unprecedented fiasco in the 150-year history of the French presence in Canada going back to Jacques Cartier. The new intendant, Jacques de Meulles, reported it caustically to the French court, and Louis recalled La Barre in mid-1685, replacing him with the Marquis de Denonville, a fervently Catholic soldier and an honest man, but completely ineffectual. There were only ten thousand French in New France, many of them women and children, and as the Iroquois swarmed and massed, the colony was consistently more endangered. The new governor of New York in 1683, Thomas Dongan, though a Roman Catholic himself, was a nationalist of the British Empire and redoubled Andros’s efforts to manipulate the Iroquois. Denonville became especially irritated by Dongan’s plan to build a fort at Niagara Falls.
New France was so delicate and vulnerable, even eighty years after Champlain founded the colony, that its fortunes could darken suddenly, and did. Champlain possessed the genius of diplomacy and tactical military acuity, and the advantage of European arms opposite a relatively easily mystified Stone Age array of bitterly divided Indians. Frontenac was a fierce, cunning, and battle-hardened general, and if he lacked Champlain’s finesse and Cartesian culture, he knew how to conduct a military campaign and had the theatrical panache to present a plausible facade of great apparent strength. And after the Stuart restoration following the death of Cromwell, the British kings Charles II and James II owed much to the French king and avoided serious conflict with him.
Louis XIV, for his part, in his frontier wars from the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 to the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, added Alsace, Lorraine, Franche-Comté (the free county of Burgundy, adjacent to the ancient duchy, between Dijon and Basel), Artois, Verdun, Metz, Saarlouis, Thionville, Montmédy, Lille, and Valenciennes to his eastern and northeastern borders, and Perpignan in the southeast. The Battle of Rocroi in the first days of Louis XIV’s reign in 1643 under Condé had established that the French had Europe’s finest soldiers, and in general they continued to be so for 180 years, until the end of the Napoleonic era. Every one of those towns added more people to the kingdom than there were Europeans in New France at the corresponding time, and it is not clear that Louis’s strategic priorities were mistaken. France was never going to be strong enough to secure all its borders against its continental rivals and defeat the British on the oceans of the world, so the wealth of Canada, which ultimately vastly exceeded the hopes of a mere gateway to China, were always going to be difficult to hold, first against the British, and then against the local forces of independence. The additions to France’s frontier territory added greatly to its permanent strength and security. While the logic may have been clear, this did little for the isolated and beleaguered colony.
Where Britain needed a ruler of the political astuteness and inspiring and conciliatory leadership qualities of Henry IV, who would minimize religious quarrels and emphasize the national interest, and to some degree had that in the stylish and clever Charles II, the succession of his brother on Charles’s death in 1685 opened the gravest dangers in the opposite direction. James II was a rather belligerent Roman Catholic in a country that was now largely Protestant. He had, against his brother’s wishes, converted to Rome in 1668, but Charles forbade the Roman Catholic baptism of James’s daughters Mary and Anne. (Charles had no legitimate heir.) James produced a Toleration Act for the benefit of Roman Catholics, Protestants who were not Anglicans, Jews, and non-believers, but this was seen by the Anglican and noble and Parliamentary establishments (which were fairly co-extensive) as an assault on the rights of Parliament (which it wasn’t, but James had the sort of authoritarian and erratic personality that invited such concerns). When James II’s Italian second wife, Mary of Modena, gave birth to a male heir (though it was falsely charged that he was a changeling produced to the maternal bed in a warming pan), Parliament asked James’s son-in-law, William III of Orange, the Dutch leader, to invade England. He did so, successfully, setting up a joint monarchy with his wife, James’s daughter, Queen Mary II, as she became. (By coincidence, William was William III of the Dutch and the English.)
This brought the final defeat of Catholicism in England and ended the era of tranquil relations between England and France until the rise of a united Germany as a threat to both countries two hundred years later. James resumed his life in exile, attempting only one serious return, which William defeated at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. This engagement was part of the Nine Years War (1688–1697), following Louis’s Revocation of Henry IV’s tolerant Edict of Nantes and various manoeuvres of Louis to expand his influence in the Rhineland. He should never have incited the antagonism of the grand coalition of England, the Netherlands, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, and Savoy and Piedmont, when assisted only by the Scottish and Irish Jacobites. This conflict was known as King William’s War in Britain and America, and as the War of the Grand Alliance to France’s other enemies.
6. The Return of Frontenac, 1689–1701
As this war began, New France was very vulnerable. The effective banning of French Protestants from the colony by the Jesuit (Bishop Laval) influence had stopped the one natural source of large-scale French immigration, as the Catholic majority was very comfortable in temperate and commodious France. The antagonism of the English and their maritime supremacy assured that they could threaten the delicate lifeline to New France and could arm and motivate the Iroquois, whom Champlain had wheedled and Frontenac overawed. And the withdrawal of Frontenac and his replacement by two successive incompetents reduced New France to a state of acute weakness.
In an initiative that can only be described as insane, Governor Denonville decided to ship off as galley slaves to France the Iroquois men in two of that tribe’s villages on the north shore of Lake Ontario who had been baptized Christians by the Sulpicians. In July 1688, Denonville plunged into Iroquois country but withdrew after a skirmish with the Seneca, in which the French took only about ten dead to more than a hundred Seneca. This led to another French disaster: the Huron chief Kondiaronk betrayed the French to the Iroquois and provoked an Iroquois attack on the French at Lachine, in August 1689, and at La Chesnay a couple of months later, killing more than sixty French. This was too much for the French government, and as New France hovered perilously near the jaws of the numerous and blood-curdling Iroquois, incited and well-armed by the English, Frontenac was dispatched back to Quebec in October 1689 to resume the governorship from Denonville. He was sixty-nine, but ready for a brilliant climax to his
remarkable career. “The universal mood was one of terror and despair. If ever Canada needed a Moses, this was the hour.”32
Louis-Hector de Callière, governor of Montreal, had worked out a plan of attack that was approved by Louis and his senior advisers, including Frontenac before he departed France, and he was charged with carrying it out. Two French warships were to harass New York, while a raiding party was to descend on the upper Hudson from Quebec. The returning Frontenac arrived too late to execute the plan as formulated but refined it to an even bolder thrust by three overland groups on snowshoes in January 1690, when complete surprise could be reasonably assumed. The three thrusts were: 210 men, mainly French, from Montreal against Schenectady, led by Nicolas d’Ailleboust de Manthet and Jacques Le Moyne de Sainte-Hélène; 26 French and 29 Indians led by François Hertel from Trois-Rivières against Dover, Permaquid, and other Maine settlements down into New Hampshire; and 50 French and 60 Indians led by René Robineau de Portneuf against what is now Portland, Maine.
All three achieved surprise, devastated English settlements, and all the commanders effectively turned a blind eye to Indian outrages against the civil populations. War at this time was not usually overly chivalrous even in Europe (as in the sack of Magdeburg in 1631, with twenty-thousand civilians killed, and the storming of Drogheda in 1649 by Cromwell, with perhaps five thousand killed), but where Indians were allowed free rein, extreme and indiscriminate violence was likely. In the three raids, about two hundred people were killed, about three-fifths men and one-fifth each women and children. Perhaps two hundred able-bodied adults were marched back as prisoners, and about a hundred elderly people, women, and children were unharmed and not physically displaced. François Hertel (who commanded the expedition into New Hampshire) had been tortured by the Iroquois as a youth, having had a thumb chopped off and a finger burned off, but he was a brave commander who, as the eminent historian Francis Parkman remarked, was unjustly decried after these raids as “the abhorred chief of Popish malignants and murdering savages.”33