by Conrad Black
It seems odd that Callière and Frontenac attacked English-American civilians rather than the Iroquois, and they can have been in no doubt that the English would soon retaliate, but Frontenac was trying to win back the Indians, which he had a chance to do by impressing them and demonstrating the fallibility of the English Americans. He had a chance to win the Iroquois over, but no possibility of winning the English over. The English struck back in the summer of 1690 with John Schuyler leading a land force along what in the next 125 years would become the well-travelled route on or beside Lake Champlain against Montreal while a naval squadron from Boston under Sir William Phips invested Quebec. Schuyler’s initiative, like most that would follow the same path, of all nationalities and in both directions, was a fiasco. It burned some crops around La Prairie but never really threatened Montreal.
The American colonists had been encouraged by the bloodless surrender of the tiny French garrison at Port-Royal, and Massachusetts subscribed the onerous sum of fifty thousand pounds and sent thirty-four ships on the expedition to Quebec. They only arrived on October 16, very late in the season to do more than bluster, a tactic Phips tried against Frontenac, a singularly unsuitable subject of such attentions. Under a white flag, Phips sent a messenger demanding surrender. Frontenac received the messenger in his citadel surrounded by his officers and officials, all in the most extravagant regalia of their offices, with Frontenac in full livery impersonating the entire dignity of the mighty and opulent monarch he represented. Phips’s envoy read his ineffably pompous ultimatum, demanding compete surrender, following which “you may expect mercy from me, as a Christian,” but failing which he would “make you wish you had accepted of the favours tendered.” Better was Frontenac’s immediate promise, before the hour allotted for consideration of the ultimatum had even begun, that “you will receive my answer from the mouths of my cannon.”
Frontenac had summoned Callière from Montreal with seven hundred soldiers, and when Phips landed thirteen hundred men on the Beauport Flats below Quebec, the French shot them up, retired across the Saint-Charles River, but prevented the Americans from coming across and easily won the artillery duel with their big guns on the cliffs of Upper Town. The British couldn’t supply the troops they had landed, and Phips wasted his ammunition on unfocused bombardments. “Harassed by the Canadians, wet, cold, and starving, [the Americans] took to the boats, leaving behind them five cannon.”34 The Canadians, commanded by a Frenchman, decisively defeated an all-American force, which slunk back to Boston to retire the heavy debt the colony had assumed to finance this hare-brained assault. The Canadians even got the flag on Phips’s flagship, which had been torn off its mast and dumped in the river by fire from the ramparts. “In the shouts of rejoicing which followed Phips’s withdrawal we hear the cry of a people reborn.”35
The defeat of the Americans at Quebec did not go unnoticed by the Iroquois, who in any case knew what to expect from Frontenac, a cunning and indomitable fighter whom they could not treat as Big Mouth had dared to treat Governor La Barre. Unfortunately, the feeble Denonville had burned down Fort Frontenac at Cataraqui, near the present Kingston, just before its namesake returned to resume the governorship in 1689. Frontenac tried to arrange a new peace with the Iroquois, based on assertions of French strength by some Indians that he brought back with him from France, who were happy to attest to the might of France and the determination of the returned governor. A council took place where the insidious English (or Americans – the distinction was becoming relevant) were invited. The council heard a feisty case for the French from a Christian Iroquois but rejected the overture and formed an alliance between the English Americans, the Iroquois, and representatives of the tribes of the West, the Michilimackinac (Ottawa and Huron), in a coalition to destroy New France. The western tribes were in fact just wavering, and Frontenac moved quickly to shore them up. He sent 150 men to reinforce his garrison at Michilimackinac, and they defeated an Iroquois band on the way and scalped some of them to impress the Ottawa. The raids on Schenectady and the other targets had impressed some of the waverers, and at a great council with Frontenac in Montreal in August 1690, Frontenac, in a diplomatic tour de force, showed few of his sixty-eight years as he danced the Ottawa rites and won the western Indians into coalition against the Iroquois. They knew the Iroquois were a mortal threat and that if the French were dispensed with they would be massacred by their more numerous and ferocious kinsmen.
Three years of intense war between the Iroquois and the western Indians with their French allies ensued as New France gasped for sustenance through the tenuous supply line from France intermittently ruptured by the Royal Navy as the Nine Years War dragged on. In order to be sure of fur revenues, Frontenac had to assure a safe path for furs from the north and west down the Ottawa, and his first priority was to deal with the Iroquois. There were incessant skirmishes in which the habitants were heroes defending their farms against Iroquois raiders, with no quarter given or asked on either side. In 1692, Madeleine de Verchères rebuffed an Iroquois attack on her family home though she was only fourteen, assisted only by an eighty-year-old man, one younger man, and two children. In 1691, a return attack by Peter Schuyler, a relative of the unsuccessful John Schuyler of the year before, was beaten off quite crisply by the French, killing about forty American militiamen. From 1692 to 1694, the French Acadians and their Abenaki allies, under Baron Jean-Vincent de Saint-Castin, carried havoc all along the Maine shore, scorching English homesteads. But Frontenac’s great stroke was his expedition against the Onondagas of 1696. Undeterred by his seventy-four years, he drove into the heart of Iroquois country with two thousand men and cannon and mortars that his indefatigable soldiers and their Indian allies dragged over portages and floated on barges, moving south from Lake Ontario. He compelled the Onondaga and then the Oneida to burn their camps and flee with only what they could carry, leaving it to the French to burn the crops and anything they had left behind. Frontenac judged it imprudent to proceed too much farther, as he would be vulnerable to English-American main forces, but he had given the haughty Iroquois a thrashing sufficient for them to seek peace after the Nine Years War came to an end with the Peace of Ryswick in 1697.
In Europe, Louis was outnumbered and wrong-footed and eventually lost a few outposts on or near the Rhine while affirming control of Alsace, lost Catalonia back to Spain, but regained Pondicherry in India, Nova Scotia, and gained the present Haiti. The British Parliament thanked King William III for having “given England the balance of Europe,” but Louis, in his mad egotism, had gone to war with almost the whole continent plus Britain and had just about drawn the contest. With a little diplomatic finesse to procure some allies, France could generally prevail against its continental neighbours. In North America, hostilities sputtered on sporadically with the Indians, but New France was no longer threatened by the English Americans and the Royal Navy.
While Frontenac was defeating the Iroquois and rallying the more moderate tribes, he was also demonstrating his strategic gifts by pursuing an ambitious plan to compensate for the growing British American strength on the Eastern Seaboard: he organized an offensive to regain control of Hudson Bay and to descend the length of the Mississippi and fortify its mouth by a maritime expedition. His goal was to develop a linear network of posts and forts through the Great Lakes and down the Ohio and Mississippi to its mouth and bypass the English possession of the Atlantic coast from Maine to the Carolinas. Despite its slender resources, New France would control the interior of the continent and its main outlets to the western ocean: Hudson Bay, the St. Lawrence, and the vast river system that debouches through the mouth of the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico. It was a plan of genius, and it was largely executed by a Canadian, Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville, one of the greatest soldiers and sailors in Canadian history. He was born in Ville-Marie (Montreal) in 1661, one of twelve brothers, who included Jacques Le Moyne de Sainte-Hélène, the leader of Frontenac’s expedition against Schenectady in 1690; Charle
s Le Moyne de Longueuil, governor of Montreal; and Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, founder of New Orleans (in 1719). D’Iberville started his career as an adventurer as a cabin boy in his French uncle’s ship trading to Port-Royal in 1673. The Hudson’s Bay Company had been founded in 1670 by Charles II. The competing French Compagnie du Nord was founded by Louis XIV in 1682. D’Iberville had been in the fur trade in the western Great Lakes for several years, and became the second-in-command in the French expedition to seize the English forts on James Bay and Hudson Bay in 1686. Three of the four forts were captured (Moose Factory, Fort Rupert, and Fort Albany). D’Iberville returned to France in 1687 to seek support and came back the following year as commander of a naval expedition that captured three Hudson’s Bay Company ships. He was a cunning and courageous fighter on land and sea and in all climates; was successful in Hudson Bay in 1690, 1694, and 1697; and was an effective coastal raider against New England in 1692, 1695, and 1696. In 1696, he also rescued the French outpost at Placentia, Newfoundland, from a British siege and then devastated most of the English settlements on that island and captured St. John’s. (Placentia Bay would be made world famous 245 years later by a shipboard meeting between the Second World War Grand Alliance leaders Winston S. Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt – Chapter 7.)
The French minister of the navy and colonies, Count Pontchartrain and Maurepas, entrusted d’Iberville with the task of establishing a fort at the mouth of the Mississippi in 1698. D’Iberville sailed directly from Brest and the following year founded Biloxi, and in 1701 he built a fort at what is now Mobile, Alabama. La Salle’s old sidekick, Henri de Tonty, was still active and joined up with d’Iberville in transacting with the Gulf Coast Indians. D’Iberville sold nine thousand furs in New York that the coureurs de bois had brought down the Mississippi. While Frontenac seduced the western Indians, subdued the Iroquois, and secured Quebec, he and d’Iberville, building on the great work of La Salle and Tonty and with the four hundred or so coureurs de bois, had built up a vast internal American empire of the fur trade that was, as historian W.L. Morton wrote, as “endlessly expansive and fragile as a spider’s web.” (He also aptly described d’Iberville as “that hybrid of d’Artagnan and Pierre Radisson.”36) There has been some dispute ever since over the relative weight in the motives of Frontenac and d’Iberville of patriotism, strategic enterprise, and personal avarice, but these bold and brilliant swashbucklers fashioned an astonishingly durable and far-flung colonial and commercial entity out of very sparse materials and inconstant support from the home country. Never again would Canada have such influence in North America, and probably not one Canadian in a thousand, two hundred years later, has any idea that Canadians founded the great American cities of Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, New Orleans, Saint Paul, Louisville, Des Moines, Mobile, Baton Rouge, and Biloxi, which today have a combined metropolitan population of more than twenty million.
Frontenac died at Quebec on November 28, 1698. He was seventy-six years old. Next to Champlain, he had been the greatest figure in the history of New France, now 164 years since the first arrival of Jacques Cartier. Frontenac was quarrelsome, a braggart, and somewhat corrupt, traits that Champlain did not possess, but he was an inspiring leader in desperate times and he provided for the survival of New France, well-launched into the eighteenth century. The able Callière succeeded him as governor. (He was the brother of François de Callières, Louis XIV’s assistant, who wrote out the king’s letters and often signed them for him. It was often alleged that the royal amanuensis exercised his great but surreptitious power in the interests of his brother.) Frontenac’s greatest victory was posthumous, like Richelieu’s at Westphalia, as, in 1701, under Callière’s aegis, a council at Montreal of the French, the Iroquois, and Michilimackinac tribes agreed a durable peace and smoked the calumet all round. The other great figure of New France in the second half of the seventeenth century, Bishop François de Laval, had given way under the strains of his long episcopate and retired in 1688. But after a brief sojourn in France, he returned to his beloved Quebec, where he continued to be a great moral influence as the emeritus bishop right up to his death in 1708, aged eighty-five.
New France was ostensibly delivered, a remarkable feat of survival largely wrought by the inhabitants themselves. But the weaknesses that had been inherent in New France remained. There was only a trickle of immigration from France, while people poured into the English-American colonies from all parts of the British Isles. The French government barely maintained the colony, while it insisted on being paid for its efforts by renting out the fur trade, and an irreconcilable conflict resulted and was constantly being fought out between the practitioners of the fur trade and the colonial government that was trying to build a balanced and civil society. As we have seen, the Jesuits, Sulpicians, and Récollets came as missionaries and performed admirably and often heroically, but they were constantly at war with the commercial interests, and often the official secular authorities, over the trade of alcohol to the Indians, which reduced the natives to a pitiable state but was essential to the conduct of the fur trade that was all that kept the colony economically alive. The French religious regime, as we have also seen, discouraged immigration from France even prior to Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes. As Henry IV and then Richelieu, and then Louis XIV, expanded France, they concentrated overwhelmingly on surpassing their continental neighbours which were always a direct threat. The English steadily built upon their insular strength and ability to surpass all other countries in the sea power necessary to take and hold an overseas empire.
The blunder of Louis in ending the era of French religious toleration, followed at once by the ineptitude of James II fumbling the crown of England into the hands of avaricious Dutch Protestants, ended the brief era of French-English cordiality in which New France could flourish. The habitant was more of a rough and ready frontiersman than his more numerous New England neighbours. He was not much more prolific, if at all, as the Puritans had large families also, but he had none of the New Englanders’ democratic practices and institutions. There were syndics among occupations, but no town meetings, and no sense of ability to petition the authorities. The English had executed their king, albeit at the behest of someone (Cromwell) who, once he had died, they exhumed and beheaded and then displayed his decomposing head on a pike. Parliament, despite many problems and “Remonstrances,” had sat for centuries. Its powers fluctuated, but it could not just be ignored, as Cromwell had demonstrated. The Estates General of France were hardly of comparable authority, and Richelieu, as it turned out, had shut them down for 175 years in 1614.
7. Queen Anne’s War (the War of the Spanish Succession), 1701–1715
Louis XIV’s policy of almost continuous war had been a departure from Richelieu’s practice of incentivizing others to do the fighting, and had brought France substantial expansion on its eastern frontiers, though not as quickly or cost-efficiently as Richelieu’s subtler and more patient and manipulative methods. But it had severely strained the country’s finances, and, with acts of conspicuous extravagance such as the construction of the Palace of Versailles, the most opulent residence in the world, had incited serious resentment among the majority of the French population of high taxes and overindulgence of the nobility and clergy. There were too many poor peasants in a naturally rich country.
Louis had also become complacent about the diplomatic strategy to accompany his wars of aggrandizement; France was the strongest country in Europe, including Britain, but it couldn’t get to the British Isles and wasn’t strong enough to prevail over all the continental powers that would naturally be ranged against it, especially with the tangible encouragement of the British. But France went through the Nine Years War (1688–1697) and entered the eighteenth century with no serious allies. Richelieu’s successors had grasped the virtues of his absolutism and central authority, but not his genius for acquiring allies, especially allies who would actually do most of the fighting. And unlike Richel
ieu’s wars, these recent conflicts were largely fought on French soil, on the backs of the French, the foreseeable result of Louis having dispensed with serious allies.
In England, James II’s daughter, Mary II, died in 1694, leaving William III, the deposed and exiled king’s son-in-law and the joint monarch, to govern alone until his death in 1702, when James II’s other daughter, Anne, became queen. She had had seventeen pregnancies with her persevering Danish husband, resulting in three children who did not live longer than eleven years, two who died within two hours, six who were stillborn, and six miscarriages. In the Act of Settlement of 1701, Anne’s heir presumptive was named as the elector of Hanover, grandson of King Charles I’s sister (Anne’s great aunt).
When King Charles II of Spain died in 1700, he left his crown to the grandson of Louis XIV, Philip, Duke of Anjou, including all Spain’s possessions in the New World. In his mad egotism, Louis declared, “The Pyrenees are no more.”37 Louis had ample opportunity to prepare for this event, and instead of detaching the Dutch and the Austrians from the English, when he purported to accept the crown of Spain for his grandson, he found himself fighting the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), supported only by the Philippian Spanish and for a time the Bavarians, against the Holy Roman Empire, Britain (in 1707, the Acts of Union joined Britain and Scotland in the Kingdom of Great Britain), Prussia, Hanover, Savoy, the Dutch Republic, Portugal, and Carlist Spain. There were about 250,000 soldiers on each side, and the Grand Alliance forces led by the Duke of Marlborough and Prince Eugene of Savoy faced the French under the Duke of Villars, marshal general of France (in the first year and last five years of the war). All three were very capable commanders. It was a long war, closely fought.