The acts of Regicide France inspired horror in Canada, yet were not without their fruits. Despite his title of the “Corsican ogre” and their horror of revolution, the submission of all Europe to Napoleon did not make the French of Canadian birth more submissive. Nor did the nation of shop-keepers, whom he despised and who were to cut his ambition and send him to his island prison, become more plausible, courteous or conciliatory, through their sense of victory. Many a thing, had the positions been reversed, which would have been passed unnoticed by a phlegmatic Briton, was to the Gallican a national insult.
And LeMoine, that past grand master of the Franco-Anglo-Canadian complexion, says all too truthfully that conciliation was not a vice-regal virtue; and one of the singers of the day, a Briton of the Britons, confirms the opinion:
“So triumph to the Tories and woe to the Whigs,
And to all other foes of the nation;
Let us be through thick and thin caring nothing for the prigs
Who prate about conciliation.”
But, under its fossil simplicity, Quebec, the “relic preserved in ice,” untrue to its formation, burned with a fearsome heat and glow in the years ’37-’38, and those prior to them. The thoughtless words of such birds of passage as commandants and governors were not calculated to put out the fire. The very origin of the name Jean Baptiste, applied generically, arose from a Jean Baptiste answering to every second name or so of a roll called in 1812, when he turned out in force to defend the British flag. Getting tired of the monotony of them, said the officer in his cheerful English way: “D—— them, they are all Jean Baptistes.” And so the name stuck. General Murray, outraged at any gold and scarlet apart from his own soldiers, lost all patience at the sight of French officers in the streets of Quebec. “One cannot tell the conquering from the conquered when one sees these —— Frenchmen walking about with their uniforms and their swords.”[1]
But the French-Canadians did not struggle against individuals except as they represented a system considered vicious. With the British Constitution Jean Baptiste was a veritable Oliver Twist. He was not satisfied with the morsels doled out, but ever asked for more.
True, there were many—at any rate, some—of the higher class French whose horizon was not bounded by petty feelings regarding race and religion. These men accepted British rule as one of the fortunes of war and enjoyed its benefits. An old seigneur, when dying, counselled his grandson, “Serve your English sovereign with as much zeal and devotion and loyalty as I have served the French monarch, and receive my last blessing.” And that king in whose reign insurrection was on the eve of breaking—irreverently called “Hooked-Nose Old Glorious Billy”—strangely enough had great sympathy with French-Canadian feeling, a sympathy which did much to hearten the minority who counselled abiding by the fortunes of war. But “Old Glorious” was also called the “People’s Friend,” and the Quebecers had lively and pleasant memories of him.
In the nine years preceding the fateful one of ’37 there had been eight colonial ministers, the policy of each differing from that of his predecessor, and all of them with at best but an elementary knowledge of colonial affairs and the complexities arising from dual language, despite the object-lesson daily under their eyes in the Channel Islands. A little learning is a dangerous thing. Each Colonial Secretary had that little, and it proved the proverbial pistol which no one knew was loaded. By them Canadians were spoken of as “aliens to our nation and constitution,” and it was not thought possible that Lower Canada, any more than Hindostan or the Cape, could ever become other than foreign. It was popular and fashionable in some quarters to underrate the historic recollections which were bound up in religion and language; and as for Canadian independence, that was an orchid not yet in vogue. By 1837 he who sat in state in the Château St. Louis (says LeMoine) in the name of majesty had very decided views on that subject. H. M. William IV.’s Attorney-General, Charles Ogden, by virtue of his office “the King’s own Devil,” who was an uncompromising foe to all evil-doers, held it to mean a hempen collar.
The question of British or French rule grew steadily for a half century, until Melbourne’s cabinet and Sir John Colborne made effort to settle it in one way and forever. “Les sacres Anglais” was, in consequence, the name applied to the followers of the latter; and as to the former, probably the illiterate habitant, who could not read the papers but who had an instinct wherewith to reach conclusions, had his own patois rendering of an English colonial’s opinion that the politicians comprising the cabinet might “talk summat less and do summat more.” All classes, indeed, of all sections, were not backward in giving opinion as to the quality of ministerial despatches; for a titled lady, writing from a far-off land where she did much work for the Home Government, dipped her pen in good strong ink and wrote, “My Lord, if your diplomatic despatches are as obscure as the one which lies before me, it is no wonder that England should cease to have that proud preponderance in her foreign relations which she once could boast of.”
A humorous naturalist had said that the three blessings conferred upon England by the Hanoverian succession were the suppression of popery, the national debt, and the importation of the brown or Hanoverian rat.
Strange to say, one of the complexities of the Canadian situation was the position taken by that very popery which in England was still looked upon with distrust and suspicion. In 1794, not a decade’s remove from when the streets of London ran alike with rum and Catholic blood, through Protestant intolerance and the efforts of a mad nobleman, Bishop Plessis had thanked God in his Canadian Catholic Cathedral that the colony was English and free from the horrors enacted in the French colonies of the day. “Thank your stars,” cried another from the pulpit, “that you live here under the British flag.”