A Call to Umbrellas.
“We must have bloody noses, and cracked crowns, and pass them current, too.”
In 1837 people did not do things by halves. De mortuis nil nisi bonum doubled its meaning from the fervour of the abuse and obloquy cast upon the subject of it during life. William IV. found even his Queen—to whom, by the way, though she was jostled on the edge of accession by Mrs. Jordan and others, he seems to have been devoted—satirized, lampooned, vilified, by press and tongues alike. No sooner is he himself dead than his demise becomes “mournful intelligence,” “melancholy event,” “affecting news,” “distressing circumstance of the death of our beloved monarch.”
Out of the chaos left behind him steps a girlish figure, not unlike, in her bare feet and streaming hair, to some picture of early Italy, a Stella Matutina.
Her head and hands are touched with the holy Chrism; Melbourne redeems the sword of state with a hundred shillings; two archbishops and some peers lift the tiny figure into the throne; no champion throws the glove; the acclamations of thousands proclaim her crowned, peers and peeresses put on their coronets; trumpets blare above the boom of cannon; the heads of a nation are bowed in the silence of prayer; “Stand firm and hold fast,” adjures His Grace; the old do homage and become her liege men of life and limb and of earthly worship, and of faith and truth which they will bear unto her, to live and die against all manner of folk. All the romance of the Middle Ages seems crowded round that small figure in St. Edward’s chair, and Stella Matutina becomes Queen Regnant.
When she opened her first Parliament the Repeal Cry and disturbed Canada were vexing elements in discussion; but the young sovereign placed her trust “upon the love and affection of my people;” and that trust, as we see, was not misplaced.
The Far West was long in hearing of her accession. “There was a deep slumberous calm all around, as if Nature had not yet awoke from her night’s rest; then the atmosphere began to kindle with gradual light; it grew brighter and brighter; towards the east the sky and water intermingled in radiance and flowed and glowed together in a bath of fire. Against it rose the black hull of a large vessel, with masts and spars rising against the sky. One man stood in the bows, with an immense oar which he slowly pulled, walking backwards and forwards; but vain seemed all his toil with the heavy black craft, for it was much against both wind and current and it lay like a black log and moved not. We rowed up to the side and hailed him, ‘What news?’ What news indeed, to these people weeks away from civilization, newspapers and letters. ‘William Fourth was dead, and Queen Victoria reigned in his stead.’”
“Canada will never cost English ministers another thought or care if they will but leave her entirely alone, to govern herself as she thinks fit.” Then came the division of opinion as to what was fit, to be followed later by the opinions of Lords Durham and Sydenham upon the dominant party, to be in the meantime fought for by all. Some held it wisdom to say that a despotic government was the best safeguard of the poorer classes. A certain gentleman aired this idea in Canada, saying a governor and council was the only thing for that country. His Canadian listener looked at him fixedly for a moment, asking again if that were really his opinion,—“Then, sir, I pity your intellects.”
There was an ominous smoke from the fire in Canadian hearts over this question of class prejudices. Those were the days when a barrister would not shake hands with a solicitor, nor would a “dissenting” minister be allowed within the pale of society. Governor Maitland had been particularly hard upon this latter so-called shady lot of people. A store-keeping militia officer refused a challenge because the second who brought it was a saddler. The honourable profession of teaching was looked at so askance that to become a teacher was an avowal of poverty and hopelessness. Yet joined to this Old World nonsense, transplanted to a world so new that the crops sprung out of untilled ground, was the fact that many of the noblesse, indigenous as the burdock and thistle, drew their rent rolls from the village stores, and with the rearing of the head of what was called “the hydra-headed democracy,” Froissart’s fear was shared “that all gentility was about to perish.”
Under these circumstances military life naturally gave scope for much originality in uniform, accoutrement, and deportment. At one drill three or four hundred men were marshalled, or rather scattered in a picturesque fashion hither and thither. A few well-mounted ones, dressed as lancers, in uniforms which were anything but uniform, flourished back and forth over the greensward to the great peril of spectators, they and their horses equally wild, disorderly, spirited and undisciplined. Occasionally a carving or butcher knife lashed to the end of a fishing pole did good duty for lance,—not a whit more astounding in appearance and use than the concert of marrow-bones and cleavers which some years before had nearly frightened the Duchess of York to death on her arrival in England.