“Must I stand and crouch under thy testy humour!” might have cried Sir Francis; and quick as echo came the answer, “He’s but a mad lord, and naught but humour sways him.”
Search through his literary contemporaries, from Galt, who calls him the sly, downright author of the “Bubbles of the Brunnens,” to the somewhat bilious sketches of “those dealers in opinions, journalists,” confirms Lord Gosford’s saying that one of the essential elements of fitness for office is to be acceptable to the great body of the people. Sir Francis had a great reputation for literary smartness; he was on excellent terms with himself, and there are a few other writers of his time who have recorded things to his credit which are hard to believe in the after-light of condensed history. But most people never tired of either abusing or ridiculing him.
“‘Where are you from?’ asked a worthy but inquisitive landlord of a distinguished traveller, evidently just from Downing Street, who arrived in Canada at this solemn juncture. The testy Englishman made a laconic reply, that he had come from a very hot place. ‘And where are you going?’ continued Boniface. ‘To the devil,’ roared the traveller. And then they knew he was going to dine with Sir Francis Bond Head.”
Phrenology was a popular study then, and it afforded opportunities to those who never tired of punning in doggerel and skits on this Head. The cranium must have presented a remarkable assemblage of bumps; for, according to his many detractors and his few admirers, Sir Francis was a remarkable man. Not that he required a Boswell or Anthony Hamilton to say for him that which he was unequal to say for himself. There are no blushes on the pages of either “Narrative” or “Emigrant.”
Friends and detractors alike agreed that he had a wonderful faculty for sleep. According to himself, he was one of those felines who wait for their prey, apparently soundly off, but in reality with one eye open. When he came out it was thought the Whig ministry had let loose a tiger upon the colony. All sorts of stories were rife about him; he was placarded as a tried Reformer, much to his own surprise and amusement, for he tells us himself his emotions on seeing the piece of news which looked down on him from the posters, as he rode to Government House on his arrival. Was he a Radical? was he really the “Galloping Head”? had he ridden six thousand miles of the South American pampas, one thousand of them at a stretch in eight days, and without the comfort of galligaskins? He himself was at a loss to know why he had ever received his appointment; but these questioners at the recital of his adventures began to think that the post of lieutenant-governor in Upper Canada was a prize of sufficient size to attract persons of first-rate abilities. They required a man of statesmanlike sagacity and diplomatic shrewdness for a position which was no sinecure, and Lord Glenelg had sent them a rough rider. “Who shall we send out as lieutenant-governor to conciliate the discontented inhabitants of Upper Canada?” asked the Cabinet. The Canadians wanted a governor, and they were sent a political Puck. They thought it hard to have been given in Sir John Colborne’s place but a Captain of Engineers. “Captains of Engineers,” said one belonging to the same order, “are sometimes devilish clever fellows.”
And so, in a sense, Head proved himself to be. He contrived to compress into the two years of his Canadian life more mischief than could have been accomplished by ten ordinary men. Rash, impetuous, inordinately vain and self-conscious, dramatic, he was not only an actor who took the world for his stage, but he was his own playwright, star, support, claquer and critic; the stirring up of a rebellion was a mere curtain-lifter to him; but, fortunately, if the vehicle of disaster to the Province, he made his exit from it ignominiously. This was the man who, at twelve o’clock on the night of December 4th, was awakened and told for the third time that the enemy had really arrived and was knocking at the door.
At one of the stopping-places of his former travels he had “felt his patriotism gain force upon the plains of Marathon.” It now took the persistent efforts of three messengers to oust him from a feather bed. Colonel Moodie had lost his life trying to ride through the rebel ranks to do this same service, and Colonel FitzGibbon lost no time in warning all, governor and citizens alike. When Sir Francis was inquired for at Government House at ten o’clock, Mrs. Dalrymple, his sister-in-law, reported that the Governor was fatigued and already asleep. FitzGibbon, restless and disturbed, feeling that he could never sleep again, insisted; and the hero of active service in Spain, the spectator of Waterloo and Quatre Bras, appeared in his dressing-gown, concealed his irritation as best he might, and got back to bed as quickly as possible. “What is all this noise about,” asked Judge Jonas Jones, who also did not like disturbance; “who desired you to call me? Colonel FitzGibbon? The zeal of that man is giving us a great deal of unnecessary trouble.”
About an hour earlier, John Powell, a magistrate who had been busy swearing in special constables, went on horseback with some other volunteers to patrol the northern approaches to the city. At the rise of the Blue Hill Mackenzie and two others were met, the first armed with a large horse pistol, the others with rifles. Powell was not only taken prisoner, but was told “they would let Bond Head know something before long,” that “they had borne tyranny and oppression too long, and were now determined to have a government of their own.” A fellow-prisoner told Powell of the death of Colonel Moodie, put spurs to his horse and managed to escape. Confident that the city’s safety now depended on his own ability to elude his captors, Powell essayed to do the same, but was told by one of them, Anderson, he “would drive a ball through” him. Then followed the incident which has been described as Anderson’s fall from his horse and picked up with neck broken, as “an atrocious murder,” “a victim to Powell’s treachery,” and as a self-deliverance from those whom he believed to be common assassins. When questioned as to his arms he had replied that he had none, a denial refuted shortly afterwards when he drew the pistols given him by a bailiff on leaving the City Hall. Mackenzie had doubted his word, but the statement was repeated. He replied, “Then, gentlemen, as you are my townsmen and men of honour, I should be ashamed to show that I question your word by ordering you to be searched.” Powell, in his account, allows no such quixotic courtesy, and says he heard nothing but mutterings of dissatisfaction. Then, not two feet from Anderson, Powell suddenly reined back his horse, drew a pistol and fired. The shot struck Anderson in the back of his neck; he fell like a sack—the spinal cord was severed and death must have been instantaneous. To wheel about, ride at a breakneck pace, pass Mackenzie himself, hear the latter’s bullet whistle past him, turn in his saddle and snap a pistol at Mackenzie’s face, dismount when he heard the clatter of following hoofs, to hide behind a log, while the pursuer passed, to run down the College Avenue, hugging the shadows as he went, until Government House was reached, brought him where FitzGibbon and others, discomfited, had failed to rouse this phenomenal sleeper. An hour before there had been a moment’s consciousness with the ringing of the Upper Canada College bell by the energetic hand of a youth named John Hillyard Cameron; but on hearing that it was rung by Colonel FitzGibbon’s command, the sleeper, like a marmot, turned over and went to sleep again. Unceremoniously shaking majesty in its nightcap, Powell managed to perform what Sir Francis, in his own account of the affair, calls a sudden awakening. Months before, the Governor had said he awaited the moment when Mackenzie should have “advanced within the short, clumsy clutches of the law,” asking Attorney-General Hagerman to advise him of the moment; he desired to wait until, in the name of law and justice, he could “seize his victim.” A warrant of arrest for Mackenzie on the charge of high treason had so far proved innocuous; now the mountain was obliging enough to come to Mahomet, and Mahomet did not seem inclined to hurry. Next to Bidwell, Mackenzie had most incurred his enmity, they, with “other nameless demagogues,” being the branches of “that plant of cancerous growth, revolution,” to which he would most willingly apply his pruning-knife. And apply it unsparingly he did; but for every twig lopped off he beheld a dozen hardy shoots springing from the wound. Truly the colonial tree was a stubborn growth; no yew or box-clipped fancy, its shaping was beyond his skill.
“Up, then, brave Canadians, get ready your rifles and make short work of it,” had been the legend on Mackenzie’s hand-bills; and here he was within a mile of the Governor and capital.
After a leisurely toilet, Sir Francis entrusted the care of his family to faithful friends, who put them on board a boat lying in the bay. Late as it was, navigation was not closed, and there was no sign of the seals of winter upon the lake. Yet the air was intensely cold, and the stars shone like diamonds as the Governor made his way over the creaking, lightly snow-covered planks from Government House to the City Hall. Every bell in the city was ringing with all its might. “Though cracked and crazy I have mettle still,
And burst with anger at such treatment ill.”
The most monotonous and the shrillest note of the Carillon, in Head’s own words, proclaimed “... Murder, murder, murder, and much worse!” “What’s amiss?” “You are, and you do not know it;” or Lady Macbeth might have been heard calling, “What’s the business, that such a hideous trumpet calls to parley the sleeper of the house.”