The encouraging terms of the proclamation made many scour the country at breakneck speed, and it is a marvel that any escape should have taken place; Mackenzie’s own recital of it sounds like the tale of the magic ring. The word was given to save themselves, and in a twinkling the woods were full of the flying and the hiding; the beacon, intended for loyalist eyes in Toronto as one of victory, told all was lost to the rebels. The hunting parties did not return empty handed. Many respectable yeomen, some Reformers but not rebels, others neither of these, were unceremoniously taken from their farms and work. These rebels by coercion, and those who had been fugitives, were bound to a strong central rope and paraded along the highway amid the hootings and jeerings of the loyal, in all to the number of sixty. To keep them company there was a party, equally mixed, who arrived in Toronto the same day from the north, with the five hundred men who reached there too late for battle. The latter were reinforced by one hundred Indians, all in paint and native splendour, but burning with as much zeal as any Briton.
The records of the whole affair show that the disaffected were always of one colour, while the African and the native were unhesitatingly and to a man for the Queen.
The last-mentioned party, in their march, could see the flames from Montgomery’s and thought the city was on fire. They were met by many flying northward from there, who in a twinkling changed their politics and their route and returned to town among the guards over those unhappy ones who had been made look like a string of trout. Powder was taken from stores; cake-baking and bacon-frying were made the business of every house passed; they carried the usual medley of gun, pike and rusty sword; and each man, to distinguish him from his fellow-man who was prisoner, wore a pink ribbon on his arm.
Naturally, there was renewed sensation when the guards and prisoners marched to the gaol; sensation greater still when Dr. Morrison and three others, who were exceptionally important, were added, their march preceded by a loaded cannon pointed towards them. A concourse of citizens, anxious to see the whole event, followed. Happily a farmer, detained in town by the impressment of his horses and waggon in Government service, and who knew the city well, left the crowd and reached the northern gate of the market in time to perceive a gunner, with a lighted portfire in his hand, standing by a cannon which was loaded with grape. Thinking the approaching crowd was a body of rebels the gunner was about to apply his light, when the farmer, with great presence of mind, stopped him. Had the piece been fired more lives would have been thus sacrificed than were lost during the whole winter.
One of the prisoners was now lying in hospital at the point of death from a grape-shot wound, and a small detachment under Captain Gamble was detailed to take a party of other prisoners from the gaol, to be led before him for recognition. Among them was Colonel Van Egmond. The dying man lay on his bed propped up with pillows, his mangled shoulder and arm slightly covered, his ghastly face telling his moments were numbered. It was night-time, and lights were held at the head and foot of the bed as his fellows were slowly marched before him. Some he knew, replied to questions, and mentioned them by name. When Van Egmond’s turn came, he must have intentionally touched the man’s foot for when the usual question was put, he said: “Why do you push my foot, Colonel Van Egmond? I am a dying man; I cannot die with a lie in my mouth. You were with us, and were to have commanded us at Montgomery’s tavern, but you did not arrive in time.”
It was a weird scene. The man died that night, and was followed by the Colonel himself, whose years could not endure the dampness and many other horrors of his cell, where the temperature was arctic. Inflammatory rheumatism and a complication of maladies brought him to a cot in the same hospital, where, with some of his unhappy companions, he closed his life.
The farce of rebellion, so far as Toronto was concerned, had been played; but the tragedy was to follow. Of the two men who had pitted themselves against each other, and who have left page upon page of their mutual opinions—let there be gall enough in the ink, though thou write with a goose pen, no matter—one was completely victorious, one completely vanquished. The progress of the first was attended with enthusiastic cheers; that of the other by hunger, cold, fatigue, and by much sympathy, which meant death to those showing it. Christmas Day of ’37, the year “of one thousand eight hundred and freeze-to-death,” saw the apostles of the “sacred dogma of equality” of either province, fugitive; and even Sir Francis himself recorded of the season, “I cannot deny that the winter of the past year was politically as well as physically severer than I expected.” “Several times,” he says, “while my mind was warmly occupied in writing my despatches, I found my pen full of a lump of stuff that appeared to be honey, but which proved to be frozen ink.” Sir Francis flatters the Canadian climate. Beautiful, vivifying, transforming as it is, it had no power to turn the gall in that compound to honey. He looked upon himself as the eminent man who makes enemies of all the bad men whose schemes he would not countenance; others looked upon him as having done more to alienate those whom he was sent to govern than any other person or set of persons. “If the people felt as I feel, there is never a Grant or Glenelg who crossed the Tay and Tweed to exchange high-bred Highland poverty for substantial Lowland wealth who would dare insult Upper Canada with the official presence, as its ruler, of such an equivocal character as this Mr. What-do-they-call-him Francis Bond Head.”
When Sir Francis first arrived he was informed that his chief duty was to sit very still in a large scarlet chair and keep his hat on. The first was easy, but the second was repugnant to his feelings; and thinking the dignity of the head would lose nothing by being divided from the hat, he meditated holding the latter between his white gloved hands. His English attendants agreed with him in this idea of courtesy. But he quailed beneath the reproof of a wordless stare from a Canadian who thought this a bid to democracy; “What,” said the look, “what! to purchase five minutes’ loathsome popularity will you barter one of the few remaining prerogatives of the British crown?” And so he wore his hat.
Of deceptive stature, the governor’s presence did not tally with his militia register. He owed much to a wonderful personal magnetism; old and young alike loved him—when they did not hate him. Seated in that chair he is described by an eye-witness on his first appearance in it: “Although too small to fill it, his shoulders and the poise of his head did much to counterbalance the lack of nether proportions; his feet, unable to reach the floor, were not allowed to dangle, but were thrust out stiffly in front and kept in that position, apparently without effort, during the opening. One of two Americans, in the space near him reserved for visitors, plucked his friend’s sleeve. ‘That,’ said he, ‘is a man of determination, and will gain his point.’