Flesh and blood had revolted at the long tasks of memorizing Scripture, Westminster Catechism, Psalms and “Baxter’s Call to the Unconverted,” set him by his parent. The leader of men was first a leader of boys, and the rebel of after years began that career by rebelling against his mother at the ripe age of ten years, leaving home and setting up on his own account in the Grampians as a hermit. An old castle perched somewhere near where the clouds seemed to touch the crags was to have been the hermitage, but a most carnal need of bread and butter and a fear of fairies induced a return. Though longing to be a hermit, young Willie had no taste for the study of polemics; but he would read till midnight, and his mother feared that “the laddie would read himself out o’ his judgment.” The first school to which he went was held in an old Roman Catholic chapel, where the former Holy Water basin was made the seat of punishment. This very small boy was early a good arithmetician and made satisfactory general progress, but he managed to find time to decorate the backs of his fellows with caricatures in chalk, and to pin papers to their coat-tails. One day he went into that sanctum, the master’s closet, put on the fool’s cap, tied himself up with the taws, and with the birch for sceptre took his seat in the holy cup. There was the usual denouement of discovery, a master boiling with rage, the taws and birch in active use, and a sorrowful small boy.
The mother was extremely small in stature, brunette, and with dark brown hair which, when it turned white, remained as long and abundant as ever; her eyes were sharp and piercing, generally quiet in expression but under excitement flashed ominously. The cheek bones were high, and the small features unmistakably Celtic, the thin-lipped mouth telling of an unconquerable will which she bequeathed to her only child. The face under the broad high forehead was seldom allowed to relax into perfect placidity, the surface always showing more or less of the inward volcano; any repose there was due to religious feeling. In the son we have but a replica of the mother. She spoke Gaelic, but seldom used it; she did not reckon fairies among abolished myths, and she believed firmly in the Mackenzie death-warning which was always given by an invisible messenger. The strongest affection existed between mother and son, who lived together for the last seventeen years of the former’s life.
It was but little to the credit of one of his powerful enemies that, in an effort to equal the Advocate, jeering remarks upon Mackenzie’s aged mother were made in the public press. But so it was; and he was advised to mend his ways as an editor, if he expected to continue to support his mother and family. The inference, as his biographer gives it, is that it was not praiseworthy to support an aged mother. It drew from the son the boast that if he could keep his old mother, his wife and his family, and avoid debt, he cared not for wealth.
Speaking in his paper of the spirit of the “faction” towards the press, Mackenzie indulged in a prophecy of an event at which the same aged mother was a pained witness. In connection with the trials of a Canadian editor of a different political stripe, he says: “By the implied consent of King, Lords and Commons, he is doomed to speedy shipwreck, unless a merciful Providence should open his eyes in time, and his good genius prompt him to hurl press and types to the bottom of Lake Ontario.” Mackenzie lived quite close to the lake, and his evil wishers must have taken the hint. Every one knows the story of how noblesse oblige was construed into the necessity for an invasion of the printing office, at an hour when no man would be there; how the raiders, in age from thirty-four years downwards, were the flower of that “Canadian nobility” against which the editor never wearied hurling his radical sayings; and how Mrs. Mackenzie, then in her seventy-eighth year, stood trembling in a corner of the office—for the building was home as well—while she witnessed, with fear and indignation, the destruction of her son’s property and the means of her own livelihood. As if the tale could be improved upon, some romancers, telling of the rise of Canada from barbarism to civilization, have adorned it with gross maltreatment of the aged lady by these gentlemen who, with her only to stay them, were naturally sans peur. They should also be without this one reproach, for they were too intent upon pi-ing type and throwing the contents of the office into the bay to trouble about her.
Someone says that a good and true woman is like a Cremona violin; age but increases the worth and sweetens the tone. In the words of Disraeli, this woman’s love had illumined the dark woof of poverty; fate had it in store that that love should “lighten the fetters of the slave” before she died.
The way in which Canadian rebels were treated in prison is to the reader of their experiences a continual reproach to the powers which made them thus suffer. But the American Bastille, according to the records left by Mackenzie, out-did the Canadian. A steep staircase, a ladder and a trap-door fastened by bar and lock, led to a room wherein were the dangling rope and hideous apparatus of death ready waiting for the next unfortunate; beyond the room was Mackenzie’s cell. It was only through this passage-way that mother, children, wife or friends could reach him, where they had to run the gauntlet of coarse jests from brutalized men and the worse than brutal remarks of such women as were prisoners there. The gaoler in this place deserved to be immortalized by Dickens. Of low stature, with an exaggerated hook nose, fleshless and fallen-in cheeks on which nature had begrudged a sufficient skin covering; round, sunken, peering eyes, feline from long watching; nails filthy, like claws forever in the dirt—such was the gaoler. “You felt in regarding him that if cast into the sea he would have more power to pollute it than it would have to purify him.” A fee of thirty-six dollars for three months procured from him the occasional admittance of friends, although the iron doors were freely opened to those who wished to see a real live Canadian rebel. Close confinement and miasma broke Mackenzie’s health in a short time; he could no longer eat the food which his children carried him—it was feared he might be poisoned by the gaol fare—his wife was in delicate health, his mother had reached ninety years, and his mind was torn with anxiety over the illness of a beloved daughter. The other prisoners were allowed occasional days of freedom to visit taverns and roam the town, but no such liberty came to him. “My dear little girl grew worse and worse, she was wasted to a skeleton.... I had followed four of her sisters and a brother to the churchyard, but I might not look upon her. One fine day she was carried ... to the prison, and her mother and I watched her for forty-eight hours, but the gaoler vexed us so that she had to be taken home again, where she was soon in the utmost danger, and when her poor little sister comes to tell me how she is at dusk ... the gaoler will tell her to wait in the public place in the gaol, perhaps for an hour or more, till supper comes, as he can’t be put to the trouble of opening my cage twice.”
Then the poor old mother sickens, and he knows her time has come. He makes every effort to be allowed to see her, and when he has given up hope writes her a truly beautiful letter of farewell. In it he thanks her for all she had done for him, all she has been to him, and that if the wealth of the world were his he would give it to be at her side. “But wealth I have none, and of justice there is but little here.” He tells her of his hopes to put, with his coming liberty, the rest in comfort, but “sorrow fills my heart when I am told that you will not have your aged eyes comforted by the sight.” The majesty of the law, for offence against which he was suffering, was invoked to get him freedom for the desired interview. Under the shadow of a writ of Habeas Corpus ad respondendum, a court at which he was required to appear as a witness was held in his house, and accompanied by his gaoler he was allowed to attend. The magistrate was late in arriving, conveniently cold when he did come, and protracted his sitting so that the desired interview between the dying mother and distressed son might have no interruption, while the sheriff and gaoler waited in the room adjoining the bedroom. The mother summoned all her fortitude, pronounced her last farewell, bade him trust in God and fear not. She never spoke afterwards, and from the windows of the gaol the political prisoner, in an agony which any can understand, with which all can sympathize, saw her funeral pass.
Mackenzie’s consideration towards women did not extend beyond the members of his own family. But an alert providence arranged that he should usually be well met. Some hours after Anderson had been shot, a rebel named Pool called at the house of Mr. James Scott Howard, in Yonge Street, to inquire the whereabouts of the body. Immediately after he left, the first detachment of the rebel army, about fifteen or twenty men, drew up on the lawn in front of the house, wheeled at the word of command, and went away in search of the dead man. The next to be seen were three or four Loyalists hurrying down the road, who said there were five hundred rebels behind them, and as the morning wore on more men were seen and the sound of firing was heard. At eleven o’clock, or thereabouts, another detachment of rebels appeared, headed by the afterwards well-known figure stuffed out with extra coats to be bullet-proof, on a small white horse. To enable the pony to enter the lawn the men wrenched off fence-boards, after which the stuffed man, Mackenzie, entered the house without knocking, took possession of the sitting-room, and ordered dinner for fifty. Mrs. Howard said she could not comply with such an order. Mackenzie took advantage of Mr. Howard’s absence in town to indulge in much abuse of the latter, saying it was high time someone else held the postmastership. Mrs. Howard at length referred him to the servant in the kitchen, and Mackenzie went to see about dinner himself. He and his men appropriated a sheep in process of cooking in a large sugar-kettle, a barrel of beef and a baking of bread. The tool house was made free use of to sharpen their weapons, which consisted of chisels and gouges on pole-ends, hatchets, knives and guns of all descriptions. At two o’clock the rebels took a disorderly departure, leaving a young West Highlander on guard. Mrs. Howard said she was sorry to see so fine a Scotchman turn against his Queen, to which the reply was, “Country first, Queen next.” The fifty rebels had evidently left on account of the flag of truce proceedings, and at half-past three they all returned, headed by Mackenzie. He demanded of Mrs. Howard “where the dinner was,” and her coolness of demeanour and temper exasperated him. He pulled her from her chair to the window, shook his whip over her, and told her to be thankful her house was not in the state in which she saw Dr. Horne’s. Lount privately told Mrs. Howard not to mind Mackenzie, as he was quite beside himself. After they had eaten the much-ordered dinner, the men had some barrels of whiskey on the lawn and their behaviour during the night naturally alarmed the family. The one man-servant had made his escape, saying he feared being taken prisoner by the rebels. The party remained there until Wednesday; the true defence of the place lay in Mrs. Howard’s intrepidity. Her troubles did not end with the departure of the rabble, for her husband, a true Loyalist of the best type, suffered much at the hands of either party. Such grinding between the upper and the nether millstone as he thereafter experienced is a matter of history.
Nathaniel Pearson, a Quaker, one of the most refined and gentle of the gentlest sect, an intelligent farmer and keenly interested in politics, lived in the Aurora district. Some of his Quaker principles were sacrificed to those of Reform, and he rode off to join the insurgents on their way south. He missed them, and to his Quaker mind there was but one honourable thing to do, and that was to give himself up to the Government. During his absence his wife, possessed of as many gifts and attractions as her husband, had to go to Aurora on business, with the result that she was marched to the guard-house between two Loyalist soldiers. She appealed for help to a man who was their neighbour, and who often had been kept in the necessities of life by the Quaker family; but he turned a deaf ear, even when she pleaded on the score of her young baby at home. Her case reached the ears of a man named King, from Orillia, who at once interested himself in her behalf. “Do you tell me you have a young baby at home needing you? Gad, if they had taken my wife that way, they wouldn’t know that the devil had ever been born before!” His interest resulted in her release, and on reaching home she found that Quaker principles were to be forfeited once more. The Loyalists were about, searching for food and arms, and the faithful maid, Betty, determined they should have neither at her employers’ expense. The one gun in the house was hidden in a brush-heap behind the barn, and Betty had barely straightened her back after doing so when she saw a Loyalist on the fence, watching her. A party entered the house, demanding food, and were on their way to the cellar, where a large stock of freshly-cooked provisions was stored, when the faithful Betty once more forswore her sect, declared the cellar empty, and saved her master’s property.