| Building of the fort at Quebec. |
During these troubled years, amid the squabbles of conflicting interests, the one source of strength and steadfastness for the Frenchmen on the St. Lawrence was Champlain's own personality, while the two principal events were the building of the fort at Quebec, and the coming of the Jesuit missionaries. As Lieutenant of the King and representative of the Viceroys of New France, Champlain's difficult task was to hold the balance even between the rival traders and to maintain some semblance of law and order along the water highway of Canada. In former years, as an explorer he had obtained unrivalled influence among the Indians; now, as Governor, he brought the same qualities of tact and firmness into play in keeping the peace among his turbulent countrymen. From 1620 to 1624, he was continuously in Canada, and on the rock of Quebec he built a fort stronger and more substantial than the wooden buildings which abutted on the river below. Well situated, able to withstand ten thousand men,26 such was an English account a few years later of this fort, when enlarged and completed—the fort St. Louis at Quebec. The merchants grudged the money and the men for the work, but the building of a substantial fortress on the St. Lawrence was a step forward towards the French dominion of Canada.
26 Calendar of State Papers, Colonial, 1574-1660, p. 139, under the year 1632.
| Coming of the Jesuits to Canada. Their policy. Supported by the French Government. |
The year 1625 was the year in which the first Jesuit missionaries came into Canada. In that year the Duc de Ventadour became Viceroy of New France: he was closely connected with the Jesuit order, and began his régime by sending out priests at his own expense. Their coming marked an epoch in Canadian history. The Franciscan brethren, who were already in the field, and who welcomed the new-comers on their arrival, were men of a different stamp. Devoted missionaries, they kept to their work; they claimed, outwardly at least, no religious monopoly; they had no wish to control the temporal power; and they lived at peace with all men. The Jesuits, on the other hand, imported religious despotism. The Jesuit emissaries were brave men, none more so; they were self-sacrificing to an extreme, venturesome and tenacious, indifferent to danger, and fearless of death. They were tactful in their dealings with the Indians, and were trained in a school of diplomacy which has never been excelled. But they were the champions of exclusiveness, and the enemies of freedom. Their coming meant that one form of religion was to supplant all others—that the spiritual power was, as far as in them lay, to dominate all things and all men; and that while much was to be done, it was to be done for instead of by the colonists and the natives, from above instead of from below, on a rigid system—strong in itself but inimical to healthy growth, to that variety of life, of thought, and of outward form which helps on the expansion of a young community. From their training and their organization, the Jesuits would in any case have had great influence on the fortunes of the land to which they came; but their influence was greater in that their despotic views harmonized for the time being with the policy of the Bourbon Kings and their ministers. For absolute monarchy had taken root in France; and in the French dependencies, as in the mother country, there was to be henceforth political and religious despotism. That the spiritual power might grow too strong was a distant danger, and in France hardly a practical possibility. In the meantime Kings and priests went hand in hand, co-operating against liberty in church and state alike. Protestantism meant liberty. The Jesuits abhorred the Huguenots because they deemed them heretics: the French Kings and their ministers oppressed them rather on political than on religious grounds, but were glad to use the religious argument in support of political aims.
| Oppression of the Huguenots in France. Its effects in Canada. The Huguenots excluded from New France. |
On the death of Henry IV in 1610, his young son, Louis XIII, became King of France. In 1624 Richelieu became his minister. In 1627 the discontent of the Huguenots culminated in the open revolt of the town of La Rochelle; and its fall, after a ten months' siege, gave the King and the cardinal mastery over the Protestants of France. The effect on Canada of this unsuccessful rising was twofold. It involved the exclusion of Huguenot settlers, and it involved also the hostility of England. The patent granted in 1627 to the company of New France, known as the One Hundred Associates, provided that every colonist who went out to Canada must be a Catholic, and when in the following year Richelieu received the submission of the Rochellois, he was well able to enforce this arbitrary provision. It is difficult at the present day to comprehend a policy, initiated and approved by a statesman of consummate ability, which could not but result in blighting the infancy of the greatest French colony. The English colonies were in the main pre-eminently homes of freedom, dwelling-places for men whose political and religious opinions found scant favour in the United Kingdom. For the English race the New World redressed the balance of the Old; and though the colonists who went out from Europe to America, were in their turn prejudiced and narrow-minded, their want of tolerance was not forced upon them from without, and members of one or other unpopular sect, when persecuted in one province, could find refuge in another. Maryland was a British colony, founded under Roman Catholic auspices; its neighbour, Pennsylvania, was founded and dominated by Quaker influence; throughout British North America there were examples of all opinions and of all creeds. The men on the spot quarrelled with and persecuted each other; but persecution and exclusion were not ordained from home. It would have been bad for the British Empire if from all settlements, which the English formed and maintained, Roman Catholics had been rigidly kept out; but it was far worse for France when her Kings and ministers closed the French colonies to the Huguenots.
| Merits of the Huguenots as colonists. War between England and France. |
The Huguenots were the best of the French traders; they were men of substance; they were capable, enterprising, and resolute. They were beyond others of their countrymen, the pioneers of trade and colonization, and had led the way in the New World. De Monts was a Huguenot, the De Caens were Huguenots, Champlain himself is said to have been of Huguenot parentage. The exclusion of the French Protestants from Canada meant depriving Canada of the class of Frenchmen who were most capable of colonizing the country and developing its trade. Their fault, in the eyes of the French Government, was their independence; that they did not conform to the state religion, and that by not conforming they were politically an element of danger. But what was deemed a fault in France would, in colonizing America, have been a virtue; inasmuch as in the field of adventure, trade, and settlement in new lands, the men who are least bound by old-world systems and traditional views are of most value. If fair play had been given to the French Protestants, Canada would have been far stronger than it ever was while it belonged to France, and probably it would have continued to belong to France down to the present day. For the closing of Canada to the Huguenots, followed as it was afterwards by their ejection from France, not only weakened France and her colonies, but strengthened the rival nations and their colonies. The French citizens who had begun to build up the French colonial empire, helped to build up instead the colonial empires of other European nations; and the oppressions which they suffered brought them the sympathy, at times the armed sympathy, of the Protestant nations of Europe. The rising of the citizens of La Rochelle was accompanied by war between England and France. Buckingham's expedition for the relief of the city, ill planned and ill led, was a fiasco, completing the ruin of the Rochellois instead of bringing them relief; but on the other side of the Atlantic, where English adventurers could take advantage of a time of war without being hampered by court favourites, there was a different tale to tell.
| David Kirke |