A history of Canada, 1763-1812

by Sir Charles Prestwood Lucas

Ryland’s mission to England.

When Craig wrote these letters to Ryland, the latter was in England. He had been sent by the governor to lay the views of the latter upon the political situation in Canada before the Home Government; and, reaching England at the end of July, 1810, he was active in interviewing ministers and supplying them verbally and by written memoranda with first-hand information. Ryland had gone out to America in 1781 as a paymaster in the army during the War of Independence; and, returning with Carleton at the end of the war, had been taken by him to Canada as confidential secretary. He continued to hold that office to successive governors for twenty years, until 1813, when Sir George Prevost, who followed Craig as Governor-General and with whom Ryland was not in harmony, suggested that other arrangements should be made for the secretaryship. Ryland then resigned his office of governor’s secretary but remained clerk to the Executive Council, living in the suburbs of Quebec, until his death in 1838. He seems to have been an able, honourable man, strongly opposed to the democratic party in Lower Canada, to the French and Roman Catholic section of the community. In England he was brought into relations chiefly with Lord Liverpool, who was Secretary of State for War and the Colonies[223] in the Percival ministry, having succeeded Lord Castlereagh in that office, and with the Under-Secretary of State, Robert Peel. Peel was then beginning his public life, and Ryland’s impression of him on his first interview was that ‘though a very young man and but a few days in office [he] appears to be very much au fait in matters of public business’. A week or two later he wrote of him as ‘a very elegant young man of fine talents, as I am informed’, and very pleasing manners.[224] With these two ministers and with various other public men, including George Canning, Ryland conferred or corresponded during his stay in England, which lasted for the better part of two years. On one occasion, soon after his arrival, he was present at a Cabinet Council, being seated, as we learn from the full account which he wrote to Craig, between Percival and Lord Liverpool. He was asked a large number of questions, including a query as to the number of regular troops in Canada, and, as the result, he appears to have formed a very poor opinion of the knowledge and capacity of the ministry.

Craig’s views on the political situation in Lower Canada.

He had brought with him to England a very long dispatch in which Craig had set out his views. Craig estimated the population of Lower Canada at the time when he wrote, May, 1810, at between 250,000 and 300,000 souls, out of whom he computed that no more than 20,000 to 25,000 were English or Americans. The remainder, the French Canadians, he represented as, in the main, wholly alienated from the British section of the community, French in religion, laws, language and manners, and becoming more attracted to France and more alienated from Great Britain, in proportion as the power of France in Europe became more consolidated. The large mass of the people were, so he wrote, wholly uneducated, following unscrupulous men, their leaders in the country and in the House of Assembly. The Roman Catholic priests were anti-English on grounds of race and religion; their attachment to France had been renewed since Napoleon made his concordat with the Pope; and, being largely drawn from the lower orders of society, and headed by a bishop who exercised more authority than in the days of the old régime and who arrogated complete independence of the civil government, they were hardly even outwardly loyal to the British Crown. The growing nationalist and democratic feeling was reflected and embodied in the elected House of Assembly. When the constitution was first granted, some few Canadian gentlemen had come forward and been elected; but, at the time when the governor wrote, the Canadian members of the Assembly, who formed an overwhelming majority, according to his account consisted of avocats and notaries, shopkeepers and habitants, some of the last named being unable either to read or write. The organ of the party was the paper Le Canadien, which vilified the Executive officers as ‘gens en place’, and aimed at bringing the government into contempt.

To meet the evils which he deemed so great and emphasized so strongly, Craig proposed that the existing constitution should be either cancelled or suspended. His view, as expressed in a letter to Ryland written in Constitutional changes recommended. November, 1810,[225] was that it should be suspended during the continuance of the war with France and for five years afterwards, and that in this interval the former government by means of a governor and a nominated Legislative Council should be revived. He argued that representative institutions had been prematurely granted, before French Canadians were prepared for them; that they had been demanded by the English section of the inhabitants, not the French; and that at the time the best informed Canadians had been opposed to the change. In the alternative, he discussed the reunion of the two provinces, so as to leaven the Assembly with a larger number of British members, though he did not advocate this course; and the re-casting of the electoral divisions in Lower Canada, so as to give more adequate representation to those parts of the province, such as the Eastern Townships, where the English-speaking element could hold its own. In any case he pointed out the necessity of enacting a property qualification for the members of the Assembly, no such qualification being required under the Act of 1791, although that Act prescribed a qualification for the voters who elected the members. Craig went on to urge, as Milnes had urged before him, that the Royal supremacy should be exercised over the Roman Catholic priesthood, additional salary being given to the bishop, in consideration of holding his position under the Crown, and the curés being given freehold in their livings under appointment from the Crown. There was a further point. The Sulpician seminary at Montreal was possessed of large estates, and Craig considered this clerical body to be dangerous in view of the fact that it consisted largely of French emigrant priests. He proposed therefore that the Crown should resume the greater part of the lands.

Craig’s views not accepted by the Imperial Government.

Ryland soon found that the ministry were not prepared to face Parliament with any proposals for a constitutional change in Canada, and that they were more inclined to what he called ‘the namby-pamby system of conciliation’.[226] They thought that it had been a mistake in the first instance to divide Canada into two provinces, but the only step which they now took was to procure a somewhat superfluous opinion from the Attorney-General to the effect that the Imperial Parliament could alter the constitution of the provinces, or could reunite them with one Council and Assembly; and a rather less self-evident opinion that the governor could not redistribute the electoral divisions of Lower Canada without being authorized to do so by an Act either of the Imperial or of the Colonial Legislature.

Critical condition of England at the time of Ryland’s mission.

To Ryland the affairs of Canada were all in all; to the ministry whom he deemed so weak, they were overshadowed by events and difficulties at home and abroad, compared with which the political questions which troubled Lower Canada were insignificant, noteworthy only as likely, if not carefully handled, to add to the burden which was laid on the statesmen responsible for the safe-keeping of the Empire. In 1809 Talavera had been fought and hardly won, but it was the year also of the disastrous expedition to Walcheren. In 1810, behind the lines of Torres Vedras, Wellington was beginning to turn the tide of French invasion in the Peninsula. The next year saw Massena’s retreat, but at home the political situation was complicated by the insanity of the old King and the consequent necessity of declaring a regency. In 1812, the year of Salamanca, Percival the Prime Minister was assassinated, his place being taken by Lord Liverpool, who, as long as Ryland was in England, had been in charge of the colonies. In the same year, war with the United States long threatened, came to pass. These years were in England years of financial distress and of widespread misery. William Cobbett giving voice to the hungry discontent of the poor was fined and imprisoned, and Ryland hoped that his fate would have some effect in Canada.[227]

Lord Liverpool, however, was very loyal to Craig, though he did not support any such drastic measures as the latter had suggested. At the end of July, 1811, by which time Craig had left Canada, he wrote a letter to him expressing the Prince Regent’s high approbation of his general conduct in the administration of the government of the North American provinces and the Prince’s particular regret at the cause which had necessitated his retirement. He wrote too to Craig’s successor, Sir George Prevost, highly praising Ryland and expressing a hope that he would be retained in his appointment. Legal opinion as to patronage to appointments in the Roman Catholic Church in Canada, and as to the Sulpician estates. The law officers of the Crown in England had been consulted as to the Roman Catholic Church in Canada in view of the governor’s proposals, and advised that so much of the patronage of Roman Catholic benefices as was exercised by the Bishop of Quebec under the French Government had of right devolved on the Crown. On the further question, whether the Crown had the right of property in the estates of the Sulpician seminary at Montreal, they advised that legally the Crown had the right, inasmuch as the Sulpicians who remained in Canada after the British conquest had no legal capacity to hold lands apart from the parent body at Paris which had since been dissolved, and had not obtained a licence from the Crown to hold the estates; but the law officers, seeing the hardship which would be involved in wholesale confiscation of the lands after so many years of undisturbed tenure, suggested that the question was one for compromise or amicable arrangement. In the end nothing was done in the matter in the direction of Craig’s and Ryland’s views, and many years later, in 1840,[228] by an ordinance of Lower Canada, the Sulpicians of Montreal were incorporated under certain conditions and confirmed in the possession of their estates.