Title:  The Fighting Governor A Chronicle of Frontenac

Author:  Charles W. Colby
        Edited by George M. Wrong and H. H. Langton

Release Date:  February, 2004 [EBook #5146] [Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on May 13, 2002]

Edition:  10

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

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Chronicles of Canada
Edited by George M. Wrong and H. H. Langton
In thirty-two volumes

Volume 7

The fighting governor
A Chronicle of Frontenac

By Charles W. Colby
Toronto, 1915

CHAPTER I

CANADA IN 1672

The Canada to which Frontenac came in 1672 was no longer the infant colony it had been when Richelieu founded the Company of One Hundred Associates.  Through the efforts of Louis XIV and Colbert it had assumed the form of an organized province. [Footnote:  See The Great Intendant in this Series.] Though its inhabitants numbered less than seven thousand, the institutions under which they lived could not have been more elaborate or precise.  In short, the divine right of the king to rule over his people was proclaimed as loudly in the colony as in the motherland.

It was inevitable that this should be so, for the whole course of French history since the thirteenth century had led up to the absolutism of Louis XIV.  During the early ages of feudalism France had been distracted by the wars of her kings against rebellious nobles.  The virtues and firmness of Louis IX (1226-70) had turned the scale in favour of the crown.  There were still to be many rebellions—­the strife of Burgundians and Armagnacs in the fifteenth century, the Wars of the League in the sixteenth century, the cabal of the Fronde in the seventeenth century—­but the great issue had been settled in the days of the good St Louis.  When Raymond VII of Toulouse accepted the Peace of Lorris (1243) the government of Canada by Louis XIV already existed in the germ.  That is to say, behind the policy of France in the New World may be seen an ancient process which had ended in untrammelled autocracy at Paris.

This process as it affected Canada was not confined to the spirit of government.  It is equally visible in the forms of colonial administration.  During the Middle Ages the dukes and counts of France had been great territorial lords—­levying their own armies, coining their own money, holding power of life and death over their vassals.  In that period Normandy, Brittany, Maine, Anjou, Toulouse, and many other districts, were subject to the king