Louis de Buade de Frontenac

“ America owes him an enduring memory; for, in this masculine figure, she sees the pioneer who guided her to the possession of her richest heritage.
III THE COMING OF FRONTENAC TO CANADA [50] (1672)
Count Frontenac came of an ancient and noble race, said to have been of Basque origin. His father held a high post in the household of Louis XIII, who became the child's godfather, and gave him his own name. At the age of fifteen, the young Louis showed an uncontrollable passion for the life of a soldier. He was sent to the seat of war in Holland, to serve under the Prince of Orange. ”

“ We get a strong light upon the character of Frontenac when we rightly grasp that of his master, the Roi-Soleil, as he allowed himself to be called, the man who, daring the fate of Herod or Nebuchadnezzar, once said, "It seems to me as if any glory won by another was robbed from myself." ”

“ An immense mass of papers was sent with them for the instruction of the king; and Frontenac wrote a long despatch, in which he sets forth the offences of Perrot and Fénelon, the pretensions of the ecclesiastics, the calumnies he had incurred in his efforts to serve his Majesty, and the insults heaped upon him, "which no man but me would have endured so patiently." Indeed, while the suits were pending before the council, he had displayed a calmness and moderation which surprised his opponents. ”

“ On the one hand, Perrot had violated the authority lodged by the king in the person of his representative; and, on the other, the mutinous official was a rival in trade, who had made great and illicit profits, while his superior had, thus far, made none. As a governor and as a man, Frontenac was deeply moved; yet, helpless as he was, he could do no more than send three of his guardsmen, under a lieutenant named Bizard, with orders to arrest Carion and bring him to Quebec. ”

“ Frontenac was meditating a grand effort to inflict such castigation as would bring them to reason, when one of their chiefs, named Tareha, came to Quebec with overtures of peace. The Iroquois had lost many of their best warriors. The arrival of troops from France had discouraged them; the war had interrupted their hunting; and, having no furs to barter with the English, they were in want of arms, ammunition, and all the necessaries of life. Moreover, Father Milet, nominally a prisoner among them, but really an adopted chief, had used all his influence to bring about a peace ”

“ In his charges of cabal and intrigue, Frontenac had chiefly in view the clergy, whom he profoundly distrusted, excepting always the Récollet friars, whom he befriended because the bishop and the Jesuits opposed them. The priests on their part declare that he persecuted them, compelled 40 them to take passports like laymen when travelling about the colony, and even intercepted their letters. These accusations and many others were carried to the king and the minister by the Abbé d'Urfé, who sailed in the same ship with Fénelon. ”

“ It often happened that the services of all the strong men were required to bear arms in the field, and that there remained upon the farms only old men, women, and children to reap the harvest. Under such circumstances want was sure to follow during the winter months. Such was the condition of affairs in 1700. The grim figure of Frontenac had passed finally from the stage of Canadian politics. On his return, in 1689, he had found the name of Frenchman a mockery and a taunt. [1] The Iroquois sounded their threats under the very walls of the French forts. ”

“ La Forêt, the officer in command at Fort Frontenac, appeared, bringing with him a famous Iroquois chief called Decanisora or Tegannisorens, attended by a number 78 of warriors. They came to invite Frontenac to meet the deputies of the five tribes at Oswego, within their own limits. Frontenac's reply was characteristic. "It is for the father to tell the children where to hold council, not for the children to tell the father. Fort Frontenac is the proper place, and you should thank me for going so far every summer to meet you." ”

“ Such was the crisis when Frontenac left Canada at the moment when he was needed most, and Le Febvre de la Barre came to supplant him. The new governor introduces himself with a burst of rhodomontade. "The Iroquois," he writes to the king, "have twenty-six hundred warriors. I will attack them with twelve hundred men. They know me before seeing me, for they have been told by the English how roughly I handled them in the West Indies." ”

“ King Louis now gave Frontenac orders to seize New York so that the French might have access to the Hudson River, and a port open all the year round and not frozen up for months at a time like Quebec.
So Frontenac made ready his forces. He gathered three armies and sent them by different ways to attack the British. But few of these forces were regular soldiers. Many of them were Indians, still more were coureurs de bois, wild bush-rangers who dressed and lived more like Indians than white men, and were as fearless, and lawless, and learned in the secrets of the forest as the Indians. ”

“ There was a commercial revolution in the colony. The merchants whom Frontenac excluded from his ring now had their turn. It was they who, jointly with the intendant and the ecclesiastics, had procured the removal of the old governor; and it was they who gained the ear of the new one. Aubert de la Chesnaye, Jacques Le Ber, and the rest of their faction, now basked in official favor; and La Salle, La Forêt, and the other friends of Frontenac, were cast out. There was one exception. Greysolon Du Lhut, leader of coureurs de bois, was too important to be thus set aside. ”

“ It is to be remarked that for some years after Frontenac's arrival in Canada immigration received a serious check. His commission as governor was nearly even in date with the commencement of Louis XIV's buccaneering war against Holland, in which he was joined by his English cousin Charles II. The heroic stand made by the Dutch against the united power of the French and English monarchies is one of the glories of their history. It was not a good time for French immigrant ships to be abroad ”

“ Her father's fort was the Castle Dangerous of Canada; and it was but two years before that her mother, left with three or four 309 armed men, and beset by the Iroquois, threw herself with her followers into the blockhouse, and held the assailants two days at bay, till the Marquis de Crisasi came with troops to her relief. [22]
[22] La Potherie, I. 326.
From the moment when the Canadians found a chief whom they could trust, and the firm old hand of Frontenac grasped the reins of their destiny, a spirit of hardihood and energy grew up in all this rugged population ”

“ In the question of Fort Frontenac, as in every thing else, the opposition to the governor, always busy and vehement, found its chief representative in the intendant, who told the minister that the policy of Frontenac was all wrong; that the public good was not its object; that he disobeyed or evaded the orders of the king; and that he had suffered the Iroquois to delude him by false overtures of peace. The representations of the intendant and his faction had such effect, that Ponchartrain wrote to the governor that the plan of re-establishing Fort Frontenac "must absolutely be abandoned." ”

“ Whatever the cause, they maintained an active correspondence during Frontenac's years in Canada, and at court Madame de Frontenac was her husband's chief defence against numerous enemies. When he died it was found that he had left her his property. But she never set foot in Canada.
Frontenac was forty-one when Louis XIV dismissed Fouquet and took Colbert for his chief adviser. At Versailles everything depended on royal favour, and forty-one is an important age. What would the young king do for Frontenac? ”

“ An entire volume of the series is devoted to the Life of Count Frontenac, the great French governor of Canada. "Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV." was issued in 1877. Parkman describes him in the preface as "the most remarkable man who ever represented the crown of France in the New World. He grew with every emergency and rose equal to every crisis. ”

“ Possessed himself of iron nerve and unbending resolution, and sustained by visions of high accomplishment, he expected more from [162] average men than they were altogether capable of rendering. More than once some of his followers deserted him. One attempt was made at Fort Frontenac to poison him; and finally he met his death at the hand of an assassin, a member of his own party, in that far southern region which he had added to the domain of France.
Frontenac's personal relations with La Salle are not very clearly defined. He was certainly favourable to him at first. ”

“ Frontenac struck the table with his fist, and told him fiercely that he would teach him his duty. Every day embittered the strife. The governor made the declaration usual with him on such occasions, that he would not permit the royal authority to suffer in his person. At length he banished from Quebec his three most strenuous opponents, Villeray, Tilly, and Auteuil, and commanded them to remain in their country houses till they received his farther orders. All attempts at compromise proved fruitless; and Auteuil, in behalf of the exiles, appealed piteously to the king. ”

“ They had their periods of uneventful calm, when the wheels of administration ran as smoothly as could be expected in view of the condition of the colony. In one respect at least, Frontenac had shown a remarkable fitness for his office. Few white men have ever equalled or approached him in the art of dealing with Indians. ”

“ No other colonial governor, English, French, or Dutch, ever commanded so readily the respect and admiration of the red man. But in his dealings with the intendant and the bishop, with the clergy, and with all those among the French of New France who showed any disposition to disagree with him, Frontenac displayed an uncontrollable temper, an arrogance of spirit, and a degree of personal vanity which would not have made for cordial relations in any field of human effort. He had formed his own opinions and was quite ready to ride rough-shod over those of other men. ”

“ The monarch—"ce religieux prince," as the Abbé Faillon calls him—had no hesitation in demanding of the parliament of Paris legitimation of successive batches of his bastard offspring, and registration of the titles of nobility he was pleased to confer upon them. Whatever the responsibilities of Father Maupassant may have been, he must have had a sinecure in comparison with the king's confessor. It may be added that Frontenac vehemently denied that there were any disorders or scandals in his household. ”

“ The first period of Frontenac’s government, 1672-82, had given him no opportunity of showing his real strength; for the vexatious struggle carried on between him and the intendant, whose rivalry he could not brook, had ended in the governor’s recall. But when danger of the most serious kind threatened the colony,Frontenac’s masterfulness and his extraordinary influence with the Indians pointed him out as the one man capable of facing the situation. The new danger arose once more from the power of the Iroquois. ”

“ He secured the support of Count Frontenac, then governor of Canada, and in 1674 and 1677 visited France, obtaining from Louis XIV. on his first visit a patent of nobility and a grant of lands about Fort Frontenac, on the site of the present Kingston, Ontario, and on his second visit a patent empowering him to explore the West at his own expense, and giving him the buffalo-hide monopoly. ”

“ England and France were face to face in Europe, and in the New World the veiled conflict between the rival colonies now gave place to open war. The King by this time realised that Frontenac, for all his seventy years and his reputation for rashness, was the only man qualified to fill the difficult post of Governor, and accordingly sent him again to New France. He reached Quebec about the middle of October. It was evening, and the citizens had gathered at the quay with torches of welcome, while fireworks and illuminations blazed in his honour over the streets of the Upper Town. ”

“ From a painting in the Versailles Gallery.
Madame de Frontenac then became a maid of honour to the Duchesse de Montpensier, daughter of Gaston d'Orléans [3] and first cousin to Louis XIV. This princess, known as La Grande Mademoiselle, plunged into the politics of the Fronde with a vigour which involved her whole household—Madame de Frontenac included—and wrote Memoirs in which her adventures are recorded at full length, to the pungent criticism of her foes and the {23} enthusiastic glorification of herself. ”

“ The rarest quality of a ruler is the power to select good subordinates and fill them with his own high spirit. Judged by this standard Frontenac deserves great praise, for he never lacked capable and loyal lieutenants. With Callières at Montreal, Tonty on the Mississippi, Perrot and Du Lhut at Michilimackinac, Villebon and Saint-Castin in Acadia, Sainte-Hélène at the siege of Quebec, and Iberville at Hudson Bay, he was well supported by his staff. At this critical moment the shortcomings of the {151} French in America were certainly not due to lack of purpose or driving power. ”

“ It is true that in New France there were conditions which no amount of experience in the Old World could train a man to handle. Nor was Frontenac particularly fitted by training or temperament for all of the duties which his new post involved. In some things he was well-endowed; he had great physical endurance, a strong will, with no end of courage, and industry to spare. These were qualities of the highest value in a land encircled by enemies and forced to depend for existence upon the strength of its own people. ”