Mézy’s Defeat and Death

The real question was whether the new syndic should belong to the governor or to the bishop.

Our special project presenting the definitive account of France in Canada by Francis Parkman, one of America’s greatest historians.

Previously in The Old Regime In Canada. Continuing chapter 8.

Mézy was dealing with an adversary armed with redoubtable weapons. It was intimated to him that the sacraments would be refused, and the churches closed against him. This threw him into an agony of doubt and perturbation; for the emotional religion which had become a part of his nature, though overborne by gusts of passionate irritation, was still full of life within him. Tossing between the old feeling and the new, he took a course which reveals the trouble and confusion of his mind. He threw himself for counsel and comfort on the Jesuits, though he knew them to be one with Laval against him, and though, under cover of denouncing sin in general, they had lashed him sharply in their sermons. There is something pathetic in the appeal he makes them. For the glory of God and the service of the king, he had come, he says, on Laval’s solicitation, to seek salvation in Canada; and being under obligation to the bishop, who had recommended him to the king, he felt bound to show proofs of his gratitude on every occasion.

Yet neither gratitude to a benefactor nor the respect due to his character and person should be permitted to interfere with duty to the king, “since neither conscience nor honor permit us to neglect the requirements of our office and betray the interests of his Majesty, after receiving orders from his lips, and making oath of fidelity between his hands.” He proceeds to say that, having discovered practices of which he felt obliged to prevent the continuance, he had made a declaration expelling the offenders from office; that the bishop and all the ecclesiastics had taken this declaration as an offence; that, regardless of the king’s service, they had denounced him as a calumniator, an unjust judge, without gratitude, and perverted in conscience; and that one of the chief among them had come to warn him that the sacraments would be refused and the churches closed against him. “This,” writes the unhappy governor, “has agitated our soul with scruples; and we have none from whom to seek light save those who are our declared opponents, pronouncing judgment on us without knowledge of cause. Yet as our salvation and the duty we owe the king are the things most important to us on earth, and as we hold them to be inseparable the one from the other: and as nothing is so certain as death, and nothing so uncertain as the hour thereof; and as there is no time to inform his Majesty of what is passing and to receive his commands; and as our soul, though conscious of innocence, is always in fear, — we feel obliged, despite their opposition, to have recourse to the reverend father casuists of the House of Jesus, to tell us in conscience what we can do for the fulfilment of our duty at once to God and to the king.”

[Mézy aux PP. Jésuites, Fait au Château de Quebec ce dernier jour de Février, 1664.]

The Jesuits gave him little comfort. Lalemant, their superior, replied by advising him to follow the directions of his confessor, a Jesuit, so far as the question concerned spiritual matters, adding that in temporal matters he had no advice to give. [1] The distinction was illusory. The quarrel turned wholly on temporal matters, but it was a quarrel with a bishop. To separate in such a case the spiritual obligation from the temporal was beyond the skill of Mézy, nor would the confessor have helped him.

[1: Lettre du P. H. Lalemant a Mr. le Gouverneur.]

Perplexed and troubled as he was, he would not reinstate Bourdon and the two councilors. The people began to clamor at the interruption of justice, for which they blamed Laval, whom a recent imposition of tithes had made unpopular. Mézy thereupon issued a proclamation, in which, after mentioning his opponents as the most subtle and artful persons in Canada, he declares that, in consequence of petitions sent him from Quebec and the neighboring settlements, he had called the people to the council chamber, and by their advice had appointed the Sieur de Chartier as attorney-general in place of Bourdon.

[Declaration du Sieur de Mézy, 10 Mars, 1664.]

Bourdon replied by a violent appeal from the governor to the remaining members of the council, [2] on which Mézy declared him excluded from all public functions whatever, till the king’s pleasure should be known. [3] Thus church and state still frowned on each other, and new disputes soon arose to widen the breach between them. On the first establishment of the council, an order had been passed for the election of a mayor and two aldermen (échevins) for Quebec, which it was proposed to erect into a city, though it had only seventy houses and less than a thousand inhabitants. Repentigny was chosen mayor, and Madry and Charron aldermen; but the choice was not agreeable to the bishop, and the three functionaries declined to act, influence having probably been brought to bear on them to that end. The council now resolved that a mayor was needless, and the people were permitted to choose a syndic in his stead. These municipal elections were always so controlled by the authorities that the element of liberty which they seemed to represent was little but a mockery. On the present occasion, after an unaccountable delay of ten months, twenty-two persons cast their votes in presence of the council, and the choice fell on Charron. The real question was whether the new syndic should belong to the governor or to the bishop. Charron leaned to the governor’s party. The ecclesiastics insisted that the people were dissatisfied, and a new election was ordered, but the voters did not come. The governor now sent messages to such of the inhabitants as he knew to be in his interest, who gathered in the council chamber, voted under his eye, and again chose a syndic agreeable to him. Laval’s party protested in vain. [4]

[2: Bourdon au Conseil, 13 Mars, 1664.]

[3: Ordre du Gouverneur, 13 Mars, 1664.]

[4: Registre du Conseil Supérieur.]

The councilors held office for a year, and the year had now expired. The governor and the bishop, it will be remembered, had a joint power of appointment; but agreement between them was impossible. Laval was for replacing his partisans, Bourdon, Villeray, Auteuil, and La Ferté. Mézy refused; and on the eighteenth of September he reconstructed the council by his sole authority, retaining of the old councilors only Amours and Tilly, and replacing the rest by Denis, La Tesserie, and Péronne de Maze, the surviving son of Dumesnil.

Again Laval protested; but Mézy proclaimed his choice by sound of drum, and caused placards to be posted, full, according to Father Lalemant, of abuse against the bishop. On this he was excluded from confession and absolution. He complained loudly; “but our reply was,” says the father, “that God knew every thing.”

[Journal des Jésuites, Oct., 1664.]

This unanswerable but somewhat irrelevant response failed to satisfy him, and it was possibly on this occasion that an incident occurred which is recounted by the bishop’s eulogist, La Tour. He says that Mézy, with some unknown design, appeared before the church at the head of a band of soldiers, while Laval was saying mass. The service over, the bishop presented himself at the door, on which, to the governor’s confusion, all the soldiers respectfully saluted him. [5] The story may have some foundation, but it is not supported by contemporary evidence.

[5: La Tour, Vie de Laval, Liv. VII. It is charitable to ascribe this writer’s many errors to carelessness.]

On the Sunday after Mézy’s coup d’etat, the pulpits resounded with denunciations. The people listened, doubtless, with becoming respect; but their sympathies were with the governor; and he, on his part, had made appeals to them at more than one crisis of the quarrel. He now fell into another indiscretion. He banished Bourdon and Villeray and ordered them home to France.

They carried with them the instruments of their revenge, the accusations of Laval and the Jesuits against the author of their woes. Of these accusations one alone would have sufficed. Mézy had appealed to the people. It is true that he did so from no love of popular liberty, but simply do make head against an opponent; yet the act alone was enough, and he received a peremptory recall. Again Laval had triumphed. He had made one governor and unmade two, if not three. The modest Levite, as one of his biographers calls him in his earlier days, had become the foremost power in Canada.

Laval had a threefold strength at court; his high birth, his reputed sanctity, and the support of the Jesuits. This was not all, for the permanency of his position in the colony gave him another advantage. The governors were named for three years and could be recalled at any time; but the vicar apostolic owed his appointment to the Pope, and the Pope alone could revoke it. Thus, he was beyond reach of the royal authority and the court was in a certain sense obliged to conciliate him. As for Mézy, a man of no rank or influence, he could expect no mercy. Yet, though irritable and violent, he seems to have tried conscientiously to reconcile conflicting duties, or what he regarded as such. The governors and intendants, his successors, received, during many years, secret instructions from the court to watch Laval, and cautiously prevent him from assuming powers which did not belong to him. It is likely that similar instructions had been given to Mézy [6] and that the attempt to fulfil them had aided to embroil him with one who was probably the last man on earth with whom he would willingly have quarreled.

[6: The royal commissioner, Gaudais, who came to Canada with Mézy, had, as before mentioned, orders to inquire with great secrecy into the conduct of Laval. The intendant, Talon, who followed immediately after, had similar instructions.]

An inquiry was ordered into his conduct; but a voice more potent than the voice of the king had called him to another tribunal. A disease, the result perhaps of mental agitation, seized upon him and soon brought him to extremity. As he lay gasping between life and death, fear and horror took possession of his soul. Hell yawned before his fevered vision, peopled with phantoms which long and lonely meditations, after the discipline of Loyola, made real and palpable to his thought. He smelt the fumes of infernal brimstone, and heard the bowlings of the damned. He saw the frown of the angry Judge, and the fiery swords of avenging angels, hurling wretches like himself, writhing in anguish and despair, into the gulf of unutterable woe. He listened to the ghostly counsellors who besieged his bed, bowed his head in penitence, made his peace with the church, asked pardon of Laval, confessed to him, and received absolution at his hands; and his late adversaries, now benign and bland, soothed him with promises of pardon, and hopes of eternal bliss.

Before he died, he wrote to the Marquis de Tracy, newly appointed viceroy, a letter which indicates that even in his penitence he could not feel himself wholly in the wrong. [7] He also left a will in which the pathetic and the quaint are curiously mingled. After praying his patron, Saint Augustine, with Saint John, Saint Peter, and all the other saints, to intercede for the pardon of his sins, he directs that his body shall be buried in the cemetery of the poor at the hospital, as being unworthy of more honored sepulture. He then makes various legacies of piety and charity. Other bequests follow, one of which is to his friend Major Angoville, to whom he leaves two hundred francs, his coat of English cloth, his camlet mantle, a pair of new shoes, eight shirts with sleeve buttons, his sword and belt, and a new blanket for the major’s servant. Felix Aubert is to have fifty francs, with a gray jacket, a small coat of gray serge, “which,” says the testator, “has been worn for a while,” and a pair of long white stockings. And in a codicil he farther leaves to Angoville his best black coat, in order that he may wear mourning for him. [8]

[7: Lettre de Mézy au Marquis de Tracy, 26 Avril 1665.]

[8: Testament du Sieur de Mézy. This will, as well as the letter, is engrossed in the registers of the council.]

– The Old Regime In Canada, Chapter 8 by Francis Parkman

The below is from Francis Parkman’s Introduction.

If, at times, it may seem that range has been allowed to fancy, it is so in appearance only; since the minutest details of narrative or description rest on authentic documents or on personal observation.

Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than a research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. Such facts may be detailed with the most minute exactness, and yet the narrative, taken as a whole, may be unmeaning or untrue. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time. He must study events in their bearings near and remote; in the character, habits, and manners of those who took part in them, he must himself be, as it were, a sharer or a spectator of the action he describes.

With respect to that special research which, if inadequate, is still in the most emphatic sense indispensable, it has been the writer’s aim to exhaust the existing material of every subject treated. While it would be folly to claim success in such an attempt, he has reason to hope that, so far at least as relates to the present volume, nothing of much importance has escaped him. With respect to the general preparation just alluded to, he has long been too fond of his theme to neglect any means within his reach of making his conception of it distinct and true.

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