The Alleged Murder

In virtue of their new dignity, the accused now claimed exemption from accountability but this was not all.

Continuing chapter 7.  Previously in The Old Regime In Canada

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

The bishop’s success at court was triumphant. Not only did he procure the removal of Avaugour, but he was invited to choose a new governor to replace him. [1] This was not all; for he succeeded in effecting a complete change in the government of the colony. The Company of New France was called upon to resign its claims; [2] and, by a royal edict of April, 1663, all power, legislative, judicial, and executive, was vested in a council composed of the governor whom Laval had chosen, of Laval himself, and of five councilors, an attorney-general, and a secretary, to be chosen by Laval and the governor jointly. [3] Bearing with them blank commissions to be filled with the names of the new functionaries, Laval and his governor sailed for Quebec, where they landed on the fifteenth of September. With them came one Gaudais-Dupont, a royal commissioner instructed to inquire into the state of the colony.

[1: La Tour, Vie de Laval, Liv. V.]

[2: See the deliberations and acts to this end in Edits et Ordonnances concernant le Canada, 1. 30-32.]

[3: Edit de Création du Conseil Supérieur de Quebec.]

No sooner had they arrived than Laval and Mézy, the new governor, proceeded to construct the new council. Mézy knew nobody in the colony, and was, at this time, completely under Laval’s influence. The nominations, therefore, were virtually made by the bishop alone, in whose hands, and not in those of the governor, the blank commissions had been placed. [4] Thus for the moment he had complete control of the government; that is to say, the church was mistress of the civil power.

[4: Commission actroyée au Sieur Gaudais. Mémoire pour servir d’instruction au Sieur Gaudais. A sequel to these instructions, marked secret, shows that, notwithstanding Laval’s extraordinary success in attaining his objects, he and the Jesuits were somewhat distrusted. Gaudais is directed to make, with great discretion and caution, careful inquiry into the bishop’s conduct, and with equal secrecy to ascertain why the Jesuits had asked for Avaugour’s recall.]

Laval formed his council as follows: Jean Bourdon for attorney-general; Rouer de Villeray, Juchereau de la Berté, Ruette d’Auteuil, Le Gardeur de Tilly, and Matthieu Damours for councillors; and Peuvret de Mesnu for secretary. The royal commissioner, Gaudais, also took a prominent place at the board. [5] This functionary was on the point of marrying his niece to a son of Robert Giffard, who had a strong interest in suppressing Dumesnil’s accusations. [6] Dumesnil had laid his statements before the commissioner, who quickly rejected them and took part with the accused.

[5: As substitute for the intendant, an officer who had been appointed but who had not arrived.]

[6: Dumesnil here makes one of the few mistakes I have been able to detect in his long memorials. He says that the name of the niece of Gaudais was Marie Nau. It was, in fact, Michelle-Therese Nau, who married Joseph, son of Robert Giffard, on the 22d of October, 1663. Dumesnil had forgotten the bride’s first name. The elder Giffard was surety for Repentigny, whom Dumesnil charged with liabilities to the company, amounting to 644,700 livres. Giffard was also father-in-law of Juchereau de la Ferte, one of the accused.]

Of those appointed to the new council, their enemy Dumesnil says that they were “incapable persons,” and their associate Gaudais, in defending them against worse charges, declares that they were “unlettered, of little experience, and nearly all unable to deal with affairs of importance.” This was, perhaps, unavoidable; for, except among the ecclesiastics, education was then scarcely known in Canada. But if Laval may be excused for putting incompetent men in office, nothing can excuse him for making men charged with gross public offences the prosecutors and judges in their own cause; and his course in doing so gives color to the assertion of Dumesnil, that he made up the council expressly to shield the accused and smother the accusation.

[Dumesnil goes further than this, for he plainly intimates that the removing from power of the company, to whom the accused were responsible, and the placing in power of a council formed of the accused themselves, was a device contrived from the first by Laval and the Jesuits, to get their friends out of trouble.]

The two persons under the heaviest charges received the two most important appointments: Bourdon, attorney-general, and Villeray, keeper of the seals. La Ferté was also one of the accused. [7] Of Villeray, the governor Argenson had written in 1059: “Some of his qualities are good enough, but confidence cannot be placed in him, on account of his instability.” [8] In the same year, he had been ordered to France, “to purge himself of sundry crimes wherewith he stands charged.” [9] He was not yet free of suspicion, having returned to Canada under an order to make up and render his accounts, which he had not yet done. Dumesnil says that he first came to the colony in 1651, as valet of the governor Lauson, who had taken him from the jail at Rochelle, where he was imprisoned for a debt of seventy-one francs, “as appears by the record of the jail of date July eleventh in that year.” From this modest beginning he became in time the richest man in Canada. [10] He was strong in orthodoxy, and an ardent supporter of the bishop and the Jesuits. He is alternately praised and blamed, according to the partisan leanings of the writer.

[7: Bourdon is charged with not having accounted for an immense quantity of beaver-skins which had passed through his hands during twelve years or more, and which are valued at more than 300,000 livres. Other charges are made against him in connection with large sums borrowed in Lauson’s time on account of the colony. In a memorial addressed to the king in council, Dumesnil says that, in 1662, Bourdon, according to his own accounts, had in his hands 37,516 livres belonging to the company, which he still retained. Villeray’s liabilities arose out of the unsettled accounts of his father-in-law, Charles Sevestre, and are set down at more than 600,000 livres. La Ferté’s are of a smaller amount. Others of the council were indirectly involved in the charges.]

[8: Lettre d’Argenson, 20 Nov., 1659.]

[9. Edit du Roy, 13 Mai, 1659.]

[10. Lettre de Colbert a Frontenac, 17 Mai, 1674.]

Bourdon, though of humble origin, was, perhaps, the most intelligent man in the council. He was chiefly known as an engineer, but he had also been a baker, a painter, a syndic of the inhabitants, chief gunner at the fort, and collector of customs for the company. Whether guilty of embezzlement or not, he was a zealous devotee, and would probably have died for his creed. Like Villeray, he was one of Laval’s stanchest supporters, while the rest of the council were also sound in doctrine and sure in allegiance.

In virtue of their new dignity, the accused now claimed exemption from accountability but this was not all. The abandonment of Canada by the company, in leaving Dumesnil without support, and depriving him of official character, had made his charges far less dangerous. Nevertheless, it was thought best to suppress them altogether, and the first act of the new government was to this end.

On the twentieth of September, the second day after the establishment of the council, Bourdon, in his character of attorney-general, rose and demanded that the papers of Jean Péronne Dumesnil should be seized and sequestered. The council consented, and, to Complete the scandal, Villeray was commissioned to make the seizure in the presence of Bourdon. To color the proceeding, it was alleged that Dumesnil had obtained certain papers unlawfully from the greffe or record office. “As he was thought,” says Gaudais, “to be a violent man.”

Bourdon and Villeray took with them ten soldiers, well armed, together with a locksmith and the secretary of the council. Thus prepared for every contingency, they set out on their errand, and appeared suddenly at Dumesnil’s house between seven and eight o’clock in the evening. “The aforesaid Sieur Dumesnil,” further says Gaudais, “did not refute the opinion entertained of his violence; for he made a great noise, shouted robbers! and tried to rouse the neighborhood, outrageously abusing the aforesaid Sieur de Villeray and the attorney-general, in great contempt of the authority of the council, which he even refused to recognize.”

They tried to silence him by threats, but without effect; upon which they seized him and held him fast in a chair; “me,” writes the wrathful Dumesnil, “who had lately been their judge.” The soldiers stood over him and stopped his mouth while the others broke open and ransacked his cabinet, drawers, and chest, from which they took all his papers, refusing to give him an inventory, or to permit any witness to enter the house. Some of these papers were private; among the rest were, he says, the charges and specifications, nearly finished, for the trial of Bourdon and Villeray, together with the proofs of their “peculations, extortions, and malversations.” The papers were enclosed under seal, and deposited in a neighboring house, whence they were afterwards removed to the council-chamber, and Dumesnil never saw them again. It may well be believed that this, the inaugural act of the new council, was not allowed to appear on its records.

[The above is drawn from the two memorials of Gaudais and of Dimesnil. They do not contradict each other as, to the essential facts.]

On the twenty-first, Villeray made a formal report of the seizure to his colleagues; upon which, “by reason of the insults, violences, and irreverences therein set forth against the aforesaid Sieur de Villeray, commissioner, as also against the authority of the council,” it was ordered that the offending Dumesnil should be put under arrest; but Gaudais, as he declares, prevented the order from being carried into effect.

Dumesnil, who says that during the scene at his house he had expected to be murdered like his son, now, though unsupported and alone, returned to the attack, demanded his papers, and was so loud in threats of complaint to the king that the council were seriously alarmed. They again decreed his arrest and imprisonment; but resolved to keep the decree secret till the morning of the day when the last of the returning ships was to sail for France. In this ship Dumesnil had taken his passage, and they proposed to arrest him unexpectedly on the point of embarkation, that he might have no time to prepare and despatch a memorial to the court. Thus a full year must elapse before his complaints could reach the minister, and seven or eight months more before a reply could be returned to Canada. During this long delay the affair would have time to cool. Dumesnil received a secret warning of this plan, and accordingly went on board another vessel, which was to sail immediately. The council caused the six cannon of the battery in the Lower Town to be pointed at her, and threatened to sink her if she left the harbor; but she disregarded them, and proceeded on her way.

On reaching France, Dumesnil contrived to draw the attention of the minister Colbert to his accusations, and to the treatment they had brought upon him. On this Colbert demanded of Gaudais, who had also returned in one of the autumn ships, why he had not reported these matters to him. Gaudais made a lame attempt to explain his silence, gave his statement of the seizure of the papers, answered in vague terms some of Dumesnil’s charges against the Canadian financiers, and said that he had nothing to do with the rest.

– The Old Regime In Canada, Chapter 7 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.

MORE INFORMATION