The John A. Macdonald Retrospective 2-Book Bundle. Ged Martin

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СКАЧАТЬ to London to cover the talks, after serving a prison sentence in Ottawa for punching a politician. Since the delegates had agreed on complete secrecy, he relied on oblique briefings from Langevin. Gérin was not a reliable witness, and he likely exaggerated rumours of a brief row over marriage policy. The story surfaced again in 1886, after the hanging of Louis Riel. This time there was just one villain, who had allegedly conducted an insidious campaign to re-write the scheme. The slander still echoes: John A. Macdonald, the devious enemy of French Canada, allegedly plotted to twist Canada’s constitution into a centralizing document that would destroy Quebec. The evidence proves this to be nonsense. Five drafts of the proposed constitution written between Christmas 1866 and February 9, 1867 survive. All are based on the London Resolutions, and there is no trace of the extensive restructuring required to impose centralized control.

      These documents formed the basis for tense negotiations between the delegates and the British. Whitehall deputy minister Frederic Rogers, who had wanted Macdonald to dry out in Canada, now hailed him as “the ruling genius and spokesman” among the visitors. “I was very greatly struck by his power of management and adroitness.” The French Canadians and the Maritimers were on guard against any damaging concession, “as eager dogs watch a rat hole,” Rogers thought. Macdonald argued controversial points “with cool, ready fluency,” determined to avoid “the slightest divergence from the narrow line already agreed” by his colleagues; “every word was measured … while he was making for a point ahead, he was never for a moment unconscious of any of the rocks among which he had to steer.” The British had found their strong man to lead the new Canada, but they did not tear up the agreed Confederation blueprint, nor did he ask them to do so.

      Indeed, the British vetoed one of Macdonald’s most fervent wishes, that the Confederation should be styled the “Kingdom of Canada.” Fearful of upsetting the Americans, they preferred the term “Dominion.” “A great opportunity was lost,” Macdonald complained two decades later, but perhaps he won one minor victory in the naming stakes. British officials had assumed that Lower Canada would resume its historic name, Quebec, inferring from this that Upper Canada would become the province of Toronto. Macdonald’s Kingston voters resented the upstart rival city, and he probably chose the unexpected name of “Ontario” for the revived province.

      The finalized bill was introduced into Westminster on February 19 and passed into law, as the British North America Act, on March 29. The new Dominion would be launched on July 1, 1867. To Macdonald’s admirers, he was “the artificer in chief,” the vital craftsman without whom Confederation could not have happened. Others resented his primacy. Cartier had run huge risks managing “the fears, prejudices and jealousies of a proud and sensitive population” to bring French Canada into Confederation. Alexander Mackenzie, Canada’s second prime minister, gave the credit for securing Upper Canadian support to his idol, George Brown. Just as John A. Macdonald had hijacked the clergy reserves issue, so he stole Confederation too. “Having no great work of his own to boast about, he bravely plucks the laurel from the brows of the actual combatants and real victors, and fastens it on his own head.” This was unfair: Macdonald believed in Confederation, even if he was not starry-eyed about the challenge of joining Canada to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, with their small populations and sluggish economies. When a supporter rejoiced that Confederation would free Upper Canadians from the “financial millstone” of French Canada, Macdonald sharply retorted: “Do you think you will be better off with three mill-stones around your neck instead of one?”

      As leader of the British North American delegations creating a new nation, John A. Macdonald was working “from morning till night” in London through the winter of 1866–67. Yet, intriguingly, he also managed to get married. People fall in love at the most unexpected moments in life, so maybe there is no mystery about a widower of fifty-two finding himself suddenly swept away by a young woman twenty-two years his junior. Somehow he found time, during one of the busiest periods of his life, to woo Miss Agnes Bernard, and hurry her to the altar. According to a well-informed early biographer, Macdonald proposed shortly before Christmas, but he mentioned no engagement when he wrote to his sister Louisa on December 27. Agnes probably accepted him early in January, and she became Mrs. John A. Macdonald on February 16, 1867.

      Reared among Jamaica’s privileged white minority, Agnes Bernard had come to Canada at seventeen. In 1858, her brother Hewitt became Macdonald’s private secretary, and Agnes accompanied him, first to Toronto and then to Quebec City. Nicknamed “Pug,” she was “clever, accomplished, and handsome” — but nobody called this rigidly serious young woman pretty. Agnes was a political groupie, sometimes following Assembly debates from the gallery: when she married, Gowan concluded that “the voice of the Chamber has indeed beguiled her.” Macdonald had met her, but he kept a certain social distance from his secretary. In 1865, Agnes and her mother moved to England. Macdonald encountered them taking a stroll in London’s West End one evening late in 1866. Since Hewitt Bernard was the conference secretary, their paths would probably have crossed anyway.

      During his nine years as a widower, there had been rumours that John A. Macdonald would marry again, but he preferred the solitary life that had characterized much of his first marriage anyway. He felt crowded when a male relative visited him in Quebec in 1861. “I am now so much accustomed to live alone, that it frets me to have a person always in the same house with me.” He may not have been entirely celibate. “We speak not of Mr. Macdonald’s private life,” the Globe had thundered with menacing hint as it denounced his drunkenness in 1866. The next year, an eccentric opponent listed adultery among his many sins. Yet, suddenly, he was married.

      John A. Macdonald’s second wife, Agnes Bernard, married him in 1867. “She had a good deal to put up with.”

       Courtesy of Topley Studio Fonds/Library and Archives Canada/PA-025366.

      Late on December 11, 1866, a grey winter day, the delegates had returned to London after visiting Lord Carnarvon’s country mansion (“one of the swellest places in England,” Macdonald called it). To keep warm in his hotel room, Macdonald donned two nightshirts and then, as was his habit, he propped himself up in bed to read a newspaper. Tired from travel, he nodded off, dropping the paper on to a bedside candle. He was “awakened by intense heat” to find his bed on fire. “I didn’t lose my presence of mind,” he boasted. After emptying his water jug on to the flames, he ripped open the singed pillows, “poured an avalanche of feathers on the blazing mass, & then stamped out the fire with my hands & feet.” Fearful that his mattress might still be smouldering, he roused Cartier and Galt from their adjoining bedrooms, and they brought their water jugs to soak his bed. Only then did he realize he was badly burned. Macdonald “very nearly lost his life,” wrote Galt, and the victim agreed, “my escape was miraculous.”

      Significantly, the three decided to keep quiet about the episode. However, despite Macdonald’s attempt to shrug off his injuries, he was confined to the hotel on doctor’s orders, celebrating Christmas Day with tea and toast when its catering facilities shut down. There was no suggestion that he had been drunk, but when a man with a notorious alcohol problem catches fire in bed, speculation is obvious. If John A. Macdonald aimed to become Canada’s first prime minister, he needed a twenty-four hour guard — and that meant finding a wife, fast.

      Hewitt Bernard was appalled to learn that his boss aimed to become his brother-in-law. To his credit, he put his loyalty to Agnes first, claiming later that “he did everything he could to dissuade his sister from the marriage.” Macdonald assured Bernard that “there could only be one objection; and he had promised reformation in that respect.” Here was a dangerous ambiguity: was Macdonald taking a wife to fight his alcohol problem, or giving up drink to get married? Agnes was thirty, the age when cruel chauvinism branded a single woman a failure in the marriage stakes. A strong believer in duty, she knew that she was taking on not just a husband but a job. In a stilted and sporadic diary that she later kept in Ottawa, she called herself “a great Premier’s wife.”

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