The White and the Gold (42 page)

O
N MARCH 18, 1664, Colbert had written to Laval in Canada: “Since the Italian affair was happily terminated to the King’s satisfaction, His Majesty has resolved to send to Canada a good regiment of infantry, at the end of this year or in the month of February next, in order to destroy the Iroquois completely; and Monsieur de Tracy has been ordered to go to confer with you on the way of succeeding promptly in this war.”

Alexandre de Prouville, Marquis de Tracy, had been appointed lieutenant general of the French dominions in the New World. It was necessary for him to go first, however, to the West Indies, where things were quite stirred up and mutinous. He arrived there in 1664 and spent the year in restoring order. Having successfully fulfilled his mission, he set out the following year on his northward journey. The Carignan-Salière regiment had been selected for service in Canada, and four companies had already arrived at Quebec when Tracy put in an appearance. The ships with the lieutenant general and his additional forces dropped anchor in the Quebec basin on June 30, 1665. As the Carignan regiment had not been assigned to New France until after Tracy’s departure, the troops he brought with him did not belong to that justly famous organization. They were made up of veterans from the regiments of Poitou, Orléans, Chambellé, and Lignières. A group of eager young noblemen had come out also, looking for adventure, glory, and perhaps quick fortunes.

On this day, therefore, the Grand Plan of the young King reached its first stage of fulfillment.

The city on the rock had never before seen so much excitement. As the representative of royalty, the marquis came ashore under a white flag with the fleur-de-lis embroidered magnificently upon it, while behind him came the colonelle (the number-one company of a regiment under the direct command of the first officer) with its special pennant. The commander was a majestic man, almost mountainous in build if the comments of beholders can be believed, carrying himself with soldierly ease in spite of his sixty-three years. He was surrounded by the aforementioned young noblemen, all of them attired in their handsomest clothes and so presenting a rare front: white wigs and coats of all colors sticking out as stiffly as the hoop skirts of women, swords protruding even farther under the tails of the coats.

The soldiers were veterans of the Turkish war, and some of them could even claim to have fought in the Fronde. Their discipline was perfect and they marched in splendid order through the Lower Town and up the steep incline to the summit; blue coats piped with white, plumed hats, buff leather bandoleers, muskets carried on slings over the shoulder, long leather boots turned back halfway of the calves. The drums were beaten furiously, the pipes screeched, the trumpets blew with a flourish which said, “Thus begins the King’s triumph and the ruin of the wicked Iroquois.”

The bells on Cathedral Square were ringing exultantly, and a procession behind Laval issued forth to bid the King’s men welcome. The Marquis de Tracy went down on the pavement on one muscular knee to receive the benediction and the holy water offered by Laval, wincing a little with the effort, for he was beginning to feel his years in such bodily use and he was sallow of face from the fevers which had entered his veins in the hot and noisome Indies. The Chevalier de Chaumont followed suit and so in turn did all the noblemen, wondering, no doubt, if colonial paving stones would be clean enough to leave their satins and velours untarnished. Twenty-four guards in royal livery stood at attention while the ceremony was performed. It was, in short, a spectacle which gave great satisfaction to all and offered to the eager inhabitants the assurance that the King’s mind would not waver nor his resolution weaken until the rejuvenation of the colony had been completed.

It is not known how the eight companies of soldiers now in Quebec were accommodated. As many as possible were quartered in the Château of St. Louis, but at best it was not a commodious building.
The inns, without a doubt, were filled to overflowing. After this was done there would still remain more than half of the rank and file to be housed, and it seems certain that they were billeted on the town. Tracy was lodged in a house which had been reserved for court sessions and was called La Senechaussée. With him were the Chevalier de Chaumont, who was captain of his guard, and most of the volunteer noblemen; with them the valets and pages and cooks without whom life would indeed have taken on the grimmest aspects of pioneering.

Until the forces were complete there could be no question of commencing military operations, anxious though everyone was to see the full might of the King employed against the Iroquois, who had held Canada in fear for so many years. The problem of maintaining order became, therefore, of the most serious concern. The town had no more than seventy private houses, and it was estimated that when all the ships had arrived there would be more than a thousand professional soldiers; a situation before which Morality had been known to shrink and hide her pallid face. That Quebec emerged from this phase without a stain (only one illegitimate child came into the world in the course of a year) is proof of the often-repeated assertion that this was a crusade and had true religious fervor behind it. Under the stern eye of the corpulent marquis the carefree veterans of many continental campaigns restrained their customary impulses. Tracy set an example of piety which clearly had its effect. Marie de l’Incarnation wrote happily in one of her revealing epistles that he had been known to remain six hours at his devotions. The chief concern seems to have been the religious beliefs of the troops, some of whom were discovered to be Huguenots. There was immediate pressure to convert them.

Eight more companies arrived in August. At the same time came ships filled with settlers and mechanics and girls of marriageable age to provide wives for those who lacked them. Ships came also with livestock and all manner of supplies. If the town on the rock, which had been so long neglected and had remained so patient, had seemed crowded before, it was now a madhouse, a hurly-burly of excitement and confusion.

Two more companies were expected, and anxiety grew as week followed week with no glimpse of new sails in the estuary. It was known that a new governor was with them, Daniel de Rémy, Sieur de Courcelle, and another official named Talon, who was to fill a new
post known as the intendant. It may be taken for granted that there was much speculation about the new governor and comparatively little interest in the other man; a division of speculation which would be reversed later, for Courcelle was just one more in the long succession of more or less futile governors, and Jean Talon was to breathe a new kind of life into the colony and to impress himself indelibly on the pages of its history.

It was not until September that the tardy ships arrived after having been one hundred and seventeen days at sea. Courcelle and Talon landed and were greeted with suitable pomp. After them tottered ashore a very sick lot of soldiers. It had been a hideous as well as an interminable voyage. The ships had been constantly buffeted by storms, with the result that the private soldiers had been compelled to remain in the malodorous holds and had suffered beyond description. Scurvy had attacked them as well as the customary diseases. Twenty of them died almost as soon as they set foot on shore, and there were one hundred and thirty so ill that they had to be put in hospital. The Hôtel-Dieu was not prepared for a test of this magnitude. The attendants worked so hard that many of the nuns were reduced to the point of death. Most of the sick soldiers had to be bedded in churches and in such of the houses as were not filled to the eaves already.

The situation in the meantime was becoming clarified with the Five Nations. Missions had been established in the Iroquois country and were making progress. Some of the tribes were manifesting what seemed a sincere desire for permanent peace. When the word spread down through the woods and along the rivers and lakes that soldiers were arriving in Quebec in numbers like the sands of the sea (the Iroquois being much addicted to metaphor) and that they marched together like one man and the sound of their musketry was louder than thunder, a peace party was organized by three of the five nations to go to Quebec at once. The three concerned were the Onondagas, the Cayugas, and the Senecas. The embassy was headed by Chief Garakontie, who had been converted by the Jesuits and was anxious for an understanding. The envoys saw the soldiers marching in the streets, they counted the muskets, and their thirst for peace became deeper.

There were no delegates, however, from the bitterly antagonistic and contumacious Mohawks. It was understood, therefore, that the Mohawks would be the first to feel the blow when the vials of the royal wrath were finally uncorked.

To appreciate what the King was doing for Canada it is necessary to understand the importance of the Carignan regiment.

The Thirty Years’ War had plunged Europe into a period of intense militarism. Men of adventurous spirit turned more readily to soldiering than ever before, making it possible for governments to organize large professional armies. No longer were unwilling and badly trained levies from the farms and the towns sent into battle; instead the armies which fought back and forth over middle Europe were well paid, well armed, well trained. War had become almost a sporting contest, a sanguinary game of chess between old men who sat in chancelleries and plotted new alliances.

It happened that the seemingly endless religious war which had converted all of Germany into a shambles produced a coterie of brilliant generals: Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, Wallenstein, Turenne, Condé, Pappenheim, Tilly. The genius of the generals was the lodestar which attracted men to the profession of arms. It was at this stage that the tradition of French supremacy in generalship was born, largely on the exploits of the skilled Turenne and the dashing, headstrong Condé. Later it would be jolted badly by the victories of England’s great Marlborough, but it would survive even that shock.

A strange development of the period was the method often followed of recruiting armies. That brilliant and strange leader, Wallenstein, raised armies on the Catholic side of the argument; he trained and equipped them at his own expense and then offered himself and his forces to the Holy Roman Emperor. In France individual noblemen of great wealth followed the Wallenstein example by recruiting regiments, which sometimes bore their names, and offering them to the King as a gift. It was in this way that the Carignan regiment came into existence.

It was raised in 1644, the year after Condé’s tremendous victory at Rocroi, by Thomas François de Savoie, Prince of Carignan. It consisted of ten companies of one hundred men each, and it is said that most of the “rankers” were men of exceptional physique and boldness of spirit. It was, at any rate, a picked lot who marched under the flag of Savoie when the regiment was offered to the French King, or rather to the Queen Regent and Cardinal Richelieu,
for Louis at this time had not graduated entirely from wooden blocks and toy soldiers. The civil wars known as the Fronde were dividing France, and the Carignan regiment was nothing short of a godsend to the harassed cardinal. It marched under Turenne to Etampes and took part in the fighting around that ancient city, and it fought also in the suburb of St. Antoine, where it covered itself with glory. It seems to have created for itself a legend of invincibility. To belong to such a dashing body was deemed an honor.

After the Thirty Years’ War was brought finally and officially to an end by the Treaty of the Pyrenees, the Savoie family could no longer support such a costly luxury and gave the regiment to Louis XIV. There seem to have been some strings to the gift, however, for the head princes of Savoie always took a proprietary interest in it, which extended even to those remnants which returned to France after the Canadian adventure.

In 1657 the regiment was combined with one which had been organized by a bold soldier of fortune named Balthazar, who came from Transylvania but had joined the French Army. He was noted for his horsemanship and rode a black stallion which became almost as famous as its master under the name of Demi-Diable (Half-Devil). The Carignan veterans remained under the command of their own officers, but the regiment became known at this juncture as Carignan-Balthazar. Whether that bizarre soldier was still in command when the regiment was sent to help the Austrians against the Turks is not made clear in the records, but it is told to the credit of the veterans that they fought brilliantly on the banks of the Raab and were praised for the trouncing given the Turkish Grand Vizier Achmet Kapruli.

When the Turkish campaigning was over and the troops were back in France, King Louis was making his arrangements for the carrying out of his Grand Plan, and his eyes fixed themselves on the Carignan. By this time the Savoie family was thoroughly out of conceit with the idea of continuing the financial drain and Colbert was pressing the King to economize on the army and put the money into strengthening the French fleet, which, as always, was being neglected in favor of the land forces. There seemed no sense, certainly, in allowing such a splendidly trained outfit to rust in garrisons, so the King decided to reorganize the regiment and send it out to Canada under Henri de Chapelas, Sieur de Salières. The veterans were given the option of dropping out or re-enlisting under the
Salières command. The latter had been first captain as long as the dashing Balthazar remained in command, but now he was gazetted colonel and the name of the regiment was changed to Carignan-Salière.