A Fleeting Empire takes a hard look at a subject that usually gets but fleeting attention — the short-lived British takeover of New France from 1629 to 1632. The capture of Quebec by the Kirke brothers, privateers acting for Britain, is generally treated as a colourful footnote in Canadian history. In that event, Samuel de Champlain, the Jesuit missionaries, and most of the French colonists were taken prisoner and shipped to France; three years later, Champlain and company were back in the New World, picking up their lives as if the 1629 fall of Quebec was just a rude interruption.
Few have looked closely at what was behind this episode. Andrew D. Nicholls, a Buffalo State College history professor, decided to follow his own curiosity to fill in the gaps. He looked at seemingly unrelated events and people, and found that they were in fact different players in the same story, which was one of courtly intrigue, ambition, and hoped-for riches.
The Kirke brothers’ activities in Quebec took place the same year two other events unfolded — Scottish noblemen planted settlements in both Port Royal, Nova Scotia, and Baleine, Cape Breton. All three ventures were backed by Charles I, the young and often reckless British king who was then engaged in hostilities with France as part of the Thirty Years War.
Nicholls traces the relationships between Charles, the Kirkes, Sir William Alexander of Menstrie (whose son led the Port Royal colony), and James Stewart of Killeith, fourth lord of Ochiltree (who led the very short-lived Cape Breton colony).
He has done a masterful job of connecting the dots, showing how X relates to Y. His premise is that the events of 1629 deserve a larger place in the Canadian historical narrative. However, explaining it all is a complex matter, which makes the book difficult to digest, especially for a general reader not already deeply familiar with this historical interlude.
The story gets rather complicated — the French-born Kirke brothers’ actions as English privateers harassing the French in the St. Lawrence conflicted with Alexander’s Scottish claims to that region. To resolve that problem, Charles — who was king of both England and Scotland — backed a new Anglo-Scottish partnership known as the Merchant Adventurers to Canada, which included the Kirkes, Alexander, and Ochiltree.
The king gave the partners a monopoly on trading rights in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and St. Lawrence River, plus authority to expel the French. This partnership was a strategy by Charles to win gains over the French in the New World, since he did not have the military might or the money to defeat France on his side of the Atlantic.
But the dramatic victory of the Kirkes, and the very limited successes of Alexander and Ochiltree — half of the Port Royal colonists died of illness the first winter — were all for naught in the end. The Merchant Adventurers’ ships had barely put to sea in 1629 when Charles made peace with France.
Charles’ motivation for making peace had much to do with obtaining a significant wedding dowry owed to him by the French king. To get his hands on the 400,000 French crowns, Charles had to return all the newly won territory to the French. If not for the dowry of Queen Henrietta Maria, the history of Canada might look very different today.
— Nelle Oosterom (Read bio)
Nelle Oosterom is the Senior Editor of Canada's History magazine.