The John A. Macdonald Retrospective 2-Book Bundle. Ged Martin
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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.”
The wedding took place at very short notice. Macdonald claimed that the ceremony was hurried on so that Agnes could be presented to Queen Victoria, but it is equally likely that he needed to demonstrate possession of a wife to become Canada’s first prime minister. The fashionable church of St George’s, Hanover Square, was packed with friends of Canada: three of the four bridesmaids were delegates’ daughters, giving the marriage the flavour of a dynastic alliance. As the couple took their vows, “a bright ray of sunshine fell through the fine old stained glass windows,” lighting the scene in a happy omen. At the wedding breakfast, the bridegroom delivered a “brilliant speech,” playing on the joke that he was applying the political principle of uniting the provinces to his domestic life — “Confederation, under a female sovereign.” The couple’s health was toasted by elder statesman Francis Hincks. Twelve years earlier, Macdonald had denounced him as “steeped to the lips in corruption.” Now Hincks presented Agnes with a valuable diamond and pearl bracelet. The couple headed for a two-day honeymoon in Oxford: Macdonald was needed in London when the Confederation legislation came before Parliament.
The newlyweds were “kept in England by some Canadian business,” which included a special audience with Queen Victoria, who praised the loyalty of her transatlantic subjects and the “very important measure” of Confederation. The prime minister-designate formally replied that Canadians had declared “in the most solemn & emphatic manner our resolve to be under the sovereignty of Your Majesty and your family forever.” It was early May before the couple returned to Ottawa. On his first Monday back at work, Macdonald held a celebration luncheon. An Ottawa diarist was “very much disturbed” to learn that “John A. was carried out of the lunch room ... hopelessly drunk.” “What a prospect Mrs. John A. has before her!”
5
1867–1872
Gristle into Bone
“Except Macdonald, I know none of the Delegates who really think enough of the future,” wrote Alexander Galt from London, adding that even Macdonald believed that the “immediate task is to complete the Union, leaving the rest to be solved by time.” Lord Monck had commissioned Macdonald to form the first ministry, enabling him, as his friend Gowan urged, “to give a fair start to the new Dominion.” Macdonald had claimed in 1866 that “a great party is arising of moderate men,” soaring above “the petty politics of past days … to join together for the good of the future of Canada.” Unfortunately, the formation of the first Dominion Cabinet disproved this noble vision.
Macdonald nearly failed to shoehorn claimants and interest groups into the thirteen available Cabinet places. The Maritime premiers, Tupper and Tilley, each selected a colleague to fill the region’s four seats. Tough bargaining allocated five ministers to Ontario against Quebec’s four. Since the Conservatives were weak in Ontario, Macdonald reappointed all three Great Coalition Reformers. He also retained the courteous and bilingual Alexander Campbell to run the Senate. Campbell represented the Tory wing of the party: the prime minister was the only Macdonald Conservative in the Cabinet. His biggest headache lay in the political arithmetic of Quebec. Naturally, French Canadians claimed three of the four seats — leaving one ministry for the anglophone minority. D’Arcy McGee demanded the place on behalf of the Dominion’s Irish Catholics, but his appointment would have excluded Quebec’s Protestant community, whose spokesman, Galt, also represented Montreal finance. Macdonald confronted the impasse “in a constant state of partial intoxication,” said Galt, and threatened to abandon his commission. The logjam was broken by Tupper, who persuaded McGee they should both stand down, freeing the thirteenth place for a Nova Scotian Irish Catholic. The Halifax merchant, Edward “Papa” Kenny, was surprised to receive the summons to Ottawa. To prevent the Grits from controlling the new province of Ontario, John A. Macdonald tried a new twist on an old triangular rivalry. To block