The History of Emily Montague is set at a very particular time in Canadian history. Colonel Rivers’s opening letter is dated April 10, 1766, just three years after the Treaty of Paris ended the Seven Years’ War and two years after the Quebec Act allowed Roman Catholics to again participate in the civil government of the province and restored the French civil law for private matters. Into this setting Rivers has come, along with his correspondents, to colonize the colony.
Rivers’s early letters especially provide much information on the two different colonized peoples: the Native Americans and the French Canadians. His understanding grows with the time he spends in the country, with him first telling his sister, Miss Rivers, back in England:
I have just had time to observe, that the Canadian ladies have the vivacity of the French, with a superior share of beauty: as to balls and assemblies, we have none at present, it being a kind of interregnum of government: if I chose to give you the political state of the country, I could fill volumes with the pours and the contres; but I am not one of those sagacious observers, who, by staying a week in a place, think themselves qualified to give, not only its natural, but its moral and political history, besides which, you and I are rather too young to be very profound politicians.
But soon he is able to express firm opinions on the problems of the colony. He disapproves of the seigneurs, the power and draw of the Catholic church, and the laziness of the farmers and soldiers.
He also spends quite a bit of time comparing Canadian women to French women; they have much in common, compared to English women at least. In this way the English prejudices against the French are brought relatively intact across the Atlantic: the French women are good-looking, flirtatious, capricious, unserious. They are good for, say, John Temple to fool around with on the continent, but not so much for marrying.
Rivers also gives excellent travel-narrative-type description of the scene, interspersed with his own liberal opinions, of course:
On approaching the coast of America, I felt a kind of religious veneration, on seeing rocks which almost touch’d the clouds, cover’d with tall groves of pines that seemed coeval with the world itself: to which veneration the solumn silence not a little contributed; from Cap Rosières, up the river St Lawrence, during a course of more than two hundred miles, there is not the least appearance of a human foot-step; no objects meet the eye but mountains, woods, and numerous rivers, which seem to roll their waters in vain.
It is impossible to behold a scene like this without lamenting the madness of mankind, who, more merciless than the fierce inhabitants of the howling wilderness, destroy millions of their own species in the wild contention for a little portion of that earth, the far greater part of which remains yet unpossest, and courts the hand of labour for cultivation.
The river itself is one of the noblest in the world; its breadth is ninety miles at its entrance, gradually, and almost imperceptibly, decreasing; interspers’d with islands which give it a variety infinitely pleasing, and navigable near five hundred miles from the sea.
Nothing can be more striking than the view of Quebec as you approach; it stands on the summit of a boldly-rising hill, at the confluence of two very beautiful rivers, the St Lawrence and St Charles….
Bell Fermor also gives lovely descriptions of the scenery, especially the waterfall at Montmorenci, a favorite beauty spot of the group. And they are all quick to write of the Quebec winter once it begins to set in. Just like today, the ladies wrap themselves in furs and hardly hesitate to go out even in the bitter cold—although in 1766–67 they had the amazing privilege of taking sledges out on the frozen St Lawrence, the fastest and safest way to travel during that season, even as far as between Quebec City and Montreal.
Unsurprisingly, another prejudice that’s crossed the Atlantic with the English colonists is an anti-Catholic one. At first, in fact, it seems like Frances Brooke is awfully hard on religion in general, speaking negatively through Rivers of “superstition” here and there. He has a real hatred of the convents so prevalent in Quebec, and “cannot help being fir’d with a degree of zeal against an institution equally incompatible with public good, and private happiness; an institution which cruelly devotes beauty and innocence to slavery, regret, and wretchedness; to a more irksome imprisonment than the severest laws inflict on the worst of criminals.” He asks his sister:
Could any thing but experience, my dear Lucy, make it be believ’d possible that there should be rational beings, who think they are serving the God of mercy by inflicting on themselves voluntary tortures, and cutting themselves off from that state of society in which he has plac’d them, and for which they were form’d?
Brooke is, however, a minister’s wife herself, so we shouldn’t expect too much of her. But she is a bit gratuitously self-serving in the voice of Bell Fermor, again writing to Miss Rivers:
I have been making the tour of the three religions this morning, and, as I am the most constant creature breathing; am come back only a thousand times more pleased with my own. I have been at mass, at church, and at the presbyterian meeting: an idea struck me at the last, in regard to the drapery of them all; that the Romish religion is like an over-dressed, tawdry, rich citizen’s wife; the presbyterian like a rude aukward country girl; the church of England like an elegant well-dressed woman of quality, “plain in her neatness” (to quote Horace, who is my favorite author). There is a noble, graceful simplicity both in the worship and the ceremonies of the church of England, which, even if I were a stranger to her doctrines, would prejudice me strongly in her favour.
Sure, Bell, I believe that.
What’s really new, though, about anti-Catholic bigotry in an English novel? In fact, I find it rather different here than usual, and couched largely in the medium of double-colonization. The French have been in Canada trying to make Catholics out of the natives (among other things), and the English, in a very Protestant work ethic sort of way, find Catholicism detrimental to the success of what is now their own colony.
The only letter-writer in The History of Emily Montague not of courting-and-marrying age is Bell Fermor’s father, William, who writes to an Earl back in England about the political and especially religious state of the colony with great interest. Fermor complains about the sloth and idleness of the Canadian peasantry, encouraged by the numerous religious festivals they celebrate, and also by the fact that monasteries and convents effectively steal people from the productive sector of the economy and, further, help prevent the productive sector’s multiplication through reproduction. He believes they will soon find enlightenment:
However religious prejudice may have been suffered to counter-work policy under a French government, it is scarce to be doubted that this cause of the poverty of Canada will by degrees be removed; that these people, slaves at present to ignorance and superstition, will in time be enlightened by a more liberal education, and gently led by reason to a religion which is not only preferable, as being that of the country to which they are now annexed, but which is so much more calculated to make them happy and prosperous as a people.
But in the meantime encourages tolerance as “equally just, humane, and wise.” However, Fermor vehemently believes that a single national religion will prove important to the cohesion of the colony, and that religions are in some way suited to particular types of civil government: “the Romish religion is best adapted to a despotic government, the presbyterian to a republican, and that of the church of England to a limited monarchy like ours.”
I don’t want to ascribe motives to Brooke that are purer than the certainly prejudiced ones she possessed, but when it comes to Rivers and Fermor and their thoughts about the Catholic peasantry kept down by the Church, I can’t help but think of the subsequent history of the province. The Church, which under the French had been subordinate to the state, actually gained power after that period so that by the nineteenth century the tithe was legally enforced and the Church completely controlled education in the province. The Church was important in the press, labor unions…virtually every aspect of social life in Quebec. The Quiet Revolution of the 1960s would finally put an end to the general picture, and it would turn out that disunity of religion wasn’t the only thing threatening Canada. The rapid and profound secularization of the province might have assuaged some of William Fermor’s fears, but linguistic differences and nationalism hardly subsided.
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