Charles II died in 1685 and the scene at his deathbed encouraged in England suspicions of Catholic policy and in France hope that this policy was near its climax of success.Though indolent and dissolute, Charles yet possessed striking mental capacity and insight.He knew well that to preserve his throne he must remain outwardly a Protestant and must also respect the liberties of the English nation.He cherished, however, the Roman Catholic faith and the despotic ideals of his Bourbon mother.On his deathbed he avowed his real belief.With great precautions for secrecy, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church and comforted with the consolations which it offers to the dying.While this secret was suspected by the English people, one further fact was perfectly clear.Their new King, James II, was a zealous Roman Catholic, who would use all his influence to bring England back to the Roman communion.Suspicion of the King's designs soon became certainty and, after four years of bitter conflict with James, the inevitable happened.The Roman Catholic Stuart King was driven from his throne and his daughter Mary and her Protestant husband, William of Orange, became the sovereigns of England by choice of the English Parliament.Again had the struggle between Roman Catholic and Protestant brought revolution in England, and the politics of Europe dominated America.The revolution in London was followed by revolution in Boston and New York.The authority of James II was repudiated.His chief agent in New England, Sir Edmund Andros, was seized and imprisoned, and William and Mary reigned over the English colonies in America as they reigned over the motherland.
To the loyal Catholics of France the English, who had driven out a Catholic king and dethroned an ancient line, were guilty of the double sin of heresy and of treason.To the Jesuit enthusiast in Canada not only were they infidel devils in human shape upon whose plans must rest the curse of God; they were also rebels, republican successors of the accursed Cromwell, who had sent an anointed king to the block.It would be a holy thing to destroy this lawless power which ruled from London.The Puritans of Boston were, in turn, not less convinced that theirs was the cause of God, and that Satan, enthroned in the French dominance at Quebec, must soon fall.The smaller the pit the fiercer the rats.Passions raged in the petty colonial capitals more bitterly than even in London and Paris.This intensity of religious differences embittered the struggle for the mastery of the new continent.
The English colonies had twenty white men to one in Canada.Yet Canada was long able to wage war on something like equal terms.
She had the supreme advantage of a single control.There was no trouble at Quebec about getting a reluctant legislature to vote money for war purposes.No semblance of an elected legislature existed and the money for war came not from the Canadians, but from the capacious, if now usually depleted, coffers of the French court at Versailles.In the English colonies the legislatures preferred, of all political struggles, one about money with the Governor, the representative of the King.At least one of the English colonies, Pennsylvania, believing that evil is best conquered by non-resistance, was resolutely against war for any reason, good or bad.Other colonies often raised the more sordid objection that they were too poor to help in war.The colonial legislatures, indeed, with their eternal demand for the privileges and rights which the British House of Commons had won in the long centuries of its history, constitute the most striking of all the contrasts with Canada.In them were always the sparks of an independent temper.The English diarist, Evelyn, wrote, in 1671, that New England was in "a peevish and touchy humour." Colonists who go out to found a new state will always demand rights like those which they have enjoyed at home.It was unthinkable that men of Boston, who, themselves, or whose party in England, had fought against a despotic king, had sent him to the block and driven his son from the throne, would be content with anything short of controlling the taxes which they paid, making the laws which they obeyed, and carrying on their affairs in their own way.When obliged to accept a governor from England, they were resolved as far as possible to remain his paymaster.In a majority of the colonies they insisted that the salary of the Governor should be voted each year by their representatives, in order that they might be able always to use against him the cogent logic of financial need.On questions of this kind Quebec had nothing to say.To the King in France and to him alone went all demands for pay and honors.If, in such things, the people of Canada had no remote voice, they were still as well off as Frenchmen in France.New England was a copy of Old England and New France a copy of Old France.There was, as yet, no "peevish and touchy humour" at either Quebec or Versailles in respect to political rights.
