I do so like to identify myself with all my husband’s pursuits and occupations.… I would soon fall out of his life if I went my own ways.
Lady Macdonald, in her diary, July 7, 1867
Of all Canada’s leaders, Macdonald was the most gregarious. His friends ranged from British lords who welcomed him into their country houses to an Ottawa hansom-cab driver who insisted on transporting him to and from the Parliament Buildings free of charge during his years out of power. He was also the most solitary leader. His first wife, Isabella, succumbed to illness and became bed-ridden and an opium dependent for most of the fourteen years of their marriage. He lived very much on his own when at home with Isabella, often eating by himself in their darkened, silent house. After her death in 1857, he lived alone for another decade, frequently in boarding houses in one of the three cities where the rotating capital was located.
During this time, his family circle narrowed: his father was the first to die, and then his mother, the person he was closest to his whole life. He moved away from Kingston, and so from his two sisters, Louisa and Margaret. His surviving son, Hugh John, lived with Margaret and steadily grew away from him. Macdonald had many friends, and many colleagues and cronies, but he had no partner. He had no one to care for him who loved him unreservedly.
The first entry, on July 5, 1867, in Lady Macdonald’s diary—the only one known to have been kept by a prime ministerial spouse. (photo credit 2.1)
Suddenly, in London, on February 16, 1867, towards the end of the final negotiations on the new constitution, he married Susan Agnes Bernard. The marriage was almost entirely a union of convenience. He, as prime minister, needed a hostess and housekeeper. She, at thirty-one, and neither a beauty nor the possessor of a substantial dowry, ignored warnings by her brother, Hewitt, about Macdonald’s drinking and accepted his offer, which promised to save her from a life without husband, home and children.
Rather to her surprise, Agnes fell totally and delightedly in love with John A. “I often look in astonishment at him,” she wrote early on in her diary.* “He is so wise.” Effortlessly, Macdonald became the focus of her life. “He comes in with a very moody brow,” she wrote, “tired and oppressed, his voice weak, his step slow, and ten minutes after he is making clever jokes and laughing like a schoolboy with his hands in his pockets and his head thrown back.” Another day she added, “I think he likes me to be near him; he is so equable and good-natured that being near him is always refreshing.”
Agnes’s role in Macdonald’s life was far greater than she ever gave herself credit for. E.B. Biggar, the prime minister’s first capable biographer, speculated that the heavy-drinking Macdonald would not have lived ten years beyond Confederation but for her. By tempering his habit and by caring for him, Agnes enabled him to live for a quarter-century after July 1, 1867. She thus won for him the crucial extra time he needed to complete the Canadian Pacific Railway, which turned Canada into a nation reaching from sea to sea and so ended the risk that the West might, in one way or another, become part of the United States. In her own way, Lady Macdonald can be ranked beside George Brown’s wife, Anne, as a Mother of Confederation.
All the early biographers portrayed Agnes Macdonald as a paragon of Victorian virtue—the Angel of the House. Later commentators have been less kind. One governor general’s wife described her as ruling Ottawa society with “a rod of iron,” while John Thompson, a senior cabinet minister and Canada’s fifth prime minister, called her “a mole-catcher of a wife” and described Macdonald’s home life as “tormenting.” Over the years, the prevailing image of Agnes hardened into that of a battle-axe with a passion for making moralistic judgments. This assessment seems to be justified: when a cabinet minister committed the outrageous offence of marrying a divorced woman, Macdonald’s relaxed response was to quote the maxim “Beneath the belt, there is no wisdom,”* but Agnes exiled the couple from Ottawa society. Louise Reynolds’s excellent biography, Agnes, was far more sympathetic, but she still noted Agnes’s “bleak piety.”
There were, in fact, two Agneses—as historians Donald Creighton and Sandra Fraser Gwyn have noted. To distinguish them, it’s useful to call one “Agnes” and the other “Lady Macdonald.” They had commonalities, of course: neither was considered pretty, whether the slim, statuesque figure of 1867 or the more matronly form of later years. Both were deeply religious, and neither had a sense of humour. Still, Agnes possessed a genuine sense of fun, delighting in physical abandon—as when she rode the train’s cow-catcher through the Rockies. Lady Macdonald fretted about social proprieties and stood on her dignity. Agnes felt free to sit on the stone steps leading up the Centre Block, reading a book until her husband left for the day. She was awed that, after so many years as “an insignificant spinster,” she had “found something worth living for—living in—my husband’s heart and love.”* Lady Macdonald was no less pleased, but even early on was unafraid to “tease the life out of him by talking of dress and compliments when he comes home.”
Lady Macdonald, just after Confederation: young, slim and delighted she had “found something worth living for—living in—my husband’s heart and love.” (photo credit 2.2)
Agnes was plucky, gregarious and at times a perceptive observer. When she first saw Macdonald, in 1858 in the old legislature, she was struck by his “forcible yet changeable face, with such a mixture of strength and vivacity,” and went on to describe his “bushy, dark peculiar hair as he leaned on his elbows and looked down.” In many respects, Agnes operated shrewdly, improving her French by taking lessons from the Grey Nuns and helping Macdonald by talking to francophone MPs in their own tongue. (In her diary, though, she noted crossly, “The French seem always wanting everything, and they get everything.”) She studied politics by noting what he did, watching intently “the results of his marvellous skill in the diplomatic line—all of this helped to weary & yet excite me, a Novice in this kind of life.” She understood that doing nothing was sometimes the best thing: “As long as I can help him by being cheery & smiling, I am quite satisfied,” she wrote. She took note of the crowd of supplicants waiting for hours outside the prime minister’s office: “I try to be patient with them, for does it not concern their daily bread?” She and he learned sign language so that, as she sat in the Common’s gallery and he at his desk below, they could exchange secret messages. “I do so like to identify myself with all my husband’s pursuits and occupations,” she noted astutely. “He is so busy and so much older than I that I would soon fall out of his life if I went my own ways.”
Agnes, though, was cursed by a lack of social self-confidence, gaining it only after she had fully assumed her “Lady Macdonald” character. Her day job was to be Macdonald’s hostess and chatelaine, but she lacked any of the light touches that give social occasions spirit and vitality. She possessed none of the silky assurance of Charlotte Rose, the wife of Macdonald’s finance minister and close friend, John Rose. “She is so clever but her stories savour of such worldliness that I fear she is dangerous,” Agnes observed sourly.* When the Roses moved to London in 1869, she wrote in relief, “I think I feared her cosy yet cutting smile.” More intimidating still was the beautiful, flirtatious, impeccably gowned Lucianne Desbarats, the wife of the Queen’s printer, who in her diary dismissed one of Lady Macdonald’s social events as “boring. No dancing.”
Even when there was no competition to unnerve her, Agnes remained conscious of her own clumsiness. “I pour tea very untidily,” she wrote sadly of her “kettle-drums” or small tea parties. “Tea and games for supper, but it was very stupid. I could do nothing to promote gaiety.” No one intimidated her more on such occasions than Macdonald himself: “He was charming, and we could never have done without him.” On another occasion, her party had just begun when he was called away on some cabinet crisis. She wrote afterwards, “I never enjoy myself much when he does not assist, and his pleasant easy manner makes all go well.” It’s not easy being married to a Pied Piper when tuneless oneself.
Predictably, it came to be assumed that Agnes’s personal inclinations on public matters could influence her husband. His first biographer, J.E. Collins, wrote that Macdonald, “it is whispered, is in the habit of consulting her when he is about to take some important step.” In fact, on decisions about matters of state, Macdonald did exactly as he wished. There’s a tone of almost girlish delight in Agnes’s diary entry about her inability to advance the cause of a petitioner for a post: she did all she could, she noted, but, “as is usual for him on these occasions, [he] looked very benign, very gracious, very pleasant—but answered not one word! He never does.”
Agnes’s second personality, as Lady Macdonald, would not appear in its full imperious aspect for a decade; after 1878, she did indeed rule Ottawa society with “a rod of iron.” The contrasting characters of Agnes and Lady Macdonald were never entirely alone on the stage; her readiness to moralize was evident from the beginning, while traces of the gayer Agnes were still visible during Lady Macdonald’s long years as a widow.
Whichever aspect of her was dominant, Agnes’s solace was religion. She was an Anglican who followed an unusually puritanical and censorious version of that doctrine, which she inherited from her mother, Theodora. She adored her mother and was in utter thrall to her. Agnes took “a right stand against Balls … and theatricals,” even boycotting them, and she disliked “all games of cards but Patience [solitaire],” granting this exception because Macdonald used the game to slow down his racing mind after a hard day in the office.*
St. Alban’s, in the Sandy Hill area of Ottawa, became her church. She persuaded Macdonald to attend Sunday services regularly, although sometimes he insisted on going to Presbyterian and Methodist services to mix with voters of other denominations. She found it far more difficult to introduce family prayers into the household: “How to arrange it I do not know,” she wrote in her diary. “Sir John rises late—it is his only quiet time of rest. Then Hewitt says he has not time—he goes out early.” No doubt Macdonald and Hewitt were in cahoots in their explanations for resisting reform.
Nevertheless, Agnes was able to make Sunday a true day of rest. Macdonald had got into a bachelor’s habit of filling up the emptiness of Sundays by treating them as another working day. “I made it for months a subject of very earnest prayer that my husband might prevent Sunday visitors … on anything but very pressing matters,” Agnes recorded in her diary. God answered her plea. On November 17, 1867, she wrote euphorically to herself, “This has been a very quiet, happy day.… He—my own dear, kind husband—has been mercifully taught to see the right in this thing, and now we have so much happy rest after our morning service.”
Prayer was not enough to overcome one devil in Agnes’s life. No passages in her diary are more poignant than those where she discusses Macdonald’s drinking and her efforts to get him to slow down, as he had promised before their marriage. She could never bring herself to describe the devil she was trying to exorcise; the words “liquor” and “drinking” never appear in her diary, let alone “drunk.” The descriptions are all indirect: “Some things have happened to make this a rather trying week,” or “his headaches, which gave me pain.” At times, she was optimistic, but always tentatively: “The shadow that has for so long dimmed [life’s] brightness has passed away. I trust its memory may never fade—but keep as ever, watchful and humble.” She gave up wine, “for example’s sake,” and blamed herself when this sacrifice proved insufficient: “I was overconfident, vain, presumptuous in my sense of power.” She managed to limit his intake by accompanying him on election campaigns and by waiting for him for hours at the Parliament Buildings until he emerged from some interminable debate.
Soon after Confederation, Macdonald did cut back. By the spring of 1868, Agnes could write, in triumph and in gratitude, “My darling so cheery and in good health.… Who am I to have been made the Instrument of so much improvement. God in his great mercy has so ordered it.” And, after an evening at a concert, “I never had a happier evening. John was in such boyish spirits.” But then would come the inevitable relapses, which she always blamed on herself, never on him: “I know that I troubled my darling; my over-anxiety was the cause of it.” Sometimes she almost flagellated herself: “I fancied I could do much, and I failed signally. I am more humble now.” After each failure she would become more deeply, almost more desperately, religious. His lapses continued, and gradually she retreated from the fight. But Agnes never gave up. She looked after him with assiduous care and unstinting affection.
Agnes also did her best to build a family around Macdonald. In January 1868, Hugh John, by now eighteen, distant from his father and with their relationship no warmer than formal, came for a visit during a break from his studies at the University of Toronto. Agnes noted that Hugh John “has been brought up necessarily much away from his father,” while Macdonald “never remains long at his, that is Hugh’s, home with his Aunts.” The tell-tale phrase in her account was her designation “Hugh’s home.”
Then, astonishingly, Agnes herself expanded the family by becoming pregnant at the advanced age, for the time, of thirty-three. As was the custom then, her first reference to her condition, late in June 1869, was indirect: “My strength feels failing somehow and I am not feeling well.” A few weeks later, she joyously threw aside all inhibitions: “Can it be that someday I shall have the sweet happiness of being a Mother? It seems too wonderful and yet so beautiful—I can hardly express what a new life it has given me. What a new life.”
None of this caused Agnes to slacken in the most vital contribution she was making to her husband: to bring order into Macdonald’s personal life. For the first time since he had left his parents’ home, his fires were lit on time, his meals were served properly and promptly, his house was kept clean, his servants were supervised, the flow of visitors at all hours was controlled, and large weekly dinners were organized so he could invite all his MPs in rotation. One consequence was that Macdonald’s own habits became more orderly. His days became much more regular, often broken by a restful nap in the afternoon. He rose early, read the newspapers and the official papers, stopped at 9:30 for a light breakfast, and then, assisted by a single secretary, personally answered all his incoming letters by hand.
Agnes knew she was doing the right thing, because Macdonald let her know it. Whenever Macdonald praised her, she blossomed: “We had a large dinner party last night—12—and everything was nice indeed,” she wrote on one occasion. “John seemed in such good spirits, & so satisfied that I was ever so happy.” Sometimes she got everything right: “My house is warm and cosy with the blazing fire and the bright gaslights as we trundled in after our cold drive, and John said, ‘How comfortable this is.’ ” One wonderful moment she recorded in her diary: “As I write, the clock is striking ten; the house is very quiet. John lies reading near me on the sofa. Do you think it was very wicked of me to rest my head on his shoulder while he read me [Tennyson’s] ‘Locksley Hall’?”
While Agnes clearly loved him absolutely, it’s impossible to know Macdonald’s own thoughts about their relationship, because not a single letter from him to her survives. Almost certainly, Agnes destroyed the correspondence during her widowhood, perhaps out of melancholy or possibly out of pride that only she knew their full story. Macdonald’s attitude to his second wife was always one of respect, affection, loyalty and fidelity, but his feelings towards her, to the extent it’s possible to guess at them, were never stronger than these. No doubt their age difference was a factor, and their temperaments—his jaunty, hers judgmental—put them apart. Perhaps Macdonald had endured too much pain to ever again open himself up fully to another person, as he once had briefly to Isabella. And then, of course, he always maintained a mistress—politics.
Essentially, Agnes gave him a sanctuary. Within it, Macdonald experienced a force virtually unknown to him since he left his family home: female tenderness. “My darling held me in his arms until just now when I feared to disturb his precious sleep and I got up softly, turning out the gas, and left him.” In this way Agnes won for him that extra decade and a half it took to give the country a spine.
* Lady Macdonald’s diary covers the years 1867–69 quite extensively, but later entries are scarce.
* The maxim’s source was a seventeenth-century English writer, Sir Matthew Hale. In the original version it was “below the girdle,” then the term for a man’s belt.
* Lady Macdonald’s diary
* In referring to stories that “savour of such worldliness,” she may have had in mind Charlotte Rose’s predilection for literary works such as Cometh Up As a Flower, in which a married woman admits to an admirer that she loves him.
* Agnes recorded in her diary, “We read that Albert the Good [Victoria’s consort] was fond of” patience—knowledge that provided further reinforcement for its acceptability.