The darling dream of his heart …
Lady Macdonald
As soon as the rebellion and its immediate aftermath were over, Macdonald took off for England—to do some business and to see his doctors, but mostly for rest and recuperation. His trip began on a humiliating note. As usual, the Macdonalds went by train from Ottawa to Montreal, but rather than board the Polynesian there, they continued straight on by train to Rimouski, where Macdonald alone embarked hurriedly on the steamer. He had been warned that, so soon after Riel’s execution, he would be at risk if he lingered in Montreal. Lady Macdonald and Mary left him here and went off on a railway tour of the Maritimes. Macdonald stayed in England by himself for five weeks, over Christmas and his birthday, returning to Canada only in mid-January 1886.
He had a grand time over there. He turned down entreaties by both CPR president George Stephen and his old friend Sir John Rose to stay at their houses and instead settled into his favourite hotel, Batt’s. He went out almost every night, often to the theatre or the prestigious Athenaeum Club, and once to the pantomime Aladdin. He was also regularly invited to dine at the very best houses.
At some point during this holiday, it seems that the suggestion was made to him, in the usual discreet, deniable way, that he might play a role in the June 1887 celebrations commemorating Queen Victoria’s fiftieth anniversary of her accession to the throne. As the Empire’s senior colonial statesman, would he, perhaps, consider accepting an elevation to the peerage? In fact, Macdonald never rose above the rank of knight. But Lady Macdonald confirmed that something was afoot by her comment to Macdonald’s sister, Louisa: “You may be sure that he will never take a peerage! It would make us both look ridiculous.” The real problem, Macdonald knew, was that being Lord Something or Other would distance him from voters.
In 1888, speculation bubbled up that Macdonald might be made Britain’s ambassador to Washington after a mini-scandal compelled the hasty retirement of the incumbent, Sir Lionel Sackville-West.* Although this appointment was never likely, there may well have been some talk about it at Westminster. What is interesting is the confirmation this provides of how well regarded Macdonald was in Britain—and, despite his admiration for the Mother Country, also of his determination not to move there to live, as so many other successful Canadians had done.
In Britain, Macdonald’s health recovered with near-miraculous speed. Reporters waiting for him in Montreal advised their readers he was “as ruddy as a red apple.”
Lady Macdonald was also having a grand time. She and Mary travelled all over the Maritimes. Once back in Ottawa, she set off again, this time without Mary, on a far more ambitious trip. Late in December 1885, she took a CPR train, a special one consisting of a private car and a second car housing a butler and maid, out to the West, first to Winnipeg to spend time with Hugh John and his new wife, Gertrude (Vankoughnet), whom he had married following the sudden death of Jean. Afterwards, she crossed the flatlands—“prairies undulating in soft swelling,” as she recorded—to the foothills of the Rockies, where the train reversed and raced back to Ottawa so she could greet her husband on his return. The newspapers had got it right about Macdonald: “He was so tired and worried when he went away that it quite enspirits me to see him so cheery,” she wrote in her diary.
The trip also brought out her second, more youthful and ebullient side. She wrote excitedly of the “brilliantly fine and clear” prairie skies and contrasted the West to the capital: “Ottawa seems so dull & tame & stupid & old after that wonderful new western world with its breadth and clear air & and wonderfully exhilarating atmosphere that always seems to lure me out. [I] feel a new person.” The original Agnes, far more physical, at times downright girlish, was emerging, someone quite unlike the stern guardian of morality she had become.
While Macdonald went to Britain after the drama of 1885, Lady Macdonald went to the West. She fell wholly in love with it, and often returned to the West, staying at the CPR’s log mansion at Banff Hot Springs. (photo credit 31.1)
For two decades now, she had been Macdonald’s hostess, chatelaine, nurse and assistant, sitting in the galleries of the House of Commons and taking notes of the debates when he was away or ill. She had hosted dinners twice a week for his MPs, and coped with the lot that life had handed her, of “constantly nursing the sick and housekeeping in Ottawa for a large household & looking after all sorts of things daily,” as she wrote to Louisa, herself by now in deep decline and housebound in Kingston.
Much about the relationship between John A. and Agnes can never be more than speculation, principally because no letters between them have survived. Soon after their marriage, she had fallen hopelessly in love, and was always immensely proud of him. His prolonged drunkenness would have deeply pained her, but the gesture he had made in becoming an Anglican to help ease her grief after her mother’s death must have touched her to her core. They had experienced many triumphs and setbacks together and were bonded by their fierce, protective love for Mary. Many of the pursuits Macdonald took on in later life to earn extra money, such as accepting in 1887 the strictly nominal but salaried post of president of the Manufacturers Life Insurance Company (today, Manulife Financial), had but one purpose: to build up a nest egg to protect Agnes and Mary after he was gone.*
When they took their separate holidays in the winter of 1885–86, there was no rupture between them. In all probability, though, they were preparing for the solitariness that, with Macdonald now in his seventies, couldn’t be far off. At the same time, she was just entering her fifties, in full middle-aged vigour. From this point on, Agnes would often either plunge off on her own or allow him to do the same, though she continued to accompany him on election campaigns. As she wrote to Louisa on one occasion, “I hope Sir John will go to England. Perhaps I may go too, but I don’t greatly care about it.” Essentially, she preferred the Canadian landscape to the grandest of cities, her favourite being the new resort of Banff Hot Springs, where the CPR built a wooden mansion for tourists, following Van Horne’s instructions to “capitalize the scenery.” Macdonald distanced himself from her in more subtle ways: often in the years ahead, he buried himself in government work to an extent far beyond what was really needed.
The best-known trip of their lives they made together, to the far west coast. Agnes badgered him into going to fulfill a pledge she had made to Louisa that she would “never rest till he too goes.” They set out from Ottawa on July 10, 1886, a few days after the first transcontinental train had left Montreal for the BC terminus of Port Moody. They went in a special train, comfortably settled in the “Jamaica” private car. Agnes described their quarters later in a lively article for Britain’s Murray’s Magazine: it was crammed with sofas and plump armchairs, and an abundance of books and games, “all somewhat resembling the cabin of a fine ship.”* There’s a proud affection in her comment that Macdonald, looking out from the stateroom, was seeing “the realization of the darling dream of his heart—a railway from ocean to ocean, the development of many million acres of magnificent country, and the birth of a new nation.”
Winnipeg surprised everybody in their group. Agnes called it “a prodigy among cities.” Joseph Pope, Macdonald’s trusted secretary, noted in his diary, “It is excellently paved from end to end with wooden blocks … and furnished with all the appeals of modern civilization, including a first-rate line of street cars.” When they reached Regina, Agnes raved at the sight of the Mounted Police, “in their bright red coats as they … rode compactly together, and wheeled into a low enclosure of the Police fort.” At a reception held for him there, Macdonald was asked by a Belgian bishop why one of the guests was wearing a skirt rather than pants. Noticing a kilted Highlander standing nearby, Macdonald told the puzzled cleric that his extraordinary outfit was but a local custom: “In some places people take off their hats as a mark of honour to distinguished guests; here, they take off their trousers.”
In present-day southern Alberta, the Macdonalds met with Crowfoot, the illustrious Blackfoot chief, who was wearing rags, in mourning for his recently deceased adopted son, Poundmaker. Although Crowfoot pledged undying loyalty to the Canadian government, he also pointed out that sparks from the engines roaring across his reserve often caused fires. Macdonald answered that the railway mostly brought good, and then proceeded to lecture the Indians on their need to “dig and plant and sow like white men.” His sermon was received in silence.
In 1886, the Macdonalds travelled in the CPR’s special VIP car “Jamaica” all the way from Ottawa to the Pacific terminus at Port Moody, then crossed to Victoria. Through the Rockies, Lady Macdonald sat on the cowcatcher at the train’s front. Macdonald did the same, but briefly. (photo credit 31.2)
The Rockies were next on their itinerary. At Laggan, a stop early in the mountains (today, Lake Louise), Agnes got out to inspect the new powerful engine that had come to pull them up the steep inclines. As she later recorded, “from the instant my eyes rested on the broad, shining surface of the buffer-beam and cowcatcher” on the exposed front of the engine, she made up her mind to sit there for the remaining six hundred miles. She asked “the Chief” for permission, and when he called her proposition “rather ridiculous,” she deliberately misunderstood his response and did what she wanted to do. As the train hurtled along, it passed through a pack of pigs, and one got hooked up in the engine’s apparatus. Suddenly, there was “a squeal, a flash of something near,” which just missed her. She was extremely lucky to avoid direct impact. Still, she remained immobile on her perch, “a soft felt hat well over the eyes, and a linen carriage cover tucked round me from waist to foot.” She was well aware of the risk she was taking, “but the wild spell of the mountains is strong upon me, and I sit watching the stars gleam out over the mountains.” To general consternation, she managed to persuade Macdonald to join her—briefly—but he chose not to spend too long outside on the cowcatcher.
The train at last made it to the CPR’s western terminus at Port Moody. There, Macdonald made a short speech from the rear platform of the railway car, saying nothing memorable. In his Memoirs, Pope tried to fill the gap: “I could not help feeling as I stood by that old man standing on the shores of the Pacific, with his grey hair blowing over his forehead, what an exultant moment it must have been for him.” The Port Moody Gazette reported that “Sir John looks as gay as a lark.” He also proved that age hadn’t dimmed one of his most valuable political assets—his near-photographic memory for faces and names. When a man came up to say they had once met before, Macdonald replied instantly, and correctly, that it had been at a picnic in Ontario in 1856 and that the day had been rainy. The group spent little time in the new town of Vancouver, which had burned to the ground a couple of months earlier. Instead, they sailed across to Victoria, where they stayed for three weeks. Macdonald found the town slow-paced, if not sleepy. After that, they boarded the train again for the long journey back to Ottawa.
Agnes, having succeeded in having one article published, went on to sell others to Murray’s Magazine. In one of her best, “Men and Measures in Canada,” she recounted watching the House of Commons in action on an especially hot summer day: “I counted four pages asleep round the steps of a chair in which the Speaker had gone to bed. Five members in one row lay back sleeping peacefully; in the next, one was making a sketch with ink on a reclining sleeper’s bald and shiny crown, while another dropped ice-water into his neighbour’s left ear.”* No wonder she preferred Banff!
As soon as the parliamentary session of 1887 had ended, Agnes took off for a two-week fishing holiday on New Brunswick’s Restigouche River. She slept on the floor of a crude cabin, ate beans from a tin plate, kept out the mosquitoes by tying her veil tightly with a rubber band, and after listening carefully to the advice of seasoned fishermen, landed a twenty-five-pound salmon after an hour-long struggle. She had found, she wrote, the answer to the ultimate question: “Is life worth living?”
By this time, the Macdonalds had settled into a routine that fulfilled both their needs, whether apart or together. Their Ottawa home, Earnscliffe, was a most agreeable place, especially after the renovations were completed in January 1889. Mary was now in her late teens. Physically, nothing had changed. Much-touted and expensive treatments, such as “the Swedish massage,” and a trip to New York to see a specialist, accomplished little. She was unable to stand, got around in a wheelchair and was painfully slow in her speech. Yet she seemed content. As Hugh John remarked to Professor Williamson, “She is a gentle amiable girl, and no one who sees much of her can help being fond of her.”
In 1888, Macdonald yielded to Lady Macdonald’s urging and commissioned major renovations to the Earnscliffe house he’d bought five years earlier. Besides a new dining room and a veranda from which Mary could look out on the Ottawa River, he now had a capacious office with a secret door so he could escape unwanted visitors. (photo credit 31.3)
Macdonald’s contribution surely counted the most towards her happiness. “Where’s my Baboo?” he would call as soon as he returned home each day. He wrapped her in his arms, told her the day’s gossip and read her stories. And his absences left a huge hole in her life. During his long stay in Britain at the end of 1885, she wrote him (dictated, that is) a poignant letter: “I suppose you will soon be thinking of coming home. I hope so for I miss you very much, but of course as it is going to do you good I must not grumble.… [Have] you seen Her Majesty the Queen? Do you remember what you told me last year about kissing her hand? … What are you going to do on Christmas day? I will miss you very much. I suppose you will be out in time for your birthday and then wont we hug and kiss each other. Were you very sick crossing? … I must say good-bye, hoping that if you do not sail soon after this letter, you will let me have one in return.” Mary ended, “Many kisses for your dear old self.” In a later letter, when she was in Banff with her mother, Mary ended: “Are you very lonely without us, do you miss our evening talk?” By contrast, Lady Macdonald’s approach, if every bit as loving, was more demanding: as she told her sister-in-law, Louisa, “I have tried to teach Mary what my mother tried to teach me, that she must do, or have done, what was best for her & and for others, & not grumble.”
For those times, the care and love with which the Macdonalds surrounded Mary were exceptional. And their attentions never slackened. In the spring of 1889, the famous Canadian-born opera singer Emma Albani came to Ottawa to perform at a concert. Because Mary could not attend, the Macdonalds arranged for Albani to come to Earnscliffe a few days later for Mary’s birthday party, where she performed for her and her guests.
In one respect, the Macdonalds’ care may have been misjudged. Hugh John spotted it and told Williamson that, after a long stay at Earnscliffe in 1888, he had become “perfectly convinced that [Mary’s] mind was developing and that she was becoming more of a woman and less of a child.” Her apparent childishness, he wrote, “is, I think, accounted for by the fact that both my father and mother treat her as a child.” Hugh John was right; much later, when both her parents had passed on, Mary would reveal a long-hidden maturity.
By now, Hugh John was doing well in Winnipeg as a lawyer. His role as a militia officer during the rebellion had boosted his confidence: ׁׁI was pleased and rather surprised to find I was quite cool under fire and perfectly able to handle my men,” he wrote proudly to his father. Soon, he was confident enough to argue with his father over politics, taking a far harder stand on the issue of bilingualism in the West than did Macdonald.
The strongest bond between father and son was Daisy, Hugh John’s daughter, Daisy often spent part or all of her summers with the Macdonalds, both at Earnscliffe and at their cottage in Rivière-du-Loup. Mary showed no resentment of this new female competition. As Patricia Phenix writes perceptively in Private Demons, Mary was “lacking in ego.” One of Mary’s few recorded comments about Daisy was that she took “great pride in her lessons.” If Macdonald didn’t quite dote on Daisy, he certainly delighted in her. She had a way with him, ending her letters, “Your little puss.” And he had a way with young girls, knowing exactly how to treat them with mock seriousness and, even better, how to make them laugh.
Relations between father and son greatly improved when Hugh John remarried, this time to a family friend, Gertrude Vankoughnet. Their son was named John Alexander. (photo credit 31.4)
Early in 1891, the last year of his life, Macdonald received a letter from a girl he had never met. Lottie Prentiss, aged eleven and living in Chelsea on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River, had written to him after learning that Macdonald’s birthday fell on the same day as her own. She wished him well and then worked in the subject that really interested her—that a boy she liked had been “real mean” to her, because he had not bothered to answer a letter she had sent him. Macdonald replied immediately, on January 6:
My dear Little Friend,
I am glad to get your letter, and to know that next Sunday you and I will be of the same age. I hope and believe, however, that you will see many more birthdays than I shall, and I trust that every birthday may find you strong in health, and prosperous, and happy.
I think it was mean of that young fellow not to answer your letter. You see, I have been longer in the world than he, and know more than he does of what is due young ladies.
I send you a dollar note, with which pray buy some small keepsake to remember me by.
Believe me. Yours sincerely,
John A. Macdonald
No wonder, in Globe editor John Willison’s comment, so many women, and girls, “worshipped” him.
That was Macdonald at his best. His late-life dealings with old relatives nearing their end sometimes revealed him at less than his best. This emotional awkwardness showed itself most clearly in his relationship with his remaining sister, Louisa. She had always been his favourite, stubborn and difficult as she was, but also exceptionally courageous, and he had always gone out of his way to accommodate her eccentricities. After the death in 1876 of Macdonald’s other sister, Margaret, the two remaining members of that household, Louisa and the widower James Williamson, moved into the centre of Kingston, where they rented rooms in a boarding house. They didn’t get on. Louisa complained that Williamson left books lying all over the house, and before long that he had begun to fall apart, drinking and “dining out,” and, most startlingly, going “off to the club with a lot of girls.” Macdonald tried to smooth things over by sending money, but he kept finding reasons not to fulfill his promise to Williamson to attend various Queen’s University functions. In an attempt to repair the damage, Macdonald wrote to Louisa, “I fear the Professor is breaking up & shall advise him to retire and devote himself to literary pursuits.” Paradoxically, this implied threat worked, causing Williamson to apply himself harder to hold on to his university post.
By this time, though, Macdonald was finding reasons to avoid coming to Kingston to visit not just the errant Williamson, but the increasingly lonely and sick Louisa. “I am chained by the leg here just now,” he wrote, “and cannot leave town for the moment as the negotiations with Washington are going on [over the fisheries] and I am receiving cipher messages hourly which require immediate answer.” He did spring into action by letter when her doctor issued Louisa a stern warning. Macdonald told her in no uncertain terms, “Complete rest, he says, is your best medicine, and you won’t take it. He objects especially to your going up & down those stairs … my dear Louisa, you really must take better care of yourself or you and I will quarrel.” Finally, at the end of 1887, he did go down by train, aboard the “Jamaica,” for a one-day visit. Louisa’s spirits were much improved as a result: Williamson reported that she was “the better in health for your visit, and goes up this evening to take tea at Mrs. John’s.”
Louisa’s improvement was only temporary. A year later, word was sent to the family that her end was near. Macdonald rushed to Kingston, to find her considerably improved. He returned to Earnscliffe, and was there when a telegram arrived announcing her death. At Louisa’s funeral, at St. Andrew’s Church in Kingston, Macdonald wept, making no attempt to halt the tears. She was later interred in Cataraqui Cemetery, in the family plot.
All of Macdonald’s original family was gone now, except for Maria, Isabella’s sister. She had married one of the Macpherson clan and still lived in Kingston, but they had never been close.* As for Williamson, Hugh John best described to the professor the consequences of Louisa’s death: “[You] and she had lived together for so long I don’t think either of you realized how much you were to each other.” Thereafter, the letters between Williamson and Macdonald dwindled away to brief notes, usually about money, and they met for the last time when Macdonald was in Kingston for his final election, in 1891.
The death, impending or actual, of family members and old friends was an inevitable fact of Macdonald’s last years, with the same inevitability applying to himself. Macdonald, though, found a way to make the subject a part of his political character. In 1884, on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of his entry into politics, a monster celebratory rally was staged in Toronto. When Macdonald remarked on how few were left of those who had “entered [politics] full of hope, life and the earnestness of youth,” all of them now, “like myself, feeble old men,” cries of “No, no, no,” burst out from all over the hall. Then someone called out, “You’ll never die, John A.”
One of the most memorable of all Canadian political slogans had been born. At once defiant and melancholy, it encapsulated what it was that his government and the Conservative Party now stood for—Macdonald himself, a Grand Old Man, unflagging and alluring, if flawed, battling on unbowed on behalf of his country even in the face of his own impending death. For the rest of his career, Macdonald would be lifted up, as if on the shoulders of ordinary Canadians, by that iconic war cry, “You’ll never die, John A.”
Only two of Canada’s prime ministers have died in office. The other, Sir John Thompson, was comparatively young, and his death from a heart attack was unexpected. Macdonald took a long time to die, and he was often in poor health. For several years, therefore, Canadians watched their leader slowly dying while still he fought for their national survival.
Although Macdonald often told those close to him he would soon have to step down—as in his 1885 letter to Lord Carnarvon, when he wrote that, “With the CPR completed and the Franchise Bill passed, I can sing my nunc dimittis and retire”—he probably never meant it, except to keep his supporters in order. Equally, only some temporary frustration caused him to tell the CPR’s George Stephen in 1888 that he had “lost all interest in public service.” The reality was that he immensely enjoyed his job and was exceptionally good at it, and that there was no one to take his place. As well, the adrenalin rush of politics filled up some of the void in his private life. “When a man like myself has once entered on the track, he cannot go back,” he said. “Having assumed certain duties, he cannot, in justice to himself, in justice to his constituents, or in justice to his own principles, recede. He cannot retire.”
Macdonald had become convinced that without him Canada—his creation and in a sense his child—might not survive. He never lost his mistrust of Americans, and in later years, amid the disaffections unleashed by the never-ending Long Depression, it is probable that he came to question just how much his own Canadians could be trusted not to sell out to the attractive alternative next door. Beyond any doubt, he was certain that Confederation still needed time to jell, and that no one else possessed the skill, determination, guile and deviousness it took to ensure that Canadians got the time they needed to achieve that transformation. In the end, it was this goal for Canada, and not the CPR, that was his real “darling dream.”
And so it happened. Uniquely among Canadian leaders, Macdonald stayed on the bridge to his end, giving up only after he had got the country through as considerable a challenge to its existence as any it has faced. He of course did die, but only when his going made no difference.
* Lionel Sackville-West’s real claim to fame was that his daughter, Victoria, was the mother of Vita Sackville-West, the novelist, poet and lover of Virginia Woolf, and a good many others.
* Right after Macdonald’s death, Lady Macdonald was elevated by the Queen to the rank of baroness. Macdonald would have given his consent to this honour earlier, most likely at the time he turned down a peerage for himself.
* Actually, the greatest luxury was the new type of fine mesh screen that Van Horne had put up on the windows to keep out mosquitoes and soot.
* This article was anonymous, not to protect Agnes’s identity, but in accordance with Murray’s practice for all political articles.
* A second, more remote relative also existed. Another of Isabella’s sisters, Ann, had moved to New Zealand. In 1888, she wrote to Macdonald to urge him to retire to “honest private life.”