The women of York were shocked. They’d come to the ball expecting a pleasant evening with the lieutenant-governor and his wife, one of the many dances and dinners that provided a public stage for the town’s elites — a place to see and be seen. But as it turned out, this was no ordinary occasion. For a year now, a social war had been raging in the ballrooms of York. Nearly a decade after the New Year’s duel, Elizabeth Small was trying to re-enter society. She was sick of being ostracized from all formal occasions, tainted by her association with the fatal duel and John White’s accusations of infidelity. She and her husband had spent years banished to their lonely cabin on the edge of town. But when a new lieutenant-governor was appointed, she saw her opening. She convinced her contacts back in England to speak with Francis Gore on her behalf before he set sail for Canada. And Lieutenant-Governor Gore, determined to bring York together as a community by healing the divisions sown by scandal and gossip, listened. Suddenly, after years of social exile, Elizabeth Small was back on the scene. She’d spent the last twelve months re-establishing herself. She was there at the ball that night, enjoying her restored reputation.
But the lieutenant-governor’s wife was nowhere to be found. Annabella Gore declined to attend. Her message was silent but clear: she’d taken sides against Small. It was a seismic shift in society; all the rules instantly reverted. It was once more absolutely unacceptable to be seen in public with Elizabeth Small. There in the ballroom, the women of York suddenly realized they’d been caught on the wrong side of the front lines. They scrambled to call for their sleighs, rushing to flee the event as quickly as possible, carrioles fleeing into the night.
And just like that, Elizabeth Small was ostracized once again. Francis Gore had lost his battle to restore her reputation. Anne Murray Powell had taken on the lieutenant-governor — and won.
Powell was the grande dame of York society. In the early years of the 1800s, she ruled over the town’s social scene. Praised for her good manners and conservatism, she had the power to make or break someone’s reputation. And she wasn’t afraid to use it. York might have been a tiny outpost on the very edge of the Empire, but in Anne Murray Powell’s town, strict rules of decorum were to be vigorously enforced. Adultery was enough to get you driven out of respectable society altogether.
As Toronto historian and librarian Edith Firth once put it, “Mrs. Powell’s power was very real.” When she first arrived in York in 1798, there were still only a few hundred people living in the new capital. And in such a small and isolated community, bickering and feuds were commonplace. “Their many parties, dinners, and balls were not mere diversions but battlegrounds upon which fights over social position were won and lost,” Powell’s biographer, Katherine McKenna, explains. Lives could be changed with a line of whispered gossip or a carefully executed snub. And her stubborn adherence to social norms made Anne Murray Powell a master of those social battles. As the town grew, so did her power.
When Elizabeth Small tried to re-enter polite society, Powell put her foot down. The idea that a woman who’d been publicly accused of adultery would try to regain her reputation was unacceptable. When Gore made it clear that Small had his support, Powell still refused to attend any event Small was attending. She kept it up for a full year, willing to miss out rather than compromise her principles. She didn’t even back down when the lieutenant-governor openly snubbed her. And when Powell finally had a chance to fully explain her reasoning to the lieutenant-governor’s wife, Annabella Gore agreed and followed her lead by refusing to attend that year’s edition of the Queen Charlotte’s Ball. In the face of his wife’s dissension, the lieutenant-governor was powerless. Powell had won.
“Anne and other wives of the men who dominated political life clearly exerted a great deal of influence on public events,” McKenna writes. “Their behavior to each other and to men could result in devastating consequences — fatal duels, social ostracism, and political downfall.… A man whose wife lost in the social stakes would suffer a serious blow to his advancement.”
The reverse was true, too. Wives and husbands could make formidable teams. And there were few more formidable than the Powells. With his wife’s help, William Powell would work his way to the very top of the legal profession in Upper Canada: as chief justice, he was the highest-ranking judge in the entire province. He became a trusted advisor to more than one lieutenant-governor, and wielded enormous influence. The Powells were, without a doubt, one of the most respected couples in town.
That success came with social responsibilities. When York’s first church was built — the small wooden ancestor of today’s towering St. James Cathedral — the Powells held the very best pew. They expanded their small log cabin on Front Street (where the Royal York Hotel now stands) into a stately home overlooking the lake. Their country estate, Caer Howell, was impressive enough to be turned into a hotel after they died. And as leaders in the community, they were expected to entertain on a regular basis. They hosted lavish dinners at least twice a week, with as many as sixteen guests sitting down at their dining-room table. Once, a shelf in their cellar gave way with a crack that shook the whole house, buckling under the weight of more than a hundred bottles of brandy.
The Powells paid a small fortune to keep themselves stocked with all the best food and wearing the most fashionable clothes. They had an example to set and they dedicated themselves to that task wholeheartedly, holding themselves to the highest possible standard — and everyone else, too. But behind the veneer of etiquette and decorum, York’s most respectable couple was hiding a remarkable secret.
They’d begun their own marriage in a most scandalous fashion.
Anne Murray Powell’s obsession with propriety could be traced back all the way to her teenage years. She was sixteen when she left England for America, sent to live with family in Boston. There, her aunt put her to work serving customers in the family’s hat shop. It was meant to give her independence and worldly experience, but young Anne was mortified. She was from a new generation who felt that any respectable woman’s place was in the home — a view, just beginning to take hold, that would last for nearly two centuries. A job was far beneath her. She was devastated by what it was doing to her social standing: “a state of degradation,” she called it. She would later remember it as the most unhappy time of her life. She would spend the rest of her days trying to make up for it, steadfastly enforcing the social rules that proved she was a woman of class and sophistication.
She didn’t think much of Billy Powell at first. She was still a teenager when they met. He was simply the older brother of her best friend. And she wasn’t thrilled by the idea of marrying anyone. It wasn’t until William’s mother died of smallpox that they really became close — as Anne comforted him in his grief, they fell deeply in love. The thought of being away from each other was too much to bear. So, Anne made a promise: if they were ever going to be torn apart, they would get married first. They got secretly engaged, hiding it from their parents, who thought they were far too young to marry.
And then came the American Revolution. Tensions in Boston had been rising for years. When open rebellion broke out, the first battles were fought in the countryside surrounding the city. It was soon under siege by rebel forces.
It was a hard time. William took up arms to support the British and helped organize a “Declaration of Loyal Citizens.” But even his own uncle was an avowed rebel. It didn’t take long for it become clear that Boston was a dangerous place for someone as loyal to the British as William Powell. He would need to flee the city for his own safety.
William asked Anne to marry him right there and then — to run away with him. She said yes. But their parents were still a problem. William didn’t even bother asking his father; he knew he wouldn’t agree. And all they could get from Anne’s aunt was a promise not to actively stand in their way, while pretending they’d never mentioned it.
That was enough for the young lovers. In 1775, they eloped, getting married in Boston and then escaping the city by sea. She was twenty. He was nineteen.
William’s family was outraged when they found out: his uncle tried to separate them; his father disowned him entirely. Even Anne’s aunt suffered for her passive support as gossip flew around Boston. “Anne and William had begun their married life with the feeling that they had a great deal to live down,” McKenna writes, “and much to prove concerning their ‘respectability.’” Both of them would spend their lives trying to show the world they were upstanding citizens. No matter how bad things would get from then on, Anne Murray Powell always had her manners: “An inflexible coat of armour shielding her from the world,” as McKenna describes it.
Unwelcome in the United States and shunned by William’s family in England, the newlyweds eventually headed out to the Canadian frontier to make their life together. They arrived in Upper Canada before the province had even officially been created. They’d been living there a while by the time the Simcoes arrived. When they did, Anne and Elizabeth became friends. “She is a very sensible pleasant woman,” Simcoe wrote in her diary. “[Her] company is very pleasant to me.”
Still, even while they hobnobbed with the new rulers of the province, the Powells would always be haunted by their American roots. British-born settlers tended to look down on anyone who’d lived south of the border. Anne was always self-conscious about the American habits and customs she’d picked up during her time in Boston. And William’s professional rivals were quick to use his past against him. They repeatedly accused him of treason, going as far as to forge a treacherous letter they claimed he’d written to the American secretary of war. The Powells responded to their American insecurities by becoming as demonstrably British as they possibly could.
Once the Simcoes returned to England, it was Anne Murray Powell who took on the responsibility of making York as British and aristocratic a place as possible. She spent many long years trying to build a bastion of respectability and grace among the old trees and muddy streets of the isolated frontier town. While William was the arbiter of the law, Anne became the arbiter of social conventions. And while their uncompromising natures made them plenty of enemies, it also earned them plenty of respect. They found themselves at the very top of society — only the lieutenant-governor and his wife were above them in the provincial hierarchy.
The Powells found themselves leaders of a powerful group that became known as “The Family Compact.” This insular clique of staunchly conservative Tories was deeply Protestant and fiercely British. Many of them were veterans of the American Revolution and they shared both John Graves Simcoe’s visceral distrust of democracy and his vision for Upper Canada: a British monoculture with one official language, one official religion, and themselves as the ruling class. As the historian Gerald M. Craig once put it, they “sometimes seemed to be more British than the King.” The Family Compact did everything they could to keep power in their own hands: all the best government jobs, appointments, and free land. They dominated the government, filling the unelected posts in the Legislative Council and the Executive Council. They had a veto over new laws and the lieutenant-governor’s ear.
The families who made up the Family Compact planned to pass their power and privilege down to their children, arranging professional opportunities and suitable marriages for their sons and daughters. The Powells were no different. But as their family grew, so did their disappointments. Raised by such strict parents, some of the Powell kids began to rebel. Anne Murray Powell’s family could never live up to her stringent expectations. And in the end, they would bring her down with them.
John was a troublemaker at school. Eliza would die a spinster. William eloped with a woman his parents disapproved of, and then drowned in the Niagara River. But the real disgrace started with Jeremiah. The Powells had always hoped to secure a respectable profession for their favourite son, but Jeremiah had other ideas. He seems to have had a lust for adventure. Despite his parents’ impassioned pleas, he was so determined to make something more of himself that not only did he leave Upper Canada, he headed all the way south to Haiti.
It was a dangerous time in Port-au-Prince. The Haitian Revolution had just ended. The country had long been ruled by the French as a slave colony they called Saint-Domingue. The leaders of the French Revolution had abolished slavery, but it was French royalists who still controlled Haiti — and they had no intention of freeing the half-million people they enslaved.
When those people launched a revolution — the biggest uprising against slavery since Spartacus led his revolt against the Romans — the French royalists asked for help. Thousands of British troops were sent to the island, hoping to crush the uprising, restore slavery, and secure the island’s sugar riches for themselves. None other than John Graves Simcoe was sent to the island to lead the British into battle. But he was an avowed abolitionist who believed slavery was evil. He lasted only a few months before he seems to have gotten sick of fighting for a cause he didn’t believe in and headed home for England, nearly getting arrested for desertion.
The Haitian Revolution raged for thirteen years and claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. But in the end, it was successful. Haiti had become a free, independent country, and was just beginning to establish itself. In 1804, a constitution was still being drafted and the bloodshed wasn’t over yet. The very same year that Jeremiah Powell arrived, Haiti’s new leader, Emperor Dessalines, had ordered the massacre of all the French settlers still living on the island. Thousands were killed.
At first, though, Jeremiah was welcomed by the emperor. Despite his British roots, he was given a guarantee of safety while he established an import business, selling weapons and other goods directly to Dessalines himself. Everything went smoothly for a while. Right up until the unforgiving emperor discovered that Jeremiah Powell had accidentally sold him some gold trinkets that weren’t actually gold at all. Things went south from there in a hurry.
Jeremiah, however, was in luck. Just as it seemed as if his life was in danger, a ship turned up. On board was a man named Francisco de Miranda, a revolutionary South American leader who was on his way to Venezuela, where he planned to liberate the country from Spanish rule. Jeremiah Powell, more than eager to leave Haiti behind, suddenly decided he believed quite strongly in the idea of Venezuelan independence. He joined Miranda and sailed for South America.
The revolution would not go well. The Spanish had been warned; they were waiting for them when they arrived. As they tried to land their ships, they came under attack. Miranda fled, his forces defeated, and those who were left behind were rounded up and arrested — Jeremiah Powell among them. Ten of the men were hanged the very next day, their bodies torn in quarters, their severed heads stuck on poles for public display. Jeremiah was one of the lucky ones: he was convicted of piracy and sentenced to ten years in a South American labour camp.
When the news eventually reached York, the Powells were mortified. It must have been both frightening and deeply humiliating for Anne Murray Powell. She was a woman who had no patience for scandal, but now a member of her own family had been disgraced, thrown into jail as a pirate. William pulled every string he could on his son’s behalf. He spent months — and hundreds of pounds — travelling across Upper Canada, the United States, and England looking for leads. He even somehow managed to get Dr. Edward Jenner, inventor of vaccines, to write a letter to the king of Spain on his behalf.
Eventually, it worked. Jeremiah was given a royal pardon and released from prison. Anne Murray Powell was utterly relieved. “While his life was in danger,” she wrote, “the scene before me seem’d closed forever. All was cheerless. His safety brightens the prospect, & … bids me to look forward to years of serenity.”
But that wasn’t to be. Jeremiah came home to York only briefly before heading back to South America, anxious to start yet another new adventure. This time, as he was sailing across the Atlantic on business, his ship disappeared, lost at sea. Some think it must have been caught in a terrible storm, driven beneath the waves. Others have suggested that the ship was seized by pirates off the Spanish coast, and Jeremiah killed. Either way, the Powells’ favourite son was dead.
It was just the beginning. The next scandal would be even bigger. So big, in fact, that it would drive Anne Murray Powell out of society altogether. The death of her beloved son wasn’t the last time she’d lose a child at sea.
The Belle of York was in love. The young Anne Powell was named after her impressive mother, and was growing into one of the most beautiful and promising women in the capital. As a teenager, she was already charming and caring, with a striking fashion sense, a delight at dinners and balls.
Plenty of men would have been happy to have her hand in marriage. But the young Anne rejected her first serious suitor after a long courtship. Her next potential husband was Laurent Quetton St. George, a royalist refugee from France. He’d fought alongside Augustin Boiton de Fougères against the revolutionaries of Paris before they both fled to Upper Canada. But Anne Murray Powell refused to let her daughter marry “that animal” — not only was he French, he was extravagant. Unforgivable.
It wasn’t until Anne was in her late twenties that she finally, truly fell in love.
John Beverley Robinson was one of the most promising young lawyers in Upper Canada. His father had served under John Graves Simcoe during the American Revolution; the family had come to Upper Canada with the first wave of settlers when Robinson was still a young boy. He was clearly destined for great things; he’d already become the acting attorney general at the tender age of twenty-one. In time, he would be elected to the Legislative Assembly and even be named as the chief justice, just like William Powell before him. In fact, the old judge had taken him under his wing as his protégé. One day, Robinson would rise to the very top of the Family Compact. He would eventually be knighted for his service and given a noble title: Sir John Beverley Robinson, 1st Baronet, of Toronto.
That was all still many years away, but his promise was obvious. Anne was more than smitten. She spent a lot of time with the young lawyer, falling deeply and hopelessly in love with him. It seemed to everyone as if the young lovers were destined to get married. To Anne Powell most of all. When Robinson travelled to England to further his legal education, she followed him there. They toured around London together as Robinson showed her the sights of the great imperial capital.
But Anne’s heart was about to be broken. Robinson had fallen in love with another woman since arriving in London. He was already engaged. And his new sweetheart wasn’t impressed by all the time he was spending with Anne. His fiancée demanded that he stop seeing the young Miss Powell. He agreed.
Reverend John Strachan, the Anglican minister who would go on to become the first Bishop of Toronto, was deeply worried by the news. He had once been Robinson’s teacher. They would lead the Family Compact together for many years to come. He, like everyone else in York, had expected the young lawyer to marry Anne Powell. Breaking an engagement was very serious business. You could be sued for breach of promise. The priest sent Robinson a letter that aimed to get to the bottom of things. “One thing is certain,” he wrote, “by every account the young [lady] was distracted after you … [her behaviour seems to] indicate some sort of expectation which to me requires some explanation to fully comprehend.”
But it was too late. When they returned to York, Robinson began his new life with his new wife, Emma, while Anne Powell was left nursing a broken heart. And while she did try to find a new purpose for her life, exploring the possibility of becoming a teacher, that dream was quickly snuffed out by her mother. She didn’t think her daughter’s professional ambitions were appropriate for a woman from a respectable family.
It didn’t take long for signs of trouble to appear. Anne was a changed woman — it now seems clear she was suffering from some kind of mental illness. Where she’d once been sweet and charming, she was now jealous, even tyrannical. She developed a terrible temper. And her love for John Beverley Robinson grew into a terrible obsession. She sent him troubling messages that one of their friends described as “some of the D——dest letters you ever saw.” Emma Robinson burned many of them before her husband even had a chance to read them, refusing to let Anne into their house. One story, told many years later, even claimed that the Robinsons came home one night to find her there, uninvited, caressing their infant child.
When the Robinsons headed out on another trip to England, Anne Powell was determined to follow them. It would be a chance not only to be with her old sweetheart, but to break free from her parents’ control. Everyone tried to talk her out of it: her mother, her brother, Reverend Strachan, even Robinson himself. But there was no stopping her. The best Anne Murray Powell could do was to delay her long enough to give the young lawyer a forty-eight-hour head start.
Even then, Anne wouldn’t wait. She escaped from her mother’s custody, running away from home without any money or luggage, racing out of town on a sleigh. She quickly caught up with the Robinsons and followed them all the way to New York City, where their ship to England was waiting for them. The young lawyer did everything he could to keep her from following any farther, convincing the ship’s captain she shouldn’t be allowed on board. And yet, still, she wouldn’t leave them alone. She caught the very next ship she could find.
In the end, it took a storm to stop her. As her ship sailed past the southern coast of Ireland, it was caught in a terrible tempest. All afternoon and into the night, the gale kept pounding away at the vessel, until it was swamped under an onslaught of crashing waves. Six crew members were swept overboard, along with a passenger, the lifeboats, the masts, and everything else on deck. The ship was plunged into darkness. Below decks, the water was now knee deep. Cabins had been destroyed; pieces of wrecked furniture floated by. Many of those on board had been severely wounded. Some crew members gave up at that point, choosing to spend their final hours getting drunk rather than fighting to save their doomed ship.
Anne Powell wasn’t going to give up that easily. The captain and some of the crew lashed themselves to the pumps to keep from being washed overboard while working desperately to keep the dying ship from filling with water. Powell joined them; the Belle of York began pumping away as fast as she could, doing everything in her power to save her own life and those of everyone on board.
All night, they worked, and into the wee hours of the morning. But they were drifting ever closer to the jagged rocks of the Irish coast. It was nearly three in the morning when the captain called everyone together, telling them what he’d known for hours: there was no escaping their fate. Soon, their ship would smash into those rocks and be torn apart. Some women couldn’t help but scream in terror at the news; the rest watched in silent horror as the great cliffs of Ireland drew ever closer in the chaotic black night. “Our situation at that moment,” one of the few survivors would later write, “is indescribable, and I can scarcely dwell upon, much less attempt to detail, its horrors.”
Minutes later, the ship struck the rocks with the crack and snap of splintering wood. A shallow reef tore away the bottom of the boat. As the bow pitched downwards, more than a dozen dead bodies were thrown together at the front of the ship. And yet still, Anne Powell fought on, clinging to the wreckage, stubbornly holding on to what was left of the ship until it finally split in half, pitching her into the dark waves as they broke against the rocks. She had, as one witness described it, fought to the very last moment “with almost supernatural energy.” Her body would later wash up on shore, identified only by a pin she wore. She was buried there in the Irish soil, laid to rest in the small graveyard of an old church near the cliffs where she had died.
Anne Murray Powell had been warring with her daughter for years. As they clashed over Anne’s behaviour and her plans for her future, the grande dame of York found herself running out of patience. Her daughter was putting her family’s reputation at risk. Powell worried the young woman had gone insane. And when Anne made her mad dash after John Beverley Robinson, it was the final straw. Her mother openly took the other side in the affair. It wasn’t Anne she felt sorry for. “Dear little woman,” she said of Emma Robinson, “my heart bleeds for her.”
William agreed. He was in England at the time, sending a series of angry letters back home to his wife. He called his troubled daughter a “freak,” a “fiend,” a “miserable wretch,” a “witch,” a “monster in human disguise,” a “Plague,” and a “baneful Comet.” He could barely stand to think of her. “Vanity, folly & malice are so blended in her Composition that I can only expect mortification when I hear of her.” He worried that if he ever saw her again, he wouldn’t be able to hold himself back. “My indignation is so uncontrollable, that I should fear some bit of violence might result.”
The Powells talked about having Anne thrown into a lunatic asylum, into debtor’s prison, or into a convent. But wherever she ended up, they were going to make one thing clear: her behaviour was so unacceptable, so harmful to their good name, that they would be forced to disown her forever. “If she returns,” Anne Murray Powell wrote, “legal measures must be taken to ensure her separation from a family she has rendered miserable, by subjecting them to the feeling of disgrace.”
It was then, at the height of their anger, that they received the terrible news. Their daughter was dead.
William was stunned. “It is not possible to describe to you my best friend,” he wrote home to his wife, “the internal Effect of this Intelligence. Horror was at first the principal, Sorrow and regret succeeded and quite overpowered me for a time, when a thousand various Emotions succeeded.” He wandered the streets of London in a daze — there, in a bizarre coincidence, he stumbled into John Beverley Robinson. His protégé pretended not to see him.
Anne Murray Powell was equally shocked. “It is impossible to say what I have felt and what I continue to feel,” she wrote. “The recollection of her early promise, and the conviction of what she could and might have been to her Parents and her family, overpowers all resentful feelings.… I can think of nothing else, she is ever before my eyes.… I will not, I dare not doubt the felicity she now enjoys, and I seek consolation in the hope, that after all the afflictions of this miserable world we shall meet where sorrow never enters.”
The shipwreck of the Albion marked the end of the reign of Anne Murray Powell. Her days ruling over the society of York were over. She had spent her entire life, ever since those humiliating days in the hat shop and her scandalous wedding, building a reputation as one of the most respectable women in Upper Canada. But now, her own family had failed her. One son had eloped and died. Another had been charged with piracy and then killed by pirates himself. And now her daughter, once so promising, had been drowned at sea in a desperate bid to follow the object of her obsession. The disgrace was simply too much. The Powell name was in tatters. Their credibility had been ruined.
Once, many years earlier, Anne Murray Powell had driven Elizabeth Small out of society for a lack of propriety. Now, she would apply the same standard to herself. The old grande dame of York withdrew from public life. She would accept an occasional invitation from the lieutenant-governor, or lend her name to a charitable cause, but never again would she preside over the extravagant balls and the elaborate dinners where she had once ruled supreme.