The housekeeper listened closely. The Parliament buildings must have been quiet on that spring evening in 1838, with most of the politicians and staff already gone for the day. But Margaret Powell was used to being there at night; she was the housekeeper for the west wing. Over the course of that winter, she’d noticed George Markland was spending an awful lot of time in his office at night. And that he often wasn’t alone in there.
Her curiosity had finally gotten the better of her, so on this particular night, she came to investigate. She found the door to Markland’s office locked. But there were voices coming from the other side of the door, too quiet to make out. She could hear nothing more than a murmur, just enough to tell that one of the people speaking was Markland himself.
Then, other sounds started — the kind of sounds that convinced her Markland was in there with a woman. “No doubt remains upon my mind,” she would later claim, “as to the nature of the noise I heard, and I was sure a female was in the room.”
The housekeeper withdrew discretely and waited downstairs. Fifteen minutes passed before the door finally opened and someone came rushing down the stairs. But it wasn’t a woman. Mary Powell was surprised to see she’d been wrong; Markland’s visitor was a man. A drummer from the army.
She’d been growing suspicious for months, but this was the final straw. When Markland emerged from his office hot on the drummer’s heels, she confronted him. “Well sir, these are queer doings from the bottom to the top.” And the very next day, the housekeeper sent the politician a warning.
“Sir,” her letter began, “I trust you will excuse the few lines I now address to you, which I do as a caution. Allow me, therefore, to tell you that your movements about this Building in the Evenings are watched, and have become the subject of conjuncture; I have been turning this step over in my mind for weeks, because I know that I [take] the Risk of Making you My Enemy … but I write from pure Motives and Merely as a caution against circumstances that mitigate against you.”
She was right. George Markland had enemies in Toronto. And they were ready to move against him.
He’d been born in Kingston, part of the very first generation of settlers to grow up in Upper Canada. He was educated by Reverend Strachan, served in the militia during the War of 1812, and made his way quickly up the political ranks of the province as a successful Tory. He was appointed to the Legislative Council and to the Executive Council, too. He helped start Upper Canada College and had an active role in the Anglican Church. He was even given the very same job that Alexander Wood once held: inspector general of public accounts. By the time he was in his midforties, he had established himself as one of the leaders of the Family Compact. In the years before the rebellion, George Markland was one of the most powerful men in Toronto.
But that’s when his troubles began. It all started with the arrival of Bond Head. When the new lieutenant-governor first arrived, he’d chosen some leading Reformers to sit on his Executive Council as a symbolic olive branch. It quickly became clear, however, that it was an empty gesture; Bond Head had no interest in listening to his Canadian advisors from either side of the political divide. Frustrated by his refusal to take their advice, his entire Executive Council resigned in protest — Reformers and Tories alike. The crisis sparked a standoff that ended with the corrupt election of 1836, and would be remembered as an important milestone on the road to rebellion.
Markland was one of the Tories who quit the council in protest. And once the rebellion had been crushed, it seems that some members of the Family Compact may have been looking for revenge.
Markland’s sexuality made him an easy target. He was married, but there had long been questions about his private life. Nearly twenty years earlier, John Beverley Robinson described him as “a good fellow, and very friendly,” but worried about the way he carried himself. “I prefer seeing a person at his age rather more manly and not quite so feminine either in speech or action.” Nothing had come of it. Until now.
It was about a month after the housekeeper’s warning that it all blew up. An anonymous letter — signed simply by “Toronto” — was sent to the lieutenant-governor’s secretary. It took direct aim at Markland’s career: “Can it be possible that the Government will continue to retain in office a man with such an indelible stain upon his character as the Honourable!! George H. Markland!” A second letter, sent directly to Lieutenant-Governor Arthur, built on the attack: “What an everlasting stigma and disgrace it will be upon the Government of this province if [Markland] is allowed to remain in office.”
It was a serious accusation. As the British Empire spread across the globe, they’d brought laws against homosexuality with them. It’s a legacy that has lasted well into the twenty-first century; today, more than half the countries where being gay is a crime are former British colonies. Upper Canada was no exception. Homosexuality was illegal. Sodomy was punishable by death and would be for another thirty years. Those laws weren’t usually enforced — the most notable previous cases of men being convicted for being gay in Canada had occurred during the days of New France — but Markland could be forgiven for worrying his life might suddenly be in jeopardy.
As the dangerous rumours swirled, it was Markland himself who called for an inquiry. He hoped an official investigation into his private life would clear his name. “It would seem that I am suspected of what I declare myself wholly incapable of even imagining,” he wrote to the lieutenant-governor, “and I unhesitatingly assert my innocence, which I can prove.”
But things went off the rails from there. Markland asked that John Strachan — his lifelong friend and mentor — conduct the inquiry. Instead, it was the entire Executive Council who would examine his case. That summer, they dug deep into the details of his private life, calling a series of witnesses to give testimony about their relationships with the politician.
One after another, the young men called upon to testify described their encounters with Markland. Some had spent time alone with him in his office. Others had been to his house for dinner. At least one had gone for a sunset stroll with him along the waterfront. Markland had been having these kinds of meetings for years. And while all the men agreed that none of their experiences were so blatantly intimate as to call their own sexuality into question, they did claim his behaviour was enough to make them uncomfortable.
One law student remembered some of Markland’s loaded comments. “On one occasion,” he explained, “I was dining with Mr. Markland alone when I was much ashamed at Mr. Markland making the following observation: ‘You have the most perfect figure of any one in town. Several people have remarked it.’”
And that student wasn’t alone. A soldier from Fort York remembered physical contact during a walk: “He laid his hand on my arm as if he knew me and leaned on my arm. I was quite alarmed. I did not understand his behaviour. I thought Mr. Markland must have been out of his mind.”
A third witness shared a story his brother had told him about a long walk along the water at dusk. “Mr. Markland had leaned upon his shoulder and had put his hand in an indecent manner on my brother’s person. And that he, my brother, immediately kicked Mr. Markland on the body and immediately ran away.”
We will, of course, never know the truth of what happened on those evening strolls along the lakeshore, or behind Markland’s locked doors. The city’s prejudice against anyone who didn’t conform to accepted ideas about love and relationships provided plenty of reasons to keep those feelings private. For his part, Markland insisted there was nothing romantic about the encounters; they were, he claimed, simply meetings with young men he had taken under his wing, buying their discharge from the army or lending other professional and financial support.
William Lyon Mackenzie, beginning his life of exile in New York, rushed to Markland’s defence. His newspaper dismissed the entire affair as a political witch hunt, claiming the Family Compact was simply looking for revenge against someone they believed had betrayed them. The housekeeper, Margaret Powell, Mackenzie’s Gazette insisted, must have been bribed to lie about what she’d seen and heard on those infamous nights at the Parliament buildings.
In the end, the Family Compact won. As the testimony piled up, Markland made a deal: he resigned in return for the inquiry being dropped. His reputation in tatters, he fled from Toronto and would never hold public office again. And that wasn’t the end of his suffering: he’d be investigated twice more over the next decade, accused of financial wrongdoing. For the most part, though, he lived a quiet life in Kingston. He made no further mark on the history of the province and he left little behind, a few letters he exchanged with his friends and colleagues, and a folder at Library and Archives Canada called “File M,” which contains the records from the inquiry into his love life. Before the rebellion, he’d been one of the most powerful men in the province, with the full weight of the Family Compact behind him. But when he died in 1862, his passing was worth only a couple of lines in the newspaper. George Markland faded from history, the true details of his private life lost in time.