The First Conservative

By C.P. Champion

THE TITLE OF the “first conservative” or father of conservatism is typically given to  Edmund Burke, Joseph de Maistre, or both as in Peter Viereck’s Conservatism. For Russell Kirk, it is to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France that “philosophical conservatism owes its being,” and W.F. Buckley envisioned him as a precursor of 20th century anti-communism. But from David Lefer’s The Founding Conservatives ten years ago to Yoram Hazony’s Conservatism: A Rediscovery last year outlining Anglo-American conservatism on either side of the Atlantic, no study of conservative ideas takes a single Canadian into account. Where conservatism is concerned, Canada is a sideshow.

Canada has its Taché and MacNab, Bédard and Baldwin, Bourget and Strachan, Cartier and Macdonald, Laflèche and Leacock, Groulx and Grant in a counterrevolutionary tradition that enfolds French and English in creative tension. Macdonald was a Burkean and a conservative according to Hazony’s criteria (p. 30-31). But even studies written by Canadians overlook the foundational conservatism of Sir Guy Carleton, 1st Baron Dorchester, twice Governor and Commander in Chief of Quebec, the new Province established by the British in 1763 by Royal Proclamation on the substructure left by the French régime, and extending protection and friendship to His Majesty’s Indian allies. Carleton’s collaborators included Pitt, Burke, and Adam Smith. And Carleton in the 1770s relied heavily on the first Conservative party in Canada, also known as the French party of Dr. Adam Mabane. 

It is typically Canadian to forget Sir Guy’s legacy. Yet it is fundamental to our nationhood and constitutional inheritance and we used to celebrate it. Dorchester was the great lawgiver, the man who stood up to General Washington, godfathered the Quebec Act, defeated the first American invasion, and brought the Loyalists from New York to safety in Nova Scotia and Quebec. What else did the Fathers of Confederation revise, entrench, and perpetuate in 1867 but the inheritance of Carleton and Pitt’s Canada Act of 1791, which accorded to Canadians the “appropriate rights of Englishmen” and before it, Carleton and Shelburne’s 1774 Quebec Act, our mini-magna carta, the “treaty” between the Empire and the French Canadians to which Macdonald alludes in the Confederation Debates.

Dorchester Conservatism was built on four pillars. First, the British governors’ policy of tolerating, accommodating, and supporting the religion of the 65,000 habitants — as the Act put it, the “above sixty-five thousand Persons professing the Religion of the Church of Rome” — together with continuation of the civil law, first in practice and then according to law in the Quebec Act, bequeathed a durable modus vivendi of liberty and coexistence. As governors, James Murray and Guy Carleton’s first priority was to secure peace and order in the Province by enabling the French and Catholic majority to reside harmoniously with the newly-arrived English-speaking minority of 500 mostly Protestant subjects in their midst. The governors chose to accept, for example, the Canadians’ mistrust of English trial by jury (something that in itself gave Burke pause, though he supported in principle preserving local customs). 

If some British officials hoped that toleration of Catholics, and their own good sense, would in time lure them into assimilation as Anglicans, instead what occurred — as Carleton expected — was the preservation of a stable, traditionally ordered French and Roman Catholic culture under the protection of the Crown and at least passively (and sometimes actively) loyal to it. It is often forgotten that both a Simcoe and a Salaberry fought with Wellington in the Peninsular War and that generations of French Canadians, like the Tachés and Cartiers, proudly served in British and Canadian regiments.

The wider strategic purpose of the Quebec Act was to extend the boundaries of the Province south of the Great Lakes and prevent the westward expansion of the Thirteen Colonies. Without such containment, Carleton and his allies in England believed that the Colonists would, among other things, seize the Ohio Valley, provoke the natives, and renew the Indian Wars. The wider Quebec borders of 1774 were intended, then, to contain and counterbalance American aggrandizement.

Two Oxford scholars believe that Adam Smith, of Wealth of Nations fame, actually wrote the Quebec Act for Lord Shelburne, for which “the circumstantial evidence is strong.” They write: “Shelburne was working on it while his links with Smith were at their strongest; it carries the mark of Smith” as “the balance-of-power theorist” and “it is consistent with Smith’s 1778 advice to Wedderburn” to contain the Colonies. “The Quebec Act thus reinstated a tourniquet on western colonial expansion.”

In forging the new modus vivendi Carleton retained in place even some of the existing military structure of New France. Not only did most of the seigneurial landowners, many of them former enemy officers, remain in fief of their idyllic mills and manor houses but local capitaines de milice retained their office and carried on in their traditional role in mediating local dissent and public discussion. The Roman clergy similarly retained their position and revenue from their approved benefices.


ALL OF THIS underpinned an established, paternalistic, well-functioning rural and commercial domestic social order. Even if it was becoming what today we may call a limited pluralistic society, with at least three religions (of which more below), Carleton and his allies believed the existing national heritage over which England’s Crown presided in Quebec should be protected, improved, and preserved: the first pillar of Dorchester Conservatism.

In repelling the American invasion of 1775, Carleton provided for the external security of the Province against the chief revisionist enemy of the Crown. Whilst tactical aspects of Carleton’s defence were imperfect, and he had difficulty in raising significant French-speaking Militia, the King’s Indian alliances held, as did the loyalty of the Canadian elite, and the victory was won. Thus the second pillar of Dorchester Conservatism, security. 

Commercial prosperity made a third pillar, with the governors encouraging and supporting both French and English merchants in developing the economy of the Province. Carleton called for the “unmolested Persuit [sic] of trade” while also exercising restraint — a key characteristic of conservatism — in the face of volatile newly-arrived American merchants. Historian G.P. Browne in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography praises Carleton’s “grasp of Canada’s economic potential.” 

A fourth pillar was selective immigration, the most prominent element of which was the refuge given to Loyal Americans. Nova Scotia and Quebec were separated in 1784 and 1791 to create two new Loyalist entities: New Brunswick (carved out of Nova Scotia) and Upper Canada (separated from what was renamed Lower Canada, when the Canadiens finally gained an assembly dominated by themselves). It is often overlooked that separation plays a more recurring role in Canadian history than unification.

Less well-known than Loyalist arrivals was Carleton’s subsequent niche immigration policy to admit 50 to 60 refugee priests from France in the 1790s at the suggestion of Roman Catholic clergy in England and the Bishop of Quebec, and with the collaboration again of, among others, no less than Edmund Burke and another distinguished MP, William Wilberforce. 

Apart from reinforcing the thinly-stretched Canadian clergy by one-third, these well-educated French priests contributed to the counter-revolutionary tendency in the Province. Some, even after returning to France when it was safe to do so, remained in contact with their friends in Quebec, and continued to exert influence on ecclesiastical and cultural life. Because they are much less well-known than the Loyalists, the French exiles will be revisited further down below.


CARLETON FIRST saw Quebec from the Île d’Orléans across the water in Jun. 1759, three months before the Battle of the Plains on Sep. 13. Carleton was a 34-year-old Lieutenant-Colonel, hand-picked by Major General James Wolfe to serve as quartermaster general.

Due to a head injury received during the Battle, when he stood in the left of the thin red lines in command of the 2nd Battalion, Royal Americans (60th Foot) opposite the Régiment de Béarn and Canadian militia and snipers  — Carleton returned to England in Oct. 1759. After recuperating he resumed campaigning with the army and went into action in 1761 on the northwest coast of France and was again wounded in the siege of Havana in 1762.

During Carleton’s absence the Canadians of the new Quebec Province, inaugurated on Oct. 7, 1763 over the seal of King George III, were ruled by military governors under the overall command first of Jeffrey Amherst and then of James Murray. Quebec remained under military rule until the Quebec Act established a Governor and an appointed Legislative Council.

When Carleton returned as Lieutenant Governor in 1766 (and became Governor in 1768), he had plenty of army experience but little of civil administration. Born in Ireland in 1724 into the Anglican ascendancy, he received a classical “home-school” education from his stepfather, the Rev. Thomas Skelton of the established Church of Ireland. It is recorded that the Skeltons showed compassion to the surrounding Catholic population and it may be that Carleton’s outlook toward the Canadians’ religion took shape at that time — an outlook he shared with Burke, born in Dublin in 1729.

At Quebec, living in the Chateau St. Louis, the old headquarters and residence of the French governors, overlooking the river, Carleton found allies in influential circles from Murray’s time, though he did not retain all of the same advisors. 

The first immigrants to old Canada under Murray and Carleton were American “Merchants,” Protestants of British, Huguenot, and other backgrounds, with a leavening of colonial Jews. For the first time, to the chagrin of the Bishop and clergy, the Canadians were forced to tolerate the practice of non-Roman religion in their midst. (They were of course familiar with former religious practices of the Indians, but these had by now been mostly abandoned voluntarily, and to a limited extent blended with Christianity.) Soon both Protestant churches and Jewish synagogues opened in Quebec and Montreal.

More jarring still was the curious intermingling of Freemasonry with Anglican (and other Protestant) religion among British officers and American merchants, as several regiments had their own masonic lodges attached to them, and dozens more were quickly established, including, for example, Merchants’ No. 1, warranted in Dec. 1759. It is hard to measure the influence of this “society with secrets” associated with Revolutionary doctrines in France — doctrines the Roman clergy were at pains to keep out of Quebec. In Canada the bishop and his clergy and religious had to reconcile the ominous reputation of anti-Catholic and regicide franc-maçonnerie with the liberal broad-church urbanity of officers holding the King’s commission who offered no injury, were if anything francophile, and spoke either fluent or tolerable Etonian French.

In contrast merchants like Thomas Walker, who settled in Boston in 1752 and came to Montreal in 1763, became great troublemakers, importing something of the ultra-sectarian fanaticism of the Colonies. Walker was on his way to becoming in the 1770s “by far the leading merchant in the City,” according to Elinor Kyte Senior. 

In his early years Walker showed contempt for the authorities and military to the point that a gang of soldiers, probably from the 28th Foot, on the night of Dec. 6, 1764 broke into his house and gave him a good drubbing, cutting off a piece of his ear. In 1775 when the American commissioners Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Chase, and Charles Carroll came to Montreal seeking to enlist Canadian support, Walker hosted them at his house on Notre Dame Street, which Carroll called one of the best in the town. Of course their mission failed.

Walker demanded an elected Assembly on the American model, an idea supported in principle by Burke in the Commons debates on the Quebec Act. An assembly was envisioned as early as 1763 and was deliberated for a decade in the Rockingham, Chatham, and North administrations. But Carleton did not favour it nor did his seigneurial and Council advisors. 

In reality the merchants — with their intrusion, the first “Americanization” of Canada was under way — sought to enfranchise only themselves and to lord it over the habitants, who had little experience of politics. The merchants saw themselves as rightful conquerors. Only a minority were politically active but they tended to be anti-French, anti-Catholic, anti-authority, anti-military, and (because fiercely American) anti-British, all rolled into one disruptive tendency. Their wider aim was eminently American: to reduce the influence of the Imperial power and the governor in local affairs, with the goal of controlling domestic politics and advancing their interests. The merchants therefore acted as a de facto Opposition to the Governor and his allies, who were obliged to manoeuvre and contain them.


WHEN CARLETON returned to North America in 1766 to serve under Murray there was already a nascent Conservative party at Quebec. It was known as “the French Party.” Sympathetic to the interests of the French Canadians and the preservation of the traditional Canadian way of life established among five or six generations of old families, its basis was an evolving group of French-speaking allies cultivated by Murray. As an intellectual and political tendency in the Province, the French Party was called into existence by the need to check the influence of the “Americanizing” Merchant Party.

The introduction of English law brought concepts such as trial by jury, alluded to above, and habeas corpus, which were familiar to American Colonists but alien to the Canadian habitants. 

The French party themselves were neither Canadian nor Roman Catholic. They were Scots and Huguenot Protestants who made the preservation of French civil law their policy on the basis of Realpolitik and from a sense of justice: because the Canadiens were used to it and understood it, and because safeguarding the status quo would preserve stability and good order. The new regime, they believed, like Burke and other conservative thinkers, should refrain from meddling unduly with settled customs.

Among the associates who in time formed the French party was Dr. Adam Mabane, a former Army surgeon and self-taught lawyer born in Scotland. Wanting to start with a clean slate, Carleton had removed Mabane from the Council early on, but he remained an influential judge and by 1775 was the recognized leader of the clearly-delineated French Party in the Council. Another officer, John Fraser, also a Protestant, was partly educated at the Jesuit College at Douai in France.

A prominent Huguenot ally of Mabane’s was a merchant named François Mounier, who spoke little English. French Protestants like Mounier had “barely been tolerated” under the French régime. Hence their loyalty and usefulness to the Governor, their local knowledge and connections when promoted to high office. 

Carleton was careful to cultivate allies on different sides of the table. Another prominent Huguenot, Hector Cramahé, had served in the Army and as Murray’s secretary. Cramahé had become a staunch defender of Canadien rights. Other key supporters included figures like William Hey, of Eton, Cambridge and the Middle Temple, whom Carleton made Chief Justice in the Province of Quebec. He named another Cambridge man, Francis Maseres, born in London of Huguenot descent, as Attorney General, Maseres having served, at first, as an advocate for the English merchants in London; he certainly knew both sides of the argument. Hey and Maseres were advocates of maintaining “the laws and customs of Canada.” They enlisted the help of various collaborators such as François-Joseph Cugnet (a traitor to the French military cause even before the Conquest), to get to grips with the details, as well as a number of Catholic clergy, who had an obvious interest in helping the tolerant and agreeable Governor succeed.

Two such allies were Fr. Joseph-André-Mathurin Jacrau and Fr. Colomban-Sébastien Pressart. Both born in France, Fr. Jacrau (the confessor of Msgr.  Briand) had been in Canada for 30 years and Fr. Pressart for 20 years. These supporters provided much legal groundwork that Carleton carried with him to England in order to sponsor and defend the Quebec Act which did much to extend liberty but which prioritized order.

Thus, the earliest Conservative tradition in Canada is recognizable as pro-ordered liberty, pro-French, pro-military, pro-British, supportive of commercial expansion, supportive of existing laws including seigneurial landholding, and of the existing religious customs of the majority; favourable to Anglicanism but cautious not to rock the boat. In spite of their Protestant and in some cases masonic affiliations the Governor’s circle were “pro-Catholic” insofar as they eschewed the anti-Catholicism that was deeply characteristic of the American Colonies and much of the British establishment, and interfered little with local religious practice — within limits such as the ban on contact with ecclesiastical hierarchies in France or Rome.


CARLETON WAS, of course, an Anglican, educated by his clergyman stepfather of the established Church of Ireland. During the time before the first Protestant church was built with the tallest spire in the town of Quebec, the Bishop had permitted the Governor and his circle to hold Anglican Communion services in the Franciscan Recollets’ chapel, which they did 30 minutes after the end of the Catholic Mass. 

But during his governorship Carleton did so little to promote Anglicanism that “there have not been wanting persons to suppose” that he “was not a member of the Church” at all. He soft-pedalled his Royal Instructions for the “Encouragement of the Protestant Religion.” He did not “at any time take the trouble … to see that Churches were erected.” If a university were to be established for Canada, he preferred that it be secular. But the Governor did observe the forms of the Church of England. He attended services and went at least on great occasions to Holy Communion. His children were baptized, and the Loyalist Charles Inglis, the first Bishop of Nova Scotia (his diocese included Quebec), conferred Confirmation on at least two of Dorchester’s sons, at which time “his Lordship, Lady Dorchester and those two sons [having been confirmed], received the Sacrament.” 

While Carleton exercised fully his power of appointment during his first and second governorships (the first ending in 1778), it is significant that he set much-reduced salaries for the French Protestant ministers sent from England to look after the “large number” of Huguenots and other Protestants. He did not think much of them, informing the Colonial Secretary that he had “issued to them patents under which they would be able to do the least possible harm.” His priority was to avoid offending the local majority culture. He seemed, by temperament or precept, to reject David Hume’s advocacy of an established church as the guarantor of order and liberty, and to prefer religious pluralism as advocated by Adam Smith.

Continuing a conservative policy and emboldened now by his success with the Quebec Act, which allowed Roman Catholics to hold public office in Quebec, Carleton continued to build alliances. He appointed men like Jean-Claude Panet and René-Ovide Hertel de Rouville to judgeships — the first Roman Catholics to hold office in the Province of Quebec. By that time Adam Mabane was back on the Council and Carleton had a solid Conservative party prepared to defend the Quebec Act.


WHEN IN COMES to immigration, the largest proportion of new arrivals were the Loyalists from the United States, up to 50,000 in total including 2,000 Indians, mostly Iroquois, and 3,500 Black Loyalists both freemen and escaped slaves, mostly to Nova Scotia. 

A much smaller, lesser-known class of refugees that interests us here were émigré Roman Catholic priests who had fled the Revolution in France and were invited to Canada in the 1790s during his second governorship, which had begun in 1785.

Refuge for these clergy in Canada was an extension of the asylum they had obtained in England. Clergy and religious in Revolutionary France were required to take an oath to the state in order to become dependents of the Revolutionary regime. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy of 1790 was followed by additional arbitrary decrees in 1792. Rather than comply with the decrees, which pretended to supersede their oath to God and the Church, many men and women of the cloth refused and were imprisoned and executed (such as the famous Martyrs of Compiègne, innocent nuns sent to the guillotine) or managed to flee to Germany, Switzerland, or Spain. By 1794 and 1795 the largest number, as many as 8,000, fled to the Channel Islands or England.

Burke was the most prominent voice on their behalf in Parliament. Others were Lord Arundel, the Marquis of Buckingham, and a Catholic lady named Dorothy Silburne, who rolled up her sleeves to provide relief daily to refugee priests in London and was known as “La Mère des Prêtres exilés.” Burke hosted French exiles at his home in Beaconsfield, among them Chateaubriand and the exiled Bishop of St. Pol de Léon, Msgr. Jean-François de la Marche.

Dorchester met de la Marche in England between 1791 and 1793, when the Governor was on leave before returning to Quebec. That the bishop was a former dragoon in the French Royal Army before taking up the priesthood was perhaps of some interest to Carleton.

In England, exiled clergy were the beneficiaries of sustained interest by a group called “Subscribers to a Fund for the Relief of the Suffering Clergy of France in the British Dominions.” Meetings took place at the Freemasons Tavern in Bloomsbury, a hub for relief efforts a few doors down from Dorothy Silburne’s house. (The Tavern was a multipurpose hall built on Great Queen Street by the Grand Lodge of England, with offices for members’ use in an adjacent building.)

According to an account in the Gentleman’s Magazine, attendees at an early meeting of the Fund in Sep. 1792 included Edmund Burke, the Marquis of Buckingham, Earl Fitzwilliam, the Bishops of London and Durham, the Lord Mayor of London, William Wilberforce, the Earl of Radnor, Lord Onslow, Lord Sheffield, and J.J. Angerstein, and was convened by the Duke of Portland and John Eardley Wilmot MP, a son of the Lord Chief Justice. Some of them had famously been active in the anti-slavery cause and in assisting the Loyalists. Sir Guy Carleton is not named but a future scholar might be able to ascertain whether or not he was present. The organizers asked the Home Secretary, Henry Dundas, to lend a building for the cause, and Dundas replied that it had already been decided to provide a castle in Winchester to host the exiles. Food and clothing were funded by the Subscribers.

A French historian of the exiles describes Dorchester as a “man of great and generous thinking, devoted body and soul to the French Canadians” without neglecting his duty to the English. He approached the “thorny problem” of the French exiles at the risk of garnering hatred from powerful anti-Catholics in Britain and the Colonies. In spite of them Dorchester asked the Bishop of Quebec to propose a policy. 

Bishop Jean-FranÇois Hubert, in position since 1788, advised that any priest hostile to the revolutionary Oath be made welcome in Canada. From 1791 onward, some 51 priests came to Dorchester’s Quebec. The Jesuits and Recollets opened their doors in Quebec, Montreal, and Trois-Rivieres to receive the refugees. Forty stayed on. Since the Province at the time had only 146 priests, this was a significant boost in manpower and expected to help in “regenerating” the Canadian Church.

Carleton left Canada for good on July 9, 1796. But between 1791 and 1796, there had already been 36 arrivals. Presenting themselves to the Bishop, they were assigned to big and small parishes, religious houses, colleges, and schools spanning the entire Province from the Bay of Chaleur between Quebec and New Brunswick all the way up the St. Lawrence to Cataraconi (Kingston).


QUEBEC HISTORIAN Narcisse-Eutrope Dionne (1848-1917) has written profiles of each priest. Fr. Philippe-Jean-Louis Desjardins had also met Msgr. de la Marche in England in 1792. In Quebec the bishop made him chaplain of the Hôtel-Dieu hospital, founded and run by Augustinian Sisters, and later promoted him Vicar General. After returning to France in 1802 he kept up correspondence with his Canadian friends. To assist in decorating many churches and other establishments he shipped 200 canvases from Paris, which arrived in 1817 and inspired a revival in Quebec painting, notably influencing Joseph Légaré (1795-1855), and his apprentice, Antoine Plamondon (1804-95) who got their start copying masters from the Desjardins collection. Plamondon went to study in Paris in 1826, but according to Laval historian Claude Galarneau, “Terrorized by the July Revolution in 1830, he hastened to return to Quebec in the autumn, his monarchist convictions more firmly entrenched than ever.”

Fr. Pierre-Joseph Malavergne arrived in 1795 and was appointed to the Jesuit College, and as a confessor to the hospital nuns, whom he taught Gregorian plain chant. He preached a famous sermon at a mass on Jan. 10, 1799 in thanksgiving for Horatio Nelson’s victory in the Battle of Aboukir, the subject of a great celebration and religious festival, whose title was “Long Live the King of England and Admiral Nelson.” Fr. Antoine Villade arrived in 1792 freshly ordained and after a stint as hospital chaplain, became parish priest in New Beauce (south of Quebec city) and Catholic chaplain to the Canadian Militia regiment raised by Dorchester in 1794, the Royal Canadian Volunteers (RCV).

To give a few more examples, Fr. Pierre Gazel arrived in 1793 with a doctorate from the Sorbonne and became French and literature teacher to Dorchester’s three sons aged 19, 18, and 7. He served as a hospital chaplain and returned to England in 1796. The jovial Fr. C.-Michel Le Saulnier arrived in Montreal in 1793 and served with the Sulpicians until his death in 1830 at age 72. He was one of the chief advocates of building the great Notre Dame Basilica that stands today. Fr. Jean-Denis Daulé (1766-1852), poet, musician, and cantor, served as chaplain to the Ursulines of Quebec from 1806 until blindness forced him to retire in 1832. In his spare time he collected heritage music of the Colony including a Christmas setting from a midnight mass sung at Quebec in 1646. He died in 1853 at age 86. 

Historian Galarneau writes of the exiles: 

They ministered as curates or parish priests in 50 parishes, founded or taught in three classical colleges, and served as chaplains in the women’s communities as well as in the missions in the east and west of Quebec diocese. The émigré priests, who were endowed with a superior education and exceptional intellectual and moral qualities, constituted for 60 years one of the most important pillars of French culture among the Canadians. These “confessors of the faith,” as they were then known, more or less re-established the Canadian Catholic church, and it was revolutionary France that gave it this second wind.


Thus four pillars of Dorchester Conservatism: liberty with internal order based on settled custom and support for religion; external security; the extension of prosperity; and selective strategic immigration: these make Sir Guy Carleton the obvious and overlooked founder of the Tory tradition of Canada; in Canadian terms, the first Conservative. 

To anticipate one objection: could there be a “conservative” before the French Revolution? The notion that Burke and Maistre are the first is based on their eloquent responses to the horrors of 1789-92. But if we allow Hazony to trace his national Anglo-Conservatism to Fortescue, Hooker, and Selden, we can suggest the following: that before French outrages and terror there were the Americans’ in persecuting upwards of a third of their own population; Carleton stood at a crossroads athwart history, opposing insurrection, persecution, revisionism, and invasion; upholding lawful authority, ordered liberty, prosperity, and immigration both humane and strategic — and thus laying the pattern for an English-French counterrevolutionary tradition that is all-Canadian. 

Originally published in the Autumn 2024 edition of The Dorchester Review.


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