The Defence of Castle Dangerous
In 1692, a girl of fourteen was left to defend her father’s manor from angry Iroquois raiders.
1692
A statue of Madeleine Jarret in Verchères, Quebec.
© Dennis Jarvis, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0 generic.
A close-up of a monument to Madeleine Jarret in Montreal. The story grew in popularity throughout the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly as an edifying tale for Canadian schoolchildren. The accompanying extract was published in 1927. The fact that this was a tale of New France did not prevent Edith Marsh from holding Madeleine up as a national heroine to all children in George V’s Canada.
Introduction
In 1672, the Count de Frontenac came to Canada as governor of the French settlers around Montreal. He built good relations with the Iroquois by casting himself as father to their nation, but the French found him high-handed and in 1682 King Louis XIV of France recalled him. His replacement, the Marquis de Denonville, treated the Iroquois barbarously and provoked reprisals which Frontenac, restored in 1689, struggled to contain.
There were many brave men and women living in the days of Frontenac, and truly there was need of them. Many a story of heroism has come down to us from those troubled times in the long ago of our country. Among them is the story of the little heroine, Madeleine Verchères.*
Madeleine’s father was a seigneur* who lived not far from Montreal. As his seigneury was often passed by the Iroquois, and often attacked by them, it was called Castle Dangerous.* One October morning,* when Seigneur Verchères and his wife were away, Madeleine, who was then only fourteen years old, came out and stood near the river watching for some friends she was expecting.
Suddenly she heard a gun. A servant went at once to see what it was, and came running back crying, —
“Run, mademoiselle, the Iroquois, the Iroquois!”*
Brave Madeleine ran to the fort calling, “To arms, to arms!” She at once ordered every one inside, and set to work to have the fort made strong and in readiness for an attack.
Most of the men were working in the fields. In the fort there were only two soldiers, a servant, an old man, and Madeleine’s two little brothers, aged ten and twelve years. All the others were women and children.
* Marie-Madeleine Jarret, known as Madeleine de Verchères (1678-1747), was the fourth child of François Jarret and his wife Marie. Jarret’s property stood on the south shore of the Saint Lawrence River, along the path naturally taken by the Iroquois (in English, pronounced IRRA-kwoy or IRRA-kwa) for their raids on Montreal. The town of Verchères stands there to this day, about twenty miles northeast, down the river, from Montreal’s city centre.
* ‘Seigneur’ is a title deriving from the French feudal system, and roughly equivalent to English ‘(liege) lord’. A seigneury was a baronial manor, in this case a log-built fortified dwelling surrounded by tenant farms.
* It was Wednesday October 22nd, 1692, on the Gregorian calendar. Two years earlier, her mother Marie had been forced to defend the house against an Iroquois raid. For another uncompromising defence of a stately home by its chatelaine, see Black Agnes Dunbar.
* A nickname apparently coined by American historian Francis Parkman, in Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV (1877). “An exaggeration of the scale of the settlement” remark Colin Coates and Cecilia Morgan in Heroines and History (2002) “but one with a nice literary ring nonetheless.” The name is presumably derived from Sir Walter Scott’s novel Castle Dangerous (1831), set in Scotland.
* The Iroquois had welcomed the Count de Frontenac in 1672 with something akin to awe, and his decision to cast himself as father of their nation went down well. However, the Marquis de Denonville was a man of much narrower vision. He sent in a well-meaning Christian missionary to arrange a conference, and when the Iroquois came along, all unsuspecting, he kidnapped fifty and sent them to France as galley slaves before torching their homes. Louis XIV had the sense to send the captives back with Frontenac in 1689, but the damage was irreparable — the Europeans now had the reputation of men who could not be trusted.
