A Fleeting Empire: Early Stuart Britain and the Merchant Adventurers to Canada (review)

In this study of English territorial and trade ambitions around the edges of New France in the early seventeenth century, Andrew Nicholls brings together historical actors and episodes he argues have previously been either ignored, downplayed, or misunderstood. When seen as interrelated, however, they cast fresh light on the question of English policy in the Atlantic during the period. Attracted by an unanswered question in George Brown’s influential school textbook, Building the Canadian Nation (1942), Nicholls ‘began to explore the ways in which the appearance of the Kirkes at Quebec in the late 1620s stemmed from the foreign and wartime policies of Charles I, and even more from the aspirations of one of his courtiers, Sir William Alexander, who held the original charter for Nova Scotia.’ Conventionally treated as ‘exotic footnotes’ to the main narrative of Charles I’s reign, events in Quebec and Acadia, he argues, need to be seen in the context of Charles’s management of court patronage, of the king’s conflicting obligations to his three kingdoms, of French claims in the area, and of the lives not only of Alexander but others such as James Stewart, Lord Ochiltree, and a host of minor figures, English, Scottish, and French. Recent work by Bernard Allaire and John Reid has partly erased the record of neglect the author deplores, but Nicholls has made a serious attempt to ask what larger picture is yielded by those events.

A Fleeting Empire investigates not only the economic and political issues that faced Charles I and Louis XIII but the patronage relationships that drove events, the family histories determining the actions of individuals, and the economic realities that affected territorial claims. After a (to me) unnecessarily long introduction, Nicholls moves successively to chapters on early English expeditions in the North Atlantic and on James VI/I’s attempts to deal with regional challenges and problems of authority between his new kingdoms, England and Scotland. There follows a thorough and very fresh view of the court career of Sir William Alexander (customarily dismissed as merely an old-fashioned poet), of Alexander’s involvement in English plans for Nova Scotia, and (revealingly) how unimportant such projects were in his expert management of his rise to the earldom of Stirling. The contrasting example of the hapless Ochiltree emphasizes Nicholls’s point that fluctuation in the personal finances of courtly entrepreneurs could play a fatal role in events thousands of miles away.

The ‘empire’ of Nicholls’s title was composed of a shifting set of monopolies and other awards established at various times between 1621 and 1632, the subject of chapters 5–10. Besides the Alexanders in Nova Scotia (father and son), Nicholls examines projects for maritime defence that required the involvement of all three kingdoms, conflicts between Alexander and the Merchant Adventurers syndicate of the Kirke brothers, the tiny Cape Breton colony of the perilously low-funded Lord Ochiltree, the loss of Port Royal, and the control of shipping in the St. Lawrence. He spends little time on financial and courtly parallels in France and New France, but he is very aware of the way men from England and France, Scotland and Ireland, as well as Catholics and Huguenots, all mingled in the Atlantic environment, a point noted by John Bosher but more fully examined here. Alexander’s acquiescence in Charles’s surrender of Nova Scotia proves to be the ‘pragmatic choice of a seasoned courtier,’ not the ignominious retreat of a failed entrepreneur.

Unfortunately, Nicholls pursues an almost entirely biographical approach, spending pages on familiar ‘background’ (Jean de Brébeuf, the Elizabethan succession crisis, the career of Sir Walter Ralegh) when an analytical narrative would tie his fascinating material together more effectively. He rightly emphasizes the role of ‘service’ and the system of honours that made courtiership function but says little about the ideals it involved and why they were effective. His archival research is excellent, though even he...