The Governors-General of Canada, 1867–1952: A Collective Profile

The Governors-General of Canada, 1867-1952: A Collective Profile ANTHONY H. M. KIRK-GREENE It is no easy thing to be a GovernorGeneral of Canada. You must have the patience ofa saint, the smile ofa cherub, the generosity of an Indian prince, and the back ofa camel. -The Philadelphia Quiz (c.1880)* The first duty of the Governor-General is to have plenty ofsmall talk and to be able to make aparty go. -Lord Tweedsmuir** Introduction*** In their discussions of the Governor-General, Canadian scholars depict him as "a legal survivor who has contrived to remain a political necessity."' They discern his erstwhile authority as having given way to nothing more than 'honourable influence': a far cry from Lord Dufferin's self-image of "a representative of all that is august, stable and sedate in the country; incapable of partisanship and lifted far above the atmosphere of faction without adherents to reward or opponents to oust from office."2 W. Stewart MacNutt summed it up when he declared that the office of Governor-General required not so much action as discretion.' As Prime Minister Borden testily said of the Duke of Connaught, he so laboured under the handicap of his position as a member of the Royal Family that he never fully realized the limitations of his office as Governor-Genera!.• Yet if we accept the Governor-General as a factor in the conduct of Canadian affairs, we are entitled to ask what are the attitudes, values and experiences that have moulded the holders of such an eminent office. For the decisions of a sovereign's representative who exercises the three Bagehotian principles of a constitutional monarch will be conditioned by his previous experience of authJournal ofCanadian Studies ority. An understanding of the pre-gubernatorial career of Canada's Governors-General can therefore help to illuminate how each interpreted the challenge of his office and responded to its crisis. To understand imperialism, it is necessary to understand the imperialists. To do this calls in the first instance for a good grasp of the background and career experience of the proconsuls. The Corpus There are several schools of thought on who constitute the Governors-General of Canada. One maintains, with mathematical propriety, that Jules Leger is the 59th Governor-General of Canada, the first being Samuel de Champlain. Another argues, with much logic but less respect for Canadian history, that the first GovernorGeneral was Lord Monck, making Leger the 2lst. The third school, lath to omit some of the great governors of Canada like Sydenham, Elgin and Sir Edmund Head, the holders of what D.G.G. Kerr regards as "the most important post in the Colonial Service,"' traces the office back to the Union Act of 1840 and its genius Lord Durham. For the purpose of this article, I am taking the cohesive group of seventeen Governors-General from Monck (appointed 1867) to Alexander (retired 1952). It is demonstrable that the historical and social influences exercised on our core group do possess a unity of their own which is at once coherent and susceptible to prosopographical analysis. Whatever the bounds of Britain's imperial ruling class, its existence was never seriously doubted up to the 1920s. "Canada has been fortunate in its Governors-General," claimed the author of a Canadian hagiography published in that decade, "because they have been drawn for service from the demi-gods of Britain's governing class...that class in England which is born to rule and to administer as other men are born to the loom and shuttle."6 A Note on Sources To risk a conceit, a lot of notable work has been done on the Governor-General but notably little on the Governors-General.7 For instance, while we have admirable studies of Monck8 and of Lorne;9 highly readable biographies of MintoIO 35 and Tweedsmuir;11 even a biography of such a recent Governor-General as Georges Vanier;12 and ponderous tomes like those in Rose's Canadian National Series of the 1880s;B nonetheless the studies which attempt to look at the Governors -General in toto are slight in all senses of the term. Francis J. Audet's paper retains...