Canadian Houses
of Romance

by

XX

“OUR ALTARS AND OUR FIRES”


1

IF their forefathers in the British Isles were not the very bulwark of the nation they were at least substantial beings. Many of them came from the professional classes, some of them were in diplomatic service, and there was here and there a title in the offing. And when a younger, and occasionally an elder, son was inclined or persuaded to brave the Atlantic and to found a career, and possibly a new family, in North America, it is excusable that the parental stock overseas loomed large.
     Families of this sort, most of them ambitious Tories, comparatively few in number but exceedingly influential, moulded the political and social life of York. They thought much of themselves for their life in Upper Canada gave them little sense of perspective. They had missed the first elemental battles with forces greater than themselves which the French who founded Canada had endured. And they were not exactly aristocrats, merely rather stiff-necked gentry who had formed a petty kingdom in a raw lake-port at a time when the worst of the civilizing process was over, and there was leisure to observe and plan the progress of social activity. [page 151]
     After York began about 1792, on the bay front near the Don River, it gradually spread westward. In twenty-five years it had grown to about three thousand inhabitants, among them some of the families who were to mould its destiny. Indeed, they had already established themselves and built houses representing their firm position.
     It was the beginning of the brick era. The first brick house, the Bishop’s Palace, erected for the famous Scotch divine, the Right Reverend John Strachan, was on Front Street between York and Simcoe. It is interesting that a material which was the pride of early Toronto was infra dig in the older and more sophisticated Halifax, where it was used merely as a lining.
     A less pretentious residence than The Palace, a villa indeed, also of brick, and afterwards known as Beverley House, was built on Queen Street by Mr. D’Arcy Boulton, and later taken over and added to by Sir John Beverley Robinson.
     Chief Justice Elmsley was one of the first residents to dream of a suburb, although, before his time Governor Simcoe had built a pretty retreat made of logs, a sort of summer house, which he called Castle Frank, upon a ravine in the present Rosedale. Chief Justice Elmsley, however, moved from King and Simcoe Streets, in 1816, to the far wild regions of Grosvenor and St. Vincent Streets where he built Elmsley Villa as a permanent abode. His [page 152] King Steet property was then used as Government House. About the same time Colonel G. T. Denison built Bellevue House in the western section, and of these, and several other gentlemen’s residences, such as Dunstable, the original Ridout house, Holland house, built by the Honourable Henry John Boulton on Wellington Street in 1831—of these, only The Grange remains.
     It seemed to have been chosen for permanence. “Well out of town,” slightly above Queen Street, the great property ran as far north as the present Bloor Street, and from Beverley Street to McCaul, [page 153] though of course a century ago none of these streets had been laid out. It was built, about 1817, upon the lines of an old English manor house, of brick probably made in York. The Lodge was at the entrance gate on Queen Street, and there were large gardens and orchards north of the house. Beyond  that the property was used for cricket and lacrosse grounds, and for a race course and grand stand.
     The Boultons were an old Lincolnshire family. Judge D’Arcy Boulton, who built The Grange, had married, in 1808, a daughter of Christopher Robinson, Esquire, of Kingston, and afterwards of Beverley House. They had nine children, of whom William Henry, the eldest, became heir to The Grange. He married Miss Harriet Dixon who, a year after his death in 1874, became the wife of the distinguished Oxford professor and man of letters, Goldwin Smith. In 1909 the house, by her bequest, became the property of the Art Gallery of Toronto, subject to the life interest of Goldwin Smith, who died in the following year.
     So until its latter end it never changed hands, but how its mood must have changed!
     It was always a conversational house, a centre during its early days for dyed-in-the-wool Toryism and attendant Tory gaiety. What fine, hearty, gossiping, convivial red-cheeked gaiety…toasts to the King, and toasts to the Beauties of York…great plans for Upper Canada, assisted by good [page 154] food and drink in the discussion of these plans—things done as they were done “at home.” “Let us keep free of the rabble,” said these cheerful gentlemen. They came to be known as the Family Compact.
     Into Little York no ships sailed from far off ports. There was seldom chatter of foreign tongues upon her muddy streets, or strange bright visitors on adventure bent, here to-day and gone to-morrow. The Family Compact had things very much in their own hands, and beneath their jollity a rod was tipped with iron. There is no gainsaying the fact, however, that it was in most ways a wise rod, the best possible for the times. To a wandering artist this early society of York, which had now merged into Toronto, was at once interesting and amusing. Anna Jameson, the English critic, whose tender mercies were not always kind, found this town of the thirties full of contrasts. “Interminable forests within half a mile of us, the haunt of the red man, the wolf and the bear, an absolute want of the means of ordinary mental and moral development, and yet, conventionalism in its most oppressive and ridiculous form.”

     It was in a later era that the well loved master of the old Tory house gave place to one of the outstanding advanced Radicals of England. A thin-lipped, [page 155] solemn scholar was Goldwin Smith, whose youth was spent at Eton and Oxford, followed by further and prolonged historical research. In the middle of the last century he was deep in University Reform, the question of the abolition of slavery in the United States, and other movements, radical at the time, which set him definitely as a defender of “fundamental moral principles.” He was intensely unpopular with the Court party in England, and was as greatly disliked by Benjamin Disraeli as he was admired by Richard Cobden. The Jamaica massacres, and the aftermath of passionate discussions and recriminations, probably wafted him to Toronto, for he resigned his professorship at Oxford, and accepted the Chair of English and Constitutional History in Cornell University at Ithaca, New York. In 1871 he removed to Toronto, where he retained his connection with Ithaca and also entered journalistic life in the small city.
     The warm and kindly house took on a more scholarly tone. Its lovely grape-arbours were removed to make way for the library, which was to house an important collection. And the room, dim and gravely beautiful, became an influence in the country. Few visitors of importance to Toronto for the next three decades failed to call upon the sage of the Grange, and the conversations which here took place were probably as interesting as any book that Mr. Goldwin Smith ever wrote. [page 156]
     Of the mistress of the house in her later years, it has been said that she was “a beautiful old lady with silver hair and a placid, chastened face, resembling greatly her brother, Chief Justice Sir John Beverley Robinson.”
     Goldwin Smith loved The Grange; even his caustic pen softens as he writes of the great elms “to whose whisperings under the starlight I owe some lessons in philosophy.”… “In such a mansion,” he goes on, “lived Miss Austin’s Emma and her father. Only church chimes were wanting to make me fancy that I was in England….Traditions are attached to the house, of horses killed by bears in its garden; of a red Indian presenting himself in the bedchamber of its mistress; of British sportsmen losing themselves in the wood in which the house stood, and being guided to it by a lighted window. Among other relics of an olden time here preserved are the wine glasses of Governor Simcoe without stands, so that you had to empty them before you put them down.”
     Those who have been in the constant service of a house and its inmates through more than a generation have no unimportant part in its history. At The Grange the English butler, Chin, who lived there for more than fifty years, is a connecting link between two régimes. He opened the door to princes and savants, dukes, archbishops, actors, and governors. He was not there when Jennie [page 158] Lind was entertained by the Boultons, but he remembers distinctly a breakfast party given to Mr. Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederate States, at the time of the Civil War, and he also remembers the day that Matthew Arnold, and afterwards, John Morley, came to call on Goldwin Smith. He has seen governments come and go, and was quite conversant with the gossip of society at home and sometimes abroad. But he was always discreet. Chin is over ninety years old, in perfect health and full of memories. I count him one of the most interesting characters in this book. “I often think,” he says, “that it is a fine thing to have served such people. In Mr. Boulton’s time a gentleman considered that he had a duty towards his city as well as towards his friends, and you do not meet that spirit in the same way to-day.” The old butler showed me a letter sent to him by Mr. Goldwin Smith; one of the famous wine glasses used by Governor Simcoe; and a little painting of “Flossie” a pet spaniel of his mistress. The picture was left to a waiting maid, at whose death it was to be sold. “I was glad to buy it,” said Chin, “for I should not like to have it go out of the family.”

     In marked contrast to The Grange, but no less important in the history of Toronto, is a humble little wooden house, the simplest of the simple, standing [page 158] on the southern edge of High Park given by the owner of the house, Mr. John G. Howard, to his adopted city.
     Here is a two-storey cottage, with a circular front and a little shallow wooden verandah with slender unstable-looking pillars, and quaint, white-painted, wooden swans. Within are small, low rooms, some bits of walnut furniture, and, a novel feature at the time in which it was built, a bath with taps for hot and cold water. But in spite of its simplicity it is an architect’s house, and fits perfectly into the sweet little old-fashioned garden surrounding it.
     Just beyond the garden and the motor roads that now wind up from the Lakeside Drive there is a rather imposing tomb: a granite cairn, surmounted by a marble cross, and enclosed by a portion of the massive iron railing which once surrounded St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. Here is the homesick note, the note of England, the one bit of sentiment in a remarkable story of a man’s enterprise and genius for construction.
     Close to the house is its most interesting feature, a picture gallery formerly filled with drawings, sketches and plans made by Mr. Howard and his wife, who was a fair amateur artist. And behind the picture gallery is an old coach house, which still contains a “chariot” brought to Toronto in the thirties by a Major Tullock. It was built in London for the famous Mrs. Trollope “to convey her from [page 159] place to place in England to give her Shakespearean readings.” The garnet damask lining of cushions, the fittings for cards, portmanteau, and perfumes, the folding steps, so exquisitely carpeted, all make one long to see the dramatic lady setting forth upon her recital tours.
     In his little known diary, of which very few copies remain, one reads a story in miniature of the life of Howard. It is the story of a strange, long voyage on one of those terrible sailing ships where people often died of seasickness, or slept with a pistol under the pillow because it was the fashion of sailors to mutiny in mid-ocean; a story of fogs which might mean death, and calms which certainly meant starvation; and at last the sight of the St. Lawrence with great rocks running out into the sea, and warm wind off the land and the perfume of strange flowers. Then the long journey up the river, and worse perils than those of ocean, for now the crew could get liquor enough to keep them permanently drunk, and cholera was raging up and down the settlements on the shore…At last Quebec, Montreal, and York…The first entry on landing reads:

     Arrived at York at 6 a.m. on the 14th September, 1832, eleven weeks and three days from London. After landing I began to inquire the best mode of reaching Goderich. Going up Church Street from the landing place I was much surprised to see in a huckster’s window a very handsome carving knife and fork for sale, which [page 160] I had given as a present to my brother-in-law before he left England. Going into the shop judge of my surprise to find my wife’s sister whom I believed to be in Goderich. She looked half-starved. One child was dead and the other in a wretched state. My first act was to call in a doctor.

     The diary for the next ten years is an amazing chronicle. Plans for almost every building of importance, public or private, in York and in the later Toronto and, indeed, within a radius of a hundred miles, seem to have been the work of John G. Howard. He was rewarded for the greatest of gambles, which lay in the hope that a crude young town in Upper Canada might provide a living, not to speak of scope for the powers, of an English architect [page 161] of ability, who had been a student in a well-known London firm, and had his first experience in assisting in the rebuilding of Leeds Castle. In this new country his tireless industry and invention are beyond anything on record to-day. Most of the residences and public buildings that he planned and superintended were designed for the old Toronto that lingered about the water-front, when King and Wellington, and Frederick Streets, and Park Lane were fashionable centers, and Queen Street was still far north. His little Toronto has vanished completely, and with it most of his architectural designs, but not the trackless forest of which he writes so simply and affectionately:

     They have conferred upon me the title of Forest Ranger since I conveyed 120 acres of land to this city as a public park forever. Colborne Lodge and its forty-five acres will follow at my death. I have made improvements in the park, forming roads, making drains, surveying the land and clearing underbrush. I have also drawn plans of wharves and bridges, and erected a station on the Lake shore for the benefit of women and children waiting for the trains. The rest of my time has been spent in making thirty-six water-colour sketches of the Grenadier Pond and Old Indian Trail and Lovers’ Walk. These are in a portfolio in the drawing room.

     There is a portrait by Berthon of Mr. Howard at the age of eighty. It shows him serene and dignified, wearing carelessly the picturesque old cloak that he enjoyed describing as “fifty years old and a little [page 162] over.” And it contains the same delightful quality as the humble little house and the imperishable acres of wild wood that surround it—a certain freedom of spirit, a splendid, calm detachment.

     It was in the thirties that a young Colonel of Militia in Upper Canada, a member and sometime Speaker of the Legislative Assembly, was knighted for his efforts to put an end to the Mackenzie Rebellion, and so became Sir Allan Napier MacNab. He was descended from an old family who owned a place called Dundurn in Perthshire, Scotland; [page 163] hence the name of the ambitious structure which he erected upon the banks of the bay at Hamilton.
     It was always a self-complacent house with a bit of a swagger about it, but set apart from other Tory houses of its day because it was, at the time, extravagantly picturesque. The Scottish Dundurn stood in simple dignity beside Loch Erne. There was no simple dignity about its namesake on this robust bay. Its columned porte-cochère led, and leads to-day, into a wide marble hall paved in mosaic of blue and white tile. The drawingrooms are impressive. Buffet bows to buffet across a massive dining room. The billiard room and bowling alley enclose a beautiful courtyard with terraces beyond. The stable buildings and yard are to-day as fine as anything to be seen in Canada. The family burying-ground, with its massive iron railing, lay on one of the terraces silently awaiting the honour of receiving the mortal remains of the McNabs. To the right of the plot, discreetly removed, is a small building, of interesting architecture. It was Sir Allan’s Little Theatre, about which strange stories linger, having to do with hunting bouts when Dundurn was en fête, packed full of gay gentlemen whose ladies were not always permitted to view the private performances which took place in the Little Theatre.
     The pompous porte-cochère is at the back of the house. The front faces the bay, and there is a [page 164] touch of distinction in the shallow pillared verandah which runs across the center, with its odd railings, an intertwined design of Maltese Crosses and Sacred Hearts.
     It was on this verandah that the MacNab, glorious in his swaying kilts, received a young Prince of Wales, afterwards Edward the VII, and many a grandee. Here his eldest daughter was married in 1855 to Viscount Bury, afterwards the Earl of Albermarle, whose daughter, Lady Susan Townley, proved a small storm-centre to the British Foreign Office because of her alleged notorious indiscretions during and after the Great War.

     It is an ambitious old story, born of days when it was easy to impress a struggling community with a sense of influence and of grandeur. Allan MacNab made the most of everything: of his ancestry—although his grandfather of the original Dundurn was neither more nor less than an officer in the Black Watch, and his father, a Lieutenant Dragoon and aide-de-camp of Governor Simcoe—of his love of country; and above all, of his kindling loyalty.
     At the time of the American invasion of York in 1813, young Allan was fifteen years old. The family were living in York, so the two MacNabs, father and [page 165] son, arrayed themselves side by side in defence of “our altars and our fires.” That, without chance of striking a blow, they were shortly hurrying with the defeated ranks to Kingston was not their fault. The next year, under Sir George Prevost, we find our youth, “with his foot upon the blade of his sword” snapping it in two to show his protest against his leader. He was a born actor, and he could afford to play a part, for he was sure of himself, his position, and his party. Nothing on earth could daunt him. He courted danger, and danger’s little gadfly, debt, he simply waved aside. It was said of him that he was designed by fortune to move in circles of fashion for he was “dipped in debt and made a merit of telling.” Why not indeed, when to relate one’s woe so often brings assistance? His father had several times been cast into a debtors’ prison only to be extricated by his friends, in defiance of boorish traders. He, himself, in his youth, was only too familiar with that charitable institution of York, “The Limits,” a sort of lordly bail, for gentlemen who were in temporary embarrassment. A succession of posts, painted blue, and tipped with a dab of white, were planted about the town at a certain distance from the old jail, beyond which the embarrassed might not with safety promenade. All the best people living within the restricted area it was a simple matter to pursue the even tenor of one’s way within “The Limits.” [page 166]
     And so, fortune favouring him at every step, and he mounting on the shoulders of one rebellion and another; and making speeches, and giving dinners; and being imprisoned falsely by William Lyon Mackenzie, and so becoming, most profitably, a martyr as well as a bon vivant; and then building Dundurn, a place which so magnificently set off his social ambitions, his martial stride and his tartan waistcoat; what else could happen, in the ordinary course of events but knighthood, and “The Thanks of Her Majesty and the Provincial Legislature”?
     And then the Speaker’s Chair, and England, as representative of the Tories on certain questions with regard to the Rebellion Losses Bill, and a tiff with Mr. Gladstone, and then more political experience, and further honours.
     At this time one of the most astute of the younger members of the Cabinet was one, John A. Macdonald, whom he called “my active young lieutenant.”
     On retiring from office he was created a baronet, with further royal thanks.
     There are three women in the story. His first wife was the daughter of Lieutenant Daniel Brooke, of Kingston. Her eldest son died but she left a daughter. His second wife was Mary Stuart, one of the daughters of the old Kingston rectory, that over a hundred years ago sent out so many distinguished sons and daughters. This Mary Stuart lived up to her name and tradition, for it was her [page 167] eldest daughter who became the Countess of Albermarle.
     The symbolic railing of the upper verandah at the front of Dundurn, carved in hearts and crosses, has been noted. It was not accidentally placed. After his wife’s death in 1846, Sir Allan accorded a home to his brother’s widow, a zealous Roman Catholic, who acquired a great influence over him in his declining years. She introduced the railing. Nevertheless, he remained loyal  to the Anglican faith. But the extraordinary circumstances which followed his death made a drama that was recounted all over Upper Canada for at least a generation.
     In a phrase of the sixties, “no sooner had breath left his body before startling reports began to circulate”…He had, while unconscious during his last hours, received the Roman Catholic bishop…His body was to be “taken” by that Church for burial…All of which was celebrated by poster, and by speech in public places. Explanations by the lady and the bishop were brushed aside. Furious editorials were written, and the famous Grave Scene cartoon, afterwards suppressed, in which appeared His Satanic Majesty, a bishop, a clergyman, and several ladies—accompanied by a key to the names—was sold in thousands. Many people gathered for the funeral…Friends of the family, assembled in the marble hall of Dundurn, waited to see and hear who would officiate at the [page 168] service….Shortly they were seen retreating in choleric haste….In a few moments not half a dozen persons were standing in the hall….Nothing is chronicled as to the crowd without, but it is certain that Sir Allan was never more triumphantly a public man than in his last moments.

     I considered it all as I stood looking at old china, and stuffed animals, and pictures of local interest in the spacious rooms of Dundurn, which is now a museum. Many shabby persons about me were eyeing the treasures encased on all sides as listlessly as I. I wondered anew where all the jaded birds with moulting wings who gather daily in such places live when museum doors close in the evening and they must go home.
     I was depressed by the present Dundurn, and I frankly said as much to its curator who had so patiently taken me upstairs and down, and shown me black walnut doors, and wainscotting and marble mantels.
     “After the city took the place over,” she volunteered, “it became a Deaf and Dumb Institution for a time.”
     I am afraid I interrupted her there. It was something better left out. I turned to go. But she followed me to the grandiose porch, where noisy little motor cars filled with tourists were drawing up. [page 169] She beckoned me to the side of the house where the great billiard room and bowling alley lie, and where, beyond the terrace, the bright bay shines forever on the hurrying visitors to Dundurn.
     “I was standing here one day,” she said, “it was not so very long ago, when I saw a tall handsome young fellow strolling around and looking most interested at everything. When I went back to my little table in the hall, he followed me. ‘I have heard,’ he said, ‘that the family burying-ground was over there by the terrace. I can’t find it.’ ‘You wouldn’t,’ said I, ‘for when the city took over Dundurn the private cemetery was closed.’
     “He asked me to show him where the plot had been, and he stood looking at it for a long time. Something about him made me wonder, and then he turned and said to me, ‘I don’t know how I’m going to tell my mother this.’. .
     “It turned out that he was the present Albermarle,” the curator concluded, “so I gave him the old key of the enclosure. He said he would take that home to his mother.” [page 170]

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