Tag Archives: august 2

1608: Jean Duval, for plotting against Champlain

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On or about this date in 1608, explorer Samuel de Champlain judged guilty and had executed for plotting his own murder a Norman locksmith among his host of men establishing the Quebec settlement.

Though there were previous European forts on the site, Quebec City had been formally founded by Champlain just a month earlier, on July 3, and we here join the exposition of the public-domain Pioneers of France in the New World.

Hanging judge: Samuel de Champlain monument in Ottawa. Creative Commons image from dugspr.

They were pioneers of an advancing host, — advancing, it is true, with feeble and uncertain progress, — priests, soldiers, peasants, feudal scutcheons, royal insignia: not the Middle Age, but engendered of it by the stronger life of modern centralization, sharply stamped with a parental likeness, heir to parental weakness and parental force.

In a few weeks a pile of wooden buildings rose on the brink of the St. Lawrence, on or near the site of the market-place of the Lower Town of Quebec. The pencil of Champlain, always regardless of proportion and perspective, has preserved its likeness. A strong wooden wall, surmounted by a gallery loopholed for musketry, enclosed three buildings, containing quarters for himself and his men, together with a courtyard, from one side of which rose a tall dove-cot, like a belfry. A moat surrounded the whole, and two or three small cannon were planted on salient platforms towards the river. There was a large storehouse near at hand, and a part of the adjacent ground was laid out as a garden.

In this garden Champlain was one morning directing his laborers, when Tetu, his pilot, approached him with an anxious countenance, and muttered a request to speak with him in private. Champlain assenting, they withdrew to the neighboring woods, when the pilot disburdened himself of his secret. One Antoine Natel, a locksmith, smitten by conscience or fear, had revealed to him a conspiracy to murder his commander and deliver Quebec into the hands of the Basques and Spaniards then at Tadoussac. Another locksmith, named Duval, was author of the plot, and, with the aid of three accomplices, had befooled or frightened nearly all the company into taking part in it. Each was assured that he should make his fortune, and all were mutually pledged to poniard the first betrayer of the secret. The critical point of their enterprise was the killing of Champlain. Some were for strangling him, some for raising a false alarm in the night and shooting him as he came out from his quarters.

Having heard the pilot’s story, Champlain, remaining in the woods, desired his informant to find Antoine Natel, and bring him to the spot. Natel soon appeared, trembling with excitement and fear, and a close examination left no doubt of the truth of his statement. A small vessel, built by [Francois] Pontgrave at Tadoussac, had lately arrived, and orders were now given that it should anchor close at hand. On board was a young man in whom confidence could be placed. Champlain sent him two bottles of wine, with a direction to tell the four ringleaders that they had been given him by his Basque friends at Tadoussac, and to invite them to share the good cheer. They came aboard in the evening, and were seized and secured. “Voyla donc mes galants bien estonnez,” writes Champlain.

It was ten o’clock, and most of the men on shore were asleep. They were wakened suddenly, and told of the discovery of the plot and the arrest of the ringleaders. Pardon was then promised them, and they were dismissed again to their beds, greatly relieved; for they had lived in trepidation, each fearing the other. Duval’s body, swinging from a gibbet, gave wholesome warning to those he had seduced; and his head was displayed on a pike, from the highest roof of the buildings, food for birds and a lesson in sedition. His three accomplices were carried by Pontgrave to France, where they made their atonement in the galleys.

More about Champlain in this podcast, by the author of Champlain’s Dream: the Visionary Adventurer Who Made a New World in Canada.

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1904: Heinrich, a Herero

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The Times of London reported thus, on Aug. 30, 1904:

GERMAN SOUTH-WEST AFRICA.

(FROM OUR OWN CORRESPONDENT.)

BERLIN, AUG. 29.

It is intended to hold Courts-martial in German South-West Africa for the trial of natives who have been implicated in the massacre of German colonists or who have rendered assistance to the insurgents. The first of these trials resulted in the condemnation of a Herero named Heinrich, alias Egbert, who had been concerned in the murder of a German farmer, and who had also acted as a spy in the interest of the rebels. Heinrich, who is described as “a schoolmaster and Evangelist,” was sentenced to death, and, according to intelligence just received, was hanged at Swakopmund on August 2. This case will produce a painful impression in German missionary circles, which have lately been in bad odour with the Government owing to the criticisms they had passed upon the conduct of some of the whites.

This “Heinrich” was thereby the first judicial execution for the January 1904 Herero raid that touched off the Herero genocide. Germany would secure the military scene just nine days later by routing Herero warriors at the Battle of Waterberg … and then proceed to drive almost the whole of the Herero nation into the deserts on pain of instant execution. (Jolly postcards were made of such scenes.)

Estimated body count: tens of thousands. Germans feel just awful about it.

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1343: Olivier III de Clisson, husband of the Lioness of Brittany

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On this date in 1343, a noble widow’s career in piracy got its start where such ventures more usually end: the scaffold.

Olivier III de Clisson beheaded with his knights, in an illustration of Froissart.

Olivier III de Clisson, a powerful Breton noble nominally loyal to France, had been persuaded to ally with England’s Edward III in what nobody yet realized was the opening stage of the Hundred Years’ War.

Intriguing to advance a claim to the French throne, Edward knew right where to look. “Brittany was France’s Scotland, choleric, Celtic, stony, bred to opposition and resistance, and ready to use the English in its struggles against its overlord as the Scots used the French in theirs,” Barbara Tuchman wrote. And the Breton War of Succession was just the sort of pretext for meddling.

Clisson was one of the great lords of the region, and in the feudal era where liege relationships counted more than “nationality,” his alliance would swing a considerable network of retainers to the English cause.

He was hardly the only one, according to Jonathan Sumption’s The Hundred Years War:

The duchies of Brittany and Normandy seemed to [the French king Philip VI] to be seething with rebels, led by the very noblemen who had promised to serve him till his dying day. He was shocked and puzzled.

When Clisson’s (apparent) lord Philip VI got wind of the secret deal, he invited Olivier to a joust in Paris and had him arrested. Then, as knight follows day …

In the year of grace one thousand three hundred and forth-three, on Saturday, the second day of August, Olivier, lord of Clisson, knight, prisoner in the Chatelet of Paris for several treasons and other crimes perpetrated by him against the king and the crown of France, and for alliances that he made with the king of England, enemy of the king and kingdom of France, as the said Olivier … has confessed, was by judgement of the king given at Orleans drawn from the Chatelet of Paris to Les Halles … and there on a scaffold had his head cut off. And then from there his corpses was drawn to the gibbet of Paris and there hanged on the highest level;* and his head was sent to Nantes in Brittany to be put on a lance over the Sauvetout gate [as a sign of his treason]. (Cited here.)

That’s chivalry for you.

The unexpected turn came while Clisson’s headless corpse was clanking away on the gibbet: his warlike, 40-something wife Jeanne de Clisson vowed vengeance, sold off the Clisson estates to buy a small fleet, and turned privateer, murderously ravaging French shipping along the Breton coast and reportedly personally beheading aristocrats she could get her hands on.

After more than a decade of avenging Olivier, the “Lioness of Brittany” retired triumphantly to England to remarry the sort of British toff whose preference ran towards strong women.

Her son, also named Olivier de Clisson, returned to fight in the Hundred Years War on the side of England … and eventually defected back to the French.

* Meaning, at the imposing tiered gallows of Montfaucon.

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