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Kingly Connections
Given the murky origins of explorer Samuel de Champlain’s birth, and new information that came to light a few years ago, scholars are reconsidering the tantalizing possibility that Champlain was actually the illegitimate son of French King Henri IV. In 2012, Champlain’s baptismal certificate surfaced in a Protestant temple in La Rochelle, France, placing his birth sometime before his baptism on August 13, 1574. Since then, many historians have been crunching numbers to try to determine if the facts of history permit Champlain’s conception to fit into the French king’s schedule. That possibility makes for a fascinating story.
According to one French historian, Éric Thierry, late-sixteenth-century France was the golden age of royal children born out of wedlock. And American historian David Hackett Fischer defends the theory of Champlain being of royal blood in his popular book Champlain’s Dream (2008). Champlain is an important figure in Canadian history. Against great odds, he colonized the New World with French settlers in the early 1600s. He settled Port Royal, the capital of Acadia in the Annapolis Basin, in 1605, and he founded the settlement of Quebec in 1608. He explored much of the Great Lakes region, established friendly relations with Aboriginal peoples, wrote detailed descriptions of his travels, and made accurate maps. He’s been declared the father of New France, the founder of Quebec, and — in a 2008 Globe and Mail article dismissing him as a product of nineteenth-century mythmakers — Sam the sham. In the introduction to his own writings, he is sometimes referred to simply as Samuel Champlain, sometimes as Samuel de Champlain, and sometimes as Sieur de Champlain, the latter suggesting a noble birth.
Psychologically, Champlain’s disposition was similar to his king’s. Like Henri IV, Champlain was raised as a Protestant and died a Catholic. Like Henri IV, he was a natural leader, not afraid to get his own hands dirty and to mete out justice with equanimity. Both Henri IV and Champlain seem to have been closer to their mothers than their fathers, the latter being either distant or dead. Both men followed their intellectual curiosity before other more base concerns, and both discovered ways to end disputes through techniques of conflict resolution that were ahead of their time. Both men loathed war but did not hesitate to use force and violence when there was no alternative. And, like Henri and other French royalty, Champlain simply signed his name Champlain. The only really striking difference between them is this: Champlain led a life of relative chastity; Henri was openly promiscuous.
Henri IV was a strong king, a weak Catholic, and un vert-galant (a ladies’ man) who happily exercised his droit de seigneur (his lordly right) upon women. Fischer reports that he had “fifty-six mistresses of record …, casual liaisons beyond counting [and] at least eleven illegitimate children,” eight of whom he legitimized and supported financially. Champlain could easily have slipped out of one of those casual liaisons “below the salt” — that is, from among the commoners.
Known in his youth as Henri de Navarre, the future king came from the ruling family of Béarn in a region that straddles the Pyrenees between France and Spain. His parents were Jeanne d’Albret, the daughter of the king of Navarre and a prominent Huguenot, and Antoine de Bourbon, a Catholic. Their religious differences and other conflicts led to frequent separations. After Antoine died of wounds sustained in battle in 1562, Jeanne became the sole ruler of the kingdom of Navarre. In 1568, a religious war prompted her and her son to flee north to the Protestant stronghold of La Rochelle in the province of Saintonge. In 1569, when Henri was sixteen, she made him and his cousin Henri de Condé co-leaders of the Protestant cause.
The following year, La Rochelle was designated one of four Protestant citadels (villes de sûreté) by the Paix de Saint-Germain. From 1570 to 1577, the Rochellais besieged the neighbouring town of Brouage, a thriving seaport, governing Brouage with their own appointees from La Rochelle. From 1568 to 1572, Henri was often in La Rochelle — the longest period lasted from October 1, 1570, up to nearly the end of July 1571. As a mature teenager coming of age, he would have mixed with many people in the region.
However, this time frame is too early for Champlain’s conception — the La Rochelle baptismal certificate places Champlain’s conception at around the beginning of November 1573. (By his own account, Champlain was born in Brouage, about forty kilometres from La Rochelle.) At the time Champlain was presumably conceived, Henri de Navarre was being held under house arrest in Paris. But Henri’s actual activities, and whom he might have been seeing at the time, are little known. There are a number of scenarios that make it possible for Henri to be Champlain’s father.
Champlain wrote little about his family or himself. Close male mentors did enter his life, but they were men like the pilot Guillaume Allène (his uncle) and François Gravé Du Pont (Pontgravé), who introduced him to Canada. Furthermore, Champlain seems to have had no siblings and spoke of himself only rarely. His mother is consistently named Marguerite Le Roy, but we know close to nothing about her.
By his own account, Champlain’s connection to the king was important. Champlain wrote in his Voyages of 1636 that he couldn’t accept an invitation to go to Canada in 1603 without asking the king, “[his Majesty,] to whom I was under an obligation both by birth and by a stipend, with which he honoured me as a means to maintain me near him.”
Scholars have suggested that the “birth” that obligated Champlain to serve the king was merely his French nationality, but that seems a rather weak excuse for an impediment to a voyage.
Champlain had already acted as a spy for the king when he was twenty-one to twenty-five years old, supporting King Henri IV against the French and Spanish ultra-Catholics during the Brittany campaign (1595–98). His activities as an informant likely continued during Champlain’s voyage with France’s recent enemy, the Spanish, to the West Indies (1599–1601) when he was twenty-five to twenty-seven. Without royal protection, a Frenchman with the Huguenot-sounding name Samuel, travelling with Spaniards, would have been highly at risk of accusation and reprisal for espionage. The stipend seems to have been a reward for Champlain’s faithful service, yet Champlain explains it not as an encouragement for further loyal activities in the field but as a personal desire on the part of the king to enjoy the young man’s presence at court.
Perhaps he was being retained as an advisor? He was young to be so engaged and surely more useful in the field. The most convincing explanation for the king’s desire to keep Champlain near him might be a deeper familial bond between them, by naissance. It may have been a way for the king to acknowledge his parentage of Champlain, as he did with some of his other illegitimate offspring.
Other circumstantial evidence extends the preferred treatment Champlain continually received from the king. He reported personally to Henri IV after both his early trips to the West Indies and then to Canada in 1603, when he was still an obscure hick from the boonies, ostensibly Brouage. Furthermore, his first journal of the 1603 voyage was licensed within a few months of his return. Just as today’s publishers hesitate to risk their investment on an unknown author, so in early seventeenth-century Paris there were hoops to jump through before publication, which only someone with power equivalent to a royal patron could overrule. Someone of such substance pushed this privilege for Champlain. Finally, until his assassination in May 1610, King Henri IV continued to act as Champlain’s greatest supporter. No future sovereign, whether Henri’s second wife, Marie de Médicis, or their son, Louis XIII, or even Cardinal Richelieu, ever gave Champlain so much attention.
After the tragic and untimely loss of his true patron, Champlain arranged his own marriage in France, in December of the same year. He was thirty-six years old, while his bride, Hélène Boullé, was twelve. The dowry from Hélène’s Huguenot father, 4,500 French livres followed by another 1,500 livres, supplied Champlain with more funds for the settlement and exploration in Canada. Arranged marriages were generally practised by the nobility, and members of the royal court attended his wedding. When the contract was signed in Paris on December 27, 1610, his father was deceased and his mother absent. The marriage produced no offspring, and Hélène became an Ursuline nun after her conversion from Huguenot to Catholic, spending only a limited time in Canada from 1620–24. The recent discovery by Jean-Marie Germes in France of the baptismal certificate of Samuel de Champlain has reawakened the improvable hypothesis of Champlain being Henri’s son.
They were slaughtered in the streets during what became known as the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.
Not everyone agrees the certificate is Champlain’s, however. Éric Thierry, a top Champlain scholar in France, has rejected the theory. He points out that the father’s name is given as “Anthoine Chapeleau,” incontrast with the “late Anthoine de Champlain” on Champlain’s marriage certificate of 1610. And, while the mother’s name is the same on both documents, Marguerite Le Roy was a common name at the time.
Yet the certificate contains three pieces of information that all ring true: the names of three individuals — Samuel the son, Antoine the father, and Marguerite Le Roy the mother; the confirmation that Champlain was born a Protestant; and the date, August 13, 1574. Only the surname Chapeleau is unexpected, and this one discrepancy accounts for the oversight of the document until now.
If we check out some of these points in greater detail, Champlain’s date of birth in 1574 is consistent with the investigation that Conrad Heidenreich and I published in Samuel de Champlain before 1604 (2010). Since then, I have argued that Samuel de Champlain must have been born between the eighth and the twelth of August 1574, at a time when both Protestants and Catholics practised infant baptism within eight days of birth. Given the high infant mortality rates at the time, families did not want to risk the salvation of their newborns by waiting any longer than necessary.
Turning to the historical context, in August 1572, Jeanne d’Albret (Henri’s Huguenot mother) and Catherine de’ Medici arranged a marriage for the young Henri de Navarre to Marguerite (Catherine’s daughter) that was designed to bring peace to the opposing Christian factions. Unfortunately, both Jeanne d’Albret and her son fell ill, causing the death of the former, which deprived Henri of his mother’s support at the Parisian court. Plans for the wedding went ahead, however, and Henri’s Huguenot friends came to Paris for the celebration, having been given assurances for their safety while in the capital. Instead they were slaughtered in the streets during what became known as the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, and Henri felt responsible for their deaths. During the massacre, both Henri de Navarre and Henri de Condé were held captive in the royal chamber, while their compatriots succumbed to their wounds in the public and private passages of Paris.
Even when he abjured his Huguenot persuasion and agreed to become a Catholic, Henri de Navarre, at the age of nineteen, was still under house arrest or surveillance. His position at court during this time remains obscure. At one point in 1573, from February 12 until early July, he was sent under guard to the Huguenot stronghold of La Rochelle, which was under siege, to help to pacify the Rochelais.
Several scenarios for Champlain’s birth suggest themselves. Either Henri, at the age of twenty-one, slipped away from surveillance in Paris to return to the La Rochelle region in early November 1573, or a country girl from the region followed him to Paris.
It’s also possible that there was a delay between the time Champlain was born and the time he was baptized. A baptismal record containing the names of two parents — even if they were adoptive parents — would confer legitimacy on an out-of-wedlock child. If Champlain was born in April 1574, nine months after the siege of La Rochelle — and if Henri was indeed Champlain’s unacknowledged father — it may have taken his unknown mother some time to inform Henri of his birth. Arranging for adoption into a “respectable bourgeois family” was a common practice for illegitimate children of high-born parents, according to Fischer. Four months or so does not seem an unreasonable period for arriving at an accommodation, given Henri’s relative inaccessibility at court and the difficulties of communication at the time.
It is even plausible that Champlain was born in La Rochelle to a Huguenot woman who placed him with a Protestant family from Brouage. Or, if he was born in Brouage, his family may have taken him to La Rochelle to be baptized because there was a Protestant temple there. Whether or not he actually knew where he was born, Champlain always maintained the facade of his paternity in Brouage; his earliest memories were likely formed there.
The most significant feature supporting the probability of Henri IV’s paternity is the resemblance between the characters of Henri de Navarre and Samuel de Champlain. As king, Henri’s greatest achievement was to end the Wars of Religion and to give legal equality to both Protestants and Catholics. Henri’s personal piety was grounded in a respect for truth, approached through discussions in council and consensus. He embraced his own conscience while abhorring force and rigid ideology, which experience had taught him to be futile. This same tolerance is reflected in Champlain’s attitude to Canada’s indigenous people, so effectively described in Fischer’s Champlain’s Dream. For Champlain, too, justice and consensus prevailed over revenge and retaliation in his dealings with First Nations.
King Henri IV has become a legend of tolerance for France; why not, then, accept Champlain as a legend of tolerance for Canada? Legend is the stuff of dreams and visions, in this case of an open-minded quest for counsel, consensus, and peaceful coexistence. A possible father-son connection between the king and the explorer awakens the imagination, providing a legend for our times.
Late scholar was fascinated by Champlain as a man of tolerance
A few months after completing the accompanying story for Canada’s History, author Janet Ritch passed away. Her death from cancer on December 12, 2014, at age fifty-nine, was a great loss to many people.
Janet was a colleague of mine, a highly respected researcher, translator, and scholar whose assistance was invaluable to my published efforts on Samuel de Champlain and John Cabot. I served as an assessor for a successful funding application for the research she was pursuing at her death, on indigenous slaves in colonial New France. Her curiosity and passion extended well beyond Champlain, but the issue of his possible status as an illegitimate son of Henri IV did fire her final years.
There is not much for me to add to the evidence Janet presented in her article. If I were able to sit with her again today and debate her case, I would be more interested in engaging Janet on her desire to view Champlain as a “legend of tolerance” for our time. Legend is something that has plagued approaches to Champlain, ever since he was resurrected as a historical figure in the nineteenth century.
Morris Bishop, in the 1963 introduction to a new edition of his classic biography Champlain: The Life of Fortitude (1948), argued for Champlain to be embraced as a “national hero.” It’s a burden few figures in our history have to shoulder, and when we approach history with a determination to create such heroes and gild them in legend, however useful such legends may appear to us, our ability to assess them critically becomes burdened as well.
Champlain is a fascinating, complicated figure who deserves all the attention he attracts, and Janet’s explorations add to that fascinating complication. But in response to the question of whether Champlain was the son of Henri IV, I would say: Would it matter if he wasn’t? — Douglas Hunter
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