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METCALFE, CHARLES THEOPHILUS, 1st Baron METCALFE, colonial administrator; b. 30 Jan. 1785 in Calcutta, second son of Major Thomas Theophilus Metcalfe and Susanna Selina Sophia Debonnaire, widow of John Smith; d. 5 Sept. 1846 at Malshangar, near Basingstoke, England.

Charles Theophilus Metcalfe came to the Canadas at the end of a long career in colonial administration. Of old Yorkshire and Irish stock, he was inordinately proud of his father, who had acquired a substantial fortune as agent for military stores in the East India Company at Calcutta. A few months after Metcalfe’s birth, the family returned to England, where Major Metcalfe was elected a director of the company (1789) and a member of parliament (1796). He was created baronet in 1802. Metcalfe’s mother was the daughter of a South African colonist. Reserved, strong willed, and ambitious for her children, she doted on Metcalfe’s elder brother, Theophilus John.

Metcalfe’s education began at an undistinguished preparatory school in Bromley, Kent. In 1796 he went to Eton College. Although totally uninterested in sports and overshadowed by the talented Theophilus John, he was profoundly happy there. He read Gibbon, Ariosto, Voltaire, and Rousseau for leisure, in a training that was self-consciously directed at future greatness. Infrequent conflicts with Theophilus and in occasional disputes with college masters, he developed the habit, which he called “holding out,” of persisting doggedly in a crisis until he had won or irretrievably lost.

Reluctantly leaving Eton in March 1800 and abandoning the prospect of further education at Oxford or Cambridge, Metcalfe took up the Bengal writership his father had obtained for him in the East India Company. He was by then 16, short in stature, and very plain in looks; his considerable intelligence was matched by a warm, equable disposition, deep attachment to his family, and the fortunate capacity to keep the cares of the day separate from the other compartments of his life. An Anglican, he was already sincerely religious.

Metcalfe arrived in India near the start of one of the last spurts in the expansion that, between 1757 and 1818, would establish Britain as the dominant power on the Indian subcontinent. Although ill adapted to conquest – he rode poorly and disliked hunting and shooting – he established his military credentials at the storming of Dig in 1804 as a volunteer in the advance guard of Lord Lake. In general, however, he stuck to “the political line.” His first major assignment, in 1808–9, was a mission to Ranjit Singh, the great Sikh maharajah of the Punjab, with whom by hard bargaining and threats he concluded a treaty that somewhat unjustifiably established his reputation as a skilled negotiator. Between 1811 and 1818, and again from 1825 to 1827, he was the resident at Delhi, a key post on the frontier of British India, where he was the de facto ruler, largely independent of the British government at Calcutta and yet the centre of a web of imperial diplomacy stretching into Nepal and the states of central Asia.

As British rule moved into a phase dominated by consolidation and reform, Metcalfe made a corresponding transition, becoming in 1827 a member of the Supreme Council of India. His position as the second most important figure in the administration was recognized by his appointment as provisional governor general in December 1833, a rank which he held until 1838. On 20 March 1835 he became acting governor general after Lord William Cavendish Bentinck retired because of ill health. But disappointment, undiminished by the receipt of a gcb on 14 March 1836, followed. The non-confirmation by the whig government of his appointment as governor general was the first of several slights, as he perceived them to be. Rather than sacrifice dignity or principle, he resigned from the East India Company on 1 Jan. 1838. Although he had never married, he had fathered three Eurasian sons during his years in India.

Back in England after 37 years, the bearer of a high reputation, a personal fortune of £100,000, and a baronetcy (since the death of Theophilus John on 14 Aug. 1822), Metcalfe hankered for the large responsibilities and heavy work-load of the past. He accepted the governorship of Jamaica and during his tenure, from 26 Sept. 1839 to 21 May 1842, succeeded in surmounting, at least temporarily, the major crisis in relations between the intransigent plantocracy and the newly liberated black population that had been the reason for his appointment. In consequence, he was recognized as a great conciliator, and it was probably this factor, together with belief in his “superior powers of Government,” that led Lord Stanley, colonial secretary in the conservative administration of Sir Robert Peel, to offer Metcalfe the post of governor-in-chief of the province of Canada. The offer was accepted on 19 Jan. 1843.

Like Jamaica, the Canadas were thought to be in crisis. In September 1842 Metcalfe’s predecessor, Sir Charles Bagot, had overcome a political deadlock by calling the Lower Canadian and Upper Canadian reformers under Louis-Hippolyte La Fontaine* and Robert Baldwin* to his Executive Council. This “great measure,” as Bagot termed it, compromised two major aspects of imperial policy, anglicization of the Canadians and maintenance of the method of governing used by Lord Sydenham [Thomson], the latter involving rule by the governor with the support of a non-party executive and a non-party majority in the House of Assembly. While accepting Bagot’s assurances that he had averted recognition of responsible government in the extreme or party form advocated by Baldwin, the British government deeply regretted his action, and it chose Metcalfe in the hope that, without repudiating the “great measure,” he might, in some vaguely defined way, return the implementation of British policy in the colony to a firm footing.

Assuming office on 30 March 1843, Metcalfe soon reached an unusual assessment of the colonial situation. On the one hand, he concluded that the Canadians had been justifiably aggrieved at their exclusion from office and that Bagot’s remedying of this evil was the chief of the “very beneficial effects” of his administration. On the other hand, it was clear to him that the events of September 1842 and the fatal illness that afflicted Bagot from late in that year had convinced all parties in Canada that responsible government had been introduced in a more extreme form than Bagot had conceded. The members of the Executive Council were considered to be ministers and to constitute a cabinet. That “cabinet” was now dominated by one party, almost all its members acknowledging the leadership of La Fontaine and Baldwin and conceiving, as Metcalfe saw it, that their interest lay in strengthening their support largely through the distribution of patronage. In short, the constitutional position had already passed beyond that he had been sent to remedy.

Temperament, training, and his instructions prevented Metcalfe from accepting this situation. He meant to be the effective head of the administration, consulting the council whenever law, usage, or the public good required but taking ultimate responsibility himself. He intended to conciliate all parties, and viewed patronage as an essential instrument to that end. He would be neither “a nullity” nor “a tool in the hands of party.” More clearly even than Baldwin, he understood that this plan of administration was consistent with responsible government as interpreted by his predecessors Lord Durham [Lambton], Sydenham, and Bagot, and that it differed fundamentally from the party government to which La Fontaine in particular was now wedded. The great difficulty was not that Metcalfe regarded Sydenham’s method of governing as ill adapted to colonial circumstances, which he did, but rather that sustaining it imposed on him the necessity of maintaining a majority in the Legislative Assembly, which, in the event of a clash with La Fontaine and Baldwin, would be extremely difficult. By 10 May Metcalfe considered such a clash inevitable.

Metcalfe tried to ensure that, when the conflict occurred, it took place on an issue and in circumstances of his own choosing. Yet he also sought to avert it. The ministers too were anxious for harmony. Initially, therefore, Metcalfe’s relations with them were cordial, and even later he agreed with them on many issues. At its first meeting the Executive Council presented him with three urgent problems; he strongly supported its recommendations. He reported to Stanley that the council’s choice, Montreal, was “decidedly the fittest place” to be capital of the union, and he appealed to the home government to announce this decision as its own, in an effort to minimize opposition in Upper Canada. Similarly, Metcalfe urged the imperial authorities to grant a general amnesty for all offences except murder committed during the rebellions of 1837–38. Finally, he asked Stanley that he be permitted, despite instructions to the contrary, to announce at the opening of the legislature that, if an adequate civil list was granted by the assembly, the British government would repeal that part of the act of union which compelled the province, irrespective of its wishes, to provide the stipulated funds.

In supporting these steps Metcalfe was concerned to reduce the high level of party spirit which had made a deep impression on him at his arrival. He also showed much political realism, contending, for example, that the whole province was opposed to the civil list clause. His arguments revealed a rejection of the policy of forced anglicization. Metcalfe declared that “if the French Canadians are to be ruled to their satisfaction, and who could desire to rule them otherwise? every attempt to metamorphose them systematically into English must be abandoned.” Thus, Kingston was precluded from being the provincial capital because it was “a foreign land” to the Canadians. He also urged that the act of union be amended to give French and English equal status in the legislature. Opposition to anglicization naturally improved Metcalfe’s standing with the French bloc in the assembly, but it also reflected deeply held beliefs which had originated in his early education and had shown themselves in his Indian policy.

Unfortunately for Metcalfe, Stanley and Peel were already heavily committed against the measures he advocated, and, although Stanley in particular felt that he was yielding in a way he would to few governors, the British administration either rejected the recommendations or hedged its approval with so many conditions that the governor felt unable to act. He set out determinedly to change or circumvent the British response. On Stanley’s ruling that the council must take the political consequences of its decision concerning the seat of government, he could do nothing. But his dispatches were to keep hammering away at the civil list issue, and he soon achieved the practical, if not the political, effect of a general amnesty partly by pardoning individuals within his jurisdiction almost willy-nilly.

The intransigence of the imperial government reduced Metcalfe’s standing in the eyes of the councillors and raised doubts about his good faith. But his relationship with them was already deteriorating. From the start he waged a daily struggle to maintain what he believed was the due authority of his office. As early as April 1843 clashes occurred over appointments. Metcalfe failed to understand the thorough use tories had previously made of patronage for party purposes; his ideal was a non-partisan bureaucracy where selection rested on fitness for office rather than political affiliation. There were also clashes over policy. When the governor pardoned three leading Upper Canadian rebels, La Fontaine demanded equal treatment for three of his compatriots, including the exiled leader Louis-Joseph Papineau*. Although Metcalfe recognized the strength of this claim, he resisted until La Fontaine reached the point of resignation, probably feeling that the Colonial Office would reject the concession unless he could show that there was no alternative. Another source of conflict was the violent tory Orange order [see Ogle Robert Gowan*], which the reformers sought to proscribe in ways Metcalfe thought counter-productive and an infringement of civil liberties. He rapidly developed an extreme aversion to La Fontaine, whom he regarded as dictatorial. While the reformers slightingly referred to him as “Old Square Toes,” “le grand Mogul,” and, later, “Charles the Simple,” his dispatches contemptuously described them as “the Democratic Party.”

Rupture finally came when each side found the existing relationship intolerable. Before the parliamentary session began on 28 Sept. 1843 Metcalfe resolutely refused to dismiss the tory Robert Sympson Jameson* from the speakership of the Legislative Council because he regarded the executive’s request that he do so as purely a reflection of party animosity. When Jameson resigned of his own volition, the governor demonstrated his independence by entering into his own negotiations to fill the vacancy. After the session opened the ministers’ parliamentary proceedings led Metcalfe to conclude that on the civil list question he had been the victim “from first to last” of “a premeditated breach of confidence, such as will for ever preclude me from again seeking any confidential communication from them.” Moreover, the councillors, without first informing him, announced an important change of policy, making the chairmanship of the Board of Works held by Hamilton Hartley Killaly* a non-political rather than an Executive Council position, while Metcalfe reserved the Secret Societies Bill for royal assent without previously informing La Fontaine. The governor and his ministers were also in dispute over charges made against the provincial secretary, Dominick Daly*. Finally, on 24 Nov. 1843, after Metcalfe had named a tory, Francis Powell, clerk of the peace for the Dalhousie District, La Fontaine and Baldwin formally demanded that the governor not make any appointment without first taking their advice and that he then make it in a manner “not prejudicial” to their “influence.” Two days of fruitless discussions ensued, during which the executive councillors contended that this principle was essential to the operation of responsible government, while the governor claimed that it would result in the virtual surrender of the prerogative of the crown. On 26 November all the councillors except Daly resigned. Five days later, after debate in the Legislative Assembly, the ex-ministers were overwhelmingly supported by 46 votes to 23. The assembly was prorogued on 9 December.

On 9 Oct. 1843 Metcalfe had written, “I can see nothing but embarrassment and convulsion as the probable consequences of [the ministers’] dismissal.” Nevertheless, he had managed to break with them on the issue and in the way he wished; now, after the ministers’ resignations, he was determined not to yield. His aim was to form an administration of moderate conservatives, moderate reformers, and Canadians, and if, at its recall, the assembly failed to support the new body, to hold a general election.

The key to Metcalfe’s plan was the large, compact phalanx of Canadian members in the assembly. Astutely realizing that as a group they were committed to national survival rather than responsible government, Metcalfe had already taken steps to elevate the ageing Denis-Benjamin Viger* as a rival to La Fontaine. Now he called Viger to the council, hoping, though without much conviction, that his high prestige and extensive connections, particularly with the still-powerful Papineau family, might win for him a substantial body of Canadian support. On 12 Dec. 1843 Viger took office and shortly thereafter set off to gather followers in Lower Canada.

The conservatives were already strongly behind the governor. Some initially regretted his stand on responsible government, others, Metcalfe realized, would not necessarily be more amenable than La Fontaine and Baldwin to his notions of the relationship between the governor and his council. But Metcalfe had a profound sympathy with them, believing they comprised the bulk of the province’s loyal citizens. Sir Allan Napier MacNab*, their leader in the assembly, had, by the violence of his resistance to the former administration, rendered himself ineligible for the council. John Solomon Cartwright, MacNab’s lieutenant, was prevented by ill health and his wife’s opposition from accepting Metcalfe’s offer. So William Henry Draper*, a moderate conservative, came reluctantly out of political retirement. He entered the council on the same day as Viger and, like Viger, held no portfolio.

Metcalfe’s efforts to attract support from moderate reformers were directed largely towards Samuel Bealey Harrison* and William Hamilton Merritt*, but eventually both declined the offer to join the council. For many months the outcome of the crisis remained uncertain. While negotiations continued, public opinion waxed and waned, and a struggle went on to influence it. Metcalfe was agreeably surprised by the spontaneous outburst of loyal feeling in Upper Canada that followed the ministers’ resignations, a development greatly assisted by the powerful, polemical rhetoric with which he replied to popular addresses on the subject. Edward Gibbon Wakefield*, Isaac Buchanan*, and Egerton Ryerson*, three influential moderates, were early won over. They were active in support of the government, and published letters or pamphlets which appear to have had significant impact. A by-election for the riding of London and municipal elections in Toronto in January 1844 turned out favourably for pro-government candidates. On the other hand, the delay in completing the Executive Council hurt the governor’s cause, the extreme reformers in the west of the province organized effectively, and Baldwin remained confident of popular support.

French Canada was crucial, and there, despite repeated assurances from Viger that he was on the brink of success, no large body of supporters was won. Metcalfe did what he could, securing pardons for Canadians transported after the rebellion, confirming Montreal as the seat of government, and even recommending payment of arrears of salary as speaker of the Lower Canadian assembly to Papineau. “The pardons of their Countrymen . . . as well as the whole conduct of the Government towards them during my administration ought to have given me some influence among them,” Metcalfe declared, but he added significantly, “I see no symptoms of any such effect.” In April a “readiness to oppose the British Government” showed itself in a Montreal by-election, which was won by La Fontaine’s candidate, Lewis Thomas Drummond*, over the pro-government businessman William Molson*. Although Metcalfe regarded the result as determined solely by the outrageous violence of Irish labourers brought in from the Lachine Canal, he confessed that it had dismayed his Lower Canadian supporters “to a degree that I could not have supposed possible from such a cause.” His advisers began to urge an immediate dissolution, but the governor, “holding out” as had been his wont, refused to play his last card prematurely. He approached Canadian politicians independently of both Viger and La Fontaine. Still the habit of unity and the powerful organization of the French leader held firm; Augustin-Norbert Morin*, Côme-Séraphin Cherrier*, Frédéric-Auguste Quesnel*, and René-Édouard Caron* refused office, and only four Canadian members of the assembly could be reckoned as willing even to support the administration. By 28 July 1844 the negotiations with the Canadians had virtually ended.

The formation of the Executive Council was now rapidly completed. It proved to be a satisfactory but undistinguished body. Denis-Benjamin Papineau* accepted the commissionership of crown lands. The attorney generalship east was finally occupied by James Smith*, a Montreal lawyer bearing the twin disadvantages of British origin and lack of a parliamentary seat. Viger became president of the council and Daly remained provincial secretary. There were thus four Lower Canadians out of a complement of six. Draper was appointed attorney general west and was government leader; William Morris*, a moderate conservative and influential lay leader of the Church of Scotland, became receiver general. The post of inspector general was left temporarily vacant after four Upper Canadian reformers declined it. Henry Sherwood*, a Toronto tory moving erratically from exclusive to moderate views, became solicitor general west outside the council. The appointments made, Metcalfe changed his mind about meeting the existing parliament and on 23 September called a general election.

The campaign was short and heated. Metcalfe himself entered the struggle, playing on the theme of loyalty with great skill. Though local issues were important in many contests, the determining factors seem to have been the responsiveness particularly of the immigrant population in Upper Canada to Metcalfe’s appeals and the unpopularity there of the reformers’ measures. Economic prosperity may also have aided the conservatives and certainly helped to prevent the considerable violence and disorder that accompanied polling from degenerating into worse. In Lower Canada contests were generally quieter because more one-sided. Metcalfe’s men won eight seats in the tory Eastern Townships and picked up Montreal itself. But in general La Fontaine’s machine worked with brilliant efficiency to capture approximately 29 of the 42 Lower Canadian seats. In Upper Canada the government won all but a dozen of the seats. In total, the new Executive Council had a small but workable majority.

The outcome was a triumph for Metcalfe, and it was recognized as such not only in Canada but also in London. Throughout his long, difficult struggle with La Fontaine and Baldwin, Metcalfe had been strongly supported by the British government. Queen Victoria as well as Peel and Stanley seem early to have accepted the inevitability of a clash between the governor and his council, and they demurred only at the concessions Metcalfe wanted to make in order to avoid or postpone it. The very day La Fontaine and Baldwin resigned, Metcalfe received a private letter from Stanley which warned, “On one point I am sure it is necessary that you should be firm – I mean in the disposal of Patronage.” Now their gratitude and admiration were boundless. On 1 Dec. 1844 Peel wrote to Metcalfe informing him of Her Majesty’s intention of conferring a barony on him. He was created Baron Metcalfe the following month.

Metcalfe’s triumph was won at great personal and political cost, however. Some years before leaving India, he had contracted a small cancer on his right cheek. Untreated, it worsened. When it eventually was treated, the applications proved debilitating. For a time after 1842 there was some remission, yet gradually the tumour spread. In April 1844 an alarmed Stanley sent out a physician, George Pollock, with detailed instructions from leading London specialists, but during Pollock’s application of caustic chloride of zinc Metcalfe’s health deteriorated. He lost the sight of his right eye; his left eye was also weakened. He bore the affliction uncomplainingly. Well aware of the impact his untimely retirement would have on the political situation, he did his work as best he could in a darkened room with the help of readers and writers. This extraordinary fortitude gained him much sympathy; it was a factor in both the general election and the bestowal of the barony.

The political cost lay in the fact that Metcalfe had set out to be a governor above party and had been compelled to enter the realm of party conflict. This contradiction would have been less evident had his new Executive Council held a less dubious claim to being non-party. But Metcalfe’s administration, apart from the apolitical Daly, consisted of conservatives supplemented by two Canadians, and after the general election these two could muster but one follower in the assembly. Although the electoral balance had probably been determined mainly by moderate reformers who voted for government candidates, no reformer joined the Executive Council before or after the election. (The vacant position of inspector general was filled by a tory, William Benjamin Robinson*.) Furthermore, because of his illness Metcalfe relied increasingly not only on his civil secretary, James Macaulay Higginson*, but also on his ministers, particularly Draper, whom he considered the ablest man of business in the province. Inevitably power passed from the governor to the council, so that by late 1845 the relationship was almost exactly the one he had set out to reverse, except, of course, that the party in office was, in Metcalfe’s view, a party of genuine loyalty to Britain.

It was enough, and there were compensations. By the end of his term the imperial government had capitulated on the general amnesty, the civil list, and the language question. The last was an especially significant concession, for it indicated the abandonment of forced anglicization as an element of British policy; it was granted only in recognition of the severe pressure Metcalfe was under to maintain the reputations of Viger and Denis-Benjamin Papineau and to add, if possible, to their following. In Upper Canada the government ran into trouble because its supporters had no common policy and their ostensible leader, Draper, totally lacked political influence. The parliamentary session of 1844–45 thus ended with the government being forced by its own high-church wing to withdraw its main measure, a bill to establish a “University of Upper Canada,” in which Metcalfe had taken a personal interest. But most government business got through the assembly with majorities of between three and six votes. Though discontent continued among its Upper Canadian supporters, Metcalfe’s experiment seemed, in the latter part of 1845, to be not without hope of being sustained.

Metcalfe stuck to his post, keen to forward the work he had begun, keen, too, to show loyalty to those who had supported him. But in October a sudden deterioration in his health left him unable to perform adequately the duties of his office. With the permission of the Colonial Office and the assurance from his councillors that he could do no more for the Canadas, he resigned. Charles Murray, Earl Cathcart*, took over as administrator. On 26 November Metcalfe left for England, virtually blind, barely able to eat or speak, and with a gaping hole in his cheek. He died a little over nine months later.

During the first half of the 19th century the British presence in India was dominated by a small group of “glorious sahibs.” Metcalfe was the most complex and arguably the greatest of them. Certainly he was conservative there: his strong sense of historical continuity and his typically 18th-century toleration for other cultures made him a stout opponent of attempts to anglicize Indian society. But he was also extraordinarily progressive, particularly concerning criminal punishment and slavery at Delhi. Furthermore, he showed a remarkable determination to pursue honest, efficient government, even at the expense of particular British interests and, if necessary, his own career.

One might question the frequent statement that Metcalfe’s experience in India unfitted him for the task of administering the Canadas, a colony of white settlers with an advanced representative system of government. His attitude to colonial responsible government was identical in theory with, and more realistic in practice than, that of Stanley and Peel; he was as politically successful as Sydenham, the great politician among the Canadian governors of this period, under more difficult circumstances; and, though his views became less favourable towards the Canadians in the last year of his governorship, he was as sympathetic to their aspirations as any imperial representative of the era. The relationship between Metcalfe’s different careers is complex and difficult to trace because, despite the views many historians hold of his Canadian viceroyalty, he was a flexible administrator. Throughout, however, there was a common core of ideas, a consistent although developing character, and above all a constant dramatic purpose. In the Canadas, full of Byronic despair, the failing hero flung himself against the ineluctable forces of history, acting out to the last the epic in which, while still a schoolboy, he had cast himself a paladin.

Although the limited success Metcalfe won on the Canadian constitutional question did not last, his administration was of considerable significance in Canadian history. As James Maurice Stockford Careless has pointed out, Metcalfe clarified the concept of responsible government and inadvertently contributed to the full implementation of the La Fontaine–Baldwin version of it by failing to produce a viable alternative. Resolving the short-term crisis of 1843–44, he provided a valuable breathing space in which the imperial government was able to adjust to the new reality of Canadian affairs. Thus he helped to ensure that, when responsible government came fully into operation in 1848, it did so peacefully. The historian William George Ormsby has pointed to Metcalfe’s more positive and deliberate contributions to Canada’s development, in particular his part in bringing about the abandonment of anglicization as a major element in British policy. Finally, Metcalfe had a notable impact on Canadian conservatism, reconciling it to responsible government of whatever form. But his emphasis on loyalty to Britain as the litmus test of colonial politicians and his belief that, despite responsible government, Britain must retain significant power in the internal affairs of Canada strengthened elements in conservative thought that were to be central to their outraged response to the Rebellion Losses Bill of 1849.

Donald R. Beer