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FAMOUS FOLKS
(Meeting of Françoise Marie
Jacquelin and Sieur d'Aulnay by C.W. Jeffreys.)
The Lioness of
La Tour
Françoise Marie Jacquelin –
who mounted a vigorous defence of a Saint John garrison – was the very
essence of a modern women in 17-century Acadia
by M.A. MacDonald
She was called the heroine of Acadia
caught in the power struggle between two warring governors that reached its
climax in a battle at Fort La Tour in what is now Saint John in April, 1645.
Her name was Françoise Marie Jacquelin and her husband was Charles de
Saint-Étienne de La Tour, a personable underdog who had fought to
preserve the colony of Acadia through many adversities. His rival, Charles de
Menou, Sieur d'Aulnay, was an astute and capable aristocrat, cousin of France's
chief minister, Cardinal Richelieu.
Learning that La
Tour was away, leaving Françoise in charge of the small Saint John
garrison, d'Aulnay attacked in force. Late in the afternoon of April 16, 1645 -
Easter Day - d'Aulnay withdrew his forces for a time beyond artillery range.
Glad of the respite, Françoise ordered her embattled men to
rest.
In the sudden
quiet she could, perhaps, hear her child's frightened crying from the cellar of
one of the battered buildings and her maid's voice soothing him, mingled with
moans and cries from the wounded. Jagged pieces of wood from palisade and
buildings lay in heaps; spent ammunition, broken glass and roof tiles littered
the broken flagstones. Heavy projectiles had carried away sections of the
parapet, parts of which had collapsed into the defensive ditch. The habitation
reeked with the acrid, sulphurous stink of gunpowder, smoke from burning
timbers, the smell of blood and sweat. The exhausted survivors snatched a few
moments to rest or sleep, leaving the 47-year-old Swiss, Hans Vandre, to keep
watch.
D'Aulnay, meanwhile, judging the fort to be
sufficiently weakened, made preparations for the general assault. As an
incentive, he promised his followers the pillage of the place. An hour before
sundown the men from the ships and the shore battery joined forces to begin a
stealthy advance. At a little distance, Vandre watched them come, saw how
heavily they outnumbered the remaining defenders, saw them come up over ditches
filled with debris, then begin to mount the broken ramparts.
Vandre has been accused of yielding to bribery, of betraying
the fort. Perhaps "bribery" and "betrayal" are too strong: he only needed to
keep silent. Vandre came from the Swiss countryside near Lucerne, an area from
which French armies recruited heavily and he would have dreaded the fate in
store for captured rebels.
As d'Aulnay's men poured over
the shattered section of the parapet, the defenders caught up their weapons and
rushed to meet them in a melee of sword and musket butt, pike point and hooked
halberd. Françoise led the charge at the head of her men and only
yielded, in the words of the contemporary historian Nicholas Denys, "at the
last extremity, and under the condition that the said d'Aulnay should give
quarter to all."
But when he had made himself master of
the place, d'Aulnay broke his word. He had been deceived, he said, adding in a
fury that he would not have granted terms if he had known how few the defenders
were. Such obstinacy had to be punished. He had lost too many men in taking the
fort.
As he looked, he could see the heavy toll the
garrison, too, had paid. But it was not enough. D'Aulnay gave orders to hang
all the surviving defenders on the spot, with the exception of one man "who had
his life spared on condition that he would perform the execution." One other,
Vandre, also survived.
In the stench and shambles of the
fort, in the midst of its shattered and burning buildings, Françoise
stood bound and with a rope around her neck "as though she had been the
greatest villain," according to Nicholas Denys. The fort's dead lay with
wide-flung limbs or in broken, bloodied heaps about her, among splinters of
wood, discarded weapons, smoke and the reek of smouldering tow that had ignited
the silenced cannon. She was forced to watch as her remaining men, grimed and
stained with sweat, met a slow, agonizing death. All were well known to her,
many of them friends of long standing. They died, one by one, of slow
strangulation. It was not a matter of a quick drop and a broken neck; "hanged
and strangled," say all the accounts.
Françoise
was spared the gruesome fate of her men but died three weeks later; no one
knows exactly how.
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