Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [81]
Against this backdrop of family misfortune, John had to contend with unending political sabotage. But Belleville’s political battles brought an unexpected dividend when the Moodies met a politician for whom they would develop a lifelong admiration. This was Robert Baldwin, the Toronto lawyer who led the Reform Party.
In his time, Robert Baldwin was recognized as a giant amongst the young colony’s statesmen. Today, his name is invariably invoked as “the father of Responsible Government,” because he helped establish real democracy in Canada. (He is also remembered for a connection that would have surprised him: he was the grandfather of Robbie Ross, Oscar Wilde’s first male lover.) Born in Toronto in 1804, Baldwin inherited from his father, the Irish born and immensely debonair Dr. William Baldwin, a large fortune, the extensive Spadina estate in the middle of Toronto and a sturdy belief that the government in Canada should be answerable to Canadian voters as well as to the government in London. In the aftermath of the 1837 Rebellion, the two Baldwins had made a forceful case for responsible government in the colony to Lord Durham, the Whig grandee sent out by the British government to investigate the troubled state of British North America. In the report that Lord Durham presented in 1839, the Baldwins were delighted to see that, alongside its recommendation for the union of Upper and Lower Canada (roughly, present-day Ontario and Quebec) into the United Provinces of Canada, it also proposed that the executive wing of government should be accountable to the elected legislature.
Robert Baldwin (1804–1858) was the father of Responsible Government and a close friend of the Moodies.
At first, Westminster refused this move to strengthen the colonial government, arguing that such a step would compromise British sovereignty. So Robert Baldwin spent the next twenty years championing responsible government in his native land. He also dedicated himself to implementing the kind of progressive policies that were only just beginning to be understood within the scattered settlements of the colony: linguistic and religious freedoms; a strong and non-denominational education system; and a firm partnership between English-speaking and French-speaking citizens of the United Provinces. Much of today’s Canadian political culture has its origins in the measured tolerance and broad-minded idealism of Robert Baldwin. He practised what he preached: he sent his four children to be educated in francophone schools in Lower Canada, and he forged a durable political partnership with Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine, leader of the moderate reformers in Montreal. The two men served as joint premiers of the United Provinces between 1842 and 1843, and again between 1848 and 1851.
Yet Robert Baldwin was a reluctant politician who cut a poor figure on the hustings. A stilted orator, he was heavy and stooping, and he always had an unhealthy pallor. His opponents mocked (as historian Donald Creighton put it) his “solemn, slightly Pecksniffian air of conscious rectitude.” Lord Sydenham, appointed Governor-General of British North America in 1839, described Baldwin as “such an ass!” Nevertheless, the public Baldwin personified the gentlemanly virtues to which John Moodie aspired—devotion to honour, duty and principle, and a fierce integrity in public office.
There was, however, another side to Robert Baldwin that appealed particularly to Susanna’s fascination with darker, more complicated human emotions. The private Baldwin was intensely sensitive and had already suffered a painful epiphany by the time he met the Moodies. In 1836, his beloved wife Eliza, mother of his four children, had died after only nine years of marriage. Baldwin’s grief was Gothic in its fervor, putting him in the galaxy of Canadian politicians whose private lives are as bizarre as their professional lives are bland. Robert Baldwin’s determination to be reunited with his dead wife and share her pain was quite as weird as, a century later, Mackenzie King