The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion | Page 5

filched from him in this deliberate fashion, is an idea not to be borne with composure by anyone whose breast is susceptible to human impulses. But Robert Gourlay was no great criminal. He had engaged in no plot to blow up King, Lords and Commons. He had been guilty of no treason or felony. He had threatened no man's life, and taken no man's purse upon the highway. He was by no means the stuff of which great criminals are made. He was not even a vicious or immoral man. He was an affectionate husband, a fond and indulgent father. His story, from beginning to end, even when subjected to the fiercest light that can be thrown upon it, discloses nothing cruel or revengeful, nothing vile or outrageously wicked, nothing grovelling or base, nothing sordid or mean. On the other hand, it discloses a man of many noble and generous impulses; a man with a great heart in his bosom which could warmly sympathize with the wrongs of his fellow-creatures; a man in whom was no selfishness or greed; a man of decided principles and stainless morals; who was incapable of dishonesty or cruelty; who had a high sense of human responsibility; who feared his God and honoured his King. When we compare his virtuous and honourable, albeit turbulent and much misguided life, with that of any one of his immediate persecutors, the contrast is mournfully suggestive of Mr. Lowell's antithesis about
"Truth forever on the scaffold; wrong forever on the throne."
To what, then, was his long and bitter persecution to be attributed? Why had he been deprived of his liberty; thrust into a dark and unwholesome dungeon; refused the benefit of the Habeas Corpus Act; denied his enlargement upon bail or main-prize; branded as a malefactor of the most dangerous kind; badgered and tortured to the ruin of his health and his reason? Merely this: he had imbibed, in advance, the spirit of Mr. Arthur Clennam, and had "wanted to know."[2] He had displayed a persistent determination to let in the light of day upon the iniquities and rascalities of public officials. He had denounced the system of patronage and favouritism in the disposal of the Crown Lands. He had inveighed against some of the human bloodsuckers of that day, in language which certainly was not gracious or parliamentary, but which as certainly was both forcible and true. He had even ventured to speak in contumelious terms of the reverend Rector of York himself, whom he had stigmatized as "a lying little fool of a renegade Presbyterian." Nay, he had advised the sending of commissioners to England to entreat Imperial attention to colonial grievances. He had been the one man in Upper Canada possessed of sufficient courage to do and to dare: to lift the thin and flimsy veil which only half concealed the corruption whereby a score of greedy vampires were rapidly enriching themselves at the public cost. He had dared to hold up to general inspection the baneful effects of an irresponsible Executive, and of a dominating clique whose one hope lay in preserving the existing order of things undisturbed. It was for this that the Inquisition had wreaked its vengeance upon him; for this that the vials of Executive wrath had been poured upon his head; for this that his body had been subjugated and his nerves lacerated by more than seven months' close imprisonment; for this that he had been "ruined in his fortune and overwhelmed in his mind." And all these things took place in "this Canada of ours," in the year of grace eighteen hundred and nineteen--barely sixty-six years ago--while the Duke of Richmond was Governor-General, and his handsome scapegrace of a son-in-law nominally administered the government of the Upper Province.
With a view to a clearer understanding of the circumstances which led to this most villainous of Canadian State prosecutions, it will be well to glance at some details of the prisoner's past life.[3]
Robert Gourlay was the son of a gentleman of considerable fortune--a retired Writer to the Signet--and was born in the parish of Ceres, Fifeshire, Scotland, in 1778. He received an education suitable to his social position, and while at the University of St. Andrews was the fellow-student and personal friend of young Thomas Chalmers, who afterwards became one of the most eloquent pulpit orators of modern times.[4] Robert was the eldest son of his parents, and, being heir to the paternal estates, he grew up to manhood with the expectation of one day succeeding to wealth and station in society. He was put to no profession, and after leaving college, devoted himself to no settled pursuit. He was on visiting terms with the resident gentry of his native shire, and took some interest in local military matters. In 1806 he offered