The Chevalier de Johnstone is one of the most colourful personalities to have come through Cape Breton in the 18th century. A Scottish exile who was involved in the 1746 Jacobite Rebellion, Johnstone was likely one of the only – if not the only – Scotsmen in Cape Breton during the time of Louisbourg. He is often in the right place, but simply not at the right time.

Special thanks to the Barra MacNeils for kindly allowing us to use their rendition of the song “Niel Gow’s Lament for the Death of his Second Wife” for this episode.

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TRANSCRIPT

1. On the morning of September 8 1760, the city of Montréal in New France surrendered to the combined forces under the command of General Jeffrey Amherst. The terms of capitulation signed by the French governor included the surrender, not just of Montreal, but of the colony of New France in its entirety. In the days following the surrender, the city of Montréal rumbled with the marching of thousands of British troops, and French refugees from the countryside who had fled the approaching British armies now flooded the city’s narrow streets. 

2. Among those packed into the city was an exiled Scotsman named James Johnstone, who history would remember as the Chevalier de Johnstone. Johnstone was no ordinary Scotsman. Johnstone was a wanted man, who would hang if ever caught by the British. During the Jacobite Rebellion in Scotland fifteen years prior, he had served as the personal assistant (or aide-de-camp) to Bonnie Prince Charlie and had subsequently fled Great Britain for his life after the Prince’s defeat at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. And up until a year ago, he had served as the personal assistant to the commander-in-chief of French forces in Canada. Now, After having escaped Scotland on foot, England in disguise, and the second siege of Louisbourg by the skin of his teeth, he needed to mastermind his escape from Canada, but more importantly (pause) his escape from the gallows. 

3. One morning at the break of day, Johnstone was awoken by a banging on his door. Startled, Johnstone opened up to see a towering man in a scarlet red uniform – a British soldier. “Do I have the honour of speaking to Mr. Johnstone?” the soldier asked brusquely. Johnstone froze. After being on the run for nearly 15 years, had the Chevalier de Johnstone finally been caught?

4. This is The Lost World of Cape Breton Island. It’s the aim of this project to reconstruct the lives of people long gone, walk roads that no longer exist, and retell events from Cape Breton’s history through the documentation left behind by those who saw it for themselves. These primary sources tell the stories of a long forgotten landscape – each one a thread in the tapestries of Cape Breton’s vivid and engrossing history. 

5. It’s our hope that these stories, some of them never before told outside of official documentation, bring back to life long forgotten moments from Cape Breton’s past.         

6. The Chevalier de Johnstone was born in Edinburgh (pronunciation – Edd-In-Burrah), Scotland in 1719. According to Johnstone himself, he was a descendant of the House of Johnstone and the Marquess of Annandale, who was a Peer of Scotland, and would eventually inherit the title. Historians note that Johnstone’s relationship with his father was rocky at best, while it seems that his mother, also related to nobility, was overly indulgent. In his late teens he spent time traveling outside of Scotland to visit relatives in Russia and also resided for a time in the bustling metropolis of London. Because of his birth, he enjoyed a privileged upbringing among the Scottish elite and benefited from close ties to influential Scottish nobility like Lord Rollo, Lord Ogilvie and Lady Jane Douglas. In 1745 when Charles Edward Stuart landed in Scotland to reclaim the throne of England and Scotland for the House of Stuart, it was by way of these ties that Johnstone was introduced to Prince Charles, his military entourage, and the Prince’s political supporters known as “Jacobites”. Johnstone would begin serving as Bonnie Prince Charlie’s personal military assistant, or aide-de-camp, on the spot. Johnstone varied his duties as the circumstances required through the early days of the Jacobite Rebellion, fighting at the Battle of Prestonpans, the Battle of Falkirk a couple months later, and finally witnessing the defeat of Prince Charles’ army at the Battle of Culloden in the spring of 1746. In typical fashion, Johnstone would only survive by stealing someone else’s horse from the battlefield. After escaping Great Britain and arriving in France, he accepted a position in the Compagnie Franche de la Marine in New France, where he would go on to serve as the personal assistant of the Chevalier de Lévis’ and later on the to the Marquis de Montcalm, Commander-in-Chief of the French forces in Canada during the 1750s. But first, he would serve eight years in a place that he colourfully referred to as his purgatory – Louisbourg in the French colony of Île Royale, known today as Cape Breton Island.

7. The Chevalier de Johnstone spent 8 long years in Louisbourg from 1750 to 1758, with the exception of a brief return to France in 1751. The story of his time in Louisbourg takes on epically ironic proportions when considered alongside the next hundred years of Cape Breton’s history. Cape Breton’s French colonial population, who often treated Johnstone as an outsider, would never return to Cape Breton after the island’s fall to the British in 1758. 44 years later in 1802, the first ship to carry immigrants directly from Scotland to Cape Breton would arrive in Sydney Harbour. Soon, the once predominantly French-speaking island would become the home of tens of thousands of people from Johnstone’s own native soil, truly transforming it into a ‘New Scotland’. The Chevalier de Johnstone, at one time likely the only Scotsman on Cape Breton Island, had been in the right place – but not at the right time. 

8. Two documents written by Johnstone detail the episodic events that befell him during his eight year stay in Louisbourg – firstly, his personal memoirs entitled “Memoirs of the Rebellion in 1745 and 1746”, and secondly a smaller document called “The Campaign of Louisbourg 1750-58.” It’s believed that Johnstone deposited his memoirs at the Scots College in Paris before being discovered and published in 1820, while the “Campaign of Louisbourg”, housed in the War Archives in Paris, was copied and brought to the Library of the Legislative Assembly of Canada around 1855. His memoirs cover his experiences in the Jacobite Army, his subsequent escape from Scotland and England, his exile in Louisbourg and then the two and a half years that he served in Canada. Both documents are filled with rancid tirades against people he once knew, but swooning praise for others that he esteemed – likely his way of fighting back against the unfortunate hand that he felt life had dealt him. That being said, Historian T.A. Crowley admits: “Although he sometimes erred in matters of detail and frequently bemoaned his unhappy fate, Johnstone often wrote with shrewd insight and philosophical reflection.” The portion of his memoirs that focus on his time in Cape Breton are normally overlooked by historians, who will generally concentrate their attention on his time in Scotland or his service in Canada, but his observations prove to be invaluable for aiding us in our understanding of what life was like in Louisbourg and Cape Breton during the 1750s. Historian JS MacLennan says about the Chevalier de Johnstone’s writings – quote “One wishes that more of his literary remains, which were considerable, had been concerned with Louisbourg…to him we owe touches which let us see glimpses of the real life of the place which we do not find in official correspondence.” unquote.

9. To truly appreciate the stark reality of life for Johnstone in Louisbourg, an understanding of Johnstone’s experiences in Scotland, England and France is essential. We pick up the narrative on the 16th of April, 1746 at the Battle of Culloden.

10. Half-mounted on the back of his stolen horse, the Chevalier de Johnstone fled the field of battle as the defeated Jacobite army fell into disarray. The victorious British began to advance and blocked anyone trying to escape. After outrunning the British cavalry in close pursuit, Johnstone turned south and found refuge on the shores of Loch Ness where he could finally recover some of his strength and figure out what to do in the coming days. He decided to loop back around to the military barracks of Ruthven, where to his surprise he discovered over a thousand Jacobite soldiers waiting patiently for news of Charles Edward Stuart whom they had not heard from since the defeat a few days earlier. On the 20th of April, a message finally arrived from the Prince to the soldiers there at Ruthven – “every man for himself!” Charles Edward Stuart was fleeing Scotland, and his supporters were now fugitives on their own native soil. The Jacobite Rebellion had collapsed – and so too had Johnstone’s life.

11. He now realized that if he was going to escape the gallows, his only chance was to somehow get back home to Edinburgh and find family friend and powerful noblewoman Lady Jane Douglas. No British soldier would dare barge into the residences of nobility on official business, no police searches based on only suspicions. He could, effectively, disappear. 

 12. Johnstone now did what he did best – survive. To evade the British patrols, he would hide inside of a haystack for an entire day in the oppressive summer heat, shelter in the mountains of the unforgiving Scottish Highlands, and smuggle himself across large bodies of open water in the dead of night. At the house of one Jacobite sympathizer that was assisting Johnstone, British soldiers burst into the courtyard, and he believed that he had been sold out to the authorities. But to his relief, Johnstone says “it was nothing more than the soldiers who were fighting among themselves…having exploded in a few fisticuffs.” But despite his knack for staying one step ahead of the British, time and again they would identify and interrogate the very people that had just aided him in his escape. No matter where he went, people recognized him as having been with Bonnie Prince Charlie. 

13. Against astronomical odds, Johnstone slipped into Edinburgh and successfully made contact with Lady Jane Douglas. For his own safety, Lady Jane decided to dress him up as a traveling peddler with a long black wig, darkened his eyebrows with charcoal and sent him down to London on horseback where he would blend in with the half-million other Londoners. Surely no one could recognize him there. But not long after arriving, two high ranking members of the Scottish nobility involved in the Jacobite Rebellion were tried and publicly executed in London, and Johnstone finally realized that he would never be truly safe unless he fled Great Britain. Then one day news came from Lady Jane. She fancied spending some time in France, and while securing passports for herself and her entourage, had conveniently acquired one more passport than was needed. She could only wait for him for three days before she would have to embark on the ship bringing her to the continent. And so after a 6 month journey of over one thousand kilometres, Johnstone was smuggled out of Great Britain to continental Europe disguised as a footman in the service of Lady Jane Douglas.

 14. The France that Johnstone stepped into is aptly depicted by a 1748 painting by English artist William Hogarth, entitled “The Gate of Calais.” Although painted with the intention of mocking France, the artist portrays a scene that a contemporary like Johnstone would have easily recognized. Calais’ city gate looms imposingly in the background, while in the middle of the street a cook carries a large slab of beef to his tavern. Three mangy looking French soldiers, their uniforms ripped and torn, stare longingly at the cut of beef while clutching a bowl of watery vegetable broth. Two other soldiers wearing sabots carry a pot of the soup across the street in the other direction. And in the lower right hand corner, in the shadows of the drawbridge with nothing to eat but an onion and a single piece of bread sits a Scottish Jacobite exile, dressed in a tartan suite. Although Johnstone would never find himself out on the street in France, he would soon be able to relate to the poor Scotsman’s situation of being down and out in a foreign land.

15. Through his network of highly placed noble contacts in France, Johnstone was introduced to the Foreign Secretary, Puysieulx, who arranged a position for Johnstone in the French army. In his memoirs, the Chevalier de Johnstone explains what happens next: “M. Rouille (the Secretary of the Navy), ordered an ensign’s commission to be made out for me, in the troops detached from the marine to the island of Cape Breton. This commission I refused at first with indignation and obstinacy, being unable to brook the idea of a retrogression so mortifying and revolting to an officer who had always served with honour; and it was only in consequence of the reiterated orders of M. de Puysieulx (the Foreign Secretary) that I at length consented to accept it. I set out, therefore, immediately for Rochefort to remain there in readiness for my embarkation for the island of Cape Breton, the most wretched country in the universe.” 

16. On the 13th of September 1750, A ship sailed into the port of Louisbourg, in Cape Breton Island. As it lumbered past the lighthouse and rounded the Island Battery at the mouth of the harbour, it became clear to the townspeople lining up at the harbourfront that something was very, very wrong. Its sails were torn and tattered, its rigging was in shambles, and cables each several feet in circumference had been wrapped around the hull of the ship to evidently keep the hull from splitting apart. It was l’Iphigénie, a merchant ship carrying troops for the Louisbourg garrison that had sailed from Rochefort 76 days earlier that was believed to have been lost at sea. Despite being at the mercy of a grossly incompetent and negligent captain and endless storms that assaulted the unseaworthy ship, she finally dropped anchor at her destination. 

17. The ship begins disembarking her bewildered passengers and crew, and among them is the Chevalier de Johnstone. As soon as Johnstone’s feet touches dry ground on Louisbourg’s quay, he somehow gets his hands on a wooden stake and begins swinging at the incompetent and negligent captain of the Iphigénie, intent on making him pay for the terrible Atlantic crossing that they had endured. The captain draws his sword in defense, but receives blow after blow from Johnstone in the midst of the crowds before the town’s aide-major breaks up the duel and re-asserts order along Louisbourg’s quay. So began Johnstone’s eight year exile on the Island of Cape Breton. Things would only get worse from this point on. [END]