John Graves Simcoe, Napoleon Bonaparte & The Politics of Horse Shit

This is a photo of horse shit. But it's not just any photo of horse shit. This horse shit is on Woodbury Common — a beautiful patch of heathland in the English countryside. And with horse shit on Woodbury Common, you can tell a story about the founder of Toronto — John Graves Simcoe — and about a man who challenged him to a duel over that dung.

This was a few years after Simcoe founded Toronto. He'd come back home to England by then, returning to his country in a deeply troubled time. England was at war with France.

The French Revolution had started many years earlier; it was already well underway by the time Simcoe and his family left home for Canada. But things had gotten even bloodier while they were gone: Simcoe founded Toronto in July of 1793; the Reign of Terror began just a couple of months after that, while the Simcoes were living in a pair of fancy tents pitched at the mouth of Garrison Creek. 

And even there — six thousand kilometers from the guillotines of Paris — news of the atrocities reached them. In August, the Simcoes were visited by a pair of fleeing French aristocrats hoping to settle in Upper Canada. They told a morbid story about King Louis' botched attempt to escape his captors. By the time they shared that anecdote, the French king had already lost his head.

A few months later, Marie Antoinette followed her husband to the guillotine. News of her death took many weeks to travel across the Atlantic and up the St. Lawrence to the Canadian frontier. When it did, Simcoe marked the occasion with solemn respect. That evening, the settlers of Toronto dressed all in black, postponing the dance they had planned for the night. They might hate the French, but they were staunch monarchists — many of them had already suffered through the horrors of the American Revolution and were deeply upset by the idea of yet another bloody, democratic uprising.

It was a frightening time. The French Revolution sparked decades of war between France and the monarchies of Europe, including Britain. At the very same time that Simcoe was busy planning the first few blocks of Toronto, he was also busy worrying that the war back home would spread to North America. Even now, French revolutionaries were stirring up trouble in the United States, trying to get the Americans to join the war and invade Canada. Some had even travelled into Québec, where they hoped to convince the French Canadians to rise up and launch their own revolution. As the Simcoes slept in their tents at night, they worried that at any moment an enemy ship might sail over the horizon — or enemy soldiers burst from the woods. Simcoe's wife, Elizabeth, had nightmares about it.

John Graves Simcoe

Things only got scarier when they began to head home for England. As the Simcoes sailed out of the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, French warships were waiting. They chased them out into the Atlantic, seizing other English vessels who were sailing nearby. As the Simcoes' ship dodged icebergs off the coast of Labrador, Elizabeth and the children hid themselves in the cramped quarters below deck. They could hear guns in the distance. It took weeks to sail across the open ocean before the Simcoes finally reached the safety of home.

Even then, it wasn't over. The British would be at war with the French for most of the next twenty years. And things would only get worse. By the time the Simcoes got back to England, a new French general had begun to make a name for himself. Napoleon Bonaparte would prove to be one of the most brilliant and most power hungry dictators in history.

The wars against the French would dominate the rest of Simcoe's life. In the end, he would die fighting them.

But first, he had an important role to play. Simcoe didn't always get along with his superiors, but he did earn the respect of some of the most powerful men in England: Prime Minister Addington, Admiral Nelson, the Duke of York; he even spent time with "Mad" King George. His experience was especially respected when it came to military matters. He'd been one of the most celebrated heroes on the British side of the American Revolution. And as the first Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada, he'd been responsible for preparing the defences of the new province in case of an American invasion. And so, just a couple of years after his return to England, Simcoe was given a new job: preparing part of England in case of a French invasion.

At times, it seemed as if that invasion could happen at any moment — especially once Napoleon was in charge. Having already expanded his empire on the Continent, the French general began to assemble an army to bring England to its knees. Two hundred thousand men were being trained on the coast of France: the Armée d'Angleterre. A whole flotilla of barges was built to carry them across the English Channel. For a while, Napoleon was even toying with the idea of deploying the world's first air force: a fleet of hot air balloons to support the attack. There were rumours of a giant tunnel being dug beneath the Channel. And of a massive raft powered by windmills. To pay for it all, Napoleon had already sold the Louisiana Territory to the Americans. He was so sure his invasion was going to succeed that he built a triumphal arch to commemorate it before it had even happened.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Channel, Simcoe was getting ready for the invasion. The British government had put him in charge of the entire defence of the West Country. Devon, Cornwall and Somerset would be under his command. If the French landed there, Simcoe and his men would answer with a scorched earth campaign. They would evacuate all women and children, the elderly and the sick — and all the livestock, too. Everything they left behind would be destroyed. The French would find nothing to eat.

Instead, they would be met by the biggest military force Britain had ever assembled. More than six hundred thousand men were ready to fight — nearly 10% of the entire population of England. In the West Country alone, Simcoe was in command of twelve thousand men.

Woodbury Common

But they weren't all experienced soldiers. Professional troops were joined by volunteers and conscripted militia. They needed lots of training. And to do that training, Simcoe sometimes took them to Woodbury Common.

Woodbury Common is high in the gorgeous green hills of Devon. It's just a few kilometers from the Simcoes' summer home in the seaside town of Budleigh Salterton. And it's not too far from their country estate in the Blackdown Hills, either. It's a beautiful place: gently rolling hills covered with flowers, shrubs and short grass. It's typical heathland; in fact, if you look up "heath" on Wikipedia, the first photo you'll see is a photo of Woodbury Common. It's one of England's official Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

At the very highest point on the Common, you'll find a patch of trees. They're growing on the remains of massive earthworks. The big ditches are what's left of the ancient Woodbury Castle: an Iron Age hill fort built in the days of the druids; it's more than two thousand years old. From the lands around the castle, you can see for miles and miles in every direction — all the way back down to the sea. It's the perfect spot for a military base. In fact, the British army still trains there to this day.

And so about two hundred years ago, you could find thousands of Simcoe's troops camping on Woodbury Common as they awaited Napoleon's arrival — and with those camping men came hundreds of horses.

That, finally, bring us to the horse shit.

With all those horses trotting around, there was, of course, plenty of dung on Woodbury Common. And the question of who was ultimately responsible for it — Simcoe's troops or the local land owner — sparked a fight that nearly ended in a duel. But not for the reason you might think.

The principal owner of the lands around Woodbury Common was a man by the name of Lord Rolle. History would eventually remember him as the man who tripped during Queen Victoria's coronation and rolled down the steps to the throne. He and Simcoe didn't get along at all. Rolle was pretty pissed off by the inconvenience caused by all the men camping on the Common. And he was even more pissed off by the fact that they were cleaning up after themselves. Simcoe was making sure that all the horse shit was being collected and taken away. Rolle was furious. He wanted that horse shit for himself. It was valuable manure.

Rolle began a letter-writing campaign. He complained to the authorities, insisting that tradition dictated that any horse shit left by the military on common land belonged to the local lord of the manor: him. Simcoe was stealing his shit. And if Simcoe got away with it, it would set a dangerous precedent: any British general would be allowed to trample the rights of any lord. The question of the horse shit on Woodbury Common, Rolle argued, was a question of importance to every single subject in the British Empire.

Simcoe, for his part, sent a flurry of his own letters arguing the opposite. And as the letters flew back and forth, the fight escalated. Before long, Rolle was ordering his men to physically stop Simcoe's troops from removing the shit from the Common. The dispute was getting so serious that it was eventually forwarded all the way to the man in charge of the entire British military: the Duke of York (the son of "Mad" King George III and the guy who Simcoe had originally named Toronto after — back when it was still known as the town of York).
 

Woodbury Castle

In the end, Simcoe lost the battle of the Woodbury Common horse shit. His orders came directly from Whitehall — the heart of the British government at Westminster. The manure belonged to Rolle. He would be compensated for the shit that had already been taken away. And he would be allowed to keep any dung produced by Simcoe's horses in the future — as long as he sold it to the public at an appropriate discount.

But Rolle still wasn't satisfied. He was so angry with Simcoe that he challenged him to a duel. He wanted, he declared, to have a fist-fight with the founder of Toronto.

 
Simcoe was not impressed. Gentlemen, he replied, didn't fight with their fists. It was unseemly. If Rolle wanted to have a duel, they could have a duel: with pistols or with swords. It didn't count if there was no chance you might die.

Rolle backed down.

And so did Napoleon. The tiny French Emperor never did invade England. Instead, he marched his army east into the heart of Europe. But it wasn't the end of Simcoe's connection to the man. There was one sad chapter left to come.

It didn't take long for the French army to invade Spain and Portugal. The Peninsular War — as it was called — would rage for years on end. It was a bloody campaign. Tens of thousands were killed or wounded. Simcoe's own son, Francis, would die during the Siege of Badajoz in Portugal. (Just a toddler when Toronto was founded, his parents had jokingly named their log cabin in his honour: Castle Frank. We still remember it today in the name of a subway station.)

By then, John Graves Simcoe was already dead. He died during that same campaign. His preparations for Napoleon's invasion had earned him a promotion: Commander-in-Chief of the entire British army in India. But just before he left for his new post, he got new orders: his services were once again desperately needed in the fight against the French. Simcoe sailed to Portugal. But the ship he sailed on was damp and newly painted. He had always suffered from terrible respiratory problems — in fact, that's why he'd been forced to come home from Canada.

Simcoe was deathly ill by the time he made it to Lisbon. He would never recover. He was loaded back onto the same sickly ship and sent home across the Channel to England. He died in Exeter just a few days later.

As for Napoleon, well, he did finally make it to Devon one day. But it wasn't at the head of an invading army. Instead, he saw those rolling green hills from the deck of a British ship as it sailed by. It was all over; he'd lost the Battle of Waterloo and was now being held prisoner. Defeated for the final time, the French general asked if he could retire in England with a small parcel of land. His request was refused. The British didn't let him off that ship; he was never to set foot in Devon. Instead, they kept sailing, taking him far away to the isolated island of Saint Helena where he would live out the rest of his days in peace and frustrating quiet.

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More than two hundred years after Simcoe founded our city, Toronto is still wrestling with the question of who is responsible for our horse shit. You can read more about that on the CBC News website here.

Read more of my posts about the Simcoes: the story of John Graves Simcoe's vision for Toronto (a city so awesome it would undo the American Revolution); the story of Elizabeth Simcoe's 1794 nightmare; the story of their dog, Jack Sharp; the story of their cat; the story of how they fell in love and the magical hills where it happened; the story of their summer home in Budleigh Salterton; the story of their connection to Samuel Coleridge and his family; the story of the Simcoe family and Exeter and death.

The first person to alert me to the story of Simcoe and the shit was Michael Downes at the Fairlynch Museum in Budleigh Salterton. You can find the museum at their website, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

Simcoe's biographers, Mary Beacock Fryer and Christopher Dracott, cover the story in their book, which you borrow from the Toronto Public Library here or buy here.

You can learn more about Napoleon's brief stay in Devon in Devonshire Magazine here.

Photos of Woodbury Common and Woodbury Castle by me: Adam Bunch.

This post is related to dream 01 Metropolitan York John Graves Simcoe, 1793

This post is related to dream 30 The Conference of the Beasts Francis Simcoe, 1796

This post is related to dream 34 The Upper Canadian Ball Elizabeth Simcoe, 1793

How Napoleon Bonaparte Is Indirectly Responsible For One Of The Best Walking Trails In Toronto

The Mast Trail, Rouge Park

Freaking Napoleon. Nobody could beat him. Ever since the beginning of the French Revolution, France had been fighting wars with pretty much every single other big country in Europe. And while Robespierre and his gang of paranoid mass murderers were busy guillotining everybody in Paris, Napoleon was leading the French army to one victory after another. Before long, he had taken over the country, crowned himself Emperor, and built a network of conquests and alliances that stretched from one end of Europe to the other. The only country left to fight was England. So an invasion of England was next on Napoleon's list.

There was just one big, floating, wooden problem: the Royal Navy. The British fleet had ruled the waves for the last 100 years. And they could beat Napoleon. People still talk about how badly Lord Nelson's fleet pwned the French at the Battle of Trafalgar. It left Napoleon's navy in tatters.

But the Emperor did have another way of screwing with the Royal Navy: he could take away their wood.

People in England had been chopping down their forests since the Stone Age. They barely had any left. And it took thousands of oak trees just to build one ship. The masts were especially hard to find — they had to come from big, strong, old-growth pines. The British were having to ship them in from the far north-east corner of the continent, from the towering forests on the shores of the Baltic Sea.

The same Baltic shores that Napoleon now controlled.

In fact, Napoleon now controlled just about all of the shores in Europe — which meant he could seriously mess with the British economy. He declared an embargo. No one was allowed to trade with England. Not France, not Napoleon's allies, not the nations he had conquered, not even neutral countries. If he found anyone trading with the British, he would arrest the Britons and burn all the goods. He even threatened to invade Russia if they didn't agree. And just like that, Napoleon had robbed the Royal Navy of their Baltic masts.

The Mast Trail, Rouge Park

That's where Toronto comes in. While all of this was happening in the early 1800s, our city was still a brand new little frontier town. It was surrounded by ancient forests that had been growing here for thousands of years. They'd occasionally been cut down too — the First Nations cleared land for villages and corn fields — but they'd never suffered anything like the permanent, wholesale deforestation English forests had. There were still woods all over eastern Canada. And they were full of masts.

Napoleon could keep the Baltics from trading with England, but his navy couldn't keep England from shipping wood across the ocean from Canada. All over the Canadian colonies, lumberjacks started cutting down trees. Timber exports went up by something like 1000% in just three years. Tens of thousands of masts headed across the Atlantic.

Some of them came from the forests of Toronto. The woods of the Rouge Valley — now the verrry eastern edge of Scarborough — were very tall and very old. They were home to wolves and bears and cougars and elk, wild beasts roaming beneath enormous white pines — the perfect tree for making masts. Some of them rose twelve storeys above the forest floor.

By then, the mouth of the Rouge River had already seen plenty of history. The very first people to walk along the valley's forest trails had been prehistoric nomadic hunters. They arrived thousands and thousands of years ago, leaving behind traces of their campsites and the rock they chipped into tools. More recently, it had been the First Nations. By the middle of the 1600s, the Seneca had built a village — Ganatsekwyagon — on a high hill overlooking the valley. It was a hub for the fur trade. Famous French explorers Jolliet and Marquette stopped by on their way deeper into the continent. Coureurs de bois came to trade, or to travel up the Rouge in canoes toward Lake Simcoe. One missionary spent a famously harsh winter there, starving and desperate, living off squirrels and chipmunks and eating moss off the base of the trees. Even the Governor of New France once paid a visit to Ganatsekwyagon during his war with the Seneca. His allies, the Mississauga, took it over.

Now, the Rouge Valley was part of the British Empire. And with the Empire at war with Napoleon, it was ax-wielding lumberjacks making trails through those woods. The great old pines came crashing to the ground, were floated down the Rouge to Lake Ontario and then shipped out the St. Lawrence to make the long journey across the Atlantic. They rose again as masts from the decks of British ships fighting the French half a world away.

The mouth of the Rouge River

Napoleon never was able to invade England. Eventually, his embargo broke down. The Russians finally got sick of it and started trading with the British again. Napoleon responded by invading Russia — which was a terrible idea. His army was devastated by the Tsar's scorched earth campaign and the bitter cold of the Russian winter. It was a turning point. Within a couple of years, his empire had crumbled. He was defeated and then exiled... and then escaped, raised another army, and was defeated and then exiled again. This time for good.

But even with Napoleon gone and the embargo lifted, the British still wanted Canadian lumber. The trees kept coming down and the exports kept going up. They doubled and doubled and then doubled again. Soon forestry had taken over from the fur trade as the engine of the Canadian economy. Today, it's still one of our biggest industries.

There are no more lumberjacks in the Rouge Valley, though. The forests growing there today are protected — Rouge Park is slated to become a national park. There are still enormous white pines towering above the forest floor. Some of them have been growing there since those Napoleonic days — the trees that were, at the time, too small for masts. The old logging trail is still there too. It's called the Mast Trail now. Twenty-first century Torontonians and tourists can walk in the same place those lumberjacks did 200 years ago. And where missionaries and explorers, coureurs de bois and First Nations, prehistoric hunters and wild beasts were walking long before that.

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P.S. — Those pine trees weren't just used to build ships in England. Before the Napoleonic Wars were over, we'd be building our own warships over here.

That's because Napoleon wasn't the only one with an embargo: the British had one against him too. This meant that neutral countries like the United States were caught in the middle — they were at risk of having their goods seized no matter which side they traded with. Even worse: the English were using the embargo as an excuse to board American ships and arrest any man who was British — or sort of British, or maybe kind of seemed like he might be British and couldn't prove he wasn't — so they could force him to join the Royal Navy and fight the French. Impressment, they called it. And it pissed the Americans off. It was one of the main reasons they declared war in 1812. While the British were still fighting Napoleon in Europe, the Americans invaded Canada.

Suddenly, the Great Lakes were a battlefield too. Control of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario became vitally important — it meant that you could supply your troops on the ground, support them in battle, and move them around. And so, a naval arms race broke out, with both sides rushing to build the biggest and most powerful fleet they could. Canadian lumber was now being used to build warships in Canada.

Toronto played an important role. The main reason the Americans invaded and occupied our city in 1813 was because we were building one of the biggest ships on the Great Lakes — the HMS Isaac Brock — which would have shifted the balance of power in our favour. The Americans were hoping to seize it, but we burned it first. They retaliated by burning down our parliament and other public buildings. A few months later, one of the war's most pivotal naval battles happened just outside our harbour.

But I'll save those stories for a future post.

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P.P.S. — Another kind of interesting note: Lord Nelson. He died fighting Napoleon's fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar, and became a national hero in England. They named the public square in the heart of London "Trafalgar Square" and built a giant column to honour Nelson's memory. It's one of the most iconic landmarks in Britain. But he was also a hero over here. Defeating Napoleon's navy meant the trade route between Canada and England stayed open. People in Montreal were so happy about that they built their own column to honour Nelson in their own public square more than 30 years BEFORE the Londoners built theirs. It's still there in Old Montreal at the top of Place Jacques-Cartier.

Nelson had also played an important earlier role when it came to those Baltic masts. Long before Napoleon's embargo, some of the other most powerful countries in Europe wanted to keep England from being able to trade with the Baltics. So they shut down the narrow channel between Sweden and Denmark — the only way into the Baltic Sea. Nelson was the hero of that episode too. He led the British fleet at the Battle of Copenhagen. When his commander gave him permission to retreat, Nelson famously lifted his telescope to his blind eye so that he couldn't see the signal. He kept fighting and won. It meant that the British got to keep trading with the Baltics right up until Napoleon's embargo.

Oh and Nelson was famous for other stuff too: for having lost an arm in addition to that eye, and for openly living in a sinful threesome with the young Lady Emma Hamilton and her elderly husband William. 

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You can learn more about the Mast Trail here and in a PDF here. The Toronto Star has more about the plans to turn Rouge Park into a national park here. There's a whole report on the state of the Rouge watershed, with lots of heritage info, in a PDF here. And there's another one with some info about Rouge Valley heritage and wildlife here. You can learn more about Napoleon's embargo here and here. Or the entire Napoleonic Wars here. The Canadian Encyclopedia has some more information about the Canadian timber trade here. And the federal government has a military heritage website with more information about it here. Meanwhile, Wikipedia's got you covered here if you want to learn about the British timber trade instead. If you'd like to know more about warships on the Great Lakes, head on over here. And Wikipedia also has a little page about the Naval Shipyard, just west of the foot of Bay Street, where the HMS Isaac Brock was being built. You can check that out here.

Oh and photos by me.