An Important Man In His Day Was This Feudal Magnate Giffard, To
Whom Fealty And Homage Were Rendered With Becoming
Pomp, by his
consitaires, the Bellangers - Guions - Langlois - Parents - Marcoux, of
1635, whose descendents, still bearing the old Perche or
Norman name,
occupy to this day the white cottages to be seen on all sides.
On the highest site of this limestone ridge, a clever, influential,
refined, and wealthy Briton, the Hon. Henry Wistius Ryland, for years
Civil Secretary, Clerk of the Executive Council, a member of the
Legislative Council, with other appointments, purchased from Col.
Johnston, a lot, then a wilderness, for a country seat in 1805. Mr. Ryland
had come out to Canada with Lord Dorchester in 1795, as his secretary, at
the instance, we believe, of Lord Liverpool, his protector, at the age of
21 he was acting as Paymaster of two army corps, during the War of
Independence in America.
For more than thirty years, Mr. Ryland enjoyed the favour, nay the
intimacy of every ruler (except Sir George Prevost) which this then mis-
ruled colony owed to Downing Street.
Antipathies of race had been on the increase at Quebec, ever since the
parliamentary era of 1791; there was the French party, [300] led by fiery
and able politicians, and the English oligarchy occupying nearly all the
offices, and avenues to power. French armies under Napoleon I. swayed the
destinies of continental Europe, their victories occasionally must have
awakened here a responsive echo among their down-trodden fellow-countrymen
cowardly deserted by France in 1759, whilst Nelson's victories of the
Nile, of Trafalgar, of Copenhagen, and finally the field of Waterloo, had
buoyed up to an extravagant pitch the spirits of the English minority of
Quebec, which a French parliamentary majority had so often trammelled.
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