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Chapter 3

A gentleman of Champagne among the Algonquins

The literature on Canada’s early colonial settlers contains multiple references to a certain Etienne de Nevers⁽#⁶⁴⁾. Yet the same Québec pioneer usually called himself Brentigni (Brantigny). Some of his contemporaries must have taken that nickname for a landlord’s title, “sieur de Brentigny”. It often appears in official early records right after the surname, de Nevers.

A broad consensus of Québec genealogists today proclaim Etienne de Nevers dit Brantigny to be the common ancestor of numerous North American families. Oddly enough, most if not all of these descendants today call themselves Boisvert, sometimes anglicized by translation outside Quebec to the surname Greenwood. The mother of grandfather Edouard Roberge (1879-1946) and his three brothers was a Boisvert woman of the de Nevers line from the parish of Ste. Anne d’Yamachiche, just west of Trois-Rivières. (Annex C).

[Numbers in superscript appended to names of individuals mentioned in the text match their position in Annex C, the binary family tree of direct ancestors of Marcelline Boisvert^(#1), the second wife of François Roberge and the mother of his four sons who later went by the name Roby. Such identification is also used in subsequent chapters.]

“De Nevers” is what trailblazing Québec historian and genealogist Cyprien Tanguay in the 1880s¹ chose to label the early ancestor otherwise known as Etienne dit Brantigny. That version has prevailed. The name suggests breeding. In Etienne’s youth, though, a patronymic like de Nevers might have invited discreet inquiries because it was the ducal title of a famous noble house. Even the alias Brantigny came with its own historic heft in the old province of Champagne.

“Denevers”, Quebec’s current standardization of Etienne’s surname, masks nagging doubts about his origin, beginning with his name. Remaining faithful to surviving original records, French or Latin, the consensus of historical scribes could just as well have settled on “Tenevers” or “Temévers” as the proper family label for Etienne and his children. These are actually the earliest hand-written versions committed to ancient parchment in Québec.

Moreover, no French record has been found to confirm the man’s birth in Champagne, supposedly in either 1622 or maybe 1627. And the timing and circumstances of his assumed death in 1678 also somehow went unrecorded in Québec, where he first entered the church records as an adult in 1650.

Lacking both a verifiable beginning and a finite end, the real Etienne de Nevers, sieur de Brantigny, remains a bit of a mystery. But he achieved solid respectability in mid-17^th Century New France, according to more than a quarter-century of business and personal contracts documenting his family and his energetic life.

One puzzle bequeathed by this ancestor of so many contemporary Boisvert and Greenwood families is whether he was actually an homme de qualité or maybe just a charming impostor. His venerable Québec surname conveys an echo of the high nobility of France’s ancien régime, mused a 19^th-Century Trois-Rivières historian in one of his numerous works on Canada's French colonial past. Indeed, the ancient ducal title, de Nevers, retained its cachet in Etienne’s youth, when it was still held by the head of the French branch of an ancient noble family, the Gonzaga, hereditary sovereigns of Mantua.

Benjamin Sulte, the aforementioned Québec historian, opined further that Etienne's evocative surname might merely mean that his forebears originally hailed from someplace near the ancient town of Nevers in the center of France.² Located there, not far from a ducal palace associated with the families of Cleves and Gonzague, is the ancient Romanesque church of St. Etienne de Nevers, a European architectural gem. Others detect a possible connection to France's southwestern region of Dordogne, where there is also a district called Champagne. Or, taking Sulte’s geographic lead another improbable leap southward, what would have prevented an Etienne de Navarre from entering the civil ledgers with a spelling glitch?

Nevertheless, it isn't easy to envisage some mysterious kinship between Etienne of the raw frontier and France’s elite de Nevers, cultivated cosmopolites barely less prominent than the royal Valois or Bourbon. And Sillery, the Jesuits’ Amerindian seigneurie and mission settlement where Etienne de Nevers raised a family below the southwest ramparts of Fort Québec, would have been an unlikely spot to find any displaced haute volée in the mid-17^th Century. If the patriarch had actually posessed a glamorous Old World pedigree, he probably should have landed a proper feudal fiefdom rather than just a patchwork of Québec land concessions.

Letting only surviving records speak, Etienne de Nevers’ closest brush with aristocracy would have been somewhat vicarious. According to Abbé Tanguay, one of Etienne’s sons³ in 1676 married Marie-Françoise Ursule Godefroy de Linctot,⁴ daughter of the second-generation Québec seigneurial lord said to have been the first Caucasian male born at Trois-Rivières. Born there on 28 December 1665, the bride would have been 11 years old. The bridegroom, who went by the name of Pierre Brantigny, may simply have lucked into a good match. Yet the person to whom his widow remarried 32 years later was Augustin de Galimard de Champlain, who does appear on Quebec’s noblesse lists, along with her own large baronial clan, Godefroy.⁵

Pierre and his upscale spouse even had a daughter, Marie-Anne Brantigny (1677-1710).⁶ Nowadays, however, genealogy sleuths are loathe to acknowledge that Pierre Brantigny of Trois-Rivières was even a kinsman, let alone a son of Etienne de Nevers dit Brantigny.⁷ That Etienne could have adopted Pierre or sired him before he left Trois-Rivières to marry his own Québec-born child-bride at the Amerindian reserve called St. Joseph de Sillery seems possible. But Tanguay omits Pierre’s baptism date. And this mysterious son had no known male offspring, eliminating him as a Boisvert ancestor.

Etienne de Nevers, sieur de Brantigny (~1622/1627-~1678), must be one of the few early settlers subsumed into colonial records under a couple of names that were once honorific distinctions of historic Frenchmen. The alias “Brantigny” in old Québec also corresponded in France to a title rather than a family name. An estate of Brantigny, once the property of the church of St. Etienne of nearby Troyes, can be localized to the Aube region of the old province of Champagne from which Etienne supposedly came. Also in Champagne were the duchy of Rethel and principality of Arches. Both were still held by the Gonzague dukes of Nevers for most of a century before the first sighting of Etienne de Nevers, sieur de Brantigny, in Canada.

Tanguay's initial listing of Etienne’s settler family⁸ at Sillery includes the aforementioned Pierre Brantigny along with three more, well-documented sons – Guillaume, Daniel and Jean. But it omits two other children who were undoubtedly part of the household of Etienne de Nevers dit Brantigny and his Canadienne wife, Anne Hayot^(#65)(1640-1694). Specifically, no initial mention is made of Elisabeth Ursule (~1659-1703) or of Etienne junior, dit Boisvert^(#32)(~1660-1731). Yet they both surface as family members in such other records as a purported transcript of a 1667 census and later inheritance claims on de Nevers’ estate. Moreover, the baptisms of those two alleged de Nevers siblings are conspicuously absent from the Sillery mission registry, raising the possibility of adoptions.⁹

Nevertheless, each of these two is said to have produced at least eight children, Etienne junior with Marie Jeanne Lemay^(#33) and Elisabeth Ursule with Jacques Gauthier. And recent y-DNA testing of living Boisvert and Greenwood men triangulates in retrograde to laboratory evidence that Etienne junior, who went by the alias Boisvert, must be the most recent common male ancestor of all the known Boisvert/Greenwood descendants living today.¹⁰ That outcome alone should certainly elevate this man’s humble profile among ancestry researchers. Absent ancient DNA samples, however, no laboratory test can prove whether this first Boisvert was really his father's son, a supposition that has also been repeatedly challenged.¹¹

Why Tanguay initially gave Etienne jr. short shrift at Sillery but later included him as a de Nevers in his third-generation Denevers/Boisvert family genealogies is unclear. Original documents being less likely to replicate than to disappear with the passage of time, the abbé should have been at least as well informed as later researchers who accord both Elisabeth Ursule and Etienne Boisvert^(#32) a firm place at the Sillery table but have quietly drummed poor Pierre Brantigny out of the patriarch's family circle.

Jesuit patronage

Oddities about the initial Etienne de Nevers dit Brantigny and his brood do not end there. For starters, quasi-official Fichier Origine in its updated 2015 version omits any mention of the patriarch in its exhaustive data-bank of early colonial settlers whose roots can be reliably traced to French soil. Apart from the uncertainty about his birth and death, this man doesn't quite fit the typical profile of French adventurers, craftsmen, soldiers, servants, merchants and ruffians who were so often recruited for heavy lifting in the colonial project.

Etienne’s integration into Québec society clearly begins within the ambit of native missionary work undertaken by the Society of Jesus. He was possibly an employee, or donné, of the Jesuits. Furthermore, he was uncommonly literate for a New World pathfinder. He also seems to have been a dutiful father and husband, and a good earner.

Etienne reared an eldest son who became a seigneurial notary, another became a surgeon. He tutored the orphaned sons of another settler family whose inheritance was also entrusted to his management. Apart from an apparent passion for eeling and beaver skinning, he displayed a seasoned merchant’s knack for real-estate dealings and signed contracts as Brantigny, with a distinctively upper-class flourish.

A legal guarantee made in July 1661 by Hierosme (Jerome) Lalemant, S.J., superior of the Jesuit missions of Nouvelle France, to 18 persons given Jesuit land concessions on the Sillery seigneurie otherwise reserved for native Christians identifies only two Frenchmen by title.¹² One was the royal notary, Guillaume Audouart, sieur de Saint-Germain, the other our Estienne Temévers, sieur de Brentigny. The latter was also occasionally identified in Latin church records as Dominus Brentigni (Lord Brantigny).¹³

This deference appears to speak for something more than mere vanity, pretension or name dropping on Etienne’s part. Educated contemporaries seemed to have believed that he held title to land in France. Only a credible Old World family connection would explain that. But this tie is devilishly hard to trace.

Easily traced, though, is Etienne’s paternalistic concern for the propagation of his Catholic faith among the natives of the New World. On at least two occasions, in 1650 and in 1663, he conferred his own given name, Etienne, on sons of clearly identified Amerindian tribal parents in his spiritual role as godfather in native baptisms performed by the same Jesuit priest, Pierre Bailloquet.

The 1667 census lists a youngster named Etienne^(#32) as a member of the de Nevers household, although no church certificate shows that the patriarch and his wife ever baptized a legitimate son with that name. It therefore seems possible that Étienne’s second native godson, a half-orphaned Malécite toddler he called Etienne, was then raised in the de Nevers household. That would explain why the same man was often identified in civil documents as a de Nevers son, but personally favored the rustic nickname Boisvert.

Going by Québec’s 1667 census data, the expatriate variously known as Etienne de Nevers or the sieur de Brantigny would have been born around 1627.¹⁴ Tanguay says 1622. His Sillery church marriage certificate states that he came into the world in the parish of l'Espinay in the northern province of Champagne, far from any seaport. He was probably born there at a chateau in the hamlet of Brantigny, near Piney, Aube, a Boisvert descendants’ association contends. Indeed, there still is today a chateau and a tiny hamlet at this place called Brantigny, just east of Troyes.

There is no surviving record of the man or his parents in Champagne and no ship’s manifest to show how or when he might have crossed the sea to the colony. Yet hearsay has it that Etienne renounced his claim to a family estate in France in a lost Québec notarial document from 1671.¹⁵ If so, Fichier Origine, the acknowledged arbiter of Frenchness, has been unable to trace it.

Marriage at Sillery

Even Québec’s obligatory, notarized civil marriage contract is now missing. It was made 1 Oct. 1652 before notary Rolland Godet and was listed by notary Pierre Duquet among the personal papers inventoried 12 April 1679 after the death or disappearance of Étienne de Nevers dit Brantigny. There exists, however, an original church certificate of Etienne’s marriage¹⁶ to Anne Hayaut⁽#⁶⁵⁾, a 12-year-old. It seems curiously worded when compared with others of the time.

The missionary who conferred the nuptial blessing on the couple at Sillery chapel on 28 Oct. 1652 was also Pierre Bailloquet, S.J. He wrote that one of the three required bann readings had been waived – without saying why or by whom. He identified Etienne as the son of Estienne Tennevere⁽¹²⁸⁾ and Agnès Luosbisec⁽¹²⁹⁾ of the parish of “l'Espinay en Champagne” without offering a baptismal date or place for the bridegroom himself. The groom’s surname, unlike his father’s, appears here with just one “n”. The initial “Ten-” of the patronymic gives it a vaguely Flemish look. The mother’s unusual maiden name also must have been unique in 17^th-Century Champagne.

The erudite Jesuit would have instantly recognized the name de Nevers, had he heard it. Perhaps he did, but preferred ambiguity, for Bailloquet already knew the bridegroom by a different name: namely Etienne Brantigny, the French version of what the same priest had written down in a Latin baptismal certificate¹⁷ for an Amerindian child at Trois-Rivières on 15 Jan. 1650, when the same “Stephanus Brentigni” had stood as the godfather and name-giver.

Neither de Nevers nor its variants appeared there. And that terse document is arguably the earliest solid evidence that the man later known to historians as Etienne de Nevers, the supposed Boisvert ancestor, was actually in Canada, let alone anywhere else in the world.

Transcript of the marriage, 28 Oct. 1652, of Ètienne de Nevers dit Brantigny and Anne Hayot/Ayotte at Sillery mission chapel.

The identification of the native godchild’s parents by their aboriginal tribal names reveals that neither the priest nor the chosen godfather regarded heathen parentage as an impediment to the sacrament.¹⁸ The child received the Christian name of his godfather, Etienne. The godfather’s familiar alias, Brantigny, or occasionally “Dominus Brentigni”, Latin for lord of Brantigny, is how the clergy mostly continued to identify this colonist in subsequent religious acts. The surname de Nevers or variants appear later in civil documents written in French.¹⁹

Some researchers have theorized that Etienne was initially a donné, a skilled layman engaged by the Jesuits to support their missionary work in the field. That might have been the beginning of a durable convergence of interests between the colonial settler and the religious order. In 1650, for example, Jerome Lalemant S.J. was Québec’s powerful Jesuit superior with overall responsibility for the Sillery mission reservation as well as for the resettlement of those who had just been driven out of the Jesuit mission in Huron territory north of the great lake. Perhaps it is significant that the first written record of the presence of Etienne Brantigny along the St. Lawrence was made by a Jesuit missionary priest the start of that same year.

Lalemant had promoted the use of laymen in the Jesuit missions. He became the superior of the mission to the Hurons (Wendat) in 1638, when this tribe still included about 12,000 persons in 32 villages. This Great Lakes mission included 16 priests, four religious brothers and 22 laymen (donnés) by 1649,²⁰ when a catastrophe of warfare and pestilence scattered the tribe, making refugees of many Christianized natives and their mission staff.

Previous history of employment with the Jesuits in Huronia might explain Etienne’s frequent association with the missionary order. Obviously he stood in good favor with them. The Jesuits gave Etienne his prominent Sillery land concession, exceeded in size only by that of Nicolas Pelletier, who had kinship links to the Montagnais nation and may have facilitated Charles Albanel, S.J.’s expedition to Hudson Bay. Etienne’s slice of land doubled the nearby allotment to his own father in law, Thomas Hayot, according to a schematic by historian Marcel Trudel on the status of land allocations in June 1663. Possibly the robes noires had also arranged Etienne’s marriage at Sillery.

Jacques Archambault is named as one of three formal witnesses at Etienne’s wedding at Sillery in 1652. This prolific pioneer, who had been offered a land concession at nearby Cap Rouge in 1651, had evidently sired a métisse daughter in 1621.²¹ Archambault’s wife, Françoise Tourault, commonly described with the euphemism d'origine inconnue, apparently was not French.

A Drouin Institute research finding provided to a descendant in 1938 said she was born near Montréal in 1610. On the July 28, 1647 Québec church marriage certificate of her daughter, Anne Archambault, to Michel Chauvain, the mother of the bride is clearly identified as Françoise Tocos (not Toureault). One intriguing theory makes her the daughter of a European mother and native from Brazil's Tocos do Moji, identified by Jesuit missionaries of Brazil or Paraguay as a mounted bull-fighter they sent off to Europe. Françoise supposedly married Archambault somewhere around 1629, the year English invaders deported some Quebec families.

Similarly, Thomas Hayot^(#130), father of Etienne’s bride, may have first met his own wife, Jeanne Boucher^(#131), before their exile in France spanning the 1629-32 English occupation of Quebec. The Jesuits had leased land to Hayot at Sillery in 1646. Jeanne has been called a “sister”²² of Thomas’ neighbor and friend, Marin Boucher^(#172), a Champlain companion. Marin Boucher was recruited in 1619 along two other Boucher men, and about 80 others²³, including a man called Adrien Hayot. Marin Boucher’s children were of mixed blood, concluded Métis historian, Dick Garneau. Given Jeanne Boucher’s opaque origin, he identified daughter Anne Hayot as métisse.²⁴

This integrated French wedding party could not have seemed out of place at the Amerindian mission settlement of Sillery. It remains to ponder, though, how the literate young Etienne de Nevers, sieur de Brantigny, fit into this scene and why he might have left Champagne behind him. Since the circumstances of his birth, parentage, upbringing and death remain dubious, an historical digression into the world in which he may have come of age is appropriate.

Trouble in Champagne: Brantigny, de Nevers and Henri IV

This search for roots or titles in Champagne would proceed from the year 1627, approximately the birth-date of Etienne de Nevers, sieur de Brantigny. The Thirty Years War is about to wind up its first dismal decade; Louis XIII occupies France’s throne; revolting Huguenots and their English allies are making a last stand at besieged La Rochelle; Armand Jean du Plessis, cardinal and duke of Richelieu, is making history as the Catholic Bourbon monarch’s cunningly brilliant chief minister.

A first contingent of Jesuits had already sailed for Nouvelle France in 1624 to reinforce the Franciscan Recollets who had begun missionizing Hurons in Ontario ten years earlier. In 1627 Richelieu chartered his American fur-trading monopoly, Compagnie des Cent-Associés de la Nouvelle-France. The robes noires along with the traders’ syndicate and its successor would dominate governance of the theocratic colony until Louis XIV took direct control in 1663.

The year 1627 also happens to coincide with the abrupt departure from France of Charles Gonzague. His imposing French titles: duc de Nevers, duc de Rethel, prince d'Arches. This duke of Nevers was suddenly compelled to take charge of his family’s rich ancestral duchies of Mantua and Montferrat because the reigning Gonzaga kinsman had just died there without a closer male heir as a local successor. And there were Habsburg-sponsored rivals who avidly sought the same prize.

The implications of Charles’ fateful move emerge from the larger context of geopolitical jousting in Lombardy and Savoy between France and the mighty Habsburgs, who held sway in central Europe’s Holy Roman Empire, in Spain and in much of the New World. A sinister subplot to this long-running drama was Cardinal Richelieu’s recurring purges of France’s own hereditary nobility, always a potential danger to French monarchs, including the one he served as prime minister.

In this same year there is also an oblique reference to the estate of Brantigny in the Aube region of old Champagne, just east of Troyes. A brief published history²⁵ of a nearby estate, Yèvre-le-petit, informs that the sieur de Brantigny at this time would still have been Jean de Brion, who must have been close to 70 years old by then. In his prime, though, he had held a key post during Henri IV’s war of succession to the crown upon the assassination of his Valois cousin, Henry III, in 1589. Could Etienne’s landlord title have somehow come from this seigneur?

A half-century flashback to that earlier period is needed. Jean de Brion, sieur de Brantigny, was the bailli²⁶ (bailiff) and captain of the fortified town of Chaumont in 1588. The man who preceded him in that post was undoubtedly his father, Bernard de Brion, also the provost of Troyes and a nephew of the archdeacon of that parish. De Brion kinsmen had held leading positions in the towns of Troyes, Langres and Chaumont going back four generations. The Brantigny estate is about 10 miles east of Troyes. Control of the region, now roughly France’s Haute-Marne, was then contested.

This latest Lord Brantigny was the official to whom Henri IV and his cousin, the Duke of Nevers, transmitted instructions concerning strategic Chaumont in the course of the six-year civil war²⁷ over the monarch’s succession to the throne. Jean de Brion seems to have been rudely ousted, probably in late 1588, as bailli of Chaumont by Catholic League partisans. Philippe de Guyonvelle replaced Brantigny and made the city a supply depot for the League’s army. After this rebel leader fell in the seige of Chateauvillain,²⁸ the triumphant king reinstated de Brion as his man in Chaumont.

The succession struggle had flared when a fanatical Dominican monk assassinated Henri III in 1589. Eight months before that, the unlucky Valois monarch or his mother, Catherine de Medici, had ordered the murders of the brothers de Guise, the duke and the cardinal, leaders of the Catholic League. Henri III, who died without an heir, had already stripped the ambitious Guise branch of the House of Lorraine of its control of seething Champagne, appointing Charles Gonzaga’s father, the loyalist duc de Nevers, as the new provincial governor.²⁹ A staunch Catholic, this duke initially hesitated to assume that post until Henry of Navarre’s royal succession was properly clarified.

Fresh from a series of religious wars, France was rent by the prospect of this Bourbon Calvinist, King Henry of Navarre, gaining the throne as the closest male in the line of succession to his murdered cousin, Henri III. A champion of the Huguenots, Navarre prevailed only after promising to turn Catholic.³⁰ Crowned as Henri IV, he also managed to pacify France for a time, only to be assassinated at the peak of his popularity in 1610. The father of Etienne de Nevers dit Brantigny would have been born during this confused period, perhaps on the Aube in Champagne.

Henri IV’s military dispatches³¹ amid the fighting with League forces included letters to the Sieur de Brantigny and to the king’s faithful lieutenant, Jehan Roussat, at nearby Langres, a traditional rival of Chaumont. The king also engaged the duc de Nevers to intercede with Brantigny regarding urgent military provisions. Whatever the outcome of that diplomacy, we know that Jean de Brion, sieur de Brantigny, survived the hostilities. He is also remembered as a chevalier, écuyer des ecuries du roi and gentilhomme ordinnaire de la Chambre du Roi, a member of the royal court.

We then learn from the historic sketch of the Yèvre seigneurie that Philippe de Brion, Jean’s only known son and heir, was the seigneur of Yèvre in 1627, having inherited that estate from his deceased mother, Guillemette des Boves. There is no sign that Philippe had an heir or a sibling. And Philippe must have died before his father, because both hereditary seigneurial titles, Yèvre and Brantigny, were vacant by 1636.³² The Brantigny estate, which de Brion forebears had received from the parish of St. Etienne of Troyes, was apparently sold thereafter. A different aristocratic family held it in the 18th Century.

This speaks plainly against the theory that Etienne, Québec's sieur de Brantigny, might have waived a claim to that Champagne estate in 1671. The possibility that Etienne could have had some obscure connection to the vast holdings of the ducs de Nevers looks even more tenuous – for essentially the same reason.

Fall of the House of Nevers

During the civil war over royal succession, the Duke of Nevers had been Charles’ father, the Italian-born nobleman Luigi Gonzaga, known in France as Louis Gonzague. He was the royalist ally, whom Henri III had made governor of Champagne in 1588. Apart from his many titles and feats of arms, this vigorous aristocrat had six children and may have been France's richest land owner.

Upon Louis’ death in late 1595, his 15-year-old son, Charles, took his place as a peer of France, having inherited the duchy of Rethel along with that of Nevers. In a family vexed by the early deaths of two older brothers, Charles was Louis’ only surviving son. He had already distinguished himself as a worthy successor that same year by leading his cavalry into Cambray, then besieged by a Spanish-French army hostile to the new Bourbon king. The daring youth’s future seemed secure.

Charles (1580-1637) had come into the world at l'Hotel de Nevers, the ducal court in Paris. It was his heiress mother, Henrietta de La Marck of the House of Lorraine, from whom the father had come into possession of the French titles of Nevers and Rethel. But young Charles also happened to be a grandson of Federico Gonzaga, sovereign of Mantua, and the dutchess of Montferrat, herself a descendant of a Byzantine emperor, Theodore Palaiologos.

Charles had grand ambitions. Catherine de Mayenne of the House of Lorraine-Guise became Charles’ bride at Soissons in 1599. He founded two chivalric orders, one based in Nevers being so bizarre that it was later suppressed by the crown. In 1616, he and the secretive Capucian monk known to history as Richelieu's éminence grise persuaded the pope to endorse an ecumenical crusade of Catholics and Protestants against the Ottoman sultan, a scheme scuttled only by the outbreak of general war in Europe over the 1619 “defenestration of Prague”.

By that time, young Louis XIII was king of France and Richelieu was tightening his grip on crown strategy. A second Huguenot insurrection along with Spanish and English incursions posed immediate threats. At Blevet in Brittany in 1625, Huguenot Admiral Benjamin de Rohan, duc de Soubris, managed to capture the king’s new fleet, nominally commanded by the duc de Nevers, before the ships were even rigged. Soubris’ biggest prize was the 80-cannon La Vierge, the world's largest warship of its time with 500-ton displacement. Hostilities ceased only after the royalist success at La Rochelle in 1627-28, allowing Cardinal Richelieu to turn his attention toward Lombardy and Savoy.

Strategically located east and west of Milan, the Gonzaga duchies of Mantova and Monferrato were traditionally within the feudal orbit of the Hapsburg dynasty. But the Bourbon monarchy nurtured its own schemes in Lombardy, particularly when Richelieu took charge of foreign policy. The untimely deaths of duc de Nevers’ Gonzaga kinsmen without closer Italian male heirs handed the cardinal a unique opportunity. Charles was hurriedly installed on the throne of Mantua and Montferrat in early 1628 with the backing of France. This Bourbon affront to the Habsburgs touched off the War of Mantuan Succession, which raged until 1631 as a destructive sideshow of the catastrophic Thirty Years War.

The historic tragedy of Duke Charles’ devoutly religious family³³ unfolded in stages. Charles had already lost his beloved wife in 1618. Catherine died at age 33 and was interred in the cathedral of Nevers. If he took a mistress, like so many of his peers, the secret was well kept. The eminently eligible widower, then still in his twenties, never remarried. He seems to have devoted much energy in the 1620s to the creation of a new capital of Charleville in his quasi-independent principality of Arches, a grandiose project he and his wife began in 1606.

The House of Nevers became a spent force in France as soon as Charles moved to Mantua. François, the first son of Charles and Catherine, had died in 1622 at age 16. On Christmas Day of 1627, the duke’s second son and namesake was married off to an Italian cousin, Maria Gonzaga, daughter of a deceased Mantuan sovereign. The match was calculated to anchor the French family’s claim to the disputed Italian duchies. But this son died aged 22 in 1631, effectively stranding his father in Italy – for good, as it turned out.

Charles’ third son, Ferdinand, duc de Mayenne et d'Aiguillon, died the following year, also at age 22. He was the last of the duke’s male heirs. In historical retrospect, the Gonzague family’s curious string of misfortunes served the two overriding policy aims of the French prime minister. Though apparently not his original intention, noblesse oblige left the middle-aged widower Charles in charge of Mantua and Montferrat via a negotiated peace, midwifed by Richelieu’s éminence grise, Père Joseph. The Italian and French titles passed to a grandson upon the death of Charles Gonzague in 1637.

Habsburg power was dented by Richelieu’s backing of Swedish Lutheran forces in the Thirty Years War. But Ferdinand III, the Habsburg emperor in Vienna, married Charles’ granddaughter, Eleonora di Mantova, in 1651. Eight years later, Charles’ dissolute reigning grandson, duke of Mantua, Montferrat, Nevers and Rethel, received an offer from Paris that he apparently could not refuse. Cardinal Mazarin, the Sicilian-born protége and successor of the late Richelieu, desired to purchase the French lands and ducal titles of Nevers and Rethel from the House of Gonzaga.

That was the end of the House of Nevers. The geopolitical outcome would have played neatly on Richelieu’s grand chessboard. The cardinal had wanted the powerful dukes of Nevers in Lombardy but not necessarily in France. Apart from his larger strategy of loosening the Habsburg grip on the lands surrounding France, Richelieu had maneuvered tirelessly at home to eviscerate the traditional power of the nobility in order to create the strong centralized monarchic state that soon emerged under Louis XIV, the Sun King. The fall of the House of Nevers is the iconic example of diplomatic legerdemain that simultaneously served both of Richelieu’s obsessions: breaking the geopolitical stranglehold of the Habsburgs and destroying the political base of France’s own hereditary nobility.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the evocative names Brantigny and de Nevers fared no better. They were soon replaced by the alias Boisvert after the unexplained death of the supposedly French-born family patriarch in 1678 somewhere on Québec’s seigneurie of Lauzon. Perhaps just coincidentally, a man identified as “Dominus de Boisvert, miles” had been listed among the soldiers stationed at Trois-Rivières in 1648.³⁴ This intriguing scrap of historic trivia, passed on by Benjamin Sulte, was dated little more than a year before the aboriginal baptism at the same location provided the first definitive written mention of the man who called himself Brantigny, whom historians call de Nevers or Denevers and whose descendants came to be known as Boisvert or Greenwood.

If one still seeks some further tenuous thread between Etienne de Nevers and France’s House of Nevers, there is this: One of the six children of Charles, duc de Nevers, and his wife, Catherine de Mayenne, took vows as a nun, becoming abbess of Avenay, just across the Meuse River from Epernay in the region Champagne-Ardennes. Sister Bénédicte, née Gonzague, died at age 23, just a week after her father, supposedly also in Mantua. Her sisters, one who married the king of Poland, another who wed a French duke, seemed to have no such ties to Champagne.

In their prime, Charles Gonzague and his wife were renowned for their generous support of Catholic churches, monasteries, cloisters, abbeys. They had founded Charleville, now Charleville-Mézières, in 1606 as a counter-Reformation religious center with a Carmelite cloister, Capucian church and a Jesuit college. Champagne’s main towns soon boasted Jesuit houses. A first contingent of Jesuit missionaries from Champagne arrived in Canada in the late 1640s. They certainly knew the story of their de Nevers benefactor, perhaps even of the local lords of Brantigny.

Paul Chomedey, sieur de Maisonneuve, and Jeanne Mance, the acclaimed founders of Montréal in 1642, had strong links to Champagne. Mance, who came from Langre, discovered her calling to be a missionary nurse in Canada during a pilgrimage to Troyes. Maisonneuve, an aristocratic military officer, came from Neuvillesur-Vannes in Champagne. His sister was a local abbess who encouraged Marguerite Bourgeoys, a daughter of Troyes who became Canada’s first saint, to found Montréal’s Congregation of Notre Dame with the mission of educating young French and Amerindian girls. In the mid-17^th Century, impoverished Champagne was experiencing a wave of piety that rippled out to the New World. The late Duke of Nevers had underwritten the foundation of this renewal. Our Etienne de Nevers, perhaps unconsciously, played a small part in it.

Charleville was to have been the seat of Charles Gonzague’s new sovereign principality of Arches on the Meuse at the foot of the Ardennes, France’s border with Flanders. Construction of the princely palace stopped there upon Charles’ hasty departure in 1627. King Louis XIII bought the overlooking citadel two years later, the mint was closed in 1656, the fortifications destroyed in 1686. “The existence of a small, sovereign principality on its northern border was a thorn in the side of France’s monarchy, which would never cease to shrink its importance,” notes an historical sketch of Charleville,³⁵ the capital envisaged by the tragic prince of Arches.

The census takers of Jean Talon, the royal intendant whom Louis XIV sent to represent the crown’s interest in Québec, failed to find Etienne de Nevers dit Brantigny and his family in their 1666 headcount. Talon, from Chalons sur Marne, was another son of Champagne. Pierre Bailloquet, the priest who had a special rapport with Etienne and his family, never revealed what he must have known about his friend. Having come to Canada in 1647 to save souls, the Jesuit missionary died at age 79 among the Ottawa nation in 1692. And the circumstances of Etienne’s abrupt disappearance in 1678 at roughly the age of 51, or 55, remain just as much a mystery as the timing of his supposed arrival in Canada.

Conclusion

A wealth of hard facts – constant wars, occupations, famines, deadly contagions, political upheaval – might well have prompted a man like Etienne to turn his back on Europe. But the foregoing pageant of tantalizing historical coincidences still reveals no credible sign that the Boisvert ancestor ever was in the Old World. But for just two words, “en Champagne”, written by his priestly friend Bailloquet in the 1652 marriage certificate in Sillery, the tedious search for the bridegroom’s true identity could have concentrated, perhaps productively, much closer to home.

L'Espinay, the mysterious old French parish of origin, also happens to be the name of an early fief³⁶ near Fort Québec conferred in 1626 on the pioneer Louis Hébert, a Champlain companion whose wife, Marie Rollet, instructed many unidentified local children in the French language and ways. Samuel de Champlain had attended the 1621 Québec wedding of the daughter of this famous original settler couple to St. Malo-born Guillaume Couillard, who became the first man in Nouvelle France to be enobled. This honor came in 1654 with a royal letter conferring on Hébert’s son-in-law and heir the appropriate title, Sieur de L'Espinay.

Not only are the names L'Espinay and Couillard interchangeable, but PRDH lists a dozen early settlers who also went by the nom-dit Lepine, Lespine or Lespinay. Geneviève, the daughter Jean Hayot, Etienne de Nevers’ brother in law, married one of them, Gabriele Bérard de Lepine, in 1673. As a nickname, this might identify the bearer with the Lespinay family or with one of their so-named parish seigneuries: Charlesbourg between Québec city and Beauport, L'Ange-Gardien located near the Beaupré coast or, starting in 1701, Rivière du Sud on the south bank of the St. Lawrence.

Whatever may have once transpired on the Hérbert estate called l'Espinay St. Joseph, evidence to link Québec’s supposed expatriate from Champagne to the lords of Brantigny or the house of Nevers is wanting. An early clerical error could have transformed Témevers into de Nevers. Yet the seigneurial title of Brantigny looks like a figment of someone’s imagination. Not entirely unthinkable is that some Jesuitical sense of irony might have inspired the recycling of extinguished French titles as a new Canadian identity for a loyal donné returning from the defunct Huron mission in the pays d’en haut. The Berber streak newly detected in the Boisvert y-DNA gene pool only deepens the enigma. Apart from a threadbare collection of banal notarized contracts and religious acts, surviving original records leave larger questions than answers about the true origin of Etienne de Nevers, sieur de Brantigny.

–

Notes:

1 Tanguay, Cyprien. Dictionnaire géneálogique des familles canadiennes depuis la fondation de la colonie (Vol. 1-7). Eusèbe Sénécal et fils, Montréal 1871-1890: p. 178

2 Galarneau, Claude. Edmond de Nevers, essayiste. Cahiers de l’Institut d’histoire, Université Laval. Québec, 1960: „Etienne Brantigny est né à l'Espinay en Champagne et son surnom de Nevers laisse entendre que son père ou son grand-père venu du Nivernais, selon Benjamin Sulte.“ Galarneau is quoting Sulte's April 12, 1901 article on Edmond de Nevers for l'Indépendant, Fall River, Mass. He points out that names of provinces were assumed particularly by soldiers or by members of exclusive professional guilds. Québec scholar Abraham-Edmond Boisvert had revived the de Nevers surname of his 17^th Century ancestor as his own nom de plume during his protracted sojourn in late 19^th Century Europe.

3 Tanguay, Cyprien. Dictionnaire géneálogique des familles canadiennes … (Vol. 1): pp. 86, 178-179, 255-256, 259.

4 Drolet, Yves. Dictionnaire Généalogique et Heraldique de la Noblesse Canadienne Francaise du XVIIe au XIXe Siecle. Edition Dico, Montréal 2010

5 Ibid.

6 Tanguay, Dictionnaire géneálogique ..: pp. 255-256

7 Desaulniers, François Lesieur. Les Vieilles Familles d'Yamachiche: vingt-trois généalogies. Tome 4. A.-P. Pigeon, Montréal, reprint 2011 [1908]. Boisvert: p.16. See also: Programme de recherches en demographie historique (PRDH). Presses de l'Université de Montréal 1991: Family certificate # 738, with only five children: Guillaume, Daniel, Elisabeth Ursule, Etienne, Jean.

8 Tanguay. Dictionnaire géneálogique..: pp. 178-179, 255-256

9 Hébert, Léo-Paul. Le Régistre de Sillery (1638-1690). Presses de l'Université du Québec, Fondation de l'Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, Québec, 1994. Hébert's introduction links the prevalence of orphans and adoptions to Sillery's high disease mortality, noting (pp. 47 and 53) that godparents frequently took the place of deceased parents of native children. Separately, a transcribed Latin registry entry by P. Bailloquet, S.J., for Nov. 20, 1663, (p. 195) is a triple baptism of native children, one of whom is given the Christian name, Etienne, by his godfather, Etienne (de Nevers dit) Brantigny. This godson must have been a halforphan because his younger brother had a different Etechemin father. The act, dated "9bris 20" (Nov. 20) reads: "Ego Petrus Bailloquet societatis Jesu baptisavi solemniter in eccl(esi)a Silleriancensi tres sequentes infantes, duos q(ui) primos natos ex matre Nicola Nemi8ek8e et unum ex patre Pik8etching, 8etechemin, alterum ex patre Normamin, natione quoque 8etechemin, 3ium vero natum ex matre Martina Nig8tesi et patre Roberto Nekechka8at, natione 8abanaki. Stephanus Brentigni nuncupavit 1um quinquennem Stephanu(m); Mathurinus Trud 2um et 3um Petrum et Nicolaum."

10 Y-DNA comparison of participating men with de Nevers/Boisvert ancestry revealed convergence in a “most recent common ancestor” who must have been Etienne Boisvert (~1660-~1731). Laboratory triangulation was done by the firm Family Tree DNA for a genealogy project of Jacques Beaugrand's Heritage français organization. SNP terminal was the M183 subclade of haplogroup E-M81, a characteristically Berber marker uniquely dominant in the Atlas Mountains of Northwest Africa. This genetic signature must have been rare in northern France in the time of Etienne de Nevers (~1627-~1678), the supposed father of Etienne Boisvert (~1660-1731). See miroise.org/triangulations/index.html and Heritage français' discussion forum, with messages from Boisvert family historian Michel Boisvert, at miroise.org/Forum-ADN.

11 Hubert, Claude et Rémi Savard. Algonquins de Trois-Rivières: L'oral au secours de l'ecrit 1600-2005. Recherches Amérindiennes au Quèbec. Montréal 2006: „S'il est possible qu' Étienne soit le fils du couple de Français, il n'existe aucun acte de bapteme ou de mariage pour le confirmer. Quant aux sépultures, nous n'avons trouvé qu'un acte concernant un certain Étienne Boisvert (10 aout 1731); toutefois ni les noms des parents ni celui de l'epouse y sont mentionnés.“ (p. 43.)

12 Bibliothèque et Archives nationales Québec (BAnQ): E21, S64, SS5, SS7, D427; photograph of original waiver of future charges from the building of Fort St. François Xavier to protect the Sillery réduction against Iroquois raids. The 1661 French civil document identifies the Boisvert patriarch as Estienne Temévers, sieur de Brentigny. Only one other person, a royal notary, is identified with title: Guillaume Audouart, sieur de Saint-Germain. A collation of documents by Paul Vachon, Beauport seigneurial notary, dated Aug. 13, 1661 (BanQ: E21, S64, SS5,SSS7, D42) identifies Etienne as Monsieur Brantigny, a deferential form of address rendered also to Audouart, but not to more than a dozen other Sillery concession holders. Those included Etienne's father-in-law, Thomas Hayot; his wife's cousin, François Boucher, as well as Nicolas and Jean Pelletier, Jean Neveu, Gilles Pinel, Jean Denis, Mathurine Trud and others.

13 Le Régistre de Sillery (1638-1690): Bailloquet uses the Latin form, Dominus Brentigni, when baptizing Etienne's second son, Daniel, Dec. 17, 1659 (p. 306). Gabriel Druilletes, S.J, calls the father Stephanus Denevers vulgo Brentigny at the baptism of his first son, Guillaume, on Aug. 25, 1654 (p.163). Guillaume's godparents were the titled notary, Guillaume Audouard, and the wife of Lord Jean Bourdon, engineer, architect, surveyor, cartographer, explorer, diplomat, major landlord and benefactor of the Jesuits at Sillery.

14 Sulte, Benjamin. Histoire des Canadiens-Français (Tome IV). Wilson & Cie., Montréal, 1882. Chapter IV, digitalized for Internet by Laval University, has Sulte's transcription of the 1667 census, including the family de Nevers Brentigny, with names and ages, at Cap Rouge et St. Ignace. The 1666 Talon census omitted Etienne de Nevers dit Brantigny and his family. Original census documents are archived in Paris. See also http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category: Recensement_de_la_Nouvelle-France_en_1667.

15 Historian Michel Boisvert reported to the Association des familles Boisvert Inc. in 2011 that reference to such a document had been found on p. 2,056 of a four-volume Dictionnaire biographique des ancêtres québecois 1608-1700 (Québec, La Maison des Ancetres, 1998-2001). He said that author Michel Langlois informed him the original record, made 1 May 1671 before royal notary Pierre Duquet, could no longer be found.

16 Archives Nationales du Québec (ANQ), Drouin collection. Text of photographed Sillery marriage certificate of Oct 28, 1652: „Le 28 oct 1652, aprés publication faire de deux bancs de mariage le 29 de sept et le 6 d'oct et dispense obtennu du troisieme ne s'étant trouvé aucun Empêchement le R. P. Pierre Bailloquet à ce député, à interrogé Estienne Tenevers fils d'Estienne Tennevere et d'Agnès Luosbisec ses père et mère de la paroisse d'Espinay en Champagne; Et Anne Hayaut fille de Thomas Hayot et de Janne Boucher ses père et mère habitant de ce pay lesquel ayant donné leur mutuel consentement par parole de présent, il a sollennellemant mariés dans l'Eglise de Sillery en présence de témoins connus. René Meseré dit Nopce, Jacques Archambault, Charles Gandier.“

17 ANQ, Trois Rivières 1A-48.1, registry 1621-1679 Drouin collection. Text of photographed Trois Rivières baptismal certificate of 15 Jan. 1650: „Ego Petrus Bailloquet vices agens parochii baptizavi cum caeremonies puerum natum ex patre Ka8b8k8chich, et matre K8ekass8ek8e patrinus fuit Stephanus Brantigni puerum appellum vif Stephanus.“

18 Hébert, Le Registre de Sillery (1638-1690): Commentary (p. 53) cites an example (p. 153) of this practice. A further example (p.160) dated April 19, 1654 is a triple native baptism in which Brantigny's wife and his in-laws are godparents. Bailloquet officiates in both.

19 BAnQ: E21, S64, SS5, SS7, D427. The identification used in this 1661 French civil document is Estienne Temévers, sieur de Brentigny.

20 Léon Pouliot, «Lalemant, Jérôme», dans

FR: UNDEF: public_citation_publication, vol. 1, Université Laval/University of Toronto, 2003–, consulté le 31 août 2015, <http://www.biographi.ca/fr/bio/lalemant_jerome_1F.html>

21 Tanguay, Dictionnaire généalogique …: p. 265. Separately, her 1699 burial certificate in Montreal made her a 72-year-old; her father had been a witness at her second wedding. A theory holds that her father, called Tocos, was taken to France, where he wed a local woman.

22 Jetté, Réne. Dictionnaire généalogique des familles du Québec, des origines à 1730. Presses de l'Université de Montréal 1983: pp. 135, 560 „soeur de Marin et Juilienne Baril“. Separately, historian Dick Garneau in his internet Metis-History (<metis-history.info/french17.shtml>) series, New France 1650-1654 installment, suggests that Jeanne could have been a mixed-blood daughter of either Marin Boucher or Gaspard Boucher, who are supposed to have been brothers or cousins. Marin, in Québec by 1621, was supposedly born around 1589, Jeanne around 1607. See also Dick Garneau, Métis History, New France 1637-1639 (<metishistory.info/french12.shtml>) regarding Etienne's mother-in-law.

23 Garneau, R.H. New France 1615-1619 (<www.metis-history.info/ french6.shtml>). The Métis historian said Tanguay's 1619 listing, which contained fewer names, was incomplete. Both historians list Marin Boucher.

24 Ibid.

25 Wikipedia.org/wiki: Yèvre-le-petit: „… Guillemette mourut sans doute avant 1627, année où son fils, Philippe de Brion était déjà seigneur d’Yèvre. Il dut mourir avant son père, car en 1636 les successions de Jean de Brion et de sa femme étaient vacantes… “

26 Royal agent heading a bailliage, or collection of fiefs forming a feudal jurisdiction. The office originated deep in the Middle Ages. By the late 16^th Century the bailiff's former powers were mostly shared with three other officers. Two of them, bailli and capitaine, were combined at Chaumont in the person of Brantigny. He might have been roughly comparable to the sheriff or chief executive. (Encyclopédie Larousse en ligne; Dictionnaire française Larousse)

27 Konnert, Marc W. Local Politics in the French Wars of Religion: The Towns of Champagne, the Duc de Guise and the Catholic League, 1560-95. Ashgate Publishing Limited, Aldershot, Hants, England 2006: pp. 193, 242. The long-time governor of Chaumont, a friend of Guise, died November 1587, causing the city council to petition Guise for a replacement: „On 13 December the council concluded to ask Guise to appoint to the post Jean de Brion, sieur de Brantigny, bailli and captain of the city. This, however, was not to be…“ (p. 193).

28 Constant, Pierre: XVIe siècle, Opuscules, 1879.

29 Konnert, Mark W. Civic Agendas and Religious Passion: Chalons-sur-Marne during the French Wars of Religion, 1560-1594. Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, Inc., and Truman State University, Kirkville, Missouri. 1997: 58-60, 93-96, 129, 152-154.

30 Henry of Navarre's unexpected Epiphany dismayed his Calvinist courtiers. The pragmatic monarch's laconic comment translates famously as: “France is worth a mass.” Evidently, the high nobility was not swept up in the religious fervor of their epoch, as shown in this delicious historical footnote on the spirited spouse of the Duc de Guise: “Voyez notre Histoire de la ville de Rethel, Paris, 1847 — Catherine de Cleves avait pour amant Saint-Megren, que Guise fit assassiner. Henriette de Cleves, femme du duc de Nevers, maitresse de fameux Coconas, et Marie de Cleves, femme du prince de Condé et maitresse de Henri III, étaient soeurs de la duchesse. Ces trois femmes galantes étaient surnommées les trois Graces. Les deux premiers étaient protestantes et elles ne se firent catholiques que pour favouriser la politique de Catherine de Médicis. La duchesse de Guise fuit aussi ardente dans la Lique qu'elle l'avait été parmi les protestants.” This wry comment appears on Page 106 of Claude Émile Jolibois' Histoire de la ville de Chaumont.

31 Journal Militaire de Henri IV, depuis son départ de la Navarre. Collected, edited and commented upon by M. Le Comte De Valori. Chez Firmin Didot, père et fils, Libraires, Paris, 1821: p. 368. The king is ordering prompt transfer of cannon and shot from Chaumont to Langres. Dated March 12, 1595, the letter to his lieutenant, Jehan Roussat, mayor of Langres, said in part: “… j'ai mis dans son paquet la lettre que j'ecrie au sieur de Brantigny, laquelle mon cousin le duc de Nevers accompagnere entendre mon intention. Vous aurez aussi ci-incluse la lettre qui j'ecris au maire et aux échevins de ma ville de Langres, lequel …” (The reference would be to Jean de Brion, sieur de Brantigny, bailli and capitaine of Chaumont, according to Konnert, Local Politics… p. 193). P. 365 reproduces an earlier letter in which Henri assures Roussat of help for Langres from his cousin, le duc de Nevers.

32 Wikipedia.org/wiki: Yèvre-le-petit

33 Gonzaga family tree: <http://genealogy.euweb.cz/gonzaga/gonzaga3.html#LNR>

34 Sulte, Benjamin. Histoire des Canadiens-Français 1608-1880. Wilson & Cie, Editeurs, Montréal 1882: p. 20, “…Dominus de Boisvert, miles, est mentionné en 1648, ansi que…”

35 Wikipedia.org: Charleville-Mézières: “L'existence d'une petite principauté souveraine à sa frontière nord est une épine dans le pied de la monarchie française, qui n'aura de cesse d'en réduire l'importance,”

36 Sulte, Benjamin. Pages d'histoire du Canada. Granger fréres, Montréal, 1891: p. 14.