A very sad day on the Canadian political history calendar as it was on September 5, 1920 that Lady Macdonald, our first Prime Minister’s wife, passed into history, an ocean away from the nation her husband did so much to found. Agnes Bernard, the sister of Sir John A.’s senior assistant, Hewitt Bernard, met her future husband while Macdonald and the other Fathers of Confederation were in London finalizing the British North America Act in 1866-67. The pair quickly fell in love and were married only weeks later, also in London. It had been a decade since Sir John A.’s first wife had died and the arrival of Agnes provided the Father of Confederation with stability, companionship and love on the home front.
Upon Sir John A.’s death in 1891, Lady Macdonald and the couple’s physically challenged daughter, Mary, crossed the Atlantic to live out their days. Sadly, both are buried in mostly forgotten graves in separate towns in the United Kingdom. I have long felt that our federal government should forever ensure the upkeep of the grave memorial as a way of demonstrating greater respect for the late wife and daughter of Canada’s Father of Confederation.
Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist. He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy. A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.