Radisson at last learned why preferment had
been denied him. It was on account of his wife. Twice Radisson
journeyed to London for Mary Kirke. Those were times of an easy change
in faith. Charles II was playing double with Catholics and
Protestants. The Kirkes were closely attached to the court; and it
was, perhaps, not difficult for the Huguenot wife to abjure
Protestantism and declare herself a convert to the religion of her
husband. But when Radisson proposed taking her back to France, that
was another matter. Sir John Kirke forbade his daughter's departure
till the claims of the Kirke family against New France had been paid.
When Radisson returned without his wife, he was reproached by M.
Colbert for disloyalty. The government refused its patronage to his
plans for the fur trade; but M. Colbert sent him to confer with La
Chesnaye, a prominent fur trader and member of the Council in New
France, who happened to be in Paris at that time. La Chesnaye had been
sent out to Canada to look after the affairs of a Rouen fur-trading
company. Soon he became a commissioner of the West Indies Company; and
when the merchants of Quebec organized the Company of the North, La
Chesnaye became a director. No one knew better than he how bitterly
the monopolists of Quebec would oppose Radisson's plans for a trip to
Hudson Bay; but the prospects were alluring. La Chesnaye was deeply
involved in the fur trade and snatched at the chance of profits to
stave off the bankruptcy that reduced him to beggary a few years later.
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