Charles Bagot

Charles Bagot was born in Staffordshire in 1781 and educated at Rugby and Christ Church, Oxford. He briefly studied law, entered Parliament, and served as George Canning's undersecretary from 1807 to 1809. After a temporary Paris appointment, he became minister to the United States, arriving in 1816. ¹

His principal Washington achievement was the naval limitation agreed with Acting Secretary of State Richard Rush in April 1817. The exchanged notes restricted each country to one small armed vessel on Lake Ontario, two on the upper lakes, and one on Lake Champlain. Each vessel could carry only a single eighteen-pounder cannon and could not exceed one hundred tons. Other armed vessels were to be dismantled. The arrangement reduced the naval establishments left by the War of 1812 and allowed either government to terminate it on six months' notice. ²

Bagot subsequently represented Britain in Russia and the Netherlands. Appointed governor general of Canada in 1841, he arrived in January 1842. Under pressure from the assembly, he brought Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine and Robert Baldwin into an expanded executive that September. This accommodation advanced the practice of responsible government, though Bagot had initially sought to avoid conceding it and the full constitutional settlement came later. He also reassured French Canadians about their legal and educational institutions. ¹

In October 1842 he commissioned an investigation of policy toward Indigenous peoples. Reporting in 1844, after his death, the Bagot Commission endorsed industrial boarding schools run with churches and treated parental influence as an obstacle to its assimilation program. Its recommendations belong to the early history of the residential school system. ^{3, 4}

Bagot's health deteriorated during his Canadian administration. He resigned in January 1843 and died at Kingston on 19 May, before returning to Britain. ¹