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Jean-François de la Roque de Roberval
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Jean-François de La Roque de Roberval (c. 1500 – 1560) was the first lieutenant general of French Canada and a pirate.
rval was born in in Carcassonne, southern France.
As a young nobleman, Roberval joined the French army in the Italian campaigns. He quickly developed a lifelong friendship with the future King Francis. In addition to soldiering together they hunted together on the Roberval estates. On return from the wars, he led the expensive life of a courtier, and borrowed heavily on his estates.
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Jean-François de La Roque de Roberval (c. 1500 – 1560) was the first lieutenant general of French Canada and a pirate.
Military career
Roberval was born in in Carcassonne, southern France.
As a young nobleman, Roberval joined the French army in the Italian campaigns. He quickly developed a lifelong friendship with the future King Francis. In addition to soldiering together they hunted together on the Roberval estates. On return from the wars, he led the expensive life of a courtier, and borrowed heavily on his estates. This was a debt that would encourage his adventurism throughout his life.
Canada
On January 15, 1541, King Francis I of France gave Roberval a commission to settle the province of Canada and provide for the spread of the "Holy Catholic faith". The King provided some funds for the expedition of 1541 and provided Roberval with three ships, the Valentine, the Anne and the Lechefraye. Jacques Cartier, to whom the King had first given this same commission, became hired as no more than a pilot. In fact, Roberval was not ready to go and Cartier was allowed by Roberval to make without him the initial sortie with 500 colonists, in May 1541. During the summer, not asking for authorization from their Indian hosts, Cartier and his many workmen built, upstream from Stadaconé, two fortified habitations (one at the River level, the other over the hill aside), in the place that Cartier named Charlesbourg-Royal (now Cap-Rouge).
In order to raise additional funds Roberval went pirating with Bidoux de Lartigue taking several English merchant ships. Despite his pleasure at tweaking the English, Francis I diplomatically kept the peace and rebuked de Roberval.
Roberval with his three ships and 200 colonists set sail for Newfoundland in April 1542, arriving June 8. Cartier was impatient to show the king the believed "gold and diamonds" he had found (which were nothing more than quartz and some iron pyrites) and, despite Roberval willing, he promptly left for France with his military detachment and some discouraged colonists. Having some good maps from Cartier, the Roberval team sailed easily up the Grande Rivière de Canada, to the same place where the forts were constructed, and abandoned by Cartier that June, the place which Roberval renamed France-Roy. En route, he abandoned his near-relative Marguerite de La Rocque with her lover on the "Isle of Demons", off the coast of Quebec, as punishment for their affair. The young man, their servant and baby died, but Marguerite survived to be rescued by fishermen and returned to France.
The Roberval settlement lasted less than one year due to the severe winter, scurvy, and attacks by the St. Lawrence Iroquoians, who had been displeased with the French in the recent past (since or before 1534). In 1543 a relief expedition arrived from France and Roberval decided to repatriate his little colony to France.
Pirating
Taking his disappointment at the failed Canadian venture and his ships, Roberval again went a pirating (privateering), this time in the Caribbean against Spanish ships and towns, since France and Spain were at war. Known to the Spanish as Roberto Baal, in 1543 he sacked Rancherias and Santa Marta, followed by an attack in 1544 on Cartagena de Indias. In 1546 ships under his command attacked Baracoa and Havana. In 1547 he retired from pirating, and subsequently King Henry II appointed Roberval as the Royal Superintendent of Mines. Despite all of these ventures and royal favor he did not manage to reconstitute his fortune. By 1555, his goods were fully mortgaged and the Château de Roberval was threatened with seizure.
Religion
Roberval was an early convert to Calvinism. In 1535 he escaped hanging as a Protestant only by the intervention of the King. In his management of the Canadian expedition he showed a very Calvinistic severity. One night in Paris in 1560 as he was coming out of a Calvinist meeting, Roberval, along with his fellow Protestants, was attacked by a Catholic mob and killed. The remains of his fortune passed to his creditors, and the Château de Roberval was repurchased by his nephew Louis de Madaillan.
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