The Dominion of Canada was less than a week-old when the new nation’s first lady, Agnes Macdonald, made her first entry in the new diary she had purchased. The former Agnes Bernard had married Sir John A. Macdonald in London, England earlier that year as the British North America Act wound its way through the British Parliament.
“My beautiful new Diary Book!” she recorded in the privacy of her diary on July 6, 1867. “I am ever so pleased with it and have been examining and admiring it for full two minutes! The lock too! My diaries as Miss Bernard did not need such precautions but then I was an insignificant young spinster & what I might write did not matter. Now I am a Great Premier’s wife & Lady Macdonald & ‘cabinet Secrets and Mysteries’ might drop or slip off unwittingly from the nib of my pen.”
“This new Dominion of ours came noisily into existence on the 1 & 2,” she continued. “The very newspapers look hot & tired with the weight of announcements and Cabinet lists. Here-in this house- the atmosphere is so awfully political that sometimes I think the very flies hold Parliament on the kitchen table cloths! In theory I regard my husband with much awe, in practice I tease the life out of him, by talking of dress & compliments when he comes home to rest! Today he rebelled- poor man, & ordered me out of the room.”
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.