[Sidenote: _First English capture of Quebec._] There was bitterness in France when the news came of this great disaster; there was distress and hopelessness at Quebec, where Champlain still held out through the following winter. Kirke had gone back to England; but when July came round again in 1629, he reappeared in the St. Lawrence, with a stronger fleet than before. The Frenchmen at Quebec were by this time starved out, they had no alternative but to surrender; and on July 22, 1629, the English flag was for the first time hoisted on the rocky citadel of Canada. There was little booty for the conquerors, nothing but beaver skins, which were subsequently sequestrated, and Canadian pines were cut down to freight the English ships. Kirke's ships carried back to England Champlain and his companions, who thence returned to their homes in France; and Quebec was left in charge of an English garrison. [Sidenote: _Convention of Susa and Treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye._] [Sidenote: _Canada given back to France._] The Merchant Adventurers had done their work well. With little or no loss, unaided by the Government, they had driven the French from Canada and annexed New France. Had Queen Elizabeth been on the throne of England, she would have scolded and then approved; and would have kept for her country the fruits of English daring and English success. The bold freebooter, Kirke, would have found favour in her eyes; she would have honoured and rewarded him, as she honoured and rewarded Drake. But the Stuarts were cast in a different mould, and no English minister at the time was a match for Richelieu. Before Quebec had fallen, Charles of England and Louis of France had concluded the Convention of Susa, on April 24, 1629; and the Treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye, signed nearly three years later, on March 29, 1632, definitely restored to France her possessions in North America.[28] No consideration was {77} embodied in the treaty for the surrender of Canada, but State Papers have made clear that the price was the unpaid half of Queen Henrietta Maria's marriage dowry. For this sum, already due and wrongly outstanding, Canada was sold. It was a pitiful proceeding, unworthy of an English King, but typical of a Stuart. It is noteworthy that early in the seventeenth century both the Cape and Canada might have become and remained British colonies. In 1620 two sea captains formally annexed the Cape, before any settlement had as yet been founded at Table Bay; but their action was never ratified by the Government at home.[29] Nine years later Kirke took Quebec, and again the work was undone. So the Dutch in the one case, and the French in the other, made colonies where the English might have run their course; and generations afterwards, Great Britain took again, with toil and trouble, what her adventurers, with truer instinct than her rulers possessed, had claimed and would have kept in earlier days. It is noteworthy, too, that state policy was in