So started the Company of the One Hundred Associates under the happiest auspices, endowed with almost sovereign power and having a leader of the state as its patron, for at its head was Cardinal Richelieu, who, without the title of lieutenant general which he perhaps thought unnecessary, seeing that he connected the work of colonization with his position as head of the navy, exercised the same authority. On the 27th of April, 1628, Louis XIII sent Champlain his commission as "commander in New France in the absence of our very dear and well beloved cousin, the Cardinal de Richelieu, grand master, chief and superintendent of the navigation and commerce of France." Champlain did not receive his commission on behalf of the company until he reached Dieppe in 1629, after the occupation of Quebec by the English. The first attempt to carry out the charter was in 1628, when vessels were equipped and victualled under the orders of de Roquemont, one of the chief associates. Their first object was to succour Quebec, then in famine. A number of artisans and their families started and never reached their destination, for in the gulf their ships were seized by David Kerth, a master mariner of Dieppe in pay of the English government and in command of its fleet attacking the colonies. War had broken out between England and France and hostilities soon extended to America, and a fleet of ships was sent to invade the settlements of New France and in particular to capture Quebec. It is not our duty to tell the story of Quebec or to recount the noble defence of Champlain till the fall of the city on July 29, 1629, when Louis Kerth, the brother of the admiral, installed himself as the governor general, representing the English. The state of the colony at the end of this siege interests us. Of the French, there only remained at Quebec the families of the widow of Hébert and of their son-in-law, Couillard, and these intended to leave after the harvest, but in the event they were constrained to stay. The rest passed over by way of Tadoussac into France and with them Champlain, who went to England to call upon the French ambassador, urging him to demand the restitution of Quebec on the ground that it had been captured two months after the expiration of the short war between the two nations. Canada as a province _quoad civilia_ was under Normandy, and hence it became to be believed that it was also _quoad sacra_ under Normandy. [Illustration: THE TAKING OF QUEBEC IN 1629 (From Hennepin, Edition 1698.)] It is now 1632, the year of the treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye when Acadia and Canada were again ceded to the French. For three years Louis Kerth kept Quebec in the name of England and on July 13, he formally handed over a heap of ruins to Emery de Caen, who conducted the first contingent of the returning French. "But for our habitation," says Champlain, "my people have found it utterly consumed along with good beaver skins valued at 40,000 _livres_."