for his disastrous expeditions and accusing him of cowardice. His offer to support the Comte d'Artois in seeking the French throne was rejected, and Puisaye resigned his position as lieutenant-general in the king's armies. Move to Upper Canada In England, Puisaye and his fellow "French émigrés" were supported with public money and private charity, which quickly made them unwelcome. Puisaye proposed leading them to Upper Canada where they would found a French military colony and help defend Upper Canada from republican influences. Puisaye arranged for the French royalists to be settled in Upper Canada on the same terms as the United Empire Loyalists some two decades before. He and forty-one other settlers departed England for Upper Canada in the summer of 1798. It was expected that this expedition would pave the way for the emigration of thousands of French loyalists. On 22 November 1798, the Executive Council of Upper Canada approved land grants for the settlers in Uxbridge, Gwillimbury, Whitchurch and an unnamed county north of Whitby, all in Ontario. Located in present-day Richmond Hill, the new settlement was named Windham in honour of William Windham, the British Secretary of War who help arranged the settlement. Puisaye and surveyor Augustus Jones looked over the land in December 1798. The settlers encountered significant troubles upon arrival in Canada. They were all French aristocrats, unprepared for life as pioneers. Although the building of the settlement went well at first, the settlers quickly became disillusioned, their unhappiness being expressed openly by the spring of 1799. Puisaye himself expressed his dissatisfaction with the area where the settlers were granted plots to Peter Russell, the administrator of Upper Canada; Russell wrote to Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe that "[Puisaye] now thinks the distance too great for navigation, the roads impracticable, and the consequent difficulties of transport insuperable, and in short that his people are unequal to the hardships of reducing such heavy timbered forests into cultivation. He therefore wishes for some situation on the Lake where the nobles, aged, and women may engage in less laborious occupations." He soon purchased land south of Newark, Ontario, in the Niagara region, where he spent most of his time. He negotiated with Joseph Brant to obtain land to relocate the remaining settlers, but nothing came of these negotiations. Although Puisaye kept up his properties in Windham and tried to support the other settlers, the community languished. Most of