Harper's Encyclopedia of United States History
Benson Lossing, Ed.

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Hundred associates,

The. Cardinal Richelieu, in 1627, annulled a charter of the Trading Company of New France, then held by the Sieurs de Caen, who were Huguenots, and in pursuance of his plans for the suppression of these Protestants and the aggrandizement of his monarch, organized a company under the name of the Hundred Associates, to whom he gave the absolute sovereignty of the whole of New France, then claimed to include the American territory from Florida to Hudson Bay. They were given complete monopoly of the trade in that region, excepting in the whale and cod fisheries. The charter required the company to settle 4,000 Roman Catholics there within fifteen years, to maintain and permanently endow the Roman Catholic Church in New France, and to banish all Huguenots (q. v.) or Protestants from the colony. Circumstances frustrated this scheme of temporal and spiritual dominion in America. Canada was conquered by the British in 1629, but was restored by the treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye, March 27, 1632, the whole of Canada, Cape Breton, and Acadia being restored to the French. The scheme of the Hundred Associates was not revived.