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SHCT 156 D.J.B. Trim-The Huguenots - History and Memory in Transnational Context (2011) PDF
SHCT 156 D.J.B. Trim-The Huguenots - History and Memory in Transnational Context (2011) PDF
in Transnational Context
Studies in the History of
Christian Traditions
General Editor
Robert J. Bast
Knoxville, Tennessee
In cooperation with
Henry Chadwick, Cambridge
Paul C.H. Lim, Nashville, Tennessee
Eric Saak, Liverpool
Brian Tierney, Ithaca, New York
Arjo Vanderjagt, Groningen
John Van Engen, Notre Dame, Indiana
Founding Editor
Heiko A. Oberman
VOLUME 156
Edited by
David J. B. Trim
LEIDEN BOSTON
LEIDEN BOSTON
2011
Cover Illustration: Joseph-Nicolas RobertFleury, Scne de la SaintBarthlemy, assassinat de
Briou, gouverneur du Prince de Conti, 24 aot 1572, 1833 (Paris, muse du Louvre, inv. 7673)
The Huguenots : history and memory in transnational context : essays in honour and memory
of Walter C. Utt / edited by David J.B. Trim.
p. cm. -- (Studies in the history of Christian traditions, ISSN 1573-5664 ; v. 156)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-90-04-20775-2 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Huguenots--History. I. Trim, D. J. B.
(David J. B.) II. Utt, Walter C.
BX9454.3.H88 2011
284.509--dc22
2011015899
ISSN 1573-5664
ISBN 978 90 04 20775 2
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.
Acknowledgments vii
Contributors xi
Abbreviations xiii
In Appreciation of Walter Utt................................................................. xv
Stanley G. Payne
Walter C. Utt, My Colleague..................................................................xxi
Eric Anderson
Index 305
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book was created in the belief that examining history and mem-
ory through the lens of a particular transnational communitythe
Huguenotsin the longue dure has the potential to provide uncom-
mon and valuable insights into the academically fashionable areas of
memory and transnationalism. It is the editor and contributors belief
that the essays that follow also cast new light on several aspects of
Huguenot history. Yet while this book is intended as a contribution to
scholarship in its own right, it also has another purpose.
It is a (very belated) festschrift for the late Walter C. Utt (192185),
long-time Professor of History at Pacific Union College, in Angwin,
California. Given that he was an historian of early-modern France,
perhaps the French term hommage is more appropriate in this case
than the German festschrift. Regardless of term, this collection of stud-
ies on Huguenot history, chiefly of the lateseventeenth and early
eighteenth centuriesa subject of which Walter Utt became a mas-
teris intended to commemorate an outstanding teacher and excel-
lent scholar, who, at his untimely death, left behind only one
monograph, a handful of articles, and two historical novels. His pass-
ing was untimely in that, although he was not young at his death (at
age 64), he was not particularly elderly, and indeed he is still survived
by two brothers now in their eighties, which suggests the world of
scholarship lost many productive years. Happily, Utts second mono-
graph (and masterwork), on Claude Brousson, was posthumously
brought to publication.* However, the admiration a number of schol-
ars and former students felt for Walter Utt, and the sense that his career
would, in happier circumstances, have produced more excellent books,
prompted the idea of a volume in his honour and memory, to mark the
25th anniversary of his death.
This book owes a great deal to the support of the Walter C. Utt
Endowment at Pacific Union College and of two Presidents of PUC,
*Walter C. Utt and Brian E. Strayer, The Bellicose Dove: Claude Brousson and
Protestant Resistance to Louis XIV, 16471698 (Brighton and Portland, Oreg.: Sussex
Academic Press, 2003).
viii acknowledgments
Richard Osborn and his successor, Heather Knight. The Utt Endowment
provided a generous subsidy towards the cost of publication and
also funded my appointment to a second year as Walter Utt Professor
of History at the college, which provided the necessary time to com-
plete editorial work. I gratefully acknowledge the members of the
Endowments board for their practical and moral support: Vic Aagaard,
Bruce Anderson, Eric Anderson, Martha Utt-Billington, Arleen
Downing, Steve Herber, Wayne Jacobsen, Nancy LeCourt, Grant
Mitchell, Amy Rosenthal, David Westcott, and Elle Wheeler. I am also
grateful to John Collins, Paul McGraw, Dick Osborn and Leo Ranzolin,
who took the practical steps to turn the Utt Endowments financial sup-
port into an extension of my tenure of the Utt Chair at PUC. Above all,
I am beholden to Bruce and Audrey Anderson, without whom this fest-
schrift would certainly have been neither commenced nor completed.
I appreciated the efficient and enthusiastic support of Adugnaw
Worku, Gilbert Abella, Karen Thomas and other librarians at Pacific
Union College Library in developing the Walter Utt collection in the
Library and in obtaining materials needed for chapters 1, 6 and 11. In
addition, I am greatly indebted to the Folger Shakespeare Library, for
awarding me a fellowship in 2009, and to the supremely competent
and considerate reading room staff for their help during time at the
Folger in 2009 and 2010, when the introduction was researched and
drafted, and my own essay revised.
For permission to use JosephNicolas RobertFleurys Scne de la
StBarthlemy (1833) on the cover I am obliged to Frances Runion
des muses nationaux and I thank Cristina Sanchez of its Agence pho-
tographique for her help in obtaining an image of this evocative
painting.
I am grateful to Bruce Anderson, Eric Anderson, Peter Balderstone,
Felicity Stout and Wendy Trim for helpful conversations about history
and memory; and to Lisa Diller, Greg Dodds, Matthew Glozier, David
Onnekink, and Randolph Vigne, for arranging or participating in con-
ference panels on Huguenot history that were very helpful in develop-
ing chapters in this volume. Finally, I take this opportunity to
acknowledge my indebtedness and gratitude to Robin Briggs, Mark
Greengrass, Alan James, David Parrott, Guy Rowlands, and Randolph
Vignefrom them, over the last 15 years, in many enlightening and
enjoyable conversations, I have learned much about the Huguenots,
early-modern France, and good scholarship. It is a pleasure to be
acknowledgments ix
David Trim
Angwin, Calif., Reading, Berks., and Washington, DC,
2009 and 2010
CONTRIBUTORS
MS(S) Manuscript(s)
OxDNB Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography. Oxford: Oxford Univer
sity Press, 2004.
PRO The National Archives (UK), at The
Public Record Office, Kew, England
repr. Reprint
SCJ Sixteenth Century Journal
SP State Papers
Utt & Strayer, Bellicose Dove Walter C. Utt and Brian E. Strayer,
The Bellicose Dove: Claude Brousson
and Protestant Resistance to Louis
XIV, 16471698, (Brighton and
Portland, Oreg.: Sussex Academic
Press, 2003)
Vigne & Littleton, Strangers Randolph Vigne and Charles
Littleton (eds.), From strangers to
citizens. The integration of immigrant
communities in Britain, Ireland
and colonial America, 15501750
(London/Brighton & PortlandOreg.:
Huguenot Society of Great Britain
and Ireland/Sussex Academic Press,
2001)
Wing Wing, Donald. Short-Title Catalogue
of Books Printed in England, Scotland,
Ireland, Wales, and British America
and of English Books Printed in Other
Countries 16411700, 2nd edn, rev.
and ed. John J. Morrison, Carolyn
W. Nelson, Matthew Seccombe, et al,
4 vols. (New York: Modern Language
Association of America, 198298)
WMQ The William and Mary Quarterly
In Appreciation of Walter C. Utt
Stanley G. Payne
The Utt lecture style involved the preparation of basic lecture notes
for each class, but these were rather informal and consisted simply of a
list of main points to be covered. Professor Utt had a natural eloquence,
precision and wit that turned these into a colorful and absorbing dis-
course for the full class period. The era of entertaining students had
scarcely begun in the 1950s, and each class seriously focused on the
main narrative and problems of history, with no time wasted.
Nonetheless, these were never highly formal classes and certainly not
dry-as-dust history. His lectures were delivered in a direct, engaging
and conversational style, full of personalities and colourful anecdotes
by way of illustration, so that in fact in the great majority of cases they
managed to be entertaining, as well.
The way history was done in those days, not merely at PUC but
almost everywhere, gave prominence to political history and public
affairs, the major framework of history. That meant little attention to
minorities or women, and even less to the kinds of trivial themes in
social and socio-cultural history that at the present time occupy so
much of the program of the annual convention of the American
Historical Association. Even in secular institutions, the idea of history
as transgressive was largely unknown. This was, in a word, basic his-
torythe major issues, events and personalities of the European and
Western past. It was in fact excellent preparation for further study
because it built a basic platform of knowledge and gave students a seri-
ous focus for their current and continuing work. I have always been
very grateful for it.
Professor Utts energy was very rarely wanting, which was surprising
in view of his physical limitations. There was perhaps one episode a
year (or possibly not even that often) that required a few days in bed,
and there might also be another occasion when his health was parlous
and he was barely able to come to class, but even on the latter days he
carried things off in his normal manner. That he was able to teach us so
effectively and continue a full work schedule year after year, despite
personal disability, was an inspiration to us all. There was never a sin-
gle semester, during my years at PUC, in which this resulted in any
significant hindrance to his teaching, and, in fact, in most semesters it
caused none at all. For me personally, his was a courageous example
from which I greatly profited, and which stimulated me to try to show
the same determination and perseverance.
As a Christian institution, PUC involved much more for the
faculty than teaching classes. Its professors have always had greater
in appreciation of walter c. utt xvii
Eric Anderson
For that matter, the things that now cause former students to remem-
ber Walter Utt, including the many hours he spent in witty conversa-
tion with them, the remarkably rich and gossipy correspondence he
carried on with dozens of graduates, and the lively discussion groups
he sponsored, might well look, to a practical-minded observer, charm-
ingly irrelevant. They had about as much to do with either historical
research or the immediate survival of the College, such an analyst
might conclude, as his stamp collection or his interest in French mili-
tary music. And yet he is now being honoured by a book of scholarly
essays.
For ten years I was Walter Utts colleague in the history department
at Pacific Union College. He was my chairman, mentor, editor, and
friend. We worked together on many occasions as team teachers.
I believe that the perspective of a teaching colleague may be useful to
understanding the accomplishments of this important, yet oddly invis-
ible man. It is possible, indeed, that some of his intellectual achieve-
ments were only fully manifest to his fellow historians.
A teaching associate, especially an inexperienced and youthful one,
sees some details more clearly than others, no doubt. My view of
Dr. Utt was quite different from that of his colleagues in other disci-
plines, or from College administrators, high and low, many of whom
saw him as a formidable, even frightening figure, capable of clever
obstruction or sarcastic candour. My point of view was simultaneously
more admiring and more familiar. I knew the academic actor back-
stage, without his makeup, and I thought I knew how he achieved his
effects.
I craved his approval and recognized that I was seen around campus
as his protg. I had some sense of what this meant, but not until later,
much later, did I realize that he was more my teacher than my patron,
that he was quietly showing me the imperfections of my scholarship,
my shortcomings as an historian. In a sense, although no advanced
degrees or seminars were involved, he was my tutor as well as my fac-
ulty peer. I did not recognize at first what he was teaching me.
If Walter Utt had accepted a position in a larger, better-known insti-
tution, a place like Berkeley, he would have had the luxury of focusing
his work on a fairly narrow academic speciality. He would not have had
to teach anything except modern French history and closely related
subjects. He would have had both more freedom and less. At a different
kind of school he would no doubt have had fewer administrative
assignments, no threat of theological controversy, and fewer (or at least
walter c. utt, my colleague xxiii
even a bit gauche. He believed that historians should write and rewrite
and he was happy to work on my drafts, rooting out vagueness, sug-
gesting transitions, or demanding further evidence. Oddly enough,
this specialist in seventeenth century France was as important to the
editing of my first book as the readers at a famous university press or
my eminent advisors at the University of Chicago.
I was Walters teaching colleague in the fullest sense on those occa-
sions, formal and informal, when we taught together. These included
not only regular courses that we team-taught, but also student reading
groups that met in our homes and voluntarily took on writers ranging
from G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis to Malcolm Muggeridge. We
were also part of the rotating group of discussion leaders in the Choir
Room, a weekly religious discussion group aimed more at faculty than
at students, noted for its lively, freewheeling conversations. In all of
these situations, I had the opportunity to watch Walter construct ques-
tions, direct discussion, and engage criticsall the while indulging in
his penchant for sardonic observation.
The interdisciplinary course we created on the history of the
Seventh-day Adventist denomination was certainly the most stimulat-
ing, even disturbing, experience of such collaboration. Working in a
time of intense controversy in the denomination, we found ourselves
(as we often said quietly) dancing along a precipice, trying to force one
group (cocksure believers) to recognize historical context, while resist-
ing another group (usually recently lapsed fundamentalists) who
wanted to reduce history to polemical debunking. Facing an audience
made up mostly of future elementary school teachers, Walter applied
to the history of his own group the same calm and sympathetic curios-
ity that informed his other historical work. Relentlessly sceptical of
claims of uniqueness or pure originality, he masterfully described what
Adventists owed to general Protestant values and history. Working
from small scraps of paper covered with cryptic notes, he brilliantly
extemporized, improvising like a jazz musician on an essay by Hugh
Trevor-Roper about the varieties of Protestant religious experience. By
the time he was finished, an alert student would be able to put Adventist
history into a broad perspective that extended well before 1844, and
included a range of millenarian, messianic, and puritan movements.
He counselled the rest of the teaching team, sometimes as many as
three or four colleagues, on framing complex, controversial issues,
always insisting on both integrity and prudence. He only became
impatient when a student refused to listen, stubbornly missing the
walter c. utt, my colleague xxv
On the deepest level, Walter Utts virtues are what made a school like
Pacific Union College successful. He was stimulated by good ques-
tions, the lure of discovery, and the power of disciplined curiosity. He
gave several generations of students and colleagues a working model of
a Christian scholar. Unmoved by fads or self-promoters, he loved
learning for its own sake, knowing that instant relevance and short-
term practicality might get in the way of wisdommight, indeed be
truly irrelevant or useless. He was prepared to sacrifice and to work
alone. He believed in the time-honoured idea of searching for truth.
All these old-fashioned virtues, in turn, made other people, including
me, believe in a small, obscure, isolated college. The students (and oth-
ers) who were truly educated by Walter Utt had to be ready to open
their minds, to submit themselves to an intellectual discipline, to defer
to a mentor.
In all this, Walter was a profound democrat, the opposite of an elit-
ist. In the one episode of genuine elitism in PUCs history (in the
1950s), he was mostly a sceptic, opposed to setting admission stand-
ards too high. Assuming a few common sense limits, Walter did not
doubt the basic American commitment to mass education. On the
contrary, he really believed in the power of education to change
people.
A teacher cannot avoid wondering from time to time: Can educa-
tion actually transform our students? Are our expectations too high,
our hopes of mastery and synthesis and autonomy simply unrealistic
for ordinary people? Are we too confident in our judgments of what is
important? Though he sometimes sounded like a pessimist, on such
questions he was a profound optimist.
On the small stage of a liberal arts college, my colleague Walter Utt
practiced all the values that informed his scholarship. He wasted noth-
ing, it seemed, in three decades of teaching. Disciplined in the demand-
ing world of an overloaded teacher, he mastered the art of synthesis
and summary. Thriving in a deeply religious environment, he learned
how to balance the competing demands of commitment and analysis.
More than anything else, the years at Pacific Union College showed
him the importance of explaining his specialized work to a wider audi-
ence. As a result, he approached the world of Claude Brousson, the
bellicose dove, with an appropriate mixture of irony, faith and realism.
Far from being a distraction or a detour, his life on Howell Mountain
was an ideal preparation for the real one.
CHAPTER ONE
D. J. B. Trim
Rather than a neologism, it was coined in the 1680s: Bernard Cottret, The
1
and Hesse; while some individuals went as far as Poland, Sweden and
Russia.3
The Huguenot diaspora was greatly influenced initially by its trans-
national nature, but as scholars increasingly recognise it was also sig-
nificantly shaped, over the longue dure, by the interplay of history and
memory.4 These three factorstransnationalism, history, and mem-
oryare the subject of this book, which illustrates how they and the
interplay between them fashioned the ethnic Huguenot identity over
several generations. They moulded the self-conceptualisation and self-
understanding of French Calvinist migrs and their descendants, and
additionally shaped how Huguenots were perceived and received by
their host communities, both during the original waves of emigration
and over subsequent decades and centuries. The transnational natureof
the Huguenot ethnie5 diminished over time, yet while Huguenots grad-
ually assimilated into host communities, some sense of Huguenot
identity was generally preserved in most countries where Huguenot
refugees settled; even when the French language was no longer used
and distinctive cultural practices had vanished, that identity was
(indeed, is) still expressed in art, literature, drama, and genealogical
and historical research.
Important reasons why a sense of Huguenot identity persisted
are the shared memory of historical events, and the fact that, relatively
quickly, to be a Huguenot did not necessarily mean being French.
3
For an overview of the approximate distribution of refugees during Louis XIVs
reign see map 1 in Robin Gwynn, Huguenot Heritage: The History and Contribution of
the Huguenots in Britain (2nd edn, Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2001), 31.
4
Examples of studies of history and memory from Huguenot perspectives include
the collection edited by Van Ruymbeke and Sparks, Memory and Identity; Christian
Jouhaud, Camisards! We Were Camisards! Remembrance and the Ruining of
Remembrance through the Production of Historical Absences, History and Memory
21 (Spring/ Summer 2009), 524; and the conference of the Association suisse pour
lhistoire du Refuge Huguenot at Ascona in Oct. 2010, Histoire, mmoire et identits
en mutation: Les huguenots en France et en diaspora (XVIeXXIe sicles) [http://
www.unige.ch/ihr/huguenots2010.html]. For some potential pitfalls in the scholarly
study of memory see Alon Confino, Collective Memory and Cultural History:
Problems of Method, AHR 102 (Dec. 1997), 13861403.
5
The very helpful term coined by Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), for an ethnic community, defined as human popula-
tions with shared ancestry myths, histories and cultures, having an association with a
specific territory and a sense of solidarity (ibid. 32, emphasis suppliedthe Huguenot
retained their identification with France long after having, as noted above, become an
essentially migr community).
4 d. j. b. trim
History I
(Historical events)
Memory I Memory I
Personal memories Collective memories
Memory II
Collective memory
History II
Historiography
Overview of Contents
7
See Gwynn, Conformity, esp. 2526, 3941; cf. Willem Frijhoff, Uncertain
Brotherhood: The Huguenots in the Dutch Republic, in Van Ruymbeke and Sparks,
Memory and Identity, 12871, esp. 13435.
the huguenots and the experience of exile7
8
For the importance of public opinion and print debate in this period, especially in
Britain, see Peter Lake and Steve Pincus, Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early
Modern England, Journal of British Studies 45 (April 2006), 270292; cf. Judith
Pollmann and Andrew Spicer (eds.), Public Opinion and Changing Identities in the
Early Modern Netherlands: Essays in Honour of Alastair Duke, Studies in Medieval and
Reformation Traditions 121 (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2007), for its importance in the
Low Countries. The role of Huguenots in the emergent public sphere is beginning
to be explored by scholars: e.g., Itamar Raban, The Newspaper The Post Man and
its Editor, Jean Lespinasse de Fonvive, in Vigne & Littleton, Strangers to Citizens,
397403; Simon Harvey and Elizabeth Grist, The Rainbow Coffee House and the
Exchange of Ideas in Early Eighteenth-century England, in Dunan-Page, Religious
Culture, 16372; Andrew Thompson, The Protestant Interest and the History of
Humanitarian Intervention, c.1685c.1756, in Brendan Simms and D. J. B. Trim (eds.),
Humanitarian interventiona history (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2011), 6788.
8 d. j. b. trim
9
Cf. e.g., Milton M. Gordon, Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race,
Religion, and National Origins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964); Alejandro
Portes, Luis E. Guarnizo and Patricia Landolt, The Study of Transnationalism: Pitfalls
and Promise of an Emergent Research Field, Ethnic and Racial Studies 22 (1999), 228.
the huguenots and the experience of exile9
Transnationalism
Portes, Guarnizo and Landolt, Transnationalism, 221; see e.g., Herbert Lthy, La
11
13
Portes, Guarnizo and Landolt, Transnationalism, 221. Huguenot examples are
the activities of artists and craftsmen, many of whom crossed national borders: cf. e.g.
chapters 1217 (by Karen Hearn, Julia Marciari Alexander, Christine Riding, Eileen
Goodway, Tessa Murdoch and Natalie Rothstein) in Vigne & Littleton, Strangers to
Citizens, 11771. Virtually all issues of HSP in recent years have carried at least one
article on such protagonists in cultural transnationalism. For a broader view of socio-
cultural international interchange, see chapter 9, by Vivienne Larminie, below (quota-
tion at p. 261).
14
There is a wealth of scholarship on this area, though rarely from the perspective
of transnationalism. There are studies of a range of 16th- and 17th-cent. theological
and ecclesiastical leaders who operated across borders: e.g., chapters 24 (by Carrie
A. Euler, Christoph Strohm, Jeannine E. Olson) in Vigne & Littleton, Strangers to
Citizens, 1747; Utt & Strayer, Bellicose Dove; Paula Wheeler Carlo, The Huguenot
Soul: The Calvinism of Reverend Louis Rou, in Dunan-Page, Religious Culture, 10919;
Jonathan Israel, Group Identity and Opinion among the Huguenot Diaspora and the
Challenge of Pierre Bayles Toleration Theory (16851706), in Pollmann and Spicer,
Public Opinion and Changing Identities, 27993; cf. chapter 9, by Larminie, below; cf.
also Anthony Milton (ed.), The British Delegation and the Synod of Dort (16181619),
Church of England Record Society, 13 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005),
Introduction, xviilv, and the apparatus criticus, passim, which illuminate the role that
ecclesiastical statesmen played in the Synod of Dort, a key episode in 17th-cent.
Calvinism. On the Camisard Prophets and their influence in England and North
America, see Hillel Schwartz, The French Prophets: the History of a Millenarian Group
in Eighteenth-century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980);
Kenneth G. C. Newport, The Prophets and Early Methodism: Some New Evidence,
Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society 50 (1996), 12740; Terrie Dopp Aamodt,
Out of thee, O England, shall a bright star arise: Mother Ann Lee and the English
Origins of the Shakers in Richard Bonney and D. J. B. Trim (eds), The Development of
Pluralism in Modern Britain and France (Oxford, Bern, Frankfurt am Main, New York,
etc: Peter Lang, 2007), 16988.
15
The issue of conformity was a particular challenge to Huguenots in Great Britain
and its colonies: this is the subject of chapter 5, by Robin Gwynn, below; cf. also
Gwynn, Conformity; Paula Wheeler Carlo, Anglican Conformity and Nonconformity
among the Huguenots of Colonial New York and Jane McKee, The Integration of the
Huguenots into the Irish Church: The Case of Peter Drelincourt, in Vigne & Littleton,
Strangers to Citizens, 31321, 44250; Andrew Spicer, A Place of refuge and sanctu-
ary of a holy Temple: Exile Communities and the Stranger Churches, in Nigel Goose
the huguenots and the experience of exile11
Memory
and Lien Luu (eds.), Immigrants in Tudor and early Stuart England (Brighton: Sussex
Academic Press, 2005), 91109; and Susanne Lachenicht, Differing Perceptions of the
Refuge? Huguenots in Ireland and Great Britain and Their Attitudes towards the
Governments Religious Policy (16601710), in Dunan-Page, Religious Culture, 4353.
16
Paul Ricur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David
Pellauer (London & Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 7, 124.
17
Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser
(London & Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 38.
18
Confino, Collective Memory and Cultural History, 1393.
19
This is brought out well by, e.g., Judith Pollmann, Brabanters Do Fairly Resemble
Spaniards After All. Memory, Propaganda and Identity in the Twelve Years Truce, in
Pollmann and Spicer, Public Opinion and Changing Identities, 218.
20
Cf. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, 39.
12 d. j. b. trim
21
Michael S. Roth, Remembering Forgetting: Maladies de la Mmoire in
Nineteenth-century France, Representations, no. 26, Special Issue: Memory and
Counter-Memory (Spring 1989), 49.
22
Pierre Nora, Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mmoire, Represen
tations, no. 26, Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory (Spring 1989), 8.
23
The classic work is Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of
Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
24
Jouhaud, Camisards, 6.
the huguenots and the experience of exile13
including the way their memories were shaped, both consciously and
subconsciously; but it is also the representation of those events and
their construction as a shared cultural knowledge by subsequent
generations.
This second form of memory, group memory, collectively produced
and retained, is an example of what scholars of memory call ethnic
memory, the sociological function of which is to reproduce certain
behaviours in societies.25 Nations and ethnies emphasise common his-
torical experiences and shared memories, capturing them and preserv-
ing them and making them serve the purpose of the group. Thus,
collective memory is not only a conquest, it is also an instrument and
objective of power.26 Arguably, indeed, without it, no sense of a distinct
ethnic identity can exist: as Anthony Smith argues, there can be no
identity without memory (albeit selective), no collective purpose with-
out myth, and identity and purpose are necessary elements of the
very concept of an ethnic community. An ethnie must have an
identity and hence myths and memories.27 Indeed, without mem-
ory, there can be no ethnicity.28 Collective memory is even more
important in a case (such as that of the Huguenots), when an ethnie
and its homeland are separated, perhaps by external power; the
association between the community and its lost homeland becomes
an essential part of the collective memory and identity of the
community.29
Thus, memory in its second sense is a primary source of the con-
stituent myths of ethnies and nationsand thus of ethnic and national
identity. It is also, however, inevitably a source for historiography (his-
tory in the second sense), which it is also likely to influence, for ulti-
mately, history, like memory, is a representation of the past.30 History
can therefore also be a source of, or vehicle for, myth and identity; yet
it can equally be a means of their dissolution. Accordingly, before we
examine the role of memory in shaping Huguenot identity, it is impor-
tant to consider the relationship of history and memory.
See Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory, trans. Steven Rendall and Elizabeth
25
Claman (New York & Oxford: Columbia University Press, 1992), 53, 55.
26
Le Goff, History and Memory, 98.
27
See Smith, Ethnic Origins of Nations, 2.
28
Smith, Ethnic Origins of Nations, 87.
29
Smith, Ethnic Origins of Nations, 29.
30
Nora, Between Memory and History, 8.
14 d. j. b. trim
31
Cf. Le Goff, History and Memory, 18.
32
Nora, Between Memory and History, 8; Eric Hobsbawm, Introduction:
Inventing Traditions, in Hobsbawm and Ranger, Invention of Tradition, 13; Cornelius
Holtorf, Monumental Past: The Life-histories of Megalithic Monuments in Mecklenburg-
Vorpommern (Germany), Electronic monograph (University of Toronto: Centre for
Instructional Technology Development, 20022008; http://hdl.handle.net/1807/245),
2.8 (History and Memory) [https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/citd/holtorf/2.8.html].
the huguenots and the experience of exile15
ants of Huguenot emigrants to Britain, the Netherlands, and the United States, I would
say that a fairly clear and reasonably consistent view of French Protestant history is
unquestionably still current; it is conserved and continued in conversation and story
telling. It reflects recent historical scholarship (of which many present-day Huguenots
are keen consumers), but it seems also to perpetuate older traditions.
35
Hobsbawm, Inventing Traditions, 7.
36
Cf. Nora, Between Memory and History, 8.
37
Hobsbawm, Inventing Traditions, 13.
16 d. j. b. trim
38
David A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleons Europe and the Birth of Modern
Warfare (London: Bloomsbury, 2008), 120.
39
Nora, Between Memory and History, 9.
40
Le Goff, History and Memory, 98.
the huguenots and the experience of exile17
See examples in Pierre Boismorand, Freddy Bossy and Denis Vatinel (eds.),
41
recalling how the city and its saints and relics had once narrowly
escaped falling into the clutches of violent Huguenot hagiomachs.
In contrast, a large number of Huguenot texts drew particular atten-
tion to the many massacres of which the Protestants were victims
and to the many battles Henri IV had to win in order to [establish]
his legitimate rights. As a result of this bi-partisan determination to
commemorate: Notwithstanding the commandment of oubliance, the
Wars of Religion continued to cast a long shadow over the subsequent
centuries.43
In exile, the Huguenots were determined to perpetuate the memory
of their persecution, emigration, and associated ordeals. Several chap-
ters in this book explore this process but it is worth highlighting two
important socio-cultural structures that facilitated the conservation
and transmission of memory of the Huguenot heritage. First was
French Protestants very active engagement with the essentially new
business of journalism. As scholars have long recognised, very often
refugees directed their first conspicuous energy to the writing of
pamphlets. However, it was not only political newspapers [which]
grew up under refugee auspices; so, too, did journals devoted to sci-
ence and letters.44 This engagement with the public sphere thus pro-
vided one important framework for the preservation and perpetuation
of memories and memory among the Huguenots; another was the
family. As Bertrand Van Ruymbeke argues: the familial nature of
Huguenot memory, wrongly perceived as a structural weakness, actu-
ally constituted its greatest strength. Families, genealogists, and ama-
teur historians preserved an embellished individual and collective
memory. Huguenot identity, in France and in the Refuge, is rooted
in the gray area where memory and history overlap.45
It is clear, then, that Huguenots undoubtedly valued memory, for
the first and second generations of migrs fought against the volun-
tary or involuntary loss, of collective memory among peoples that can,
as Le Goff observes, cause serious problems of collective identity.46
Early-modern Huguenots would not have put the matter in those
43
Benedict, Divided Memories, 4023.
44
Reginald Lane Poole, A History of the Huguenots of the Dispersion at the Recall of
the Edict of Nantes (London: Macmillan & Co., 1880), 176, 177; cf. sources cited in n.8,
above and chapter 7, by Onnekink, below.
45
Van Ruymbeke, Minority Survival, 1718.
46
Le Goff, History and Memory, 53.
the huguenots and the experience of exile19
terms, but they do seem to have been well aware of the danger of losing
their identity.
The Huguenot identity, in France, the loss of which confronted mi-
grs in le Refuge, was shaped not only by religious, but also by cultural,
economic and social factors, though these latter were themselves
shaped by the reality that the Huguenots were a religious minority.
Gallican Calvinism was not distinctive in terms of its doctrines, its
ecclesiology, or its attitudes towards discipline and the intersection of
church and society. Yet even in global Calvinist terms there were cer-
tain traits that were more marked in France than elsewhere, while its
Reformed attributes made it distinctive in French termsand also to
some extent in English terms. In England, there were Calvinist com-
munities (of the godly as they dubbed themselves, or Puritans as oth-
ers called them) but English Calvinists were, like Huguenots, a
minority. Thus, the Calvinist nature of Huguenot culture laid the seeds
both for a warm welcome and for a degree of scepticism, if not hostil-
ity, when French Protestants took refuge in foreign countries.
Huguenots were marked by their distinctive Reformed church
organizationeach congregation was governed by a consistory of
the pastor and elders, whose agents were the deacons; and each church
was represented at a colloquy or synod that met periodically to discuss
matters of mutual concern. The first Huguenot migrs to England
took this organisation with them (even forming what was, in effect, a
colloquy with the Italian and Dutch Churches of London, which also
were organised on Reformed lines).47 Whether this Calvinist ecclesiol-
ogy had to be preserved became a key issue facing Huguenots in
England, one explored by Robin Gwynn in chapter 5. One of the
consistorys main purposes was to maintain the spiritual discipline
that was integral to Reformed Protestantism: moral lapses would be
judged by the elders, who imposed appropriate punishmentsranging
from public penance, fines or suspension from communion, to theulti
mate sanction of expulsion. This collective communal self-discipline
was alien to other Protestants, much less Catholics. The consistory
was, however, an instrument of support as well as of constraint. It coor-
dinated poor relief, so that indigent Calvinists could count on institu-
tionalised assistance, rather than relying on personal inclination to
47
See O. Boersma and A. J. Jelsma (eds.), Unity in Multiformity: The Minutes of the
Coetus of London, 1575, and the Consistory Minutes of the Italian Church of London,
15701591, HSQS, LIX (1997).
20 d. j. b. trim
48
Philip Benedict, Rouen during the Wars of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1981), 105; see Guido Marnef, The Changing Face of Calvinism in
Antwerp, 15501585, in Andrew Pettegree, Alastair Duke and Gillian Lewis (eds.),
Calvinism in Europe 15401620 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994),
15556; cf. Nicholas Tyacke, Popular Puritan Mentality in Late Elizabethan England,
in Peter Clark, Alan G. R. Smith and Tyacke (eds.), The English Commonwealth
15471640 (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1979), 92.
49
Benedict, Rouen during the Wars of Religion, 1056, 25758, 25660.
the huguenots and the experience of exile21
Chapters 9, 10.
51
52
Borrowing the terminology of John Morrill, Englands Wars of Religion, in his
The Nature of the English Revolution (London & New York: Longman, 1993), 3344.
53
Chapters 3, 5.
22 d. j. b. trim
54
Cottret, Huguenots in England, 7.
55
Cottret, Huguenots in England, 78.
56
Chapters 9 and 10. Vigne gives examples of outright hostile language in the wills,
but in addition he and Larminie both cite evidence of testators regarding France as a
country best abandoned.
the huguenots and the experience of exile23
This was in contrast to the general hostility of wider society; hence the
Bourbon monarchy came to be seen as the source and preserver of
Protestant liberties. Whenever they [Huguenots] invoked the Edict of
Nantes, and appealed to the special royal tribunals the crown had
established to deal with confessional grievances, Protestants were sub-
mitting to the authority of the state and especially of the monarchy, on
which enforcement of the law and their legal privileges depended.57
In consequence, the Huguenots actually came to be defenders of
divine-right monarchy and criticised their own noble leaders who
led armed resistance to royal power in the early seventeenth century.58
In 1663, in a sermon that was published, one Calvinist pastor, Pierre
du Bosc, even called Louis XIV our sole source of strength, our safe-
guard, our fortress, and our place of refuge.59 Throughout much of the
seventeenth century, the Huguenots assertion of collective identity
[was] entangled with the issue of their obedience to the French crown.
Or as lisabeth Labrousse puts it, the Huguenots had become wholly
enveloped by, and dependent upon, his Majestys pleasure.60
The problem this created was two-fold. First, when the king changed
his mind about toleration, as Louis XIV gradually did, French
Protestants had cut from under their own feet many of the grounds on
which to criticise his decision. Huguenots [had] vied with Catholics to
exalt [the French monarchys] royal rightsrights which paradoxi-
cally served as one of the ideological justifications of the Revocation!61
Second, the Huguenots found it very difficult to express resentment of,
or urge resistance to, the very regime that was stealing their children,
destroying their churches, sending them as slaves to the galleys or
breaking them on the wheel. In practice, Huguenots resisted very val-
iantly and stoutly, witnessed not least by the large-scale emigration of
the 1670s and 1680s. Ideologically, however, as Labrousse observes,
57
Dianne C. Margolf, Identity, Law, and the Huguenots of Early Modern France, in
Van Ruymbeke and Sparks, Memory and Identity, 40.
58
lisabeth Labrousse, The Wars of Religion in Seventeenth-century Huguenot
Thought, in Alfred Soman (ed.), The Massacre of St. Bartholomew: Reappraisals and
Documents, International Archives of the History of Ideas, 75 (The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1974), 246; Theodore K. Rabb, St. Bartholomew and Historical Perspective, in
ibid., 253.
59
Du Bosc, Les estoiles du ciel de lEglise (Rouen: 1663), 64, quoted in Labrousse,
Wars of Religion in Seventeenth-century Huguenot Thought, 249.
60
Margolf, Identity, Law, and the Huguenots, 40; Labrousse, Wars of Religion in
Seventeenth-century Huguenot Thought, 249.
61
Labrousse, Wars of Religion in Seventeenth-century Huguenot Thought, 245.
24 d. j. b. trim
they were in total confusion.62 Only gradually did this change. Even
then, while some French Calvinists were willing to attack the Bourbon
monarchy and the French government, others found it hard to stop
being loyal subjects. As Walter Utt has shown, even the celebrated
Claude Brousson, eventually executed as a traitor for encouraging the
church of the desert to resist Louis XIVs regime by force, had initially
spilled much ink writing treatises intended to persuade the king to
change his minda fantastic notion, indicative of a theological leader-
ship out of touch with reality. But Brousson learned from experience,
and he, together with Pierre Bayle, Pierre Jurieu and others, helped
lead a change in Huguenot thought, decrying instead of defending
absolutist monarchy, and arguing for genuine religious toleration.63
As a result, in the seventeenth century, certain aspects of the
Huguenot heritage became no-go areas, avoided in public statements
and problematic for private and family remembrance. This was deeply
ironic, because, From the very beginning, religious beliers were
entwined with the militancy of the movement [which] was, of
course, translated into political violence over the course of the civil
wars. This was an important part of Huguenot memory and their
records of their own history, as well as of their polemic, especially in
the wake of the St Bartholomews Day massacre. In its wake, some
Protestants had been prepared to think the unthinkable and to develop
political theories that, although unpalatable for many justified tyran-
nicide (and hence, potentially, the assassination of a king). And yet,
Protestants remained fundamentally loyal to the crown and the estab-
lished order.64 Before the tide of oppression inexorably turned against
62
Labrousse, Wars of Religion in Seventeenth-century Huguenot Thought, 251.
63
Ibid. See Utt & Strayer, Bellicose Dove; Israel, Group Identity and Pierre Bayles
Toleration Theory; John Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment
Culture: Religious Intolerance and Arguments for Religious Toleration in Early Modern
and Early Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006),
2021, 3234, 15354, 158, 16168, 17993, 41839, 474; F. R. J. Knetsch, Pierre
Jurieu: Theologian and Politician of the Dispersion Acta Historiae Neerlandica 5
(1971), 213242; idem, Pierre Jurieu and the Glorious Revolution according to his
Lettres Pastorales, in J. van den Berg and P. G. Hoftijzer (eds.), Church, Change and
Revolution: Transactions of the Fourth Anglo-Dutch Church History Colloquium,
Publications of the Sir Thomas Browne Institute, new series, 12 (Leiden: E. J. Brill/
Leiden University Press, 1991), 14566; chapter 7, by Onnekink, below; and, for a
memorable fictionalised depiction, Walter C. Utt. Home to Our Valleys! (Mountain
View, CA & Oshawa, ON: Pacific Press, 1977).
64
Raymond A. Mentzer and Andrew Spicer, Introduction: tre protestant, in idem
(eds.), Society and Culture in the Huguenot World 15591685 (Cambridge: Cambridge
the huguenots and the experience of exile25
them under Louis XIV, Huguenots were often reluctant to refer, at least
in print, to their own history during the wars of religion, because the
past actions of the Huguenots were said to reveal them to be sub-
jects dangerous to the monarchy and potential traitors to the coun-
try.65 When they did address their history they might, as noted above,
even criticise those who had led them in resistance to the crown.
This tension between confessional loyalty continued even after the
Revocation, since many pastors were accustomed to asserting absolute
royal authority and were, as Labrousse puts it, in total confusion; they,
like Brousson, continued to try to persuade the king to change his
mind. Yet as we shall see, other Huguenots became fervent advocates
of taking up arms against their king, believing that revolt or military
aid to Louiss enemies might force an eclipse of the Sun Kings religious
policy; and this meant that the whole of Huguenot history, including
the wars of religion and their heritage of armed resistance to unjust
government, and of radical political arguments that kings had to rule
with the counsel or consent of the governed, could at last be recovered.
Just as the religio-confessional climate underwent a radical change, so
too did the way French Protestants thought, spoke and wrote about
their past.
University Press, 2002), 67; cf. Robert M. Kingdon, Myths about the St. Bartholomews
Day Massacres 15721576 (Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press,
1988), 13682, 21819.
65
Labrousse, Wars of Religion in Seventeenth-century Huguenot Thought, 245.
26 d. j. b. trim
66
Susanne Lachenicht, New Colonies in Ireland? Antoine Court and the Settlement
of French Refugees in the 18th Century, HSP 29:2 (2009), 231.
67
Lachenicht, New Colonies, 23132.
68
Cf. chapters 25 and 79, by Leonard, Dodds, Diller, Gwynn, Onnekink,
Thompson and Larminie, below.
the huguenots and the experience of exile27
arms and in the councils of rival states. In doing so they at last reclaimed
for French Protestant memory the history of the wars of religion, of the
vigorous Huguenot resistance that had once forced the crown to con-
cede confessional pluralism, and of the Huguenot alliances with sym-
pathetic states that had been a large part of Calvinist military success
in the sixteenth century. There was in fact no realistic prospect, by the
1680s, of a successful revolt against Louis XIVs military infrastruc-
ture.69 But with the Sun King engaged for almost a quarter of a century
from 1689 in two pan-European conflicts, there was a warm welcome
for Huguenot military, financial and logistical expertise across Europe.
Hopes that the Protestant powers might make concession of liberty of
conscience in France a condition of peace with France, or a strong
sense of anger at what was perceived as betrayal by the House of
Bourbon, turned many migr French Protestants into keen partisans
of Frances enemies. Thousands of Huguenots served in their armies,
including in invasions of French territory; others provided money,
matriel, propaganda, and policy advice to the allied war effort.70
Huguenot hopes that Protestant Europe, led by Anglican England
would force Louis XIV to restore French Protestant rights as guaran-
teed by the Edict of Nantes were long lived. Even after they were dis-
appointed in the Peace of Rijswijk, which ended the Nine Years War
(or War of the Grand Alliance) in 1697, such hopes persisted among
some Huguenots.71 They faded entirely only after the Peace of Utrecht
in 1713 which ended English and Dutch involvement in the War of the
Spanish Succession, and which obtained only one minor concession
for the Huguenots: the release of 136 men condemned to servitude in
69
On Louis XIVs army, see Guy Rowlands, The Dynastic State and the Army under
Louis XIV: Royal Service and Private Interest, 1661 to 1701 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002); John A. Lynn, Giant of the grand sicle: The French Army,
16101715 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
70
See Gwynn, The Huguenots, the Protestant International and the Defeat of
Louis XIV; Matthew Glozier and David Onnekink (eds), War, Religion and Service:
Huguenot Soldiering, 16851713 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), chapters 2, 4, 68, 11
(by John Childs, Randolph Vigne, Harman Murtagh, Glozier, Onnekink, Dianne
W. Ressinger and Matthias Asche); Matthew Glozier, Schomberg, Miremont and
Huguenot Invasions of France, in David Onnekink (ed.), War and Religion after
Westphalia, 16481713 (Farnham & Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 12153; Laurence
Huey Boles, Jr, The Huguenots, the Protestant Interest, and the War of the Spanish
Succession, 17021714, American University Studies, series IX (History), 181 (New
York, Bern, Frankfurt am Main, Washington, DC, etc: Peter Lang, 1997)and chapters
4, 68, by Diller, Trim, Onnekink and Thompson, below.
71
Lachenicht, New Colonies, 227.
28 d. j. b. trim
72
Boles, The Huguenots and the War of the Spanish Succession, 249.
the huguenots and the experience of exile29
73
Quotation from chapter 11, by Paul McGraw, below, p. 304 (though as he points
out, there were isolated, less assimilated, pockets). So completely were the Huguenots
assimilated that, e.g., in southern Africa, all French traces were entirely lost, both in
the language (Afrikaans) and in the culture, except for some surnames: I am indebted
to the Afrikaaner literary scholar, David Schalkwyk, for this observation.
74
Cf. Cottret, Huguenots in England, 240.
30 d. j. b. trim
Calvinism and French language, while espousing the religious and cul-
tural traits prevailing in the host societies it encountered.75 Bernard
Cottret in his history of the Huguenots in England concludes
similarly:
The communities survived only in so far as they adapted, but, at the same
time, the more they complied the more they appeared to lose their
idiosyncratic character. Therefore, they were in a perpetual state of insta-
bility, and, with the renewal of each generation, or as a result of geo-
graphical mobility, they were confronted with the danger of losing their
identity.76
However, also paradoxically, it was the very loss of a genuine Huguenot
ethnic identity that led to a resurgence of Huguenot memory and the
creation of Huguenot historiography.
75
Van Ruymbeke, Minority Survival, 17.
76
Cottret, Huguenots in England, 267 and see 26466.
77
Cottret, Huguenots in England, 267.
the huguenots and the experience of exile31
79
See chapter 11, by McGraw, below.
80
Herman Paul and Bart Wallet, A Sun that Lost its Shine: The Reformation in
Dutch Protestant Memory Culture, 18171917, Church History and Religious Culture
88 (2008), 3562.
81
Van Ruymbeke, Minority Survival, 2.
82
Kingdon, Myths about the St Bartholomews Massacres, 217.
83
Jouhaud, Camisards, 11; H. G. Koenigsberger, Introduction, in Soman, Massacre
of St. Bartholomew, 1. Cf. Van Ruymbeke, Minority Survival, 16; Donald R. Kelley,
Martyrs, Myth, and the Massacre: The Background of St. Bartholomew, in Soman,
Massacre of St. Bartholomew, 202; Eric Hobsbawm, MassProducing Traditions:
the huguenots and the experience of exile33
88
I am indebted to Randolph Vigne for his advice on the Huguenots in 19th-cent.
British culture.
89
E.g., Franois Crouzet, The Second Hundred Years War: Some Reflections,
French History 10 (1996), 43250.
90
David Coward, Introduction to the Oxford World Classics edn of Alexandre
Dumas, La Reine Margot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), vii.
the huguenots and the experience of exile35
Prince de Conti, 24 aot 1572, now in the Louvre (which can be found
on the cover).
It is notable that RobertFleury did not paint the murder of Gaspard
de Coligny, with which the massacre began and which was the subject
of many contemporary and later woodcuts, prints and other depic-
tions; the artist thus theoretically adds to the iconography of the mas-
sacre and shows his originality. But choosing Briou, tutor of the young
Prince of Conti, who was of advanced years, allows RobertFleury in
effect to paint Colignys killing by another name. Thus, the painting
shows the murder of an essentially defenceless, elderly Calvinist man
(his religion signalled by his sombre black dress), cut down in the inti-
macy of his bedchamber by numbers of well-armed assailants who are
in the prime of life. Using Briou as a surrogate for Coligny means
RobertFleury could work on a familiar theme but it also allows him
to add to his scene the pathetic figure of the young prince of Conti
who, as some sources recount, attempted to save his old tutor with
his own body.91 This greatly adds to both the pathos and the violence
of the scene, since Conti has to be forcibly held back by one of the
attackers, who wears a prominent white cross on his helmet, remind-
ing the viewer of the religious motivation of the killing, as does the
somewhat sinister figure of a monk, directly behind the boy. Meanwhile,
a well-dressed man looks on approvingly, wearing above his left elbow
the white armband that was the identifying mark adopted by those
who initiated the massacre. This figure is surely a surrogate for the
Duke of Guise, who, according to some sources, was an onlooker as
Coligny was butchered.
All these details suggest that the artist assumed in his audience some
knowledge of the actual events of the historical massacre. The painting
thus indicates the prominence of St Bartholomews in collective mem-
ory. It is additionally interesting from an artistic perspective: on the
one hand, it is a graphic and beautiful depiction of an appalling mur-
der, yet on the other it also feels highly staged and artificial. It is a
(surely deliberate) triumph of striking staging and depiction over
dynamism, and of romanticism over realism. This, too, tells us some-
thing about the place of the Huguenots in collective memory.
91
This was a reasonably well-known episode when RobertFleury was painting:
e.g., it is highlighted in Massacre of St. Bartholomew, a lengthy narrative serialized in
the New York periodical The Correspondent, vol. 5 (Jan.July 1829), 125.
36 d. j. b. trim
92
Matthias Brzoska, trans. Christopher Smith, Meyerbeer: Robert le Diable
and Les Huguenots in David Charlton (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Grand
Opera (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 199207, esp. 2067.
93
Coward, Introduction, xxii.
94
Moshe Sluhovsky, History as Voyeurism: from Marguerite de Valois to La Reine
Margot, Rethinking History 4 (July 2000), 193; cf. Coward, Introduction, xv, xxiixxiii;
David H. Solkin, Philibert Rouvire: Edouard Manets LActeur Tragique, The
the huguenots and the experience of exile37
Burlington Magazine, 117, no. 872, Special Issue: Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century
Art (Nov. 1975), 702.
95
Alan Bowness, Art and Society in England and France in the Mid-Nineteenth
Century: Two Paintings before the Public, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society,
5th series, 22 (1972), 129.
38 d. j. b. trim
96
See Godfey Davies, G. A. Henty and History, Huntington Library Quarterly 18
(195455), 15967; The Henty Society [website at http://www.hentysociety.org/]; Peter
Newbolt, Henty, George Alfred (18321902), Oxford DNB, online edn, May 2006
[http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/33827, accessed 8 July 2009].
97
E.g., the Preface and Note at the start of By Englands aid (both unpaginated)
commend to readers the work of two pioneering historians, John Lothrop Motley and
Sir Clements Markham, on which Henty declares he depended.
the huguenots and the experience of exile39
98
According to the Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._A._Henty#
Biography [accessed 9 Aug. 2009].
99
Completed posthumously: Utt & Strayer, Bellicose Dove.
100
Walter C. Utt, The Wrath of the King (Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press, 1966);
Home to Our Valleys! (Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press, 1977); Walter C. Utt and
Helen G. Pyke, No Peace for a Soldier (Nampa, ID: Pacific Press, 2007); Utt and Pyke,
Any Sacrifice but Conscience (Nampa, ID: Pacific Press, 2008).
101
G. A. Henty, With Lee in Virginia (Chicago: M. A. Donohue & Co., n.d.).
40 d. j. b. trim
romantic heroes struggling against great odds, but they also stand for
religious faithfulness.102
There is, finally, also clearly a market for at least some cinematic
dramas about Huguenots aimed at adults. The 1994 motion picture La
reine Margot, an adaptation of Dumass novel, directed by Patrice
Cherau, and starring Isabelle Adjani, JeanHugues Anglade, Daniel
Auteuil and Vincent Perez, was critically acclaimed and enjoyed inter-
national commercial success. It has numerous scenes of graphic sex
and (less gratuitously, given the subject matter of the St Bartholomews
massacre) of mob, individual and state violenceand thus is definitely
not for children and adolescents. It adapts Dumass text, itself a free
adaptation of history, rather than being directly based on the events of
157274, yet the director declared that he and his team had under-
taken research to get historical details right. The success of La reine
Margot testified that the Huguenots and their history are still capable
of capturing the public imagination and conjuring up myth and collec-
tive memory.103
Conclusion
102
A. Van Der Jagt, The Escape: The Adventures of Three Huguenot Children Fleeing
Persecution (Based on Historical Facts) (Neerlandia, AB & Pella, IA: Inheritance, 1993;
repr., 1997); idem, The Secret Mission: A Huguenots Dangerous Adventures in the Land
of Persecution (Neerlandia, AB & Pella, IA: Inheritance Publications, 1998); Katherine
Kirkpatrick, Escape across the Wide Sea (New York: Holiday House, 2004); Sabine
Malplach and Deborah Alcock, The Baron of Salgas: A True Huguenot Story by Sabine
Malplach; and: The Cross and the Crown & The Carpenter of Nmes: Two Huguenot
Stories by Deborah Alcock (Neerlandia, AB & Pella, IA: Inheritance, 2010).
103
Julianne Pidduck, La reine Margot (Champaign: University of Illinois Press,
2005) is a critical study from the disciplinary perspective of Film Studies.
the huguenots and the experience of exile41
formed the catalyst for some of the first debates about national identity
and immigration, and about the extent to which common values and
religion could substitute for common language and culture; their expe-
rience provides important evidence for modern debates about how
much immigrants can or should preserve their own institutions and
identity, and the extent to which, even in assimilation, they mould
those around them.
The Huguenots and their experience in transnational context also
provides important evidence for the influence of memory on history,
because of the extent to which memories of their turbulent past
influenced both Huguenot migrs and those around them. Frequently,
knowledge of the Huguenots history (or a version of their history con-
structed both among migrs and in their host communities) ensured
a welcome in foreign Protestant communities; yet at the same time,
especially in England, it meant they were associated with rebellious-
ness, resistance to authority, and other forms of controversy, which led
emigrants and their descendants to change their collective representa-
tion of their own past.
Furthermore, while the discourse of remembrance could produce a
powerful sense of the past in the present, it also, at the same time, could
sometimes obscure the very events on which it was based. History and
memory intersect, and there is interchange between them, because
real, adapted, and purported memories and representations of histori-
cal events were shaped by contemporary polemic and propaganda, and
by near-contemporary chronicling of those events, yet at the same time
they were shaping attitudes to those events and thus the writing of his-
tory and polemic. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century narratives of the
Huguenots, whether historical or fictional, have been shaped by long-
standing memories (or myths), as well as by new, path-breaking schol-
arship. Memory thus continues to influence history.
***
In the 27 July 1998 issue of the popular American magazine, Sports
Illustrated, columnist Frank Deford lamented, I am from a forgot-
tentribe. Not lost, you understand. Thats romantic: lost. My tribe is
simply forgotten. I am a Huguenot. A French Huguenot. Who remem-
bers us?104
http://www.ctlibrary.com/ch/2001/issue71/14.45.html
104
42 d. j. b. trim
H. H. Leonard
* An earlier version of this paper was given as the fourth Utt Lecture, at Pacific
Union College, in 2002. I am grateful to David Trim for his comments and
suggestions.
1
Philip Benedict, The St Bartholomew Massacres in the Provinces, HJ 21 (1978),
207; Barbara B. Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-
Century Paris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), for Paris. It seems clear that
from the very first years after the massacres Protestants on the whole exaggerated the
numbers, while after a time Catholics minimised them, so that by the nineteenth cen-
tury Protestants were claiming 90,000 dead while some Catholic writers were talking
of a few hundred! Even today we cannot be sure of the numbers: Denis Crouzet, La
nuit de la SaintBarthlemy: un rve perdu de la Renaissance (Paris: Fayard, 1994),
gives 8,000, J. H. M. Salmon, Society in Crisis: France in the Sixteenth Century (London:
Methuen, 1975), 187 suggests as many as 13,000. I stick with the most conservative
figure for the present.
44 h. h. leonard
that it was one of the distinguishing features of this large and exciting
city which one Catholic observer enthusiastically and significantly
compared to Jerusalem.4
In the hot and sultry August of 1572 Paris was even more crowded
than usual. Hundreds of extra bodies the nobility of France with
their households, retainers and servants had descended on the capital
for a royal wedding. Including a large number of Huguenot nobility.
Paris had never seen so many rich and highborn Protestants. They
were there for the wedding of one of their political leaders, the young
Henry of Navarre, to the princess Margaret, sister of king Charles IX.
The marriage of a catholic to a protestant was itself a rare event.
The marriage of a protestant leader to the kings catholic sister was
unheard of. It required a papal dispensation. The pope declined. The
marriage went ahead without a papal blessing. For most Parisians it
was an unwelcome marriage.
Unwelcome is too weak a word. Popular preachers, their churches
filled to bursting point, thundered from their pulpits against it.5
It could only bring divine judgment upon the capital city and the state.
For this was an era when people really did believe that God was active
in the natural and political world and that famines, floods, epidemic
diseases, monstrous births, comets, and even defeats in war were all
signs of Gods displeasure.6 Albrecht Drers masterly and haunting
image of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse bringing with them
Gods judgments of famine, disease and death were printed and imi-
tated many times during the century. Preaching in Paris reflected this.
At least since 1557 when France suffered a disastrous defeat at the
hands of the Spanish at St Quentin the preachers had blamed whatever
troubles befell the city onto the presence of heresy. Such troubles, they
4
Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross, 38. It is notable that Huguenots also used Jerusalem
in reference to Paris, but in rather different ways. French Protestants regarded Paris as
a potential Jerusalem, if it could be cleansed of apostate religion: Crouzet, La nuit de
Saint-Barthlemy, 87, 121; and they called one of their unofficial house churches in
Paris Jerusalem, rather than the city as a whole: Nancy Lyman Roelker, One King, One
Faith: The Parlement of Paris and the Religious Reformations of the Sixteenth Century
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 270.
5
Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross, 45158 is the best account of the role of the Paris
preachers throughout the period leading up to 1572.
6
Andrew Cunningham and Ole Peter Grell, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse:
Religion, War, Famine and Death in Reformation Europe, (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000). They also observe that people saw God working through the
stars our word disaster literally means a negative star.
the huguenots and the st bartholomews47
7
Denis Crouzet, Les guerriers de dieu: la violence au temps des troubles de religion,
vers 1525-vers 1610, (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1990), I, 10362, 17273, 38687, II,
407, 627.
8
On Vigor see Barbara Diefendorf, Simon Vigor: A Radical Preacher in Sixteenth-
Century Paris, SCJ 18 (1987), 399410.
9
Philip Benedict, Rouen during the French Wars of Religion, (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press 1980), 125150, gives a full account of happenings in Rouen; he deals
more briefly with some of the other cities in Saint Bartholomews Massacres in the
Provinces; Penny Roberts, Calvinists in Troyes, 15621572, in Andrew Pettegree
et al. (eds), Calvinism in Europe 15401620 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994), 100118 deals more fully with the problems facing the Huguenots in Troyes.
48 h. h. leonard
10
On this, Dieffendorf, Beneath the Cross, 29.
11
Mack P. Holt, The French Wars of Religion, 15621629 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994), 1920, argues that the Mass was principally a social act, that it
underscored the bond between the communicants themselves more than between
themselves and God. While there certainly was an important social dimension to the
Mass, or for that matter to the protestant Communion, one can elevate the social di-
mension higher than is warranted. An attack on the Mass was undoubtedly a dagger
stuck in the heart of the body social (20) but it was also blasphemy and a dagger stuck
into the heart of Christ. The two are not mutually exclusive.
the huguenots and the st bartholomews49
12
Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross, 40; cf. Moshe Sluhovsky, Patroness of Paris: Rituals
of Devotion in Early Modern France, Cultures, Beliefs and Traditions, 3 (Leiden: Brill,
1998).
50 h. h. leonard
13
Arlette Jouanna, La France du XVIe sicle 14831598, 2nd edn (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1997), 45254.
14
Guerriers de Dieu, I, 263: lanimalisation du rforme. The fact that the Apocalypse
deals so much in the imagery of beasts may also have helped.
15
Crouzet, Guerriers de Dieu, I, 25462, 265; Luc Racaut, Persecution or Pluralism?
Propaganda and Opinion-Forming during the French Wars of Religion, in Richard
Bonney and D. J. B. Trim (eds.), Persecution and Pluralism: Calvinists and Religious
Minorities in Early Modern Europe 15001700 (Oxford, New York & Bern: Peter Lang,
2006), 6587.
the huguenots and the st bartholomews51
16
Bruce Lincoln, Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of
Myth, Ritual, and Classification (New York: Oxford University Press, pb edn,
1992), 100.
17
Cunningham and Grell, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, 267.
18
They too were disobedient and by metaphorical definition infectious. The dump-
ing of the bodies in the Seine has been regarded as an ironic form of baptism but
I think it just as likely that it was seen as a means of cleansing the city of refuse. This
was, after all where most of the sewage ended up (Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross, 14),
and it is consistent with the throwing of executed heretic bodies on rotting heaps of
criminals and garbage.
19
Crouzet, La Nuit de la Saint-Barthlemy, 195.
20
Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross, 45.
52 h. h. leonard
Their model was the Old Testament king.21 The French monarchy was
(and had been since the late tenth century) a sacral monarchy, in which
the sovereign, mystically imbued with Gods presence and deputed
with some divine powers, effectively combined in his own person the
offices of king, quasi-priest and judge. To be a heretic was not only to
be a spiritual degenerate it was also to be a traitor. The traditional
French adage, One king, one faith, one law (un roi, une foi, une loi)
was much more than an aphorism; it described how contemporaries
believed the French polity wasand ought to be.22
This theoretical attitude was, moreover, expressed in juridical prac-
tice during the first six decades of the sixteenth century, resulting in
the execution of several hundred heretics.23 But when the young
Charles IX came to the throne in 1560, with his mother, Catherine de
Medici acting as regent, royal policy on heresy became at best incon-
sistent. There was a disjuncture between what ought to have been and
what was. Parisians saw Charles as simply too lenient. By 1572 he had
fought three wars against the Huguenots. Each time the war had ended
with the king making unthinkable concessions. Paris wanted a king
that would fight on, not make peace. A flood of pamphlets poured
from Pariss presses from the time of Charles IXs accession urging him
to be a modern David or Solomon, or even more significant, the new
Josiah. This built up an almost messianic expectation that the king,
learning the lessons of biblical and secular history, would play his role
as the divine agent to rid the state of heresy and avert the justice of
God.24 In these circumstances, royal policy was a let-down. Peace
seemed to reverse the policy on heresy that the wars pursued.
Of course, Parisians simplified both the problem and the kings
21
Crouzet, La Nuit de la Saint-Barthlemy, 191205.
22
Holt, French Wars of Religion, 929, is particularly persuasive here; cf. Roelker,
One King, One Faith, 163, 314; Mark Greengrass, France, in Bob Scribner, Roy Porter
and Mikuls Teich (eds.), The Reformation in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994), 49, 5657; Crouzet, La Nuit de la Saint-Barthlemy, passim;
Richard Bonney, The Obstacles to Pluralism in Early Modern France, in Keith
Cameron, Mark Greengrass and Penny Roberts (eds.), The Adventure of Religious
Pluralism in Early Modern France (Oxford, Bern, New York, etc: Peter Lang, 2000),
20929.
23
William Monter, Heresy Executions in Reformation Europe, 15201565, in Ole
Peter Grell and Bob Scribner (eds.), Tolerance and intolerance in the European
Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 49, table 4.1.
24
Crouzet, La Nuit de la Saint-Barthlemy, 191205.
the huguenots and the st bartholomews53
position, but it was the way they perceived it. As far as they were con-
cerned, when it came to the extirpation of heresy the king was not
entirely on board.
Two incidents in Paris illustrate this. The first concerns the Gastines
family. In 1569, during the third civil war, Philippe and Richard de
Gastines were caught celebrating holy communion according to the
reformed rite in their house. They were executed.25 Then their house
was torn down and in its place a pyramid with a large cross was erected.
There is a great deal to ponder here. Heresy had to be expunged
hence the executions. But the site of the false and blasphemous mass
had to be removed also. And then heresy had to be atoned for: hence
the cross upon the site. This was not triumphalism. It was the way in
which the community was cleansed and made right with God. It is not
difficult to imagine, then, the fury of the Paris mob when they learned
that one of the terms of the treaty of St Germain in 1570 was that the
cross of the Gastines was to be removed because it offended Protestants!
Passions ran high in the capital and the city authorities ignored the
royal order to remove the cross for over a year while the priests fulmi-
nated from their pulpits. Only when a second royal order was given
and then after several failures due to resistance - and only under guard,
in secrecy and at dead of nightwas the cross removed and re-erected
in the Cemetery of the Innocents. The fury died down eventually but
the event was not forgotten. It is significant that among the first victims
of the massacre of St Bartholomews Day were the friends and relatives
of the Gastines.
The second incident concerns the man who was probably the most
hated in Paris: Gaspard de Coligny, leader of the Huguenot military
forces. He was a traitor twice over. He was a traitor simply because he
was a protestant. He was even more of a traitor because he had fought
in three civil wars against the crown. And during the third, a royal
inquiry found him guilty of conspiring in the assassination of the Duke
of Guisethat same duke so beloved of Parisians because of his firm
stand against heresy. The inquiry, held as it was during the war, was
probably a propaganda move to blacken the name of the leading prot-
estant nobleman and general. Since he was not around to be executed
he was hung in effigy. The effigy was then mutilated and left to rot as
25
Diefendorrf, Beneath the Cross, 83, suggests that the fury of the mob overcame
the judicial options of fine or banishment.
54 h. h. leonard
would have happened had he been there. But in 1570 peace was made
and Coligny was re-instated. A further commission of inquiry declared
him innocent of the conspiracy and he was welcomed back to the royal
court. Although he only spent five weeks there between 1570 and 1572
he was re-admitted to the kings council and was rumoured to be gain-
ing influence over the king.26 Paris was predictably incensed and
once again, when the massacres began, Colignys body suffered all the
indignities that had been heaped upon it in effigy three years before.
In 1572, then, Paris was alienated from its monarch and from its city
government that sought to implement royal edicts. It deplored the
ending of each of the civil wars without an outright victory over heresy.
It deplored the concessions of toleration, however limited, that were
made to the Huguenots. It refused to pay the tax bill of 1570, which
was to be used in part to pay off the protestant armies that had to
be disbanded. It was maddened by the Gastines affair and the re-
instatement of Coligny. It hated the arrogance of the Huguenot n obility
who came in their droves to a marriage they deplored. And it listened
to its preachers when they said God sometimes raised up the common
people to do for Him what kings failed to do. Paris was on edge.
But that does not necessarily mean that a massacre was inevitable.
Paris had been overcrowded, resentful, listening to its preachers, wor-
ried about their kings attitude to heretics for twelve years without a
full-scale massacre taking place, although for both religious and eco-
nomic reasons it was at times nearly ungovernable.27 The elements for
a massacre were there.
The catalyst that turned elements into awful reality was a bungled
assassination attempt on Gaspard de Coligny. A few days after the con-
troversial marriage Coligny was wounded, but not killed, by an assas-
sins bullet as he walked back to his lodgings from an audience with the
King. Who was responsible is impossible to determine.28 What is cer-
tain is that the Huguenot nobility in Paris became increasingly strident
in their demands for justice. In the face of increasing pressure for
action, Catherine de Medici and Charles IX panicked. Perhaps they
26
N. M. Sutherland, The Massacre of St Bartholomew and the European Conflict,
15691572 (London: Macmillan, 1973), is not alone in this view.
27
Barbara Diefendorf, Prologue to a Massacre: Popular Unrest in Paris, 1557
1572, AHR 90 (1985), 108283, observes that several years of bad weather led to food
shortages and high prices, which added to unrest in the decade leading up to 1572.
28
It seems very likely that the Spanish were involved: see Salmon, Society in Crisis,
186; Sutherland, Massacre of St Bartholomew, 42, 107.
the huguenots and the st bartholomews55
really did believe that the Huguenots had determined to kill the king
and his major advisers in revenge. Certainly the accounts we have of
the night meeting of 2324 August exude a sense of panic as well as of
determined and off-the-cuff planning. They agreed on a pre-emptive
strike. Coligny and the major Huguenot noblemen and their retainers
would be killed before they could cause any trouble. This is probably
all that was intendedbad enough and a massacre of sorts but hardly
the massacre that ensued. Two things turned this panicky and cynical
pre-emptive strike into the massacre we know about.
First, in order to ensure that things went according to plan the Paris
militia was called out. Nothing could have been more disastrous than
to have some of the most convinced Catholics in Paris armed and on
the streets. It conveyed a sense of dire emergency and confirmed
rumours that the Huguenots were bent on revenge.29 It also conveyed a
sense that they were doing the kings will. This was reinforced by the
words of the Duke of Guise who supervised the killing of Coligny,
This was done on the orders of the king. The news quickly swept
through Paris.
This was done on the orders of the king. The participation of many
of the people of Paris has to be seen as an awful but almost joyful cel-
ebration that after ten years of half-hearted war and unwanted tolera-
tion their king was at last on their side and fulfilling his sacred
coronation vows. The King had returned to his people and to his
Catholic duties. They would respond with holy joy. And their joy knew
no bounds when the rumour spread that in the cemetery of the Holy
Innocents a hawthorn tree, symbol of Christs passion, that had seemed
to be dead and had not blossomed for several years, had burst into
bloom. It was, to eschatologically anxious minds, a sign, a miracle of
approval. Not only had the king returned to his people; the King of
Kings stood in the midst of those who in this New Jerusalem of the
latter days were cleansing the city of the pollution of blasphemy.30
Once it had started the massacre was difficult to stop. Despite the best
efforts of the city government, the parlement and the crown, the ram-
page continued until it burnt itself out. Paris was for a week a city out
of control.
point.
56 h. h. leonard
The massacre spread with the news to a dozen other cities. The death
toll increased accordingly. Two points might be made about the mas-
sacres in other towns. First, those perpetrating them believed, or pro-
fessed to believe, that they were doing the kings will. The same rejoicing
that I have suggested accompanied the massacres in Paris is to be seen
elsewhere, especially in cities with a Huguenot minority big enough to
pose a threat, and where there had been some sort of communal vio-
lence during the preceding decade.31 Second, very often the violence
followed a pattern also; it had had a ritual, symbolic nature.32 In the
past, Huguenots had vandalised and desecrated shrines, shouted abuse
at the mass, and roughed up priests to show that saints and priests had
no mystical, miracle-working power. On the other hand, for Catholics,
it was not enough simply to kill a heretic: the body had to be mutilated
and left to rot on or by the gallows without a Christian burial the fate
of common criminals: heretics were worse than common criminals.
Sometimes pages of the Bible or a Protestant tract were stuffed down
the throat of the dead person before they were burnt. The burning
pages were a symbol of the powerlessness of the Bible on which the
heretic placed so much faith. The communal violence of the period
had an awful theatre about it. And it followed the patterns of normal
judicial violence in an exaggerated form, even down to mock trials car-
ried out sometimes over dead bodies.33
Of course, sometimes violence was just violence, carried out by
those whose psychotic natures thrive in such times. But on the whole
those who participated in the massacres of the late summer and early
autumn of 1572 did so because they believed they were carrying out
the work of God in the name of the king. They saw themselves as the
agents of divine retribution on those that had mocked and desecrated
their shrines and churches, blasphemed against the holy mass, divided
the community by their refusal to participate in the ritual events that
bound the community together.34 By their acts of violence they believed
that they would avert divine retribution upon their community by
31
Benedict, Massacres in the Provinces, 22021; idem, Rouen, chap. 2; Roberts,
Calvinists in Troyes, 10018.
32
Natalie Zemon Davis, The Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in Sixteenth-century
France, Past and Present, no. 59 (1973): 5191, repr. in Society and Culture in Early
Modern France: Eight Essays (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975), 15288,
remains authoritative on what she first called the Rites of Violence.
33
Ibid.; cf. Benedict, Rouen, 5668, 12728.
34
Benedict, Rouen, 21819; Crouzet, La Nuit de la Saint-Barthlemy.
the huguenots and the st bartholomews57
What did it all achieve? There were international responses and domes-
tic consequences and eventually international effects as well. Initially,
the international reaction was limited to words (and music) rather
than deeds.
In 1572, celebratory masses were said in Rome and Pope Gregory
XIII had a commemorative medallion struck, gruesomely depicting
corpses, but struck down by the angel of death, rather than the duke of
Guise or citizens of Paris.35 Three years earlier, Pius V had celebrated Te
Deums to mark victories over the Huguenots at Jarnac and Moncontour
during the third civil war, but this was a rather different kind of vic-
tory and Gregory XIIIs celebrations of slaughter became part of
Protestant legend but then, he had previously declared that he
desire[d] nothing else than the extermination of the Huguenots.36
A celebratory mass was also held in Paris following a solemn, city-
wide procession. Hearty congratulations came from at least Rome and
Spain.
On the Protestant side, there were condemnations but little else.
Elizabeth I of England gave the Spanish ambassador a rough ride: he
arrived at the court to find all the courtiers dressed in black, and she
gave him a tongue-lashing. But that was all. The only active diplomatic
35
The medallion is reproduced in Sutherland, Massacre of St Bartholomew, plate
facing p. 55.
36
A. Lynn Martin, Papal Policy and the European Conflict, 15591572, SCJ 11
(Summer 1980), 44, 45. Cf. chapter 11, by McGraw, below, p. 000.
58 h. h. leonard
37
Kingdon, Myths about the St Bartholomews Massacres, chap. 5, especially 1036.
There were, of course, other reasons for the ending of this civil war: see James B. Wood,
The Kings Army: Warfare, Soldiers and Society during the Wars of Religion in France,
15621576 (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1996).
38
Haultain to Burghley, 27 Sept. 1572, CSPF, X (157274), 181, no. 575; Robin
Gwynn, Huguenot Heritage: The History and Contribution of the Huguenots in Britain
(2nd edn, Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2001), 19, 38; Andrew Spicer, The French-
speaking Reformed Community and Their Church in Southampton 1567c.1620,
Huguenot Society Publications, New Series, 3 (1997), 1517, 21, 149, 150, 154.
the huguenots and the st bartholomews59
39
Benedict, Rouen, 12538, 14750; cf. Holt, French Wars of Religion, 9495; Robert
J. Knecht, The French Civil Wars (Harlow: Longman Pearson Education, 2000), 166
67. While Roberts reports a decline in Troyes, over the period 156272, from 89,000
Huguenots to a handful, there systematic persecution had wrought a steady decline
over the decade and the massacre of 1572 simply finished things off: Roberts, Calvinists
in Troyes.
40
Menna Prestwich, Calvinism in France 15551629, in idem (ed.), International
Calvinism 15411715 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 97; cf. Sutherland, Massacre of
St Bartholomew, 2.
41
Prestwich, Calvinism in France, 97. On long-term trends in the French Protestant
population see Philip Benedict, The Huguenot Population of France, 16001685: The
Demographic Fate and Customs of a Religious Minority, Transactions of the American
Philosophical Society, 31: 5 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1991).
42
Quoted in Knecht, French Civil Wars, 166.
60 h. h. leonard
43
Prestwich, Calvinism in France, 9798.
44
Donald R. Kelley, Martyrs, Myth, and the Massacre: The Background of
St. Bartholomew, in Alfred Soman (ed.), The Massacre of St. Bartholomew: Reappraisals
and Documents, International Archives of the History of Ideas, 75 (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 202.
45
Luc Racaut, Religious Polemic and Huguenot Self-Perception and Identity,
15541619, in Raymond A. Mentzer and Andrew Spicer (eds.), Society and Culture in
the Huguenot World 15591685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 36.
46
lisabeth Labrousse, The Wars of Religion in Seventeenth-century Huguenot
Thought, in Soman, The Massacre of St. Bartholomew, 24351; and see chapter 1, by
Trim, above.
47
Prestwich, Calvinism in France, 95.
the huguenots and the st bartholomews61
Racaut, Religious Polemic and Huguenot Self-Perception and Identity, 36. See
48
Kelley, Martyrs, Myth, and the Massacre, 181202; Robert M. Kingdon, Myths about
the St Bartholomews Day Massacres 15721576 (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard
University Press, 1988), passim. The Vindici appeared in French editions as well as
the original Latin and was frequently reprinted: Etienne Junius Brutus, Vindiciae con-
tra tyrannos. Traduction franaise de 1581, ed. A. Jouanna, J. Perrin, M. Souli,
A. Tournon, and H. Weber, Les classiques de la pense politique, 11 (Geneva: Librairie
Droz, 1979), includes a lengthy (though still incomplete) bibliography.
62 h. h. leonard
49
Anne Dunan-Page, Introduction to idem, Religious Culture, 15.
50
A few examples: Princess of Orange to Walsingham, Middleburg, 11 Jan. 1589,
CSPF, XXIII (1589), 1; anon., A Warning Peece for London: being a True Relation of the
Bloody Massacre of the Protestants in Paris, by the Papists and Cavileers (London:
1642); speech in the English Parliament, May 1679, recorded in Roger Morrice, in
Mark Goldie et al (eds.), The Entring Book of Roger Morrice [16771691] (6 vols.,
Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007), II, 158; Gilbert Burnet, Relation of the Bloody and
Barbarous Massacre of about One Hundred Thousand Protestants, Begun at Paris and
Carried on all over France by the Papists in the Year 1572 (London: 1678); anon., The
Deplorable State and Condition of the Poor French Protestants Commiserated, and hum-
bly Represented to all Princes and People of the True Reformed Church; with Reasons for
a Protestant League (London: 1681), p.1; [Benjamin Keach], Sion in Distress: or, the
Groans of the Protestant Chruch [sic] (London: 1681), 94; J. S., Popery displayd in its
Proper Colours. Wherein its Nonentity and Nullity is demonstrated by Undeniable
Arguments. With Several Remarkable Passages relating to the Present Times. Humbly
offered to the Honourable House of Commons (London: 1681), 8. (I am indebted for
these references to David Trim and Robin Gwynn.) And cf. chapter 3, by Gregory
Dodds, below.
51
Cf. chapter 6, by D. J. B. Trim, below.
the huguenots and the st bartholomews63
52
Greengrass, France, 62 argues persuasively that even after four years of cam-
paigning as the rightful king Henry was not accepted by most of urban France.
53
Cf. Robert Hutchinson, Elizabeths Spy Master: Francis Walsingham and the Secret
War that Saved England (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006); Stephen Budiansky,
Her Majestys Spymaster: Elizabeth I, Sir Francis Walsingham, and the Birth of Modern
Espionage (New York: Viking, 2005).
64 h. h. leonard
The significance of the massacres was felt not only at the time and in
the subsequent century. It is also identifiable today. The massacres con-
stitute one of the most bitterly contested sites of collective memory,
historical imagination, and historiographical debate.
As one scholar wrote in 1974, in the light of a series of new
interpretations prompted by the four hundredth anniversary of
St Bartholomews:
The massacre has remained one of the most memorable events of
European history attested not only by its tenacious hold on the
54
See, for example Sir Charles Wilson, Queen Elizabeth and the Revolt of the
Netherlands (London: Macmillan, 1970); D. J. B. Trim, The secret war of Elizabeth I:
England and the Huguenots during the early Wars of Religion, 156277, HSP 27:2
(1999), 18999; idem, Seeking a Protestant alliance and liberty of conscience on the
Continent, 155885, in Tudor England and its Neighbours, ed. Susan Doran and Glenn
Richardson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 13977.
55
On Goulart (or Goulard) and his collaborators, see Robert M. Kingdon, Myths
about the St Bartholomews Day Massacres 15721576 (Cambridge, MA and London:
Harvard University Press, 1988).
the huguenots and the st bartholomews65
56
Alfred Soman Editors Preface to Soman (ed.), The Massacre of St. Bartholomew:
Reappraisals and Documents, International Archives of the History of Ideas, 75 (The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), viii.
57
Cf. chapter 1, by Trim, above, p. 40.
58
Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross; Marc Venard, Arrtez le massacre!, Revue
dhistoire moderne et contemporaine 39 (1992), 64561; JeanLouis Bourgeon,
Lassassinat de Coligny (Geneva: Droz, 1992); idem, Charles IX devant la Saint-
Barthlemy (Geneva: Droz, 1995); Crouzet, La nuit de la SaintBarthlemy; Mark
Greengrass, Hidden Transcripts: Secret Histories and Personal Testimonies of
Religious Violence in the French Wars of Religion, in Mark Levene and Penny Roberts
(eds.), The Massacre in History (New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1999), 6988,
esp. 7475, 7985, 87; Arlette Jouanna, La SaintBarthlemy: les mystres dun crime
dEtat, 24 aot 1572 (Paris: Gallimard, 2007); and, most recently, Stuart Carroll,
Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe (Oxford; New
York: Oxford University Press, 2009), chap. 8. A good brief overview which skilfully
elucidates the issues at stake, the historiography, and the nature and problems of the
sources, is David Potters Introduction to chapter 5, The Era of the St Bartholomew
Massacre, in Potter (ed. and trans.), The French Wars of Religion: Selected Documents
(New York: St Martins Press, 1997) 12229, esp.12528.
59
Cf. D. J. B. Trim, Tumults, riots and seditions: persecution and violence in France
during the Wars of Religion, Liberty 102:3 (May-June 2007), 18.
66 h. h. leonard
60
Kingdon, Myths about the St Bartholomews Massacres, 219.
61
Cf. Cameron, Greengrass and Roberts, Adventure in Religious Pluralism.
62
See chap. 6, by Trim, below; and Richard Bonney and D. J. B. Trim (eds.),
Introduction to Persecution and Pluralism, 44, and cf. 4142, 52.
the huguenots and the st bartholomews67
by his clergy, decided that the gradualist policy was not working and
instead imposed ever more rigorous persecution; eventually, in 1685,
the Edict of Fontainebleau revoked the Edict of Nantes and abolished
liberty of conscience.63
Armed force was the arbiter of religious dispute: the kings decision
was imposed by his armyso much so that dragonnade became syn-
onymous with persecution, after the royal regiments of dragoons that
frequently enforced the kings will on his Huguenot subjects. But the
result was not only mass Huguenot emigration; it was also insurrec-
tion. Huguenots enlisted in the armies of the enemies of France, help-
ing to inflict defeats on them and joined invasions of the south of
France, hoping to bring liberation to their confreres. And the Camisard
revolt in the south of France was a major threat for two years and took
another eleven to quell completely.64 On neither side had there been a
sincere desire for dialogue or to tolerate, even when limited pluralism
was the official policy.
Both sides, too, subscribed to a culture of force and the belief that a
polity must be confessionally unitary or it would not survive: there was
no concept that the principle of un roi, une foi, une loi might be fun-
damentally mistaken. In the end, the countries that benefited from
Frances confessional division were Great Britain and the Dutch
Republic not shining examples of religious liberty by todays stand-
ards, but significant for the degree of toleration they granted by seven-
teenth-century standards. Huguenot migrs fought in the British and
Dutch armies and Huguenot merchants and financiers powered the
wars their host nations waged against Louis XIV for almost thirty
years, which almost ruined France. Confessional hatred simply meant
perpetuating conflict and resuscitating it after periods of uneasy coex-
istence. Part of the reason for British and French mistrust of Louis XIV
was precisely the long history of French oppression of the Huguenots,
which Louis had so thoroughly and disastrously (for himself as well as
for many Huguenots) revivified.
Brian E. Strayer, The Edict of Fontainebleau (1685) and the Huguenots: Whos to
63
Gregory Dodds
1
Toleration was viewed by Charles as a way of binding dissenters to the absolutist
monarch. Brian Weiser has argued that Charles wanted dissenters to see their freedom
as a gift of grace, not of right, and to be aware that the free exercise of their religion
relied solely on keeping in the good graces of the king. Brian Weiser, Charles II and the
Politics of Access (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2003), 72.
70 gregory dodds
2
James did not proclaim this policy of toleration immediately upon taking the
throne, but initially sought to assure Tories that he would not change the laws. When
he did attempt to expand freedom of conscience two years later he was viewed as being
untrustworthy. See John Miller, James II (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
2000), 120. Steve Pincus has argued that James was never interested in real liberty of
conscience. See notes 98101 below.
3
Huguenots began coming in to England in larger numbers after James IIs
Declaration of Indulgence: Gwynn, Conformity, 24. For a full analysis of Huguenot
emigration, see Robin Gwynn, Huguenot Heritage: The history and contribution of the
Huguenots in Britain, Second Revised Edition (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2001).
sham of liberty of conscience 71
The crisis over the Catholicism of the heir apparent reached a new
levelof hysteria in the late 1670s. It was not uncommon for published
texts and sermons to mention French Protestants, but starting in 1678,
4
John Fell, Seasonable advice to Protestants shewing the necessity of maintaining the
established religion in opposition to popery (London, 1688; Wing F 620), 33.
5
Anonymous, A Letter to a Dissenter, in Anonymous, Fourteen Papers (London
1689; Wing B 5794), 53.
6
While I use the terms conformist, dissenters, and so on in this chapter, I do so
with the understanding that these are complex definitions that do not reflect uniform
groups of people. For more on the intricacies of conformity and Huguenot communi-
ties in England, see Gwynn, Strains of worship, ch. 5, below.
72 gregory dodds
with the Popish Plot, numerous publications began to focus on the past
and present plight of the Huguenots. Overt anti-Catholicism was
standard fare, but the newly heightened focus on French anti-
Protestantism signalled a new argument against both the succession of
James and, perhaps more importantly, the battle against expanding
religious toleration to dissenters and Catholics. With hindsight and
knowledge of both upcoming Huguenot persecution and the Glorious
Revolution, this approach seems unsurprising. In the 1670s, however,
Charles was still king and Louis XIV had not yet begun aggressively
harassing Protestants. After 1681 the stories of Huguenot suffering
were a powerful political weapon in the battles waged over religious
toleration. But intense persecution had not actually begun in the 1670s.
The emphasis on French Protestants in English print points to some-
thing else. What anti-Catholic propagandists needed in order to main-
tain strong penalties against English Catholics were stories of Catholic
violence and intolerance. If such stories were not available in current
events, then history, especially Huguenot history, had to provide the
lessons and teach another generation to fear Catholics.7
The major interest in the plight of French Protestants began with the
Popish Plot in the late 1670s and then increased with Louis XIVs more
aggressive decrees against Protestants in 1681. Before this, however,
some English Catholics used the freedoms experienced by Huguenots
to argue for greater tolerance of Catholics in England. In 1666, the
year of the Great Fire, Roger Palmer, the Earl of Castlemaine and a
well-known Catholic, published an apology asking for greater toler-
ance of English Catholics.8 Why, Castlemaine asked, may not we,
Noble Country-men, hope for favour from you, as well as the French
Protestants find from theirs?9 If Catholic France could tolerate
Protestants then why could not English Protestants tolerate loyal
7
Both Whigs and Tories realized the importance of public opinion. Publishing
moral histories became one of the primary methods for shifting and shaping society
views. See Tim Harris, Restoration: Charles II and his Kingdom (New York: Penguin,
2006), 211220.
8
Roger Palmer, Earl of Castlemaine, To all the Royalists that suffered for His Majesty,
and to the rest of England. The humble apology of the English Catholicks (London, 1666;
Wing C 1249).
9
Roger Palmer, Earl of, Castlemaine, A reply to the answer of the Catholiqve apology,
or a cleere vindication of the Catholicques of England from all matter of fact chargd
against them by their enemyes (Antwerp, 1668), 37: Wing C 1246. This was Castlemaines
response to William Lloyd, The late apology in behalf of the papists re-printed and an-
swered, in behalf of the Royalists (London, 1667; Wing L 2683).
sham of liberty of conscience 73
10
Lord Acton would later write that the papacy was not pleased by Castlemaines
correlation of Catholics and Huguenots. This would also complicate matters when
James II later sent Castlemaine as his ambassador to Rome. John Acton, Lectures on
Modern History (Teddington, Middx: The Echo Library, 2007), 172.
11
Castlemaine, A reply to the answer of the Catholiqve apology, 38.
12
Ibid.
13
Ibid.
74 gregory dodds
14
William Lloyd, The late apology in behalf of the papists reprinted and answered in
behalf of the royalists (London, 1673; Wing L 2684), 39.
15
Ibid.
16
Lloyd, The late apology, 16. Edward Hyde, the Earl of Clarendon, similarly argued
Huguenots obeyed the law while Catholics, by being Catholics, renounced obedience
to the king. See Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl of, Animadversions upon a book intit-
uled, Fanaticism fanatically imputed to the Catholick Church (London, 1674; Wing C
4415), 84.
17
Many bishops, Lloyd included, worked to support Huguenots in England. Robin
Gwynn, Huguenot Heritage, 164.
sham of liberty of conscience 75
23
Ibid.
24
Ibid.
25
Barclay wrote that Protestants can see how much they act the Hypocrite when
they pretend Christian Charity to any that differ from them. Barclay, Universal love
considered, 19.
26
For a detailed analysis of the Popish Plot see John Kenyon, The Popish Plot
(London: Heinemann, 1972).
27
A translation of de Thous history of the French Huguenots and particularly the
massacre was also published in 1678. See Edward Stephens (trans.), Jacques-Auguste
de Thou, A true history of the Roman Catholicks designs and bloody contrivances
sham of liberty of conscience 77
text focused on 1572 and the massacre of French Protestants. The point
of the text, in the event that any reader managed to not make the con-
nection to the Popish Plot, was clearly elucidated in the introduction
and conclusion. Burnet began by contrasting Protestant morality with
Catholic barbarism. According to Burnet, There are no Principles of
Morality more universally received, and that make deeper impressions
on the minds of all Men, that are more necessary for the good of
humane Society, and do more resemble the Divine Perfections, than
Truth and Goodness.28 A humane society, characterized by goodness
and truth, was Protestant. Catholic society was the opposite because
the Church of Rome teaches Barbarity and Cruelty, against all who
receive not their Opinions; and that Hereticks are to be delivered to
secular Princes, who must burn them without mercy.29 Cruelty and
inhumanity were fundamental Catholic doctrines. He wrote, Cruelty
and Treachery are become a part of their Doctrine, and they may join
them to their Creed.30 The problem was that Catholics were no longer
acting with quite so much obvious evil and had made cruelty and per-
secution the Secrets of their Religion, till a fit opportunity appear.31
The secret nature of Catholic plans for the future persecution of
Protestants had resulted in Protestant memory loss. Protestants had
forgotten to fear Catholic machinations. Burnet sought to correct this
memory lapse by detailing what had taken place in 1572.32 If any
Protestants were becoming charitable to Catholics and doubting that
Catholics would again use religious violence and persecution, the
History of the Parisian Massacre may satisfie them to the full.33 We
may be taught from such Precedents, he continued, what we ought
toexpect, when ever we are at the mercy of Persons of that Religion,
for the subversion of the Protestant religion in England. And how by the wonderful provi-
dence of God their treasonable and bloody conspiracies and designs have been discovered
and prevented (2nd edn, London, 1678: Wing T 1077A). This work also sought to link
the 1572 massacre with the 1678 Popish Plot.
28
Gilbert Burnet, A relation of the barbarous and bloody massacre of about an hun-
dred thousand Protestants, begun at Paris, and carried on over all France, by the Papists,
in the year 1572 collected out of Mezeray Thuanus, and other approved authors (London,
1678; Wing R 814), 3.
29
Burnet, A relation of the barbarous and bloody massacre, 3.
30
Burnet, A relation, 4.
31
Ibid.
32
John Miller has also noted the prevalence of references to the 1572 massacre
during the Popish Plot. See John Miller, Popery and Politics in England 16601688
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 89, 1812.
33
Burnet, A relation, 4.
78 gregory dodds
who, if they be true Sons of the Church of Rome, must renounce both
Faith and Mercy to all Hereticks.34 This, of course, was the primal fear
behind the Popish Plotthat Catholics would violently take control of
the English government and then use violence against the Protestant
population. Catholics were secretly planning more massacres. It was
his duty to expose the secret by reminding his readers of Catholic his-
tory, even if it was over a hundred years in the past. The rest of Burnets
work contained the translation of texts detailing the killings of
Protestants. Burnets own voice returned for the final sentence to
remind his readers once again what they could expect if a Catholic
ruled England. We may easily gather, he concluded, What is to be
expected from that Court, and what we ought to look for, when-ever
we are at the mercy of Men, whose Religion will not only bear them
through, but set them on to commit the most Treacherous and Bloody
Massacres.35 Burnet had fixed the Protestant memory loss by reintro-
ducing an agitated public to the details of St. Bartholomews Day
Massacre at a critical time when many people believed that Papists
were determined to assassinate the King and other Protestant Lords.36
Evidence of Catholic treachery was necessary to make the Plot
believable and given both the secret nature of the Popish Plot and the
reality of Catholic tolerance of French Protestants in 1678, it was criti-
cal for English authors to focus on historical accounts of the Massacre
and the Wars of Religion. Burnets was far from the only text designed
to reawaken a national anti-Catholic memory by describing, in detail,
the French massacre in 1572. One anonymous author unwittingly
recounted a cruel historical irony given what was soon to occur with
the Popish Plot in England. The massacre began, he wrote, because
certain people spread the rumor that the Hugonots (for so the Romish
Catholicks term the true Protestants in France) were in Arms (they
being all, alas, in their Beds, far from any such thoughts) and meant to
kill the King.37 French Protestants were massacred because Parisians
34
Ibid., 4.
35
Burnet, A relation, 47.
36
Burnet also directly criticized Charles II and later fled England during James IIs
reign. See John Spurr, England in the 1670s: This Masquerading Age (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2000), 202. Also see Richard L. Greaves, Secrets of the Kingdom: The Popish
Pot to the Revolution of 166889 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992),
318.
37
Anon, An Account of the several plots, conspiracies, and hellish attempts of the
bloody-minded papists against the princes and kingdoms of England, Scotland, and
Ireland from the reformation to this present year 1678 as also their cruel practices in
France against the Protestants in the massacre of Paris (London, 1679; Wing A 387), 37.
sham of liberty of conscience 79
A similar point was made in William Dugdale, A short view of the late troubles in
38
England briefly setting forth, their rise, growth, and tragical conclusion, as also, some
parallel thereof with the barons-wars in the time of King Henry III : but chiefly with that
in France, called the Holy League, in the reign of Henry III and Henry IV, late kings of the
realm (London, 1681; Wing D 2492), 601606.
39
Anon, An Account of the several plots, 38.
80 gregory dodds
the terror.40 The terror of the Popish Plot was thus tied to a history of
terror and took on dimensions far beyond any logical response to the
rumours peddled by Oates. The conclusion of this pamphlet made it
clear that the greatest of all the Papist conspiracies was not in the past,
but the present plan to destroy Protestantism in England. The author
reported that this Plot, in the general Opinion, is thought to be the
greatest and most Dangerous that ever was since the Reformation: For
as it has been of long Continuance, so it is laid Universal; for no less
than these three Northern Kingdoms were designed to be delivered
from that which they call Pestilent Heresie all the power and Wealth
of the popish Party was laid out to carry on the Catholick Cause.41
Connecting Oatess allegations to the history of religious violence
made the Plot eminently believable to an increasingly scared English
population. The last sentence made it clear that, ultimately, it was the
Devil behind the threat of Catholic violence: The Reader may see that
the Religion of the Papists is not from above (which is Pure, Peaceable,
and Gentle, and easie to be Entreated;) but from the Devil, who was a
Murther from the Beginning, and like a Roaring Catholick Lion, goes
up and down seeking whom he may devour.42 The purpose of such
texts was obviously to increase the fears of English Protestants and, in
so doing, support the ongoing investigations against English Catholics.
A secondary point, which would soon become a national obsession,
was the attempt to avoid having a Catholic monarch, namely the kings
brother James, inherit the throne. The Popish Plot made it clear to
English Protestants that Catholics had not left religious violence in the
past, or in France, and that a strong response to Catholic treachery was
justified and continued laws against English Catholics were absolutely
necessary. History, memory, and imagination were at the center of the
building anti-Catholic hysteria in England. At the heart of these
attempts to reconstruct an anti-Catholic memory was the history of
French Huguenots.
40
Another example of a text designed to spread fear of a Catholic coup can be
found in David Clarkson, The case of Protestants in England under a popish prince
if any shall happen to wear the imperial crown (London, 1681; Wing C 4569). Clarkson
also recounted the 1572 massacre in horrifying detail: the Catholick Assassinating
Spirit would naturally lead to massacres in England just as it had in France.
(ibid., 22, 29)
41
Anon, An Account of the several plots, 46.
42
Ibid.
sham of liberty of conscience 81
43
See Andrew Swatland, The House of Lords in the Reign of Charles II (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), 230.
44
This speech was included in John Dunton, The Compleat statesman demonstrated
in the life, actions, and politicks of that great minister of state, Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury
(London, 1683; Wing C 5658), 61.
45
Dunton, The Compleat statesman, 62.
46
With all the vitriolic condemnations of popery and the conflation of Louis XIVs
policies with the nature of Catholicism, it is important to remember that Pope Innocent
XI was at odds with Louix XIV, was opposed to the revocation, and, eventually, con-
demned the dragonnades and persecution of the Huguenots. See John McManners,
Church and Society in Eighteenth-Century France: Volume 2: The Religion of the People
and the Politics of Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 584.
82 gregory dodds
47
Richard Baxter referred to French Prelacy and Dragoon Discipline as methods
employed in France to destroy Protestantism. His target, however, was also English
prelacy and Anglican discipline against dissenters. See Richard Baxter, Richard Baxters
penitent confession and his necessary vindication (London, 1691; Wing B 1341), 32, 78.
48
Robin Gwynn has noted that the dragonnades in 1681 led to the introduction of
the word refugee in England. Robin Gwynn, Roger Morrice and the Huguenot
Refugees, in McElligott, Fear, Exclusion and Revolution, 32.
49
For the significance of the dragonnades in English publications, see Anne Dunan-
Page, Roger LEstrange and the Huguenots: Continental Protestantism and the Church
of England, in Anne Dunan-Page and Beth Lynch, Roger LEstrange and the Making of
Restoration Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 126130.
50
See John Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion and Responsibility (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994), 3435.
sham of liberty of conscience 83
the bottom of it; then the Mask is off, then it is in plain terms the sub-
duing of a Pestilent Heresie (for so is the true Christian Religion in the
Roman Stile now-a-days) and the utter ruine of the Protestant party.51
Toleration had become code for a Catholic conspiracy to destroy the
Protestant Reformation in England. Rather than viewing the renewed
persecution against Huguenots in France as an evil practice that should
not be imitated in England, many English Protestants saw it as conclu-
sive evidence that Catholics should never be tolerated in England.
In 1681, English publications began commenting on the plight of
French Protestants. Edmund Everard reported that physicians, profes-
sionals, and tradesmen were being excluded from practicing their
crafts for no other cause than their Religion.52 The purpose, Everard
presumed, was to take away from them of the said Religion, all means
of gaining their Lively-hood; and to condemn them cruelly to dye of
hunger; as if there were left no more humanity for them neither in
their hearts nor in their Spirits.53 The alternative to such harassment
and starvation was emigration. Many of the most virulently anti-Cath-
olic texts were anonymous. One such text, penned by a Gentleman at
London, focused on the persecution of Huguenots and what Catholics
would try to do in England. After recounting what he had learned in
letters from France, he stated that the actions of Louis XIV proved that
whatever pretence the Roman Catholicks make to the contrary, they
have always been, and still are Enemies of the Protestants; and that the
Protestants ought to look to be treated by the Catholicks as Enemies.54
The author then proceeded to recount the many ways how Protestants
were being persecuted in France, but added that he should need whole
weeks to tell you all.55 In sum, there was no method proper to ruine
them, which is not made use of including dungeons, the rack, separa-
tion from children and death in the midst of torments.56 The purpose
Edmund Everard, The great pressures and grievances of the Protestants in France
52
and their apology to the late ordinances made against them: both out of the Edict of
Nantes, and several other fundamental laws of France (London, 1681; Wing E 3529), 49.
Everard, a former Catholic turned Whig Protestant, was an opportunist who added
substantiating rumors to Oatess accusations. His accounts certainly cannot be trusted,
but his texts do represent the rhetorical use of French Protestants for English political
objectives.
53
Everard, The great pressures, 49.
54
Gentleman at London, The present state of the Protestants in France in three letters
(London, 1681; Wing P 3274), 12.
55
Gentleman at London, The present state of Protestants, 20.
56
Gentleman at London, The present state of Protestants, 21, 29.
84 gregory dodds
57
Gentleman at London, The present state of Protestants, 30.
58
Ibid.
59
Anon., The horrible persecution of the French Protestants in the province of Poitou
truly set forth by a gentleman of great quality, an eye witness , in a letter to a worthy
friend (London, 1681; Wing H 2862), 2.
sham of liberty of conscience 85
into heresie.60 Parents were not allowed to teach their own children
and, in some cases, children were forcibly placed with Catholic fami-
lies.61 These, for readers in England, were viewed as the worst forms of
persecution. It was cruel to be subjected to the dragonnades and suffer
loss of income and trade, but it was the ultimate terror to lose control
of ones own children and have those children possibly lost for all eter-
nity. In a reference to Matthew 5, this anonymous author saw the
apocalyptic separation taking place between the sheep and the goats.62
The Catholic world had finally shown its true nature. Anything but the
most committed opposition to Catholicism in England would be a
reproach to the People of England and the Government thereof.63 The
Son of Man was readying his return and the end of time was fast
approaching.
The situation in France was rapidly heightening anti-Catholic rheto-
ric in England to the point where no longer was there a fear about a
localized conspiracy, but rather the realization that they were witness-
ing the final cosmic battle between the forces of good and evil.
Protestants in England needed to do two things: first, they needed to
continue to resist Catholicism; and second, they needed to welcome
Huguenot refugees. This author noted that in the final judgment Jesus
would say: For I was an hungred and ye gave me Meat, I was thirsty
and ye gave me Drink: I was a Stranger and ye took me in: Naked and
ye Clothed me, I was sick and ye visited me, I was in Prison and ye
came unto me.64 The naked strangers were clearly, so this author
believed, Protestants fleeing French persecution. The memory of
French Protestant suffering, as well as the awareness of renewed suffer-
ing in France, had thus become a central feature in the worldviews and
rhetoric of English Catholics, conformists, and dissenters.
60
Anonymous, An Abstract of the present state of the Protestants in France (London,
1682), 2: Wing A 140.
61
This was primarily to ensure that children whose parents converted to Catholicism
were brought up as Catholics. See McManners, Church and Society, 584.
62
Anonymous, An Abstract of the present state, 2.
63
Ibid.
64
Ibid.
86 gregory dodds
65
Richard Baxter, his account to his dearly beloved, the inhabitants of Kidderminster,
of the causes of his being forbidden by the Bishop of Worcester to preach within his diocess
(London, 1662; Wing H 2862), 39.
66
Roger LEstrange, the royal propagandist, responded in print to Baxter that exter-
nal ceremonies were indifferent to salvation and therefore the king could enforce
sham of liberty of conscience 87
conformity for decorum and civility. LEstrange completely avoided any discussion of
the French Churches. See Roger LEstrange, A whipp a whipp, for the schismaticall ani-
madverter upon the Bishop of Worcesters letter (London, 1662; Wing L 1325), 3940.
67
Richard Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae, or, Mr. Richard Baxters narrative of the
most memorable passages of his life and times faithfully publishd from his own original
manuscript by Matthew Sylvester (London, 1696; Wing B 1370), 384. This text, which
included a biography of Baxter and a collection of many of his writings, was published
after his death in 1691.
68
Richard Baxter, The English nonconformity as under King Charles II and King
James II truly stated and argued by Richard Baxter (London, 1689; Wing B 1259), 267.
69
Richard Baxter, A search for the English schismatick (London, 1681), 34: Wing B
1399.
88 gregory dodds
the texts and sermons detailing the suffering of French Protestants. Yet
to allow French Protestant communities to exist in England and to
conduct services outside the established Church was to allow noncon-
formity. This was a major problem for conformist bishops and Baxter
wrote in his autobiography that many French Ministers sentenced to
Death and Banishment, fly hither for refuge: And the Church men
relieve them not because they are not of English Diocesans and
Conformity.70 With the support of Charles II, French refugees were
tolerated in England, but the vitriolic political situation placed them in
a precarious position.71 Furthermore, said Baxter, the rhetoric of con-
formity frightened people and was unfair to the Dutch and French
Churches in England, even though those churches were technically
tolerated by the Crown. We hate the spirit of pride and envy in
Preachers, wrote Baxter, who cannot endure to see others preferred
before them or worship God in another place, or in other words or
circumstances.72 These prideful preachers then frighten the people
by their loud allarm and cry of Schism; as if all were of a different
Religion or species of Communion, that differ from their book in
Word or Ceremonies. And then, by that blinding name of Different
Communions, alienate the hearts of the ignorant, and make them think
of the Dutch, French, and others that only differ from them in acci-
dents, as the Papists do of us that are called by them Hereticks.73
Naturally, Baxter was also thinking of dissenters who were not even
given the consideration of being patronizingly accepted foreign
churches. How could the English government treat English noncon-
formists with less consideration than French refugees? Baxter also
asked, Do not the French Protestants deserve all their sufferings then
for calling the Church Bishops there Papists, and separating from so
Excellent a Government?74 If that was what really mattered, episcopal
ordination, then the French Protestants were better turn Papists, than
to continue such Protestants as they are.75 Baxter then invited his con-
formist readers to join him as a schismatic, for were they not all
70
Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae, 199200.
71
Baxter, English schismatick, 1415. Officially, James II required conformity of
French churches until the Declaration of Indulgence.
72
Baxter, English schismatick, 33.
73
Ibid.
74
Richard Baxter, The true history of councils (London, 1682), 49: Wing B 1438.
75
Richard Baxter, An answer to Mr. Dodwell and Dr. Sherlocke (London, 1682), 93:
Wing B 1184.
sham of liberty of conscience 89
Baxter, An answer, 6.
77
78
Robert Barclay, William Michel unmasqued, or, The staggering instability of the
pretended stable Christian discovered his omissions observed, and weakness unveiled
(London, 1672; Wing B 742), 4.
79
Ibid.
90 gregory dodds
the French King is highly blamed for Persecuting his peaceable Subjects;
and therefore much more Reason that Protestants should not perse-
cuteone another, for it is to do the same things that is condemned in
others.80
For authors such as Baxter, Barclay, and Penn, it was the height of
hypocrisy for English conformists to condemn the treatment of French
Huguenots while continuing the persecution of English dissenters.81
One of the most opportunistic authors during the height of the
Popish Plot was Henry Care. To profit from the hysteria, Care began
publishing The Weekly Pacquet of Advice from Rome, which sustained a
continuous attack on Catholicism. But Care, a dissenter and a Whig,
also believed that the Tories, Anglican bishops and Royalists, were
almost no better than Catholics. By attacking Catholics, Care was
able to attack the Anglican hierarchy for being so much like the
Catholics. Cares Pacquets became a sensation and were matched by
Roger LEstranges Royalist weekly, The Observator. According to Lois
Schwoerer, LEstrange and Care led the way in reshaping popular
political rhetoric and Cares anti-popery writings helped to embed
anti-Catholic prejudice in the national consciousness.82 While Care
would continue his critique of Catholicism he later softened his lan-
guage when he accepted a court funded position and began writing to
support James IIs calls for religious freedom, which included Catholics
and dissenters.83 Many of his contemporaries would see this as a hypo-
critical rejection of his earlier views, but Care was, in essence, continu-
ing his attack on English conformity. James, he came to believe, was
authentically seeking real religious freedom that would benefit dissent-
ers, Catholics, and foreign Protestants, such as the Huguenot refugees.
During the Popish Plot, however, his anti-Catholicism was in full
swing. If a Papist ever sat on the throne of England then what was
80
William Penn, Some sober and weighty reasons against prosecuting Protestant dis-
senters for difference of opinion in matters of religion humbly offered to the consideration
of all in authority (London, 1682; Wing P 1372), 2.
81
While Baxter sought toleration for dissenters, his ultimate goal was a comprehen-
sive national church that could contain both dissenters and current conformists.
See N. H. Keeble, Take heed of being to forward in imposing on others: orthodoxy
and heresy in the Baxterian tradition, in David Loewenstein and John Marshall,
eds., Heresy, Literature and Politics in Early Modern English Culture (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006), 282305.
82
Lois G. Schwoerer, Care, Henry (1646/71688), in Oxford DNB, online edn,
[http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/4621 (accessed 15 Sept. 2009)].
83
Lois G. Schwoerer, The Ingenious Mr. Henry Care, Restoration Publicist (Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 196.
sham of liberty of conscience 91
happening in France would happen here too, for in such a case (which
Heaven prevent) the persecution on all sorts of Protestants would be
much more bloody and cruel than that in Queen Maries days.84 The
reality of French persecution of Huguenots after 1681 made it highly
difficult for Tories to argue that Catholic governments did not want to
persecute Protestants.85 The plight of the Huguenots in France was also
useful to Care in another way. If we teaze our Protestant Brethren,
Care asked, Meerly on the Account of Non-conformity to our
Ceremonies; do we not justifie the French King in Harassing those that
differ from his Establisht Church, not only in Ceremonies, but most
material points of Doctrine too?86 If it was so evil for Louis XIV to
persecute Huguenots, then how could the Establish Church continue
to persecute English dissenters?87 Care used the anti-Catholic hysteria,
part of which he was personally responsible for, to push the cause of
English dissenters. That his real focus was dissenters rather than either
Catholics or Huguenots would become clear in a few years when he
saw non-conformists and Catholics as being on the same side in a
struggle against the Established Church.88
Roger LEstrange, the Tory polemicist and chief rhetorical rival of
Care, also turned his attention to the Huguenots, but from a rather
different perspective. For LEstrange it was vitally important to defend
the Huguenots while at the same time strictly adhering to the theory
of royal supremacy and religious conformity.89 The situation in France
84
Henry Care, The history of popery, or, Pacquet of advice from Rome the fourth
volume containing the lives of eighteen popes and the most remarkable occurrences in the
church, for near one hundred and fifty years, viz. from the beginning of Wickliff s preach-
ing, to the first appearance of Martin Luther (London, 1682; Wing C 521), 208.
85
Another anonymous author noted that when they tell us that they remember the
Persecution of the French Protestants, acknowledge the Error and wickedness of their
Persecuting those of England; for till they do so, there are a Censorious sort of People
amongst us who will conclude, that tho some of our Clergy-men, would not have the
Arbitrary Power of France to prevail over them; yet that they do wish and hope, by that
Power, to prevail over, and yet again to trample upon English Protestants. Dissenters
were angry that conformists would denounce French persecution of Protestants while
supporting English persecution of dissenters. See Anonymous, A midnight touch at an
unlicensd pamphlet (London, 1690; Wing M 1999).
86
Care, The history of popery, or, Pacquet of advice, 208.
87
Also see, William Atwood, A seasonable vindication of the truly catholick doctrine
of the Church of England (London, 1683; Wing A 4182), 3334.
88
See Edward Andrew, Patrons of Enlightenment (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2006), 8891.
89
LEstrange liked to pretend that Huguenots in England were conformists. This
was far from reality. See Gwynn, Conformity, 3239.
92 gregory dodds
90
Roger LEstrange, An apology for the Protestants of France, in reference to the per-
secutions they are under at this day in six letters (London, 1683; Wing A 3555A), 77.
91
LEstrange, An apology for the Protestants of France, 7478.
92
Roger LEstrange, Toleration discussd, in two dialogues (London, 1679; Wing L
1316), 37.
93
LEstrange, Toleration discussd, 38.
sham of liberty of conscience 93
arguments inducing to a cessation of the penal statues against all dissenters whatever,
upon the account of religion (London, 1685; Wing P 1269), 3.
94 gregory dodds
of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 fit perfectly with the story already
being told in England.96 The threat to national interests and security
demanded continued religious intolerance. But history lessons of
Catholic atrocities from past decades could only move the argument so
far. What English anti-Catholics needed, and what Louis provided in
such a sensational fashion, was new persecution. Now English writers
could connect Catholicism with violence and then connect tolerance
of English Catholics with potential persecution of English Protestants.
While it was highly unlikely that a handful of English Catholics would
seek violently to persecute the English Protestant population, such
arguments built on earlier episodes of anti-Catholic hysteria and effec-
tively ended any possibility of comprehensive religious toleration in
England. The events of 1688 are generally connected with the rise of
constitutional monarchy, greater democracy, and expanded religious
freedom. It is often forgotten how the overthrow of James II was viewed
by contemporaries, which was primarily as a defeat of the Catholic
threat to English Protestantism.
The Glorious Revolution, until recent decades, was portrayed as an
English victory for freedom and tolerance. In a sense, historians took
at face value the rhetoric of Whigs and anti-Catholic polemicists. More
recently, revisionist historians have followed the lead of John Miller
and suggested that James II was relatively moderate and was truly
seeking to expand religious freedom in England.97 Jamess overthrow
96
Robin Gwynn reports that between 40,000 and 50,000 Huguenots emigrated to
England during Louis XIVs reign, with the largest numbers arriving after Jamess
Declaration of Indulgence in 1687: Gwynn, Huguenot Heritage, 44. Gwynn also notes,
however, that James did not encourage emigration to England and was not particularly
welcoming to those who settled there (p. 174).
97
See John Miller, The Immediate Impact of the Revocation, in Caldicott, et al.,
eds., Huguenots in Ireland: The Anatomy of an Emigration (Dun Laoghaire: Glendale
Press, 1987), 161203; John Miller, James II and Toleration, in Eveline Cruickshanks,
ed., By Force or By Default? The Revolution of 16881689 (Edinburgh: John Donald
Publishers, 1989), 827; Miller, James II, 16788; Gary S. De Krey, Reformation
and Arbitrary Government: London Dissenters and James IIs Polity of Toleration,
16871688, in Jason McElligott, ed., Fear, Exclusion and Revolution: Roger Morrice and
Britain in the 1680s (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 1331; Mark Goldie, The Political
Thought of the Anglican Revolution, in Robert Beddard, ed., The Revolutions of 1688
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 107118; Mark Goldie, John Lockes Circle and
James II, HJ 35 (Sept. 1992): 5589, 569, 579, 584; Eveline Cruickshanks, Glorious
Revolution (New York: St. Martins Press, 2000), 1921; and, Justin Champion, Willing
to Suffer, in McLaren and H. Coward, eds., Religious Conscience, State and Law
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 1328.
sham of liberty of conscience 95
Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven: Yale University
98
See John Miller, Popery and politics in England 16601688 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1973), 255. For a careful analysis of what the revocation meant for
James II, see Miller, Immediate Impact of the Revocation.
101
While James II, in principle, supported religious tolerance, he distrusted the
Huguenots and saw connections between them and both Monmouths rebellion and
with William of Oranges potential invasion. He also continued to censor their writ-
ings. See Matthew Glozier, The Huguenot Soldiers of William of Orange and the Glorious
Revolution of 1688: The Lions of Judah (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2008),
9293.
102
Richard Baxter wrote that the anti-Catholic sentiment was so strong that
dissenters who supported freedom of conscience were accused of supporting Popery,
or worse, being secret Papal agents. See Richard Baxter, Richard Baxters penitent
confession, 80.
103
See Andrew R. Murphy, Conscience and Community: Revisiting Toleration and
Religious Dissent in Early Modern England and America (University Park: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 2001), 13442.
104
See John Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture:
Religious Intolerance and Arguments for Religious Toleration in Early Modern and Early
Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 6273.
sham of liberty of conscience 97
There are many things which would make a wise man suspect that
there is some farther Design than Liberty of Conscience in all this zeal
for repealing the Penal Laws and Test. For it would be very surprising
to find a Roman Catholick Prince whose Conscience is directed by a
Jesuit, to be really zealous for Liberty of Conscience.105 As proof, the
author sarcastically pointed to the mild and gentle usage of the French
Protestants by a King whose Conscience is directed by a tender-hearted
Jesuit.106 Just as in France, where there had once been toleration,
English Protestant Subjects will quickly find what a Popish liberty of
Conscience means.107 There is only one thing that is certain, he wrote,
that the Church of Rome is a persecuting Church, and the Mother of
Persecution. Will they then be deluded by the present Sham of Liberty
of Conscience; which they of that Church pretend to give? It is not in
their power, no more than in their Spirit: They neither will nor can give
liberty of Conscience; but with a design to take all liberty from us.108
The author then, again, turned to France as the ultimate proof of
Catholic designs against Protestants. The massacre was again brought
up, but this time with proof that it was not an aberration, but rather
timeless Catholic policy. In another letter an anonymous writer asked
dissenters supporting James II, How is it that you should not have per-
ceived the Poison that was hid under the Liberty of Conscience offered
to them?109 This author then addressed the central point: You will, it
may be, tell us, that it looks ill in us, who so much complain, That we
have been deprived of Liberty of Concience in France, to find fault
with the King of England for granting it to his Subjects.110 However, the
real point was not toleration, but absolutism. French liberty of con-
science was taken away in an absolutist and tyrannical manner, just as
the English enforcement of liberty of conscience was done in a tyran-
nical and absolutist fashion. Furthermore, anyone who assumed that
James II wanted true toleration must be very little acquainted with the
Spirit of Popery.111 According to this letter, English dissenters had been
Ibid.
106
107
Anonymous, A Letter to a Dissenter, 55.
108
Ibid.
109
Anonymous, A Letter of several French Ministers Fled into Germany, in
Anonymous, Fourteen Papers, 70. For Richard Baxters support of toleration in 1689,
see The English nonconformity.
110
Anonymous, A Letter of several French Ministers, 73.
111
Anonymous, A Letter of several French Ministers, 74.
98 gregory dodds
tricked by James and the proof was the history and experience of
French Huguenots.112
In a similar vein, a published letter by the Huguenot Pierre Allix
complained that for the advancing of Popery, he [James II] has neither
had any regard to the Laws of the Land, nor to the Oaths he had taken
to preserve them. Thus much I assert boldly, that since it cannot be
denyd, but that there was a Secret Treaty betwixt Lewis XIV, and
JamesII, we can less doubt, but that the End and Aim of the Treaty, was
the Ruin of the Protestant Religion.113 When Louis XIV talked James II
into an invasion of Ireland to try to reclaim his crown, it seemed to
prove true every English Protestant accusation against Catholics and
James. Anyone in England who could not see the reality of these secret
plots or perceive the fundamentally evil nature of Catholicism was
willfully blind and hoodwink themselves.114 It is, of course, impossible
to know with certainty the motives of James II. At the very least it
would seem that James wanted the English people to believe he sup-
ported full liberty of conscience.115 James was undercut, however, by
the history of Protestantism in France. For decades Protestants had
used the memory of the St. Bartholomewes Day massacre in 1572 to
argue that Catholics were essentially intolerant and that any present
tolerance was a Machiavellian deception that would eventually give
way to more attacks on Protestants. The revocation destroyed any
chance that James II would be able to effectively counter anti-Catholic
rhetoric in England.
English Protestant authors believed that they had uncovered the
anti-Christ in the person of Louis XIV and, by proxy, in the figure of
James II. The anti-Christ looks peaceful and charitable, but then
attacksthe unwary with violence and persecution. Another necessarily
112
Gary S. De Krey argues that James did have success working with dissenters.
What ruined Jamess plans was his impatient assault upon the Test Act. De Krey,
Reformation and Arbitrary Government, 30.
113
Pierre Allix, An account of the private league betwixt the late King James the
Second, and the French king in a letter from a gentleman in London, to a gentleman in
the country (London, 1689; Wing A 344), 1415.
114
Allix, An account, 15. Also see De Krey, Reformation and Arbitrary
Government, 24.
115
A case for Jamess authentic belief in liberty of conscience can be found in Gary
S. De Krey, Restoration and Revolution in Britain (New York: Palgrave MacMillan,
2007), 23246. In several works, John Miller has established a foundation for reap-
praising James II and moving away from views of James that were established by Whigs
following the overthrow of Jamess government in 1688: see especially Miller, James II
and Toleration, 1314.
sham of liberty of conscience 99
A view of what both church men and dissenters must expect if by their unhappy divisions
popery and tyranny should return again (London, 1689; Wing A 112), 4344.
117
For a similar work, see Gentleman of that Nation, Popish treachery, or, A short
and new account of the horrid cruelties exercised on the Protestants of France (London,
1689; Wing P 2958). According to this Gentleman, the persecutions in France over the
previous centuries meant that Catholics would always try to destroy Protestant
England.
118
Anonymous, The absolute necessity, 4647.
119
While I have stressed Jamess personal commitment to liberty of conscience, the
situation for James was complex and he had conflicting views of English dissenters.
Gwynn, in Huguenot Heritage, has demonstrated how James continued to apply pres-
sure on various dissenting individuals and communities.
100 gregory dodds
120
Gary S. De Krey has made a strong case for the importance of the dissenting
community and therefore the rationality of James IIs attempts to form a coalition with
them in order to expand religious toleration in England. But the history of early non-
conformity has yet to be fully freed from post-1689 perspectives that divide English
Protestants into exclusively defined camps and that treat dissenting numbers as a small
fraction of what the church could command. James did not err in supposing that
this broad Protestant middle might be turned towards eliminating persecution and the
penal laws and providing relief, even for Catholics. De Krey, Reformation and
Arbitrary Government, 30.
sham of liberty of conscience 101
1
Charles Davenant, An Essay upon the probable methods of making a people gainers
in the ballance of trade (London: 1699; Wing D309), 28.
2
Davenant, An Essay, 29; Matthew Glozier, The Huguenot Soldiers of William of
Orange and the Glorious Revolution of 1688: The Lions of Judah (Portland, OR &
Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2002), 70, 113, 114, 130, 131, 136.
3
John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 16881783
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 56.
how dangerous, the protestant stranger?105
4
Cited in Bernard Cottret, The Huguenots in England: Immigration and Settlement,
c. 15501700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 242; Maureen Waller,
1700: Scenes from London Life (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2000), 26871.
5
Daniel Defoe, Some Seasonable Queries (London: 1697; Wing S4609A), 3; Alison
Olson, The English Reception of the Huguenots, Palatines, and Salzbuergers, 1680
1734: A Comparative Analysis, in Vigne & Littleton, Strangers, 487.
6
The Case of the French Protestants Refugees, settled in and about London, and in the
English Plantations in America (London: 1696; Wing C1080A).
7
Davenant, An Essay, 27.
8
Waller, Scenes from London Life, 135, 136, 244, 372.
106 lisa clark diller
9
Robin Gwynn, Huguenot Heritage: The History and Contribution of the Huguenots
in Britain (London: Routledge, 1985), 6773.
10
See chapters 7 and 8, by David Onnekink and Andrew Thompson, below.
11
Matthew Tindale, An Essay Concerning the Power of Magistrates (London: 1697;
Wing T1302), 164.
12
Defoe, The Englishmans Choice (London: 1694), 1217.
13
Stephen Baxter, William III and the Defense of European Liberty, 16501702
(Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1966), 20713.
14
Cottret, Huguenots in England, 220.
how dangerous, the protestant stranger?107
others, like Daniel Defoe, that it was in a common sense of the defence
of the common liberties of Europe.15
Bishop Compton is one example of the complicated sort of reaction
devout members of the Church of England might have with respect to
the Huguenots. He was a good friend to them, well-known for his
advocacy on their behalf, even writing to his clergy, for the poor
French Protestants[I] do entreat the contribution of your charitable
care.16 It appears that his primary concern was the spread of Roman
Catholicism. He therefore saw the testimonies and commitments of
the Huguenots as promoting opposition to Catholicism not only in
England, but abroad. Ultimately, however, his final concern was always
the Church of England and not simply some sort of general interna-
tional Protestantism.17
Archbishop Thomas Secker also embodied this tension Anglicans
felt regarding foreign Protestantsthey wanted to identify with them
and protect Protestantism abroad, but felt worried about heresy and
lack of orthodoxy and competition when those same Protestants came
to England. Nonconformity was fine when refugees were in the colo-
nies or elsewhere outside Englandin those cases, aid and advocacy
were thickly lavished. It was when they were in England and might
tempt English men and women from their Anglicanism that the threat
resulted in discrimination. Clearly, for these bishops, support ofAngli
can institutions and theology was central and they pursued the sup-
port of foreign Protestants only when it did not threaten those ends.18
Secker, like other bishops before him, tried to convince the Hugue
nots to adopt the Anglican liturgy in their own language, partly by
tying financial aid to those churches that conformed, often to the cha-
grin of the refugees.19 The newly-arrived Jacques Fontaine gave the
Church the ultimate insult when he argued that tying the charity to
religious observance was the core of the problem: It seemedtomeavery
Papistical proceeding, much like what I had seen in France,come
15
Defoe, The Review, vol. 6, no. 7, 19 Apr. 1709 in William Payne (ed.), The Best of
Defoes Review (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951), 156.
16
Compton to Strype, 1685, BL, Add MS 5853, f. 69; see also Sugiko Nishikawa,
Henry Compton, Bishop of London (16761713) and foreign Protestants in Vigne &
Littleton, Strangers, 360362.
17
Nishikawa, Henry Compton, Bishop of London, 361.
18
Robert Ingram, Archbishop Thomas Secker (16931768), Anglican identity and
relations with foreign Protestants in the mid-18th century, in Vigne & Littleton,
Strangers, 534, 535.
19
Ingram, Archbishop Thomas Secker, 52832.
108 lisa clark diller
20
James Fontaine [sic], A Tale of the Huguenots or Memoirs of a French Refugee
Family (New York: John S. Taylor, 1838), 129.
21
Gwynn, Huguenot Heritage, 95103.
22
David Abercromby, A Moral Discourse on the Power of Interest (London, by
Thomas Hodgkin, 1690), 90, 91, 158, 159 (Wing A83).
23
John Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture: Religious
Intolerance and Arguments for Religious Toleration in Early Modern and Early
Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 432.
how dangerous, the protestant stranger?109
Marshall, John Locke, 422, 427; Cottrett, Huguenots in England, 209, 210.
24
were paid, and cursed, and hurried home again Relieving these poor
people, and opening your hands and hearts to them will stop the mouth
of raillery and satire upon the nation.and be an eternal honor to the
nation of Britain in the ages to come. The blessing of him that is ready to
perish will come upon you.27
Liberty, then, was connected to bringing those who shared in the ide-
als of liberty and who were persecuted elsewhere. It was the right thing
to do according to the basic claims of Christianity and for those who
opposed tyranny.
In spite of the consistent efforts to provide for a general Act of
Naturalization that would cover all the French Protestant refugees,
there were many Englishmen arguing against that blanket incorpora-
tion. It appears that the primary line of reasoning against their natu-
ralization was based on their economic threat. In what may be the
most famous speech against the Act, the Bristol M.P., Sir John Knight,
railed against those who would sacrifice our English Liberties to a
number of Mercenary Foreigners and proposes that foreigners would
always choose to send their profits back to the land of their origins.28
This concern with respect to the drain on the finances which immi-
grants would pose was clearly understood by the Huguenots.
Perhaps because of their minority status and self-governing
communities back in France, the Huguenots had a highly organized
system for caring for their own. They developed a thick network of
charitable organizations that paralleled the English ones, and the lat-
ter seem even to have modelled themselves on the former. William
Maitland, for instance, lauded the French School as an example for
other English charity schools in 1739.29 They started hospitals, found
jobs for new arrivals and extended loans and financial support to get
immigrants settled in London, smaller cities in the countryside, and
Ireland.30
27
Defoe, The Review, vol. 6, no. 56, 11 Aug. 1709, in Payne, Best of Defoes Review,
147, 148.
28
Sir John Knight. The Following Speech being spoke off hand upon the debates in the
House of Commons. (London: 1690; Wing K686), 3.
29
Eileen Barrett, Huguenot Integration in late 17th- and 18th-century London:
Insights from Records of the French Church and some Relief Agencies in Vigne &
Littleton, Strangers, 377381.
30
Martin Dinges, Huguenot Poor Relief and Healthcare in the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries in Raymond Mentzer and Andrew Spicer (eds.), Society and Culture
in the Huguenot World, 15591685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002),
167174.
how dangerous, the protestant stranger?111
31
The Case of a Great Number of Silk-weavers, as well French Protestants as English.
(London: 1695; C916).
32
Nishikawa, Henry Compton, Bishop of London, 359, 360.
33
Hillel Schwartz, The French Prophets: The Study of a Millenarian Group in
Eighteenth Century England (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), 57.
34
Glozier, Huguenot Soldiers, 24.
35
Ruth Whelan, Writing the Self: Huguenot Autobiography and the process of as-
similation in Vigne & Littleton, Strangers 470472; Glozier, Huguenot Soldiers, 48;
Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500
1700. (New York: Manchester University Press, 2006), 312.
112 lisa clark diller
36
Abercromby, 140.
37
Glozier, Huguenot Soldiers, 3841. This network was as much economic as it was
military and religious.
38
Both Catholics and Protestants found Louis XIV a villain, and the Catholic
Hapsburg allies of William kept this war from being associated only with religious ele-
ments. Craig Rose, England in the 1690s. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 117; Gwynn,
Huguenot Heritage, 2728.
39
Gilbert Burnet, Ecclesiastical Princes (London, 1682), 97.
40
Popish Treachery; or a Short and New Account of the Horrid Cruelties Exercised on
the Protestants in France. (London: 1689; Wing P2958); An Account of the Sufferings
and Dying Words of Several French Protestants under this present Persecution. (London,
1699; Wing A396).
41
Ingram, Archbishop Thomas Secker, 528.
42
Defoe, The Englishmans Choice, 12.
how dangerous, the protestant stranger?113
48
Davenant, An Essay, 224.
49
By the King and Queen a Declaration for the encouraging of French Protestants to
transport themselves into this kingdom (London: 1689; Wing 2505).
50
Declaration of Royal Grace and Bounty (London: 1695; Wing H2087).
51
Marshall, John Locke, 24547; Cottret, Huguenots in England, 23438.
how dangerous, the protestant stranger?115
the power of the clergy and loyalty to the state, both mirrored and
contributed to the national discussion regarding these issues.
The influential conformist Huguenot minister, Pierre Allix,attempted
to articulate this idea in his 1693 A Letter to a Friend. He argued that
Christians should not spend a great deal of time worrying about
whether it is lawful for them to pray for their governors who may be
accused of usurpation. Christians have nothing to do with the
Affairs of State, tho they may take cognizance of them as they are citi-
zens A stranger who is bound by his oath to his own Prince, can
possess nothing in a foreign State, he hath no leave to trade in a strange
country any further than he submits himself to the laws of the Society.52
The latter sentence seems clearly targeted at assuring the English com-
munity of Huguenot loyalty. Political loyalty should be unconnected to
spiritual loyalty. In the Threadneedle Street church, for instance,
wealthy entrepreneurs such as Thomas Papillon set the tone for
fundamental support of the English crown over and against Louis XIV.
Robin Gwynns study of this church reveals that it seems impossible to
differentiate between its members religious identification as perse-
cuted Protestants and their economic commitments and loyalty to the
English crown.53
And yet, many Huguenots also found that they were able to main-
tain what seemed often to be Whig sensibilities with loyalty to Tory
governments, when necessary. Active in coffee houses and attempting
to understand the party system, some Whig writers, such as Rapin
Thoyras and Emmanuel de Cize, laid out the ideologies in a manner
that associated Tories with the absolutism of Louis XIV.54 One of the
most prolific of Huguenot political writers, Abel Boyers political eco-
nomic publications placed him firmly in the camp of supporting the
Whig party, the Bank of England, an expansive British identity and
wars to promote international trade.55 And so the Huguenots consist-
ently positioned themselves as loyal to the English state and helpful in
expanding her wealth and trading relationships.
Pierre Allix. A Letter to a Friend (London: 1693; Wing A1225), 7, 12, 13.
52
Robyn Gwynn, The Huguenots in Britain, the Protestant International and the
53
56
Daniel Defoe Refugees Englands good fortune, The Review, vol. 6, no. 35, in
Payne, The Best of Defoes Review, 136.
57
William OReilly, The Naturalization Act of 1709 and the Settlement of Germans
in Britain, Ireland and the Colonies, in Vigne & Littleton, Strangers, 494, 495; Oxford
DNB, s.v. Josiah Child, Carew Reynell, Charles Davenant; Gwynn, Huguenot
Heritage, 59.
58
OReilly, Naturalization Act of 1709, 496.
59
Olson, English reception, 481; Michael Duffy, Englishman and Foreigner
(Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healy, 1986), 16.
how dangerous, the protestant stranger?117
Gwynn, Huguenot Heritage, 155, 156; Schwartz, The French Prophets, 60.
60
Defoe, The Review, vol. 6, no. 41, 7 July 1709, in Payne, The Best of Defoes Review,
61
141, 142.
62
Defoe, Some Seasonable Queries (London: 1697; Wing S4609A), 4. This is echoed
by the Irish Protestant Richard Cox in Some thoughts on the bill depending before the
right honourable the House of Lords (Dublin: 1698; Wing C6725), 12.
63
William Petty, Political Arithmetic (London: 1690) in George Aitken (ed.), Later
Stuart Tracts (Westminster: Archibald Constable & Co., 1903), 66.
64
Durand Dauphin. A Huguenot Exile in Virginia (New York: Pioneer Press, 1934),
176, 177.
118 lisa clark diller
65
Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, From New Babylon to Eden: The Huguenots and Their
Migration to Colonial South Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press,
2006), 167.
66
OReilly, Naturalization Act of 1709, 496, 498.
67
Glozier, Huguenot Soldiers, 5.
68
Olson, English Reception, 488.
how dangerous, the protestant stranger?119
Robin Gwynn
The Huguenots who came to Britain in the 1680s and 1690s were reli-
gious refugees. To remain undisturbed in their homeland, they had
simply to sign a statement abjuring the errors of John Calvin. Many
refused to do so, or felt so guilty at what they had done that they chose
to run the loss and dangers inherent in illegal flight in order to renounce
abjurations they had signed under duress.
Their actions speak eloquently of their religious determination, yet
some who found themselves stranded across the Channel on British
shores found they were expected to conform to an unfamiliar kind of
Protestant worship based on more Anglican ways than was their cus-
tom. This paper opens by analysing three early cases where conform-
ing congregations ran into difficulties. It goes on to show that while
there were many practical advantages for the refugees in conforming,
their memory of their French roots was often too vivid to allow it, so
that there is an unmistakable movement back towards non-conformity
when opportunity permitted. The essay then examines the variety of
opinion and practice cloaked by the word conformity, noting how the
problematic relationship of conformity and non-conformity was not
confined to England and extended well into the eighteenth century.
***
As they fled, the refugees needed to decide where to make their new
home. Britain looked promising. Potentially, England was the most
powerful Protestant country. London was the largest Protestant city
in Europe, offering excellent employment opportunities. French
Protestant churches were already based in the city and in Westminster.
Other French-speaking churches around the country, at Canterbury
and Norwich and Southampton, shared with the Threadneedle
Streetchurch in London an existence and a Calvinist type of church
discipline and organization that dated back to the sixteenth cen-
tury.Following the onset of the dragonnades in 1681, Charles II was
122 robin gwynn
1
Gwynn, Conformity, 2930; Robin D. Gwynn, The Distribution of Huguenot
Refugees in England, HSP 21 (196570), 40436.
2
C.R.L. Fletcher, Some Troubles of Archbishop Sancroft, HSP 13 (192329), 240.
3
Gwynn, Distribution, 4178, 424.
4
Bodl., Tanner MS cxxiv, f. 225.
124 robin gwynn
5
HSP 7 (190104), 145; Eugne et mile Haag, La France Protestante (ou Vies des
Protestants Franais), 10 vols. (Paris: E. Thunot, 184659), s.n. Gourjault; Mme
Alexandre de Chambrier, Henri de Mirmand et les Rfugis de la Rvocation de ldit de
Nantes, 16501721 (Neuchtel: Attinger Frres, 1910), 108, 1158, and appendix p. 46;
H. D. Guyot, Le Marquis de Venours (Groningen: n.p., 1906); HSQS, LVIII (1994), 75.
6
HSQS, XLIX (1971), 16; HSP 7 (190104), 1434; Corporation of London Record
Office [hereafter CLRO], ex-Guildhall MS 346, no. 260. Moise Charas, apothecary to
Charles II, was a former Paris physician, endenized in 1682: see Baron F. de Schickler,
Les glises du Refuge en Angleterre (3 vols., Paris: Fischbacher, 1892), II, 313; HSQS,
XVIII (1911), 1301. Daniel (de) Poulveret or Poulverel or Pulveret came from
Marennes, where he had been a naval officer in a French man of war (HSQS, XLIX
(1971), 161); he too was endenized in 1682 (HSQS, XVIII (1911), 151, 159).
7
Bodl., Tanner MS xcii, f. 143r.
8
Bodl., Tanner MS xcii, f. 137r.
9
Bodl., Tanner MSS xcii, ff. 1378, and cxxiv, f. 225.
strains of worship: the huguenots and non-conformity125
10
Bodl., Tanner MSS xcii, ff. 145, 137, and cxxiv, f. 225; HSP 19 (195258), third
pagination, 36, 39.
11
Bodl., Tanner MS xcii, f. 143r; for Culpeper, see Anita McConnell, Culpeper, Sir
Thomas (1625/61697?), Oxford DNB, online edn [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/
article/6884, accessed 5 Oct. 2009].
12
Bodl., Tanner MS cxxiv, ff. 2278.
126 robin gwynn
idea of what the correct garb should be. This was the issue that broke
the Hollingbourne settlement.
The first shots in this ecclesiastical skirmish were fired when the
congregations reader, a Monsieur de la Contie, was shut out of the
church. James Wilson, the local rural dean, investigated and reported
back to Sancroft on 10 May 1683 that it was not Rondeau who had
excluded him, but Thomas, who objected to the fact that here was a
layman officiating in his church wearing a cravat and grey coat. (It was
also alleged that De la Contie had behaved badly at Boughton, but it
was his dress that was at the heart of the matter.) Rondeau was now
acting as reader in addition to his other duties which, Wilson noted, he
performed decently and reverently, with allowance onely for that
which is naturall to all French men, who seem to doe all things in
hast.13
Rondeau may not have been too unhappy with de la Conties exclu-
sion, since he had little positive to say on his behalf.14 However Thomas
was still not satisfied, and early the following month Wilson was again
writing to Sancroft, this time to warn the Archbishop that Thomas
designed to shut the church doors against Rondeau unless he wore a
surplice. Wilson added that he had advised no action should be taken
without Sancrofts prior permission, since it was the Archbishop who
had authorized the congregation. However this warning came a little
late, for Thomas had already acted. By the vicars account, Rondeau
refused to wear a surplice, and he therefore gave order that Rondeau
was not to be admitted to the church without it. I conceive that he is
bound to doe it as a priest episcopally ordained, according to the laws
of the Church of England, Thomas informed Sancroft. It gives great
offence to severall of my parish who complained to me. Thomas argued
that it might cause public disturbance and undermine loyalty and obe-
dience if Rondeau was allowed to continue in his practice.15
Rondeaus own account, in Latin, is slightly different. He told
Sancroft that he conformed exactly as did the ministers of the Savoy
church in Westminster. They used only a black gown (toga pullata),
with no surplice (superpelliceo). So did he. He had told Thomas that if
Sancroft positively ordered him to wear a surplice, he would do so. But
Thomas had shut the doors against him anyway.16
13
Bodl., Tanner MS xcii, f. 144.
14
Bodl., Tanner MS xcii, ff. 1478.
15
Bodl., Tanner MS xcii, ff. 134, 136.
16
Bodl., Tanner MS xcii, f. 136r.
strains of worship: the huguenots and non-conformity127
17
Bodl., Tanner MS xcii, f. 137.
18
LPL, MS 1029, no. 65. The minutes of the Consistory of the French Church of
Canterbury (Canterbury Cathedral Library, U47-A-7 sub 23 Feb. 1699) describe
Jacques as ministre hetrodoxe and leader of the schismatic Socinian group set up in
Canterbury by his brother, the silk merchant Claude Rondeau.
19
Bodl., Tanner MS xcii, f. 76r; Schickler, Les glises du Refuge en Angleterre, II, 331.
20
Bodl., Tanner MS cxxiv, f. 225r.
128 robin gwynn
21
CLRO, ex-Guildhall MS 346, no.68, and ex-Guildhall MS 279 sub 3 Oct. 1683 and
27 Sept. 1684; The Huguenot Library, University College, London [hereafter HL/
UCL], Bounty MS 2, pt. 5, account no. 12, and Bounty MS 6, 4 Dec. 1689. He returned
to the Hollingbourne area to serve the chapel of Huckinge 169097 as curate to the
Vicar, before moving to Canterbury: HSP 7 (190104), 145.
22
Schickler, Les glises du Refuge en Angleterre, II, 331.
23
PRO, SP 29/417, no. 275.
strains of worship: the huguenots and non-conformity129
24
un Calviniste est un des plus dangereux sujets quune monarchie puisse avoir;
Bodl., Rawlinson MS C.984, f. 51v.
25
Bernard Cottret, The Huguenots in England: Immigration and Settlement c.1550
1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 163.
26
William Durrant Cooper, Protestant Refugees in Sussex, Sussex Archaeological
Collections, XIII (1861), 2023.
27
Schickler, Les glises du Refuge en Angleterre, I, 291302; W.J. Hardy, Foreign
Refugees at Rye, HSP 2 (18878), 40627.
130 robin gwynn
The Earl urged that great care be taken when any new refugee colony
was settled, and that action be taken against those English turbulent
fanaticks, who do not only every day disturb our church, but would
alsoe pervert those French that would willingly comply with the
Government. Once the French saw the laws against English Dissenters
severely enforced, he believed, they will for feare of the like punish-
ment acquiesce more willingly from faction. He went on to bemoan
the failure to seize the opportunity of the restoration of the monarchy
in 1660 to force the Presbyterian French churches at Threadneedle
Street and Canterbury to conform, a failure he saw as the chiefe root
from whence all these evills spring.28
The second document is a letter from Paul Bertrand himself, sent a
year later in April 1684 to Charles Mossom,29 secretary to the commit-
tee responsible for administering public charitable funds for the
Huguenots (and therefore paying Bertrands salary). This angry and
indignant retort to rumours circulating in London that he neglected
his ministerial duties is now in the Rawlinson manuscripts in the
Bodleian Library,30 evidence that Mossom referred it to Bishop
Compton. The particular target of Bertrands vitriol was the Consistory
of the French Church of London, whose representatives on the
Committee had doubtless passed on the rumours.
While the church at Rye was conformist in accordance with royal
orders, and the congregation met in the parish church,31 the non-
conformist French Church of London had been largely responsible for
its foundation. In November 1681, the committee of which Mossom
was secretary urged the Threadneedle Street Consistory to consult key
members of the church and develop ideas for settling the recent arriv-
als who had flooded in since the onset of the dragonnades. Within a
fortnight one of the elders, Abraham Carris, had gone down to Rye
with the fishermen, and reported back that the magistrates agreed to
take them. A week later, the deacon Michel Savary was authorised to
buy provisions for their voyage, and the first two boats, with 37 people,
left on 6 December. Five further boats left for Rye later in the month,
and another elder, Matthieu Hebert, was sent to help the colonists
28
Bodl., Tanner MS xxxv, f. 210.
29
Also referred to in various manuscripts as Mosom, Masson and Mosson, but it is
as Charles Mossom that the name appears in the printed Account of the Disposal of the
Money (Wing M2858) in 1688.
30
Bodl., Rawlinson MS C.984, ff. 512.
31
CSPD, 1682, 197.
strains of worship: the huguenots and non-conformity131
settle in.32 Yet another church officer, the deacon Daniel Brulon, under-
took to convey the entire fishermens catch to London and Westminster,
for which he was granted the freedom of the city of London. The gov-
ernment supported the venture, encouraging the local authorities in
their reception of the settlers and ordering that Brulons agents were
not to be molested or hindered.33
Bertrand made no acknowledgement of this background, but he
told Mossom in no uncertain terms that he did not expect to be
instructed on the duties and cares of a minister by the merchants or
wool carders of the London church. The real trouble, he said, was that
he wasnt Calvinist enough. He baptized sick children in their homes
and exhorted his flock to use the splendid Anglican prayers, but that
was not well received. If on the other hand he were to preach
Independency or at least prophesy happy deliverance from the ever
tyrannical yoke of the bishops, he would be the best man in the world.
He described the spirit of Calvinism as impudent and impassioned,
full of the indiscreet zeal of a ridiculous form of government.34
Yet that was precisely the form of government that his congregation
had chosen exile to preserve; Bertrand had put himself out on a limb,
and few if any refugees wanted to follow. While he suggested in 1684
that discord at Rye was a thing of the past in his congregation, such a
claim hardly squares with his own words. In any event, he seems to
have left Rye by the middle of the following year, when he was in
London, and he departed English shores in late 1685 to exercise his
ministry in the New World, in Maryland. His replacement, Pierre
Benech, was appointed to Rye in 1686.35
***
In the course of his diatribe Bertrand briefly mentioned the examples
of Ipswich and Wandsworth as further demonstrating that wherever
the spirit of Calvinism insinuated itself, nothing escaped its venom.
The reference to Ipswich is interesting, because the documents con-
cerning that settlement talk about economic rather than religious dif-
ficulties, although it seems from an early newsletter of 3 September
1681 that the earliest suggestions of an Ipswich colony had expected it
32
HSQS, LVIII (1994), 689.
33
PRO, SP 44/66, p. 100.
34
Bodl., Rawlinson MS C984, f. 51.
35
HSQS, LVIII (1994), 148; Schickler, Les glises du Refuge en Angleterre, II, 335;
Bodl., Rawlinson MS C984, f. 72.
132 robin gwynn
36
CSPD, 16812, 437.
37
CLRO, ex-Guildhall MS 346, no. 261.
38
B.H.G. Wormald, Clarendon: politics, history and religion 16401660 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1951), 244, 262; Walter G. Simon, The Restoration
Episcopate (New York: Bookman Associates, 1965), 211.
strains of worship: the huguenots and non-conformity133
did not favour and encourage, yet they did not, at least they had nothith-
erto, condemned nor reproved the scandalous and rebellious proceed-
ings of their Presbyterian brethren in England, against the King and
against the Church: which until they should do by some public act or
manifestation of their judgement to the contrary, I could not choose but
think they approved; or at least did not dislike what our Presbyterians in
England had done, and were still doing.39
After being transferred from the bishopric of Worcester to Winchester
in 1662, Morley inherited specific problems regarding French
Protestants at Southampton and in the Channel Islands. The Channel
Islands had been stranded in a curious situation following the English
Reformation, being French speaking and dependant on France for
ministers and having a Calvinist structure of Consistories, Colloquies
and Synods, yet being ruled by a country whose church was governed
by bishops. Steps were taken to bring Jersey into line with Anglicanism
in the 1620s and 1630s, but Guernsey remained Calvinist until the
Restoration.40 Morley therefore needed to nurture a still insecure
Anglicanism in the Channel Islands, and from his perspective the
French church at Southampton was a thorn in his side.
The French-speaking Southampton congregation, consisting of
Walloons and French, had been founded in 1567. Right from its ori-
gins, it had always had close mercantile and ecclesiastical ties with the
Channel Islands.41 These ties persisted, were indeed maintained until
the nineteenth century.42 Although the Southampton congregation
was at a low ebb around the time of Morleys appointment to Winchester,
its links with the Channel Islands remained unmistakable. For exam-
ple, the ten burials recorded in its register between 1660 and 1664
39
Robert S. Bosher, The Making of the Restoration Settlement (London: Dacre Press,
1951), 49, 834, 1289; C.E. Whiting, Studies in English Puritanism from the Restoration
to the Revolution, 16601688, (London: S.P.C.K., 1931), 354.
40
See Schickler, Les glises du Refuge en Angleterre, II, chaps. 1721; G.R. Balleine,
A History of the Island of Jersey (London: Staples Press, 1950), especially chap.10; D.M.
Ogier, Reformation and Society in Guernsey (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1996).
41
Andrew Spicer, The French-speaking Reformed Community and their Church in
Southampton, 1567c.1620, Huguenot Society, New Series, 3 (1997), 1920 and
elsewhere.
42
Edwin Welch (ed.), The Minute Book of the French Church at Southampton 1702
1939, (Southampton: Southampton University Press, 1979), 1. Even the title subse-
quently given to the church register is significant: Registre des Baptesme, Mariages et
Mortz, et Jeusnes, de leglise Wallonne et des Isles de Jersey, Guernesey, Serq, Origny
etc, etablie a Southampton.
134 robin gwynn
43
Humphrey Marett Godfray (ed.), Registre, HSQS, IV (1890), 116.
44
Joannes H. Hessels (ed.), Ecclesiae Londino-Batavae Archivum. Tomi Tertii, Pars
Secunda. Epistulae et Tractatus cum Reformationis tum Ecclesiae Londino-Batavae
Historiam Illustrantes (4 vols. in 3, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 188797),
III, ii (1897), 2554.
45
French Church of London [hereafter FCL], MS 5, p. 537, and MS 45, sub 21 Sept.
1668.
46
A. Browning (ed.), English Historical Documents 16601714 (London: Eyre &
Spottiswoode, 1953), 381.
47
Schickler, Les glises du Refuge en Angleterre, II, 2324. Laud argued that the
permission of the forraigne Churches and discipline was the occasion of many factious
persons in his Diocese: J[ohn] B[ulteel], A Relation of the Troubles of the Three Forraign
Churches in Kent. Caused by the Injunctions of William Laud, (London: 1645; Wing
B5452), 10.
strains of worship: the huguenots and non-conformity135
48
Hessels, Ecclesiae Londino-Batavae Archivum, III, ii, 25547.
49
Samuel Pepys, The Diary: A New and Complete Transcription, ed. Robert Latham
and William Matthews (11 vols., London: G. Bell & Sons, 197083), III, 293 n.2.
50
Bodl., Rawlinson MS C.983, ff. 5455.
51
Elie Brevet, pastor of Bourgneuf until 1681, re-ordained in the Church of England
1682, later minister at the conformist French church of Greenwich 169395.
136 robin gwynn
those to come in that were the beginners and are the maintayners of the
Presbyterian Discipline, may be dangerous to ourselves by theyr joining
(at least in opinion) with the most inveterate and most irreconciliable of
our enimies amongst ourselves here at home, I mean our Presbyterians;
who from a liberty allowed at first to a few strangers (especially French
and Dutch) to woorship God theyr own way, are grown to soe formida-
ble a number amongst us, that they have once allready shut us out of our
own churches, and will doe soe againe, if God suffer us for the punish-
ment of our sins against him, to suffer them to grow up amongst us
againe
Morley expressed the hope, therefore, that the only Huguenot minis-
ters to be allowed into England should be such as Monsieur dOrtye52
and those of the Savoy-French Church are, while the others could go to
such places as Holland and Germany where they could be safe and
could be assisted without risking harm to ourselves. He also argued
that refugees should have to conform, noting that even in liberal
Holland, when the state contributed to the meeting place, worshippers
had to conform to the established religion.53
To give steel to his argument, Morley enclosed with his letter another
that he had just received from the Mayor and two other Southampton
leaders, asking Compton to discuss it with Archbishop Sancroft. The
Southampton authorities complained that the English Dissenters
believe the French Chappell here an Asylum and that theire resorting
thither protects them against the Law, it being the generall excuse of
those who are questioned by the Justices on the Statute of 3 K: Jac: 4
which wee now are putting in Execution. They asked that the French
church be forced to conform to the Church of England liturgy or to
admit only aliens.
The Mayors letter added that severall persons of quality in the
Channel Islands complained that when their countrymen returned
from Southampton, they come home debauched from the Liturgy of
our Church and some have then endeavoured to sett up private meet-
ings there; which the complainants justly impute to the liberty and
52
Andr (de) Lortie, pastor at La Rochelle 167480. While he was still in France, in
1677, his treatise on communion had been translated by Compton (Edward Carpenter,
The Protestant Bishop: being the life of Henry Compton, (London: Longman, Green &
Co., 1956), 327). Re-ordained in 1682, Lortie was minister of the French church of the
Savoy in 168283 and was appointed rector of Paglesham, Essex, in 1683.
53
Bodl., Rawlinson MS C.984, f. 50.
strains of worship: the huguenots and non-conformity137
practice of this Chappell, to which the Islanders all resort, whilst they
are here.54
These were serious accusations, especially at a time when Dissent
was under severe persecution, and Morleys unease is palpable. It is
therefore no surprise that he moved strongly to ensure that the new
congregation at Wandsworth, at least, should be forced to conform to
the letter of Anglican law.
We do not know a great deal about the earliest months of the French
church of Wandsworth. There is no evidence that it was deliberately
founded in the same way as Ipswich, Rye and Boughton Malherbe,
with an existing church or prominent individual as sponsor. Like those
settlements, though, it had a particular trade at its heart, in this case
felt and hat making and dyeing. Wandsworth had a long connection
with hat making extending back to the Middle Ages. Its particular
advantage for the refugees was probably that its proximity to London
meant that a market was readily to hand, yet it was far enough away
from the capital to escape effective control by the recently chartered
Feltmakers Company.55 Individual French Protestants lived there long
before the Revocation, notably Nicolas Tonnet, who settled in
Wandsworth around 1630 and prospered there for the next fifty years.56
It is plain that Wandsworth was conformist from its foundation.
Under the policy pursued by the government and the crown in the
early 1680s, nothing else was acceptable, and it was only its conformity
that allowed the congregation to claim financial support from the col-
lection made under the 1681 brief. Since the Savoy church minutes
have not survived, it is impossible to estimate the extent of its early
influence. As one would expect, the Wandsworth congregation made
much of its conformity when seeking Anglican support and financial
assistance, mentioning the Savoy in the process. There are two rele-
vant documents, both unfortunately undated which has only added
to confusion caused by researchers and cataloguers assuming that
Wansor or Winsor must be Windsor whereas it is in factWandsworth.
54
Ibid., f. 48.
55
John Traviss Squire, The Huguenots at Wandsworth in the County of Surrey,
HSP I (18856), 2378; Norman G. Brett-James, The Growth of Stuart London
(London: London & Middlesex Archaeological Society and George Allen & Unwin,
1935), 4912. By the early 1690s observers noted the recent establishment of a great
manufacture of hats(as at Wandsor, Putney): Henry Horwitz (ed.), The Parliamentary
Diary of Narcissus Luttrell 169193 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 286.
56
Squire, Huguenots at Wandsworth, 2323; HSQS, LVIII (1994), 36.
138 robin gwynn
57
Bodl., Rawlinson MS C984, f. 258.
58
Bodl., Tanner MS xcii, f. 114.
59
HSQS, LVIII (1994), 143. Carron replied he had not begun any lawsuits and
promised not to be involved in any way.
60
Squire, Huguenots at Wandsworth, 283, 307.
strains of worship: the huguenots and non-conformity139
65
HL/UCL, Burn Donation MS 28, p.2.
66
J. Durel, A View of the Government and Publick Worship of God in the Reformed
Churches beyond the Seas (London: 1662; Wing D2695), 7691.
67
Guildhall Library, MS 7412, vol. I, pp. 812, 878, 934. The situation, however,
was ambiguous; as one ally put it, you will finde upon the whole, that by the Kings
speciall favour they are exempt from Episcopall jurisdiction (Bodl., Tanner MS xcii,
f. 158v).
68
John-Armand Dubourdieu, An Appeal to the English Nation (London: 1718),
812.
strains of worship: the huguenots and non-conformity141
69
Gwynn, Conformity, 25. The Threadneedle Street church is the only one in
London for which we have full enough records to be sure of the picture.
142 robin gwynn
72
The Entring Book of Roger Morrice (6 vols., Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007),
III,54.
73
FCL, MS 135, ff. 12.
74
A similar situation existed in Ireland following legislation in 1695; Susanne
Lachenicht, Differing Perceptions of the Refuge? in Dunan-Page, Religious Culture,44.
75
Gwynn, Conformity, 35.
144 robin gwynn
Between 1681 and 1687, during the years when royal policy dictated
the necessity for conformity as the price for establishment, all substan-
tial new French congregations in England were conformist. In the
1690s, when there was freedom of choice, there was a total reversal: all
new foundations were non-conformist. Nor is it only in the capital that
one can see the trend to non-conformity. Two cases in the west coun-
try are particularly striking. The Dartmouth congregation, founded as
conformist, forced out its re-ordained minister and turned to non-
conformity in 1691 even though that meant the loss of the 22 p.a.
stipend the conformist minister had been receiving. And at Plymouth,
where a conforming refugee congregation already existed, a non-con-
formist alternative was founded in 1689 and rapidly became much the
larger of the two.76
***
Until this point, we have been viewing conformists as if they were a
group of people uniformly willing to adopt Anglican ways. In reality,
that was far from the case. Indeed when James II and Jeffreys wished to
restrict assistance only to refugees living in entire conformity and
orderly submission to our government established in Church and
State, it is just possible that they were proposing to exclude not merely
non-conformists, but also conformists such as those at the Savoy
whose degree of conformity was suspect in the eyes of Anglican lead-
ers of the Morley school. No such argument has ever previously been
advanced, so this suggestion requires some justification.
The Savoy church was the first of its conformist kind. At the time of
the Civil War, a group based in Westminster had broken away from
the Threadneedle Street church. After 1660, both sides petitioned
the restored monarchy, and Charles II licensed the members of the
Westminster congregation to continue to worship provided they sub-
mitted to the Church of England, under the imediate jurisdiction of
the Bishop of Londonand use the booke of common praiers by law
established in their owne French language, according as it is used in
the Island of Jersey. They were allowed as many ministers to performe
holy ordinances as shall be thought fitt provided theire names be first
76
HL/UCL, Bounty MS 7, Reglement of Nov. 1689; Alison Grant and Robin Gwynn,
The Huguenots of Devon, Report and Transactions of the Devonshire Association for
the Advancement of Science, Literature and the Arts, 117 (1985), 167; Gwynn,
Distribution, 413, 422.
strains of worship: the huguenots and non-conformity145
77
Bodl., Rawlinson MS C.984, f. 5.
78
HSQS, XLIX (1971), 16, 226.
79
LPL, Fulham Palace MSS, Ruling for the Savoy Church approved by the Bishop of
London, 23 Nov. 1721, Des Anciens, articles 1 and 4, and Du Consistoire, article 1.
Another, undated paper in LPL, Fulham Palace MS 124, states there were about 24
elders (serving the daughter churches of Des Grecs and Spring Gardens as well as the
Savoy itself).
146 robin gwynn
enough for the Bishop, who wanted no consistory, but two Church
wardens, with one of them nominated by the minister.
Not all Anglicans thought alike on these matters. The Savoy found a
particularly staunch defender in Bishop Compton, who informed
Archbishop Sancroft in May 1686 that he felt
it would be an insolent demand in me, to require more of the French
Church in the Savoy, then the late King himself did in his constitution of
them. Which only requires their conformity according to the usage of
Gernsey and Jersey, where never surplice or sign of the Cross were ever
used or required: and where they have alwaies taken care of their
churches by way of Consistory.80
The fact Compton was obliged to put pen to paper is sure indication he
was being pressured to act to regulate the Savoy and push it in a more
precisely Anglican direction. Later in the same letter, he revealed the
source of that pressure. Unable to defend himself because he was
already unwelcome at Court although not formally suspended from
his bishopric until September, he requested Sancroft to do me the
favour to acquaint the King and my Lord Chancelour with thus much.
We know, then, that in early 1686 the Court was seeking better con-
trol of the Savoy, and also that it wished to restrict assistance to refu-
gees from public collections only to those living in entire conformity
and orderly submission to our government established in Church and
State. And at the same time, it was proposing to ensure that the refu-
gees were offered the purest possible model of Anglican worship in
French by lending its backing to Dr Pierre Allix. Allix was an eminent
and well-connected Huguenot pastor who had been at Charenton
before the Revocation. He was a Doctor of Divinity of both Oxford and
Cambridge, and he was very willing to conform. In June 1686, King
James II licensed him to conduct a church at Jewin Street without
Aldersgate or any other convenient place for worship in the French
tongue, butt in all things else exactly according to the use of the Church
of England. Control of the church, including its furnishings and adorn-
ments, was taken out of the Bishop of Londons hands and put in those
80
Bodl., Tanner MS xcii, f. 120. For Comptons welcoming attitude towards the
Huguenots see Sugiko Nishikawa, Henry Compton, Bishop of London (16761713)
and Foreign Protestants, in Vigne a& Littleton, Strangers to Citizens, 35965, and
Carpenter, Protestant Bishop, chap. XVII.
strains of worship: the huguenots and non-conformity147
81
Compare PRO, SP 44/337, pp. 367, and SP 31/3, f. 336.
82
In HSP 7 (190104), 1757; HSQS, XXXVII (1935), xiv.
83
Lois G. Schwoerer, Lady Rachel Russell: One of the Best of Women (Baltimore &
London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 159.
84
Allix papers currently on deposit in HL/UCL, folio volume, no.194. The un-
named bishop was another of the seven bishops tried in James IIs reign.
85
HSQS, XXXVII (1935), xi.
148 robin gwynn
86
FCL, MS 7, p. 500; HSQS, LVIII (1994), 3278.
87
Raymond Hylton, Irelands Huguenots and their Refuge, 16621745: An Unlikely
Haven (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2005), 1889.
88
For Brousson, see Utt & Strayer, Bellicose Dove.
strains of worship: the huguenots and non-conformity149
89
Hylton, Irelands Huguenots, 180.
90
Welch, Minute Book, 68, 160ff; Andrew Spicer, The Consistory Records of
Reformed Congregations and the Exile Churches, HSP 28:5 (2007), 645; HSQS, IV
(1890), 1334.
150 robin gwynn
This essay has been confined to the first generation of the refuge, when
memory of the French background was most acute; and it has dealt
only with England. However, the question of conformity was a key
issue wherever the Anglican Church and Huguenot non-conforming
congregations co-existed, and it continued to be so well into the eight-
eenth century. Hylton is particularly clear about the significance of the
divide for Ireland:
Just as it would be inconceivable when discussing the Huguenots that the
religious motivation should be downplayed; it is equally mistaken to
neglect or fob off the very intense differences of opinion that existed
within the French Protestant exilic communities over Conformity to
theEstablished church against the desire to resist conformity to maintain
the purity of the Calvinist faith. Many Huguenots in fact the majority
of those in Dublin, Portarlington and Cork (the three largest Huguenot
settlements in Ireland) in effect joined the tide of Dissent. Yet this
isprecisely what has been denied for the better part of two centuries
The occasion of friction within the Huguenot community between
Conformist (Anglican) and Non-Conformed (Calvinist) elements was
either studiously ignored or else minimized into insignificance In
view of the misrepresentations of the past it is necessary to state firmly
that the place occupied by the Huguenots, as regards religion, in the life
of Ireland would revolve around this question of Conformity vs.
Dissent.91
Across the Atlantic in the New World, the same frictions, the same
range of different motivations for the choice of whether or not to con-
form, the same questions about what conformity entailed, are all evi-
dent. For example, Bertrand Van Ruymbeke has argued with regard to
South Carolina that concern for full citizenship encouraged refugees
(outside Charleston) to conform in 17046,92 while Paula Wheeler
Carlo sees sheer poverty as the driving force behind conformity at New
Rochelle in colonial New York. Both writers show the continuation of
Calvinist practices. The conformist church at New Rochelle described
by Carlo was a plain building with rough unhewn stone outside, una-
dorned whitewashed walls internally, and plain, unpainted pews.
Surviving sermons of its minister between 1725 and 1741 were still
deeply Calvinist, made frequent mention of the Elect, were generously
peppered with anti-Catholic virulence, and did not recommend that
See his From New Babylon to Eden. The Huguenots and their Migration to Colonial
92
93
Paula Wheeler Carlo, Huguenot Refugees in Colonial New York: Becoming
American in the Hudson Valley (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2005), 57, 59, 84, 89,
91, 934.
Chapter SIX
D. J. B. Trim
*The author gratefully acknowledges grants in the 1990s from the Huguenot
Society of Great Britain and Ireland, the University of London Central Research Fund,
the Royal Historical Society, and the British Academy, which made possible the archi-
val research in Paris on which much of this chapter is based. Earlier versions were
given at the conference Huguenot Soldiering 16601780, London, 11 Nov. 2002,
as the annual Friends of the Walter C. Utt. Endowment lecture at Pacific Union
College, 17 Apr. 2009, and published as Huguenot Soldiering c.15601685: The
Origins of a Tradition in Matthew Glozier and David Onnekink (eds.), War, Religion
and Service: Huguenot Soldiering, 16851713 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 930this is
a revised and considerably expanded version of that chapter.
1
I adopt here the periodisation of Mack P. Holt, The French Wars of Religion 1562
1629 (2nd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), rather than the more
traditional one of 156298, although the hostilities of the early seventeenth century
were more limited both geographically and demographically, and did not involve as
large a portion of the Huguenot community, as the wars of the sixteenth century.
2
Jean de Pablo, Contribution a ltude de lhistoire des institutions militaires
huguenotes, i. Larme de mer huguenote pendant la troisime guerre de religion,
and ii. Larme huguenote entre 1562 et 1573, Archiv fr Reformationsgeschichte
47 (1956), 6476, and 48 (1957), 192216; B. Dietz, Privateering in NorthWest
European Waters, 1568 to 1572, Ph.D. thesis (University of London, 1959); essays
in LAmiral de Coligny et son temps (Paris: Socit de lhistoire du protestantisme
franais,1974); and in Avnement dHenri IV, vol. I, Quatrime centenaire de la bataille
de Coutras (Pau: Association Henri IV, 1988); Ronald S. Love, All the Kings
Horsemen: The Equestrian Army of Henri IV, 15851598, SCJ 22 (1991), 51133;
Martine Acerra and Guy Martinire (eds.), Coligny, les protestants et la mer (Paris:
Presses de lUniversit de ParisSorbonne, 1997); Mark Greengrass, Financing
the Cause: Protestant Mobilization and Accountability in France (15621589),
154 d. j. b. trim
in Philip Benedict et al (eds.), Reformation, Revolt and Civil War in France and the
Netherlands 15551585 (Amsterdam: Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van
Wetenschappen, Verhandelingen: Afd. Letterkunde, [new series], no. 176, 1999), 233
54; D. J. B. Trim, Edict of Nantes: Product of Military Success or Failure? in Keith
Cameron, Mark Greengrass and Penny Roberts (eds.), The Adventure of Religious
Pluralism in Early Modern France (Oxford, Bern, New York: Peter Lang, 2000), 8599;
idem, Huguenot Soldiering; Alan James, Between Huguenot and Royal: Naval
Affairs during the Wars of Religion, ibid., 10112; idem, Huguenot Militancy and the
Seventeenth-century Wars of Religion, in Raymond A. Mentzer and Andrew Spicer
(eds.), Society and Culture in the Huguenot World 15591685 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), 20923.
3
Space does not permit the full bibliography (which includes many articles in
periodicals) to be cited here, but see esp. Glozier and Onnekink, War, Religion
and Service, chs. 28; Robin Gwynn, The Huguenots in Britain, the Protestant
International and the Defeat of Louis XIV, in Vigne & Littleton, Strangers to Citizens,
41224; and Matthew Glozier, The Huguenot Soldiers of William of Orange and the
Glorious Revolution of 1688: The Lions of Judah (Brighton & Portland, Oreg.: Sussex
Academic Press, 2002). See also Robin Gwynn, Huguenot Heritage: The History and
Contribution of the Huguenots in Britain (2nd edn, Brighton: Sussex Academic Press,
2001), esp. ch. 9; and the articles collected and repr. in Randolph Vigne and Philip
Rambaut (eds.), Britains Huguenot War Leaders (London: Instructa, 2002).
4
See Gozier and Onnekink, War, Religion and Service, chs. 914, on Huguenot
soldiers in the service of BrandenburgPrussia, BrunswickLneburg, Savoy, and
Russia.
the huguenots and the european wars of religion155
Huguenot soldiering originated around the year 1560, which was also
when the term Huguenot first was used; its derivation was obscure
even at the time but it originated as an insult used by their enemies,
but one that soon the followers of la Religion reforme applied to
themselves.5 Individual Huguenots served (some with distinction) in
the French royal armies during the Italian (or HabsburgValois) Wars
in the 1540s50s, but there was no such thing as Huguenot soldier-
ingas a group experience until after the emergence of the Huguenots
as a clear, distinct and powerful group amongst the French nobility.
This occurred after the death of Henri II in July 1559. It is notable
that, whereas Calvinists were at most some 1012 per cent of the total
population of France, they may have comprised almost a third of
the provincial nobility, including a goodly number of greater nobles
and princes of the blood. They were not distributed evenly across the
country: whereas only one in a hundred of the noblesse of northern
Mayenne was a Calvinist, it was one in four of the nobles of the Beauce
region in northern France, more than one in three of those of the prov-
ince of Quercy, and 40 per cent of the nobility of both the province of
Saintonge and of the election of Bayeux in Normandy.6
The Huguenot nobles came out in the three years after Henri IIs
death as protectors of their common coreligionists against local per-
secutors and Catholic mobs. In 1560 the Calvinist Louis I de Bourbon,
Prince de Cond, led an aristocratic conspiracy to seize, by force if
necessary, control of the regency of the boyking Francois II, which
was dominated by the ultra-Catholic duc de Guise. The plot failed and
Cond was briefly imprisoned, but Francoiss untimely death, succes-
sion by the still younger Charles IX and the consequent fall of the
regency resulted in Conds release.7 Calvinisms ability to attract
5
Jean Crespin, Actes des martyrs (Geneva: 1564), 99495.
6
David Potter, The French Protestant Nobility in 1562: The Associacion de
Monseigneur le Prince de Cond, French History 15 (2001), 310; JeanMarie
Constant, The Protestant Nobility in France during the Wars of Religion: A Leaven of
Innovation in a Traditional World, in Benedict et al, Reformation, Revolt and Civil
War, 701; Stuart Carroll, Noble Power during the French Wars of Religion: The Guise
Affinity and the Catholic Cause in Normandy (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998), 101; and see Philip Benedict, The Dynamics of Protestant Militancy:
France, 15551563, in Benedict et al, Reformation, Revolt and Civil War, 37.
7
Benedict, Dynamics, 4243; N. M. Sutherland, Calvinism and the Conspiracy
of Amboise, History 47 (1962), 11138. Huguenot claims (e.g. Crespin, Actes des
the huguenots and the european wars of religion157
nobles and its organized nature made its adherents a political force
that could not be swept away through repression. Furthermore, not
only did the Reformed faith attract nobles, but in addition probably a
majority of them were drawn from the noblesse dpe (the nobility
of the sword)almost 90 per cent of Calvinist nobles in the Beauce,
for example.8
This preponderance ensured that French Calvinism was militant
and militarised, and thus that it could not simply be suppressed by
persecution, as were nascent Protestant movements in Spain and Italy.
This became evident during the first episode in the history of Huguenot
soldiering, which came in 1562 with the outbreak of the first of eight
wars of religion that were to occupy most of the succeeding 36 years.
In the first war (15623) the Huguenots were able to muster troops
sufficient for both a main army in the Loire valley, under the Prince de
Cond and Gaspard II de Coligny, seigneur de Chtillon and Admiral
of France, and a secondary force, operating in Normandy, under the
comte de Montgommery. Added to these were some regional defence
forces. The infantry units were composed mostly of volunteers raised
through the various local reformed churches. As J. W. Thompson
observes, the Huguenot hierarchy of religious assemblies through
consistories, colloquies, and provincial synods not only helped unite
them into a national body ecclesiologically and theologically. It also
served to unite their forces, for the ecclesiastical framework was
turned to military purposes. Cond requested the reformed consisto-
ries of France in April 1562 each to use such means as you have
promptly to furnish soldiers; and the regional synod of Guyenne, for
example, resolved to have each church form an enseigne [company of
foot] and to group these into regiments by colloquys.9
martyrs, 994) that Cond was innocent, and the victim of a conspiracy by Guise, are
propaganda.
8
Constant, Protestant Nobility in France, 72.
9
Cond to glises rformes de France, 7 April 1562, in Mmoires du Prince de
Cond, in J.-F. Michaud and J.-J.-F. Poujoulat (eds.), Nouvelle collection des mmoires
pour servir lhistoire de France, depuis le XIIIe sicle jusqu la fin du XVIIIe, series 1
(Paris: 1839), VI, 629. See James Westfall Thompson, The Wars of Religion in France
15591576 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1909), 473; Benedict, Dynamics
of Protestant Militancy, 4244 (at 43); Andr Thierry, LHomme de guerre dans
luvre dAgrippa dAubign, in GabrielAndr Prouse, Andr Thierry, Andr
Tournon (eds.), LHomme de guerre au XVIe sicle (SaintEtienne: Universit de Saint
Etienne, 1992), 145; Andr Corvisier, Les Guerres de Religion, 15591598, in Philippe
Contamine (ed.), Histoire militaire de France, vol. I (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1992), 319.
158 d. j. b. trim
10
Estat de partie des princes, seigneurs, chevalliers de lordre, gentishommes, capi-
taynes de lassociacion de Monseigneur le prince de Cond qui ont resolu de vivre et
mourir ensemble pour maintainir levangille en France, 7 Sept. 1562, PRO, SP 70/41,
ff. 5056, printed in Potter, French Protestant Nobility, 31328 (collated with BL,
Lansdowne MS 5, f. 181).
11
E.g., Sommation du Roy a ceux de la nouvelle relligion qui estoyent en armes
a s[ain]te Denis, Dec. 1567, and undertaking of Charles IX with Huguenot nobility
Bibliothque Mazarine, Paris, MS 2620, f. 17 and MS 2619, f. 35 (the latter is undated
but almost certainly from March 1568: cf. Wood, Kings Army, 21).
12
Robert J. Knecht, The French and English Nobilities in the Sixteenth Century:
A Comparison, in Glenn Richardson (ed.), The Contending Kingdoms: France and
England 14201700 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 74.
13
See Kirsten B. Neuschel, Word of Honour: Interpreting Noble Culture in Sixteenth
Century France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989); Robert R. Harding,
Anatomy of a Power Elite: The Provincial Governors of Early Modern France, Yale
Historical Publications, Miscellany, 120 (New Haven & London: Yale University Press,
1978), 201; Sharon P. Kettering, Patronage and Kinship in Early Modern France, FHS
16 (1989), 40910, 418; Wood, The Kings Army, 139; and, e.g., the roolle de la montre
(muster roll) of the gendarmerie company of Charles de La Rochefoucauld, 9 June
1567, Bibliothque Nationale, Paris, Manuscrits franais [hereafter BN, MS Fr.], 25801,
no. 185.
14
Certainly in the first civil war: see Potter, French Protestant Nobility, 3089,
309 n.12, citing CSPF, V (1562), 279, no. 571; see also the summary of gendarmerie
the huguenots and the european wars of religion159
they sometimes took the bulk of a unit, as for example in 1568, when
HenriRobert, duc de Bouillon joined the Huguenot army: he evi-
dently was followed by 70 per cent of his compagnie de gendarmerie of
100 lances, as a new company of 30 was put in its place on the royal
establishment.15 In addition, great Protestant nobles were able to draw
on their affinities to create new units, of both cavalry and infantry.16
Furthermore, many reformedleaning aristocratic rankandfile of
the gendarmerie chose to serve the Calvinist cause, leaving their com-
panies to join the Protestant forces as individuals.17 Catholics would
have called this desertion; the men in question, however, doubtless
believed they were simply obeying higher orders, those of God, rather
than of men (as Acts 5:29 enjoins). Such veterans, together with indi-
vidual volunteers, whether from churches or noble affinities, had to be
formed into new unitspotentially a difficult task, but one that, in
practice, occurred swiftly. This suggests that most, or at any rate many,
men in each unit knew each other already, as members of the same
local church and/or of the same noble affinity.
II
How the first Huguenot soldiers were mobilised in the first and second
civil wars in France during the 1560s is important because it set a pat-
tern for Huguenot soldiering in Europe for the rest of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. Of course, French Protestant soldiering was
initially against the French crown and this indicates why Huguenot
soldiering was mostly mercenary soldieringthere was consistently a
musters, AprilJune 1563, in BN, MS Fr. 3185, ff. 734, which shows that, within
weeks of the end of the first civil war, Huguenot nobles (including Cond, Coligny and
La Rochefoucauld) had their compaignies de gendarmerye again, so that probably the
latter had served under their captains command throughout the first war. The
Huguenot captains retained their companies to the beginning of the second civil war
and they were again placed on the royal establishment after both the second and third
wars.
15
Estat du paiement des Compagnies du gendarmerie, Jan. 1568, BN, MS Fr. 3193,
f. 198. The duc de Bouillons status as a Huguenot is discussed below, p. 168.
16
Potter, French Protestant Nobility, 30910, 31323 passim; and cf. also, e.g., es-
tat of garrison of Dieppe, Dec. 1562, PRO, SP70/47, f. 197v: in two companies of ar-
quebusiers commanded by the comte de Montgommery, 52 out of 460 men were
gentilshommes.
17
E.g., at the start of the third civil war, Jehan de SaintJehan left the company of
Philip de La Roche and went to England: see the company muster roll of 15 Sept. 1569
BN, MS Nouvelles acquisitions franaises 8628, f. 37.
160 d. j. b. trim
18
Elector Palatine to Henry Knollys and Christopher Mundt, 1 Sept. 1562, CSPF, V
(1562), 276, no. 561; Corvisier, Guerres de Religion, 320.
19
Edward Grimeston, A Generall Historie of the Netherlands: continued unto 1608,
out of the best authors (London: 1609), 45657. Geoffrey Parker, The Dutch Revolt
(London: Allen Lane, 1977), genealogical table I.
the huguenots and the european wars of religion161
was he who gave the ultimate order to the fleet to disarm two years
later.20 During the brief period of peace between the third and
fourth wars of religion, there was a renewed Turkish threat in the
Mediterranean. A force of Huguenots served the Venetians against
the infidels in 1571 and French Protestants may have been among the
French troops that fought for the Spanish in the crusade of Lepanto.21
In May 1572, William and Louis of Nassau launched a renewed
revolt in the Netherlands. Louis was responsible for leading an upris-
ing in the south: he took Valenciennes and Mons with an army made
up of Huguenots, Walloon exiles, English volunteers and some German
mercenaries, with three Huguenots as his deputies: Genlis, the sieur
(or seigneur) de Poyet, and the celebrated Franois de La Noue.22
Louiss troops included almost 200 Huguenot gens darmes, in three
companies, and 612 Huguenot infantrymen in seven companies.23
Genlis, as we have seen, had served with the Nassaus in 1568 in the
Netherlands. In the 1560s Poyet had been lieutenant of one of Andelots
two companies of Gendarmerie; Louis made him Governor of Mons in
June 1572.24 It had been an integral part of the plan that Louiss army in
the southern Netherlands would soon be reinforced by a larger
Huguenot contingent, which Genlis returned to France to lead; and
that this would be a prelude to what Coligny, briefly chief adviser of
King Charles IX, planned would be a French declaration of war on
Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of
21
Philip II, trans. S. Reynolds, 2 vols. (London: Collins, 1973), II, 1105.
22
Guillaume Baudart, Les Guerres de Nassau, 2 vols. (Amsterdam: 1616), I, 96, and
131 where Poyet is called sieur; Roger Williams, A Briefe discourse of Warre (1590),
21, and idem, The Actions of the Lowe Countries (1618), 8384, 98: page nos. are in The
Works of Sir Roger Williams, ed. John X. Evans (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972) [here-
after WRW]. Cf. A. E. C. Simoni, Walter Morgan Wolff: An Elizabethan Soldier and
His Maps, Quaerendo, 26 (1996), 668. Poyet is called seigneur in JeanFranois Le
Petit, La grande chronique ancienne et moderne, de Hollande, Zelande, WestFrise,
Utrecht, Frise, Overyssel et Groeningen, 2 vols. (Dordrecht: 1601), II, 266. Standard bio-
graphical and genealogical works shed little extra light on him and none on his actual
title.
23
These are peak strengths: see Estat et compte de la recepte et mise faicte []
pour le service de [] Conte Ludoviq de Nassau, 1 June8 Oct. 1572, in P. J. Blok (ed.),
Correspondentie van en betreffende Lodewijk van Nassau en andere onuitgegeven docu-
menten, Werken van het Historisch Genootshcap te Utrecht, nieuwe serie, 47 (1887),
917; cf. M. Barroux, J. Balteau, M. Prevost, et al (eds.), Dictionnaire de biographie
franaise, 19 vols. to date (Paris: Librairie Letouzey & An, 1936[2001]), V, 11023.
24
Andelot to M. de Montmorency, 30 May 1567, BN, MS Fr. 3179, f. 39; Estat et
compte, 1 Jun.8 Oct. 1572, in Blok, Correspondentie van en betreffende Lodewijk van
Nassau, 93.
162 d. j. b. trim
Spain and the despatch of a royal army into the southern Netherlands.
Genliss force was estimated at 40 ensigns of foot and 1500 horse, by a
Spanish soldier, who was part of the force that intercepted and engaged
it. But Genlis was defeated by the Spanish, taken prisoner, and later
ignominiously strangled in his cell.25
Charles IX lost his nerve, fearing a Spanish invasion and a Catholic
rebellion if he persisted in the planned invasion of the Netherlands,
and a Huguenot rebellion if he now defaulted on the plan. The result
was the Saint Bartholomews Massacre (analysed in chapter 2). The
death or imprisonment of most of the Huguenot leaders ensured that,
for the next few years, the Huguenots could only fight to survive.
Without French assistance, William of Orange, leading a German mer-
cenary army to aid his brother, was driven back into Germany; the
garrison of Mons was thus cut off andeventuallyforced to accept
terms. But the mostly Huguenot garrison, despite their isolation, fac-
ing lite Spanish troops, made a defiant and resolute defence, that was
preserved in French Protestant memory, both in France and in the
countries of the Refuge. Over a century later, a Huguenot author
recalled how the brave Defence of Count Lodowick, assisted by
Mounsieur [sic] de La Noe and many of the French Nobility, made
the Siege of Mons very long and difficult.26
This southern extension of the second Dutch revolt of 1572 demon-
strates well how Huguenots, Dutch and English cooperated towards a
common end. Although the grand design failed, it was French troops,
both in the planning and execution, which formed the major elementof
Louis of Nassaus army. Huguenot troops also rallied to Flushing, after
it rebelled and formed part of the forces serving the State of Zeeland.27
25
Baron J. Kervyn de Lettenhove (ed.), Relations politiques des PaysBas et de
lAngleterre, sous le rgne de Philippe II, 12 vols. (Brussels: Acadmie Royale, 1882
1900), no. 2443, VI, 46871 (at 468); cf. anon., Discours de la deffaicte des troupes du
S[eigneu]r de Genlis, BN, MS Fr. 18587, ff. 5413; Williams, Actions, in WRW, 9294;
Dictionnaire de biographie franaise, XVII, 57779.
26
L. Aubery du Maurier, The lives of all the princes of Orange, from William the
Great, founder of the Commonwealth of the United Provinces (1682), trans. T. Brown
(London, 1693; Wing A4184), 32. Cf. Williams, Actions, in WRW, 8792; and D. J. B.
Trim, Fighting Jacobs Wars. The Employment of English and Welsh Mercenaries in
the European Wars of Religion: France and the Netherlands, 15621610, Ph.D. thesis
(University of London, 2002), 112.
27
E.g., anon. reports to Lord Burghley, 12 and 16 July 1572, and convention be-
tween Magistrates of Flushing and Colonel Gilbert, 15 July 1572, in Lettenhove,
Relations politiques, nos. 2435, 2438, 2437, VI, 454, 458, 457.
the huguenots and the european wars of religion163
Haultain and others to Burghley, 27 Sept. 1572, CSPF, X (157274), 181, no. 575.
28
Calvinism, in Nigel Goose and Lien Luu (eds.), Immigrants in Tudor and Early Stuart
England (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2005), 212; La Mothe Fnlon to Charles
IX, 27 Feb. and 19 Mar. 1573, in A. Teulet (ed.), Correspondance diplomatique de
Bertrand de Salignac de la Mothe Fnlon: Ambassadeur de France en Angleterre de
1568 1575, 7 vols. (Paris & London: Bannatyne Club, 183840), nos. 303, 307, V, 263,
281; Rekening of payments made to units of William of Oranges army, 15725,
Regionaal Archief Leiden [hereafter RAL], Archief der Secretarie 1033, ff. 12r, 43v; Le
Petit, Grand chronique, II, 25354; William of Orange to Poyet, 3 July 1573, Koninklijk
Huisarchief, Den Haag [hereafter KHH], A 11/XIV I/12, f. 341r; Williams, Actions, in
WRW, 135.
30
Commission to Poyet, 1 Aug. 1573, KHH, A 11/XIV I/12, ff. 2rv; Williams,
Actions, in WRW, 13536, 138, 143, 240n.; Le Petit, Grand chronique, II, 266; Baudart,
Guerres de Nassau, I, 13132; Thomas Morgan to Lord Burghley, 13 Sept. 1573,
in Lettenhove, Relations Politiques, no. 2625, X, 81112; cf. Evans, Commentary, in
WRW, 240.
164 d. j. b. trim
31
Le Petit, Grand chronique, II, 267; Williams, Actions, in WRW, 138, 14243, 148;
Baudart, Guerres de Nassau, I, 126; William of Orange to officers of Poyets army, 15
May 1574, KHH, A 11/XIV I/12, f. 396. K. W. Swart, Willem van Oranje en de
Nederlandse Opstand 15721584, ed. Raymond Fagel, Henk van Nierop and M. E. H.
N. Mout (Den Haag: Sdu, 1994), 70.
32
Huguenot companies: e.g., receipts of payments to Captains Duran and dAultrain,
Leiden, 1574, RAL, Archief der Secretarie 1334 (unnumbered).
33
Muster rolls of companies of La Garde and Captain Duran, Nov. 1575, Het
Nationaal Archief, Den Haag [hereafter NA], Collectie Ortell 35; F. J. G. ten Raa and
F. de Bas, Het Staatsche Leger 15681795, vols. IIV (Breda: Koninklijke Militaire
Academie, 191118), I, 28.
the huguenots and the european wars of religion165
Coligny, the admirals daughter, having earlier wed (and buried) as his
third wife, Charlotte de Bourbon, a cousin of Louis de Cond and
Henri de Bourbon, King of Navarre.34 But ties of kinship were also
common at lower levels of the aristocracy; as David Potter shows, there
were numerous lineages which straddled the artificial divide between
France and the Low Countries in the sixteenth century.35 For ideologi-
cal, strategic and familial reasons the Huguenots identified the Dutch
Revolt as a cause worth fighting for, and the Netherlands drew many
Huguenot soldiers.
III
34
Parker, Dutch Revolt, 271, 273, genealogical tables I, III; Potter, French Protestant
Nobility in 1562, 313 n.3: the title of Prince de Porcien was used by Antoine de Croy,
who was, presumably, related to the great Netherlands noble family of Croy.
35
David Potter, The Private Face of Anglo-French Relations in the Sixteenth
Century: the Lisles and their French Friends, in David Grummitt (ed.), The English
Experience in France c. 14501558: War, Diplomacy and Cultural Exchange (Burlington,
Vt. & Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 2089 at 208.
36
Graeme P. Herd, General Patrick Gordon of AuchleuchriesA Scot in
SeventeenthCentury Russian Service, Ph.D. thesis (University of Aberdeen, 1993),
135.
166 d. j. b. trim
was the senior French captain in the Netherlands and indeed one of
the most senior commanders in the Dutch army. La Noue rivals
Coligny and Montgommery for the status of greatest Huguenot soldier
of the sixteenth century. He had been one of the chief captains under
Louis of Nassau at Mons in 1572, and arrived in the Netherlands as
colonel of the first of the Huguenot infantry regiments, of 12 compa-
nies. Antoine de La Garde commanded the second, of 10 companies
plus a company of horse. The total Huguenot establishment in Dutch
pay was 2,500 men in the two regiments of foot, plus 400 horse, of
which half were described as edelen or noblemen.37
In August 1578, de La Noue was appointed marchaldecamp by
the States General and made commanderinchief of the States forces
in Flanders later that year; La Garde was La Noues sergeant-major and,
like his superior, was appointed to the States Council of War. La Noue
held command of the Dutch army of Flanders until his capture by the
Spanish in the late spring of 1580. La Noue was regarded highly by his
employers who, in addition to appointing him to senior army com-
mand, consulted him on wider strategic and political issues. He was
seen by the Spanish as sufficient a threat that, after they captured him
in May 1580 at the Battle of Ingelmunster, they held him in exception-
ally harsh conditions. La Garde, meanwhile, commanded the defence
of Breda in 1581, and for his efforts there was made governor of the
important fortress of BergenopZoom. He held this post until he
took the field in 1583 as Maistre de lArtillerie of an army operating in
northern Brabant and was killed by a cannon ball. Over thirty years
later, La Gardes services lived on in memory. A Dutch chronicler (in a
work published in French and thus probably aimed partly at a Huguenot
readership) called La Garde one of the most valiant, wise and prudent
Captains who was ever employed in the wars of the Low Countries,
one who understood well the making of policy as well as the art of
war; he remained faithful until death.38
37
Le Petit, La Grande chronique, II, 41011, 424. Prince of Orange to States General,
4 Jan. 1580, RAL, Stadsarchief 3021; Ten Raa and de Bas, Het Staatsche Leger, I, 5657,
61, 160.
38
See Henri Hauser, Franois de La Noue (15311591) (Paris: Hachette, 1892),
95125; P. Kervyn de Volkaersbeke (ed.), Correspondance de Franois de La
Noue, surnomm BrasdeFer, accompagne de notes historiques et prcde de la vie
de ce grand capitaine (Ghent, Brussels & Paris: n.p., 1854), 56210 passim; La Noue
to States General, 27 Dec. 1577, Archives des Affaires trangres, Paris, Mmoires
et Documents Franais [hereafter AAE, MDF] 242, ff. 32r37r; Le Petit, La Grande
the huguenots and the european wars of religion167
chronique, II, 410; Ten Raa and de Bas, Het Staatsche Leger, I, 51, 2445; Baudart,
Guerres de Nassau, I, 43839 at 439 (translation mine).
39
Lord Cobham to Sir Francis Walsingham, 6 June 1582, Thomas Doyley to idem,
22 June 1582, John Cobham to idem, 4 Sept. 1582, Sir John Norreys to idem, 2 Dec.
1582, Thomas Stokes to idem, 2 Dec. 1582, CSPF, XVI (1582), 68, 180, 302, 48283,
nos. 74, 180, 49293. In light of the cross-border intermarriages highlighted above, it
is possible that there were also some Huguenot officers in the regiment of Picardy (the
French province bordering the southern Low Countries), which was sent to the United
Provinces in the summer of 1583: Cobham to Walsingham, 3 July 1583, PRO, SP
78/10, f. 1r.
40
Hauser, Franois de La Noue, 12425 (at 124); Ten Raa and de Bas, Het Staatsche
Leger, I, 6364, 108, 173, 183.
41
See Dietz, Privateering in NorthWest European Waters, 424, 426, 428; Jean
Franois Dubost, La France italienne (Paris: Aubier, 1997), 203; Lord Cobham to
Walsingham, 26 July 1582, CSPF, XVI (1582), 188, no. 187; Antnio to Pope Sixtus V,
Aug. 1585, BN, Collection Dupuy, MS 500, f. 152.
168 d. j. b. trim
IV
In 1584, the wars of religion had resumed and from 1585 to 1598 the
Huguenots attention was fixed on France, where Henri de Navarre
battled to become Henri IV of France and to settle the civil wars. Few
Huguenots served in foreign armies in these years; some fought with
German forces, but only when they intervened in France.
In 1587, GuillaumeRobert de La Marck, duc de Bouillon and sov-
ereign Prince of Sedan, was joint commander of a large army, paid for
largely by Elizabeth I of England, that entered France to aid Henri de
Navarre and the Protestant cause. Ultimately defeated by Catholic
forces under the duc de Guise, the army consisted mostly of mercenar-
ies. First among them were Germans, led by Baron Dohna, both cav-
alry (the reiters, whose fame lent their name to the entire force in
contemporary French usage) and infantry (landsknechts). There were
also Swiss infantry, led by Bouillon; but some Huguenots served with
them.42 Bouillons own statusGerman or Huguenotis debateable.
Sedan was a principality of the Holy Roman Empire (and Bouillon was
disputed between France and the Empire), so he could be regarded
as German. In practice, however, the rulers of the several small sover-
eign principalities on the borders of (or actually within) France were
regarded by contemporaries as foreign princes in France: among
them Guise, Bouillon and Navarre, but there were others as well.
These princes were wellintegrated into French aristocratic kinship
networks, typically owned large estates within France, commanded
French armies, served as gouverneurs of French provinces, and were
integral members of the French court and political scene. Bouillon was
himself a Calvinist (like his father before him); he was a cousin of
Navarre and brotherinlaw of one of the Huguenot military leaders,
Henri de La Tour (who inherited the duchy on GuillaumeRoberts
death in 1588). Bouillon effectively was a Huguenot himself, not a
German.43 In any event, the presence of French Calvinists serving
42
Estat de larmee des reistres and articles et capitulation of the army of the Prince
de Conty, duc de Bouillon and Baron dHone (Dohna) [1587], and Bouillon to Henri
de Navarre, 20 Aug. 1587, BN, MS Fr. 704, ff. 6970, 86, 72; Garrett Mattingly, The
Defeat of the Spanish Armada (London: 1959), 146, 14954.
43
E.g. Princes estrangers en France, AAE, MDF 28; Mmoires sur les Maisons de
Savoie, Lorraine, la TourBouillon et Rohan, AAE, MDF 186. Cf. David Parrott,
Richelieu, the Grands, and French Army, in Joseph Bergin and Laurence Brockliss
(eds.), Richelieu and His Age (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 1369; Arlette Jouanna,
the huguenots and the european wars of religion169
alongside his mercenaries does not invalidate the point that Huguenot
soldiering from the mid1580s was for 15 years occupied with France
itself. When Huguenots and Dutch were in combat alongside each
other, it was because the Dutch were intervening to aid their confreres
in France.44
In 1598 the Treaty of Vervins ended the war with Spain and the same
year the Edict of Nantes guaranteed freedom of religion for the mem-
bers of Frances reformed churches and provided royal salaries to pay
Huguenot pastors; it also, as a guarantee against persecution by future
kings, created a state within a state, allowing the Huguenots the right
to maintain troops in some 200 towns, 100 of which could be fortified
and their garrisons paid by the crown. Although very controversial,
the terms of the Edict induced both Huguenots and Catholics to stop
fighting.45
With peace at home, the attention of Huguenot soldiers once again
turned outwards. Some may have served alongside Catholics in one of
two French contingents under the Holy Roman Emperor against the
Turks: one recruited in 1597, the other (made up entirely of noble vol-
unteers) in 1599.46 Huguenots may also have been among the French
troops who served in Muscovy in the early 1600s: one French company
distinguished themselves in the service of Boris Gudunov (c.1605); a
corps of 5,000 Scots, French and Swedish soldiers served the Muscovite
government from 1608 to 1611. That the Scots and Swedes would have
been Protestants may give a clue about the confessional allegiance of
the French.47 As in the 1570s and 1580s, there is no question that most
Huguenot soldiers preferred to fight for fellow Protestants: from 1599,
the Netherlands once again drew them.
48
Ten Raa and de Bas, Het Staatsche Leger, II, 23, 307 et seq.
49
Trim, Fighting Jacobs Wars; H. L. Zwitzer, De militie van den staat: Het leger
van de Republiek der Verenigde Nederlanden (Amsterdam: Van Soeren, 1991), ch. 3,
esp. pp. 3942.
50
Quoted in Ten Raa and de Bas, Het Staatsche Leger, II, 41 (Franchois Edelman
van qualiteyt, die religie; officieren ende soldaten daerse professie doen vande
religie).
51
States General summary of extraordinary military expenditure, 1599, NA,
Collectie Aanwinsten 879, ff. 6v, 11r; Ten Raa and de Bas, Het Staatsche Leger, II, 51
164, 3523.
52
GuillaumeLouis of Nassau to Jean of Nassau, 26 June and 10 July 1599, in
G. Groen van Prinsterer (ed.), Archives ou correspondance indite de la maisondOrange-
Nassau, sries 2, vol. 1, 15841599 (Utrecht: Kemink, 1857), 43234; Jan Orlers,
the huguenots and the european wars of religion171
58
William Browne to Robert Sidney, 30 July and 10 Aug. 1603, in HMC, Dudley &
De LIsle MSS, III, 44, 48; Orlers, Nassauschen Laurencrans, 130; States General reso-
lution, 14 Nov. 1603, in Resolutin der StatenGeneraal, XII, 517; Ten Raa and de Bas,
Het Staatsche Leger, II, 83, 166, 367; David Parrott, Richelieus Army: War, Government
and Society in France, 16241642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 29;
Anon., Reduction de la ville de lEscluse (Paris: 1604), 5; Dictionnaire de biographie
franaise, VIII, 802.
59
Ten Raa and de Bas, Het Staatsche Leger, II, 164.
60
Ten Raa and de Bas, Het Staatsche Leger, III, 187; Parrott, Richelieus Army, 29.
61
Not Bertrand de Vignolles, Seigneur de Casaubon (pace Parrott, Richelieus Army,
29): see Ten Raa and de Bas, Het Staatsche Leger, III, 1878; and The forme of battaile of
horse and foot ordered by Prince Maurice, before Dornick, 11 Sept. 1621, in John
Cruso, Militarie Instructions for the Cavallrie (Cambridge: 1632), pt. iv, ch. 8, fig. 14.
the huguenots and the european wars of religion173
62
E.g., extraordinary military accounts, 1605, NA, Aan. 879, f. 68v; Browne to Lisle,
15 June 1606, in HMC, De LIsle & Dudley MSS, III, 282; and this was standard practice
for foreign regiments in the staatse leger, cf. Trim, Fighting Jacobs Wars, ch. 7.
63
Lord Wimbledon, The Demonstrance of Cavallerye, BL, Royal MS 18.C.xxiii,
f. 74, printed in Charles Dalton, Life and Times of General Sir Edward Cecil, Viscount
Wimbledon (2 vols, London; Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1885), II,
329. Henri IVs deliberate encouragement of French service in the Dutch army was
also recognised by contemporary Catholic soldiers, e.g. cf. Articles concernant le ser-
vice du roy et lestat et necessit de ses affaires en son arme, 17 Sept. 1621, Bibliothque
Sainte-Genevive, Paris [hereafter BSG], MS 847, f. 108v
64
Parrott, Richelieus Army, 31.
65
Parrott, Richelieu, the Grands, and the French Army, 170; Browne to Lisle, 12
Nov. 1606, HMC, Dudley & De LIsle MSS, III, 329; Ten Raa and de Bas, Het Staatsche
Leger, II, 83.
174 d. j. b. trim
in the staatse leger at some point, including the authors of many influ-
ential military treatises published from the 1610s to the 1640s. A strong
aristocratic component was typical of the Huguenot units in Dutch
pay; so, too, was the presence of sons and grandsons of men who had
fought for William in the 1570s and 1580s (including Tligny and the
grandsons of the Admiral Coligny). There were particular influxes of
such volunteers in 16067, when the Dutch republic was threatened by
a great offensive directed by the celebrated Spanish general, Ambrogio
Spnola, and increased its army in response; and in the early 1620s,
following the resumption of hostilities between the United Provinces
and Spain at the end of the Twelve Years Truce.66 The strong family
connections and high aristocratic component suggest that, as with the
Huguenot units of the 1560s, recruiting for Huguenot units in Dutch
pay in the seventeenth century was done via affinity connections,
including kinship networks and extended clienteles.67
VI
66
Cf. Parrott, Richelieus Army, 2830, 37; Ten Raa and de Bas, Het Staatsche Leger,
II, 83, 277, 279 n.31, 3645; Trim, Fighting Jacobs Wars, 188, 3378; Browne to
Lisle, 15 June 1606, HMC, De LIsle & Dudley MSS, III, 282; list of French captains
in the 1607 state van oorlog, NA, Archief Staten-Generaal, 8043, unfoliated; entries in
album amicorum of Bernard ten Broecke Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague, MS
133.M.63; William Crosse, A generall historie of the Netherlands. Newly revewed, cor-
rected, and supplied with observations omitted in the first impression, by Ed. Grimeston.
Continued from the yeare 1608 till the yeare 1627 by William Crosse. The second impres-
sion (London: 1627), 1436; Carleton to Chamberlain, 11 July 1623, in Dudley Carleton
to John Chamberlain, 16031624: Jacobean Letters, ed. M. Lee, Jr. (New Brunswick,
N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1972), 305.
67
Parrott, Richelieus Army, 29.
the huguenots and the european wars of religion175
68
James, Huguenot Militancy, 210, 21516; Holt, French Wars of Religion,
17981.
69
See papers concerning Rohans imprisonment in Montpellier, Feb.Mar. 1623,
Soubise to the inhabitants of La Rochelle, 13 Jan. 1625, and papers concerning the re-
sistance and final capitulation in Languedoc, Mar.June 1629 (including copy of the
articles of the Peace of Als), LPL, MS 3473, ff. 71r78r, 112r, 210r17r; Holt, French
Wars of Religion, 18288 (at 187), 19093; Parrott, Richelieu, the Grands, and the
French Army, 170; James, Huguenot Militancy, 21113, 21623.
176 d. j. b. trim
70
Parrott, Richelieu, the Grands, and the French Army, 145, 157, 163, 170; Thomas
Edmondes to Elizabeth, Electress Palatine, 29 Oct. 1629, Folger Shakespeare Library
[hereafter FSL], MS X.c.60, fo. [2r]; Scudamore to the Secretary of State, 18 Sept. 1635
and early Oct. 1635, BL, Add. MS 35097, ff. 5r, 7r.
the huguenots and the european wars of religion177
their faith, or at least received only their just deserts from the French
government.
In fact, however, none of the Huguenots appointed to army com-
mand ever received Richelieus full trust. The elevation to army com-
mand of Bouillon simply reflected the fact that he was a sovereign
prince and could not be ignored; his younger brother, Turenne, one of
the most celebrated French generals of the seventeenth century, had to
wait until after Richelieus death in 1642 to receive a full command and
be made marchal. Chtillons son, Gaspard IV de ColignyChtillon,
only received high military office after he abjured his faith in 1643.71
Although Rohan was employed as an army commander by Richelieu
in 16356, the cardinal continued to distrust him. In March 1637, he
was held responsible for the collapse of the French army in the
Valtelline, although David Parrott shows that, in fact, royal officials
who starved it of money were more culpable than Rohan. The criticism
of Chtillon and La Force in 1638 was equally harsh, because their
army was much weaker than its establishment strength; thus, as Parrott
argues, their cautious strategy had been, in the circumstances
entirely justified.72 Clearly, however, neither had received unqualified
support.
As for Chtillons gift from the king in 1636, it was actually a reim-
bursement (and probably only a partial one) of his own expenditure
on the army under his command (with La Force as his deputy) in
Flanders in 1635when, contrary to Scudamores claims of inactivity
or reluctance, the French force, with their Dutch allies, had been active
enough to fill the residents of the southern Netherlands with fear.73
Itis impossible to know how many of the 12,000 French troops were
Huguenots, but Chtillons men joined the Dutch in a wave of looting
Longmans, Green & Co., 1907); Dictionnaire de biographie franaise, VIII, 804; Mark
Bannister, Cond in Context: Ideological Change in Seventeenth-century France (Oxford:
Legenda, 2000), 4748
72
Parrott, Richelieu, the Grands, and the French Army, 157, 1634 (at 163), 170.
For the armys strength, see Bernhard Kroener, Die Entwicklung der Truppenstarken
in den franzosischen Armeen zwischen 1635 und 1661, in Konrad Repgen (ed.),
Forschungen und Quellen zur Geschichte des Dreiigjhrigen Krieges, Schriftenreihe der
Vereinigung zur Erforschung der Neueren Geschichte, 12 (Munster: Aschendorff,
1981), 202.
73
Parrott, Richelieu, the Grands, and the French Army, 17071, 145; Ren Vermeir,
In staat van oorlog: Filips IV en de Zuidelijke Nederlanden, 16291648 (Maastricht:
Shaker, 2001), 117.
178 d. j. b. trim
74
Quoted in Vermeir, In staat van oorlog, 117; see Kroener, Entwicklung der
Truppenstarken, 19798.
75
Vermeir, In staat van oorlog, 117.
76
Frederick Henry to Chtillon, 18 March 1635, and Chtillon to Frederick Henry,
n.d., BSG, MS 3338, ff. 8r, 249r.
77
Parrott, Richelieu, the Grands, and the French Army, 1558, esp. 157; Carroll,
Noble Power, 12437.
the huguenots and the european wars of religion179
Raymond A. Mentzer, Jr, Blood and Belief: Family Survival and Confessional
78
Identity among the Provincial Huguenot Nobility (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue
University Press, 1994), 7480, 16876.
79
Estat des Troupes de larme de Messieurs les Estats, BSG, MS 3338, ff.
179v82v.
180 d. j. b. trim
VII
80
Ten Raa and de Bas, Het Staatsche Leger, III, 18890, IV, 24650.
81
John Stapleton, Jr, Forging a Coalition Army: William III, the Grand Alliance,
and the Confederate Army in the Spanish Netherlands, 16881697, Ph.D. diss. (The
Ohio State University, 2003), 260n. The Perponcher family ultimately settled in the
Dutch Republic, becoming naturalized: ibid., 261n.
82
B. N. Teensma (ed.), DutchBrazil (Rio de Janeiro: 1999), vol. III, Vincent Joachim
Solers Seventeen Letters 16361643, passim, but esp. 7, 84, 1245.
83
Simon Stevin (Dutch military engineer), treatise on Jlich campaign, c.1611, BN,
MS Fr. 654, ff. 7r45 at 24v25v; Ten Raa and de Bas, Het Staatsche Leger, III, 14.
the huguenots and the european wars of religion181
Emperor.84 In the late 1620s and on into the 1630s, others served King
Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, the Republic of Venice, and the
Protestant prince and military entrepreneur, Bernard, Duke of Saxe
Weimar. Among those who served Gustavus Adolphus were the sieur
dAurignac, later the author of an influential military treatise, the Livre
de guerre. Venice recruited one Huguenot regiment in the mid1620s,
and Rohan and his entourage served the Serene Republic in 1630
Rohan contracted to raise a 6,000strong corps in France for the Serene
Republics service; in the end, he was unable to meet his obligations,
but he and his entourage were in Venetian service through the cam-
paign seasons of 1630 and 1631. Rohan ended his long and varied mili-
tary career as a gentleman volunteer with SaxeWeimar, being mortally
wounded at the battle of Rheinfelden (28 February 1638).85
The Elector Palatines younger son, Prince Rupert of the Rhine, took
several Huguenot officers with him to England in the 1640s, where
they served in the English Civil War. Other Huguenot soldiers joined
the army of Charles II after the Restoration, among them Louis Duras,
a nephew of the great Turenne. Although his uncle (and brothers) had
eventually converted to Catholicism, Duras maintained his Protestant
faith, which explains his taking service in Protestant England. His mil-
itary experience stood him in good stead in England and he held a
number of offices, eventually rising to become commander-in-chief
of the army. He was ennobled as Earl of Feversham and in 1685, while
the Edict of Fontainebleau deprived his fellow Protestants in France
of the rights granted by the Edict of Nantes, Feversham superintended
the successful campaign against the Duke of Monmouths rebellion;
contemporary opinion differed as to his contribution to the eventual
victory, but he did bear responsibility for the campaign.86 He was James
IIs commander-in-chief during William IIIs invasion of England in
the autumn of 1688, but quickly wrote to William to assure him that
84
Probably seconded from the French regiments of the staatse leger: cf. Olivier
Chaline, La bataille de la Montagne Blanche 8 novembre 1620, in Lucien Bly and
Isabelle Richefort (eds), LEurope des traits de Westphalie: Esprit de la diplomatie et
diplomatie de lesprit (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000), 318.
85
Parrott, Richelieus Army, 29, citing Aurignac, Livre de guerre (1663), as P. Azan
(ed.), Un tacticien du XIIe sicle (Paris, 1904); H. Layard, The duc de Rohans Relations
with the Republic of Venice, 16301637, HSP, 4 (189193), 21824, 290; Parrott,
Richelieu, the Grands, and the French Army, 170.
86
Philip Rambaut, A Study in Misplaced Loyalty: Louis de DurfortDuras, Earl of
Feversham (16401709), in Glozier and Onnekink, War, Religion and Service, 4758.
182 d. j. b. trim
87
Feversham to Dartmouth, 13 Dec. 1688, encl. Feversham to Orange, Yale
University, Beinecke Library, MS Osborn fb.190, vol. 4, no. L.345.
88
E.g., Brian Strayer and Walter C. Utt, Un Faux frre: le sieur de Tillires et les
rfugis huguenots aux Provinces Unies, 16851688, Bull. SHPF, 150 (2004), 50716
(at 509), which is to be preferred to the brief account of Tellires [sic] in W. A. Speck,
The Orangist Conspiracy against James II, HJ 30 (1987), 45362 (at 4579).
the huguenots and the european wars of religion183
later in the early 1700s, wrote that this was the fifth great crisis, under
which the whole Protestant religion was brought.89
Although Turenne, veteran of Dutch service but by this time a con-
vert to Catholicism, assisted Louis in command in the field, it is nota-
ble that numerous Huguenots deserted from the French army during
the invasion. In its aftermath the Dutch were shaken out of their com-
placency and realised that citizen militias could not protect them from
a large modern army. There was once again a largescale employer
wanting to recruit Huguenots. Five Huguenot infantry regiments
fought against their king during the FrancoDutch War (16728).
Although after the conflict these dedicated French regiments were dis-
banded, many French officers and men remained in the States service
in nominally Dutch regiments. A good example is JacquesLouis,
comte de Noyelles, who began his military career as an ensign in
William of Oranges lite Blue Guards regiment. In 1674 he was pro-
moted captain in the same regiment and, in 1681, became its colonel.
He eventually rose to the rank of general, becoming a naturalized
Dutch citizen.90
Of course, a new wave of military emigration followed the 1685 rev-
ocation of the Edict of Nantes; common religious sympathies ensured
that the refugees found a ready welcome in the Dutch Republic, albeit
employment opportunities in the Dutch army remained limited until
1688the year of the Glorious Revolution, but also the first year of the
Nine Years War. Nevertheless, recent revisionist attempts to play down
the significance of the Huguenot component of the Dutch army in
168588 probably go too far, for, as we have seen, there were already in
1685 Huguenots serving in nominally Dutch regiments, who must be
added to the post-1685 migrs who did find Dutch employment.91
These included three specifically French companies of nobles, raised in
1686; but most Huguenots, again, served in Dutch regiments, includ-
ing eighty-eight of the officers in Williams elite regiments of Blue, Red,
and Life Guards.92
89
Gilbert Burnet, Bishop Burnets History of his own Time: From the Restoration of
King Charles II, to the Conclusion of the Treaty of Peace at Utrecht, in the Reign of Queen
Anne, 4 vols. in 6 (London: R.H. Evans, J. Mackinlay, W. Clarke, and R. Priestley, 1809),
I, ii, 449, 433.
90
Stapleton, Forging a Coalition Army, 111, 25961; Burnet, History, I, ii, 450.
91
See Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness and Fall (corr. pb
edn, Oxford, 1998), p. 840; cf. Glozier, Huguenot Soldiers, 5254.
92
Glozier, Huguenot Soldiers, 5354, 6365.
184 d. j. b. trim
VIII
93
See Israel, Dutch Republic, 84549; and Stapleton, Forging a Coalition Army,
115n., 2089, the source for the figure given above, which must supersede the figure of
14,352 regular Dutch troops given by Israel, Dutch Republic, 849 and Glozier, Huguenot
Soldiers, 105, because Stapleton uses more detailed archival sources for the army.
94
Glozier, Huguenot Soldiers, 53, 1056; Stapleton, Forging a Coalition Army,
115n., 208.
the huguenots and the european wars of religion185
1680s, was foreign and helped shape the identity of the families
from which recruits were drawn, and of individual soldiers them-
selves,has not been sufficiently acknowledged or examined. Likewise,
the employment of French Calvinists abroad for a centuryanda
quarter before the Revocation and concomitant mass emigration
constitutes an important and generally overlooked foundation for
the emergence of transnational Huguenot identity in the decades
after 1685.
A number of other issues emerge as important. One is the role of the
nobility, not only as generals, but also as officers and in the rankand
file. This is worth emphasising since modern historiography tends to
portray mercenaries as being drawn, mostly, from the scum of the
earth, albeit sometimes captained by nobles.95
It has already been seen that, at the beginning of the wars of religion,
the Huguenots recruited through aristocratic affinities. A high propor-
tion of noble volunteers (glittering Frenchmen in the words of one
English observer)96 was characteristic of Huguenot units at least until
the midseventeenth century, reflecting wider French practice; as
David Parrott observes, the French armies that fought the Thirty Years
War were recruited through the clienteles and influence of the nobil-
ity, especially the provincial aristocracy. They had access to a system of
subcontracting through relatives and lesser noble supporters, who
could themselves carry out the local recruitment of units of soldiers.97
This recruitment via affinities was one of the factors that made the
Huguenots attractive to the Dutch.98 Into the 1680s, kinship and
friendship networks provided the basis for much of the recruiting for
William IIIs Huguenot units.99
Moreover, Huguenot nobles not only recruited through their soli-
darit connections: they also themselves served in the ranks. Thus, like
English and at least some Scottish, Irish and Italian mercenaries,
French Protestant soldiers were often nobles or their immediate
100
Cf. Trim, Fighting Jacobs Wars, pp. 70, 26086; Dubost, La France italienne,
614, 2424; and Gregory P. Hanlon, The Decline of a Provincial Military Aristocracy,
Past and Present, no. 155 (May 1997), 748.
101
Glozier, Huguenot Soldiers, 2.
102
Chappell, Escape Accounts 6 n.11; Harman Murtagh, Schomberg, Ruvigny and
the Huguenots in Ireland: William IIIs Irish War, 168991, in Glozier and Onnekink,
War, Religion and Service, 95109; Glozier, Huguenot Soldiers, 5355, 65. In a review of
Huguenot Soldiers, in Albion 36 (2004), 131, Robin Gwynn, doyen of Huguenot stud-
ies, questions Gloziers assertion that most, if not all of the common soldiers in these
regiments came from respectable families; but Murtaghs study confirms Gloziers
characterisation.
the huguenots and the european wars of religion187
from the 1570s onwards), but also among the mass of exiles that fled
France in various waves, most notably after the Revocation in 1685.
The relative speed with which an inchoate agglomerate of refugees was
mobilised and organised into highly capable fighting units in the late
1680s is very strikingthat social structure provided a basis for mili-
tary structures is an important point to bear in mind.
So too, however, is the fact that, as in 1562, many Huguenots were
deserters from royal forces. No doubt many of the volunteers who
fought for the Dutch republic, Brandenburg, Great Britain and
other states in the 1690s were simply angry migrs with a desire for
vengeance and an apocalyptic world view.103 However, many exiles
were veterans, who could be readily integrated into new military
organisations. In the 1680s and 1690s the proportion of refugees with
military experience was probably lower than in the late sixteenth or
early seventeenth centuries, simply because the Protestant community
had been demilitarised since the 1620s. Nevertheless, the veterans sup-
plied a vital hard core around whom the remainder (who were often
kin or clients in any case) could be moulded more readily than if they
did not exist. This was true, as we saw, in the 1560s and was equally
true in the 1680s. It was surely true in the 120 years intervening. It is a
striking fact that the formation of the Jacobite Irish exiles into an effec-
tive corps in French pay in the same period owed something to similar
dynamics.104
In addition, Huguenots were quickly integrated into the army of the
Netherlands, in particular, because of the long tradition of service in
Dutch pay, with three and four generations sometimes fighting for the
United Provinces. As for integration into other armies, tradition is,
again, important here. After all, Huguenots had fought alongside
English, Scottish, German and Swiss soldiers from the 1560s70s all
the way down to the 1680s. There was no reason to feel suspicion of or
alienation from soldiers of different nationalities. Ethnic diversity was
something the Huguenots (and indeed their colleagues of varying
national backgrounds) would have taken for granted.
103
Pierre Jurieu, the great Huguenot theologian of the late seventeenth century,
identified the Revocation as the death of the two witnesses of Rev. 11: 710, and thus
an imminent sign of Christs second coming and the judgment; it also, of course,
implied that France (and French Protestants) would be at the centre of the final events.
104
Cf. Guy Rowlands, An Army in Exile Louis XIV and the Irish Forces of James II
in France, 16911698, Royal Stuart Paper, no. 60 (2001).
188 d. j. b. trim
105
Parrott, Richelieus Army, 29.
106
Judith Pollmann, From Freedom of Conscience to Confessional Segregation?
Religious Choice and Toleration in the Dutch Republic, in Richard Bonney and D. J. B.
Trim (eds.), Persecution and Pluralism: Calvinists and Religious Minorities in Early
Modern Europe 15501700 (Oxford, Bern, New York, etc: Peter Lang, 2006), 12348;
Bodo Nischan, The Second Reformation in Brandenburg: Aims and Goals, SCJ 14
(1983), 1867.
the huguenots and the european wars of religion189
107
Gwynn, Huguenot Heritage, 18586; Glozier, Huguenot Soldiers, 701, and NB
62: Most Huguenots remained steadfast in their faith and most deserved the implicit
trust of William of Orange in terms of their religious fidelity.
108
Ibverville to Louvois, 22 Nov. 1689, AAE, quoted in Walter Utt, Home to Our
Valleys! (Mountain View, CA & Oshawa, ON: Pacific Press, 1977), v. See Utt & Strayer,
Bellicose Dove, 79, 82; and Raymond Hylton, The Huguenot Settlement at
Portarlington, 16921771, in C. E. J. Caldicott, Hugh Gough and Jean-Paul Pitton
(eds.), The Huguenots and Ireland: Anatomy of an Emigration (Dublin: Glendale Press,
1987), 297315.
109
Anon. newsletter, 11 June 1692, FSL, MS L.c.2100; NB that the typescript tran-
scription [available at http://10.1.5.20/local/newdig/newdig.htm] mistakenly tran-
scribes dauphoney as danghoney.
110
Cf. Andrew C. Thompson, After Westphalia: Remodelling a Religious Foreign
Policy and David Onnekink, The Last War of Religion? The Dutch and the Nine
190 d. j. b. trim
Years War, in Onnekink (ed.), War and Religion after Westphalia, 16481713 (Farnham
& Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 4767, 6988; Jeremy Black, Introduction to idem
(ed.), The Origins of War in Early Modern Europe (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1987),
56; Laurence Huey Boles, Jr, The Huguenots, the Protestant Interest, and the War of the
Spanish Succession, 17021714, American University Studies, series IX (History), 181
(New York, Bern, Frankfurt am Main, etc: Peter Lang, 1997).
111
CSPD, 168990, 401.
112
Vigne, Preface to Britains Huguenot War Leaders, v; cf. Matthew Glozier,
Marshal Schomberg (16151690), the Ablest Soldier of His Age: International Soldiering
and the Formation of State Armies in Seventeenth-century Europe (Brighton: Sussex
Academic Press, 2005).
113
E.g. see Trim, Edict of Nantes, 902 (and sources cited there); Glozier, Huguenot
Soldiers, 57.
114
W. Stanford Reid, The Battle Hymns of the Lord: Calvinist Psalmody of the
Sixteenth Century, in Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies 2 (1971), 3654; Alec
Ryrie, The Psalms and Confrontation in English and Scottish Protestantism, Archiv
fr Reformationsgeschichte 101 (2010), 12930.
the huguenots and the european wars of religion191
into action.115 But whichever psalms were sung, the passion imparted
by the process of worship stood the Huguenots in good stead once in
combat. At the Battle of Coutras (1587), just before Henri IVs cavalry
charged, a participant later recalledsharing a personal memory he
treasuredthat the men made communal prayer and some sang from
Psalm 118. They were heard in the opposing compagnies dordonnance
and many Catholic nobles cried out loud enough to be heard, They
tremble the cowards, they confess themselves. But as a Catholic vet-
eran quickly cautioned his fellows: When the Huguenots make these
sounds, they are ready to charge hard. The hard charging of the aristo-
cratic Calvinist cavalry, caught up in religious fervour, swept the much
larger Catholic army to destruction.116
The same confessionally generated fighting qualities were still evi-
dent a century later, but to the general Calvinist zeal that seems always
to have been present among Huguenot soldiers was now added a new
factor: collective personal and group memory of the humiliations and
torments heaped upon Huguenots by the French army, against which
they regularly fought. At the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, when units of
the French army were serving under James IIs command, the Huguenot
regiments were rallied at a critical stage in the battle by the cry:
Forward, my friends, gather your courage and your resentment; there
are your persecutors.117 Courage is an inner quality but resentment
entails remembrance. When Nicolas Catinat defeated the Allies under
the Duke of Savoy at the battle of Marsiglia in 1693 the Allied army was
routed, but its Huguenot regiments refused to retreat and were almost
wiped out.118 A substantial part of the reason why the Huguenots
fought to the bitter end is surely that they were in combat with the very
instrument of their persecution and, as the incident at the Boyne sug-
gests, their memories of oppression were still fresh.
115
Thierry, Lhomme de guerre, 146. Psalm 68 was also popular as a battle hymn
among the Huguenots close allies and confrres, the Vaudois (who up to the 17th cent.
lived in southern France as well as in what today is northern Italy): e.g., cf. Giorgio
Tourn, The Waldensians: The First 800 Years, trans. Camillo P. Merlino, ed. Charles W.
Arbuthnot (Turin: Claudiana, 1980), 14849.
116
Aubign, LHistoire universelle, III, 53; cf. Mattingly, Defeat of the Spanish
Armada, 13945.
117
Quoted by Murtagh, Schomberg, Ruvigny and the Huguenots in Ireland, 103.
118
Cf. Trim, Huguenot Soldiering, 30.
192 d. j. b. trim
David Onnekink
Introduction
Now we groan under hard Bondage, as the People of God did hereto-
fore in Egypt; but God will deliver us out of it with a strong Hand and
stretched out Arm. Now we are terrified with the Power of our Enemies;
But since tis against God they wage War [] Hell fight for us him-
self.1 This statement was delivered in a sermon by Claude Brousson,
the remarkable Huguenot pastor and subject of a renowned study by
Walter Utt and Brian Strayer.2 Brousson responded to the persecution
of the Huguenots, and suggested a pacific course of action. He also
suggested an identity model for the Huguenot community by compar-
ing it to the people of Israel in bondage.
The 1680s, 1690s and 1700s constitute a particular painful episode
in the history of French Protestantism. The dragonnades were followed
up by the infamous Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, after which
hundreds of thousands of Huguenots fled their native country and
found refuge in Protestant states, such as England, the Dutch Republic,
the Palatinate and Brandenburg. During these years, the Huguenot
exiles developed a sense of community, purpose and commitment. As
such the Huguenots became a transnational community, but because
of their hope of return, one with national aspirations. Given the situa-
tion, there was also tension between the hope of return and the need to
integrate into the societies the Huguenots had found refuge in.
1
Claude Brousson, The support of the faithful in times of persecution, or, a sermon
preachd in the Wilderness to the poor Protestants in France (London, 1699), 82. The
sermon is not dated but was preached before 1695, and translated and republished
immediately after his death. The international readership of the works of these
Huguenots meant they were often translated. In this article, I have made use of the
English version when possible.
2
Utt and Strayer, The Bellicose Dove.
194 david onnekink
3
Matthew Glozier and David Onnekink (eds), War, Religion and Service: Huguenot
Soldiering, 16851713 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); cf. chapter 6, above.
4
Utt and Strayer, The Bellicose Dove.
5
Robin Gwynn, The Huguenots in Britain, the Protestant International and the
Defeat of Louis XIV, in Vigne & Littleton, Strangers.
models of an imagined community 195
and citizens of the Kingdom of God, their duty was to endure suppres-
sion rather than to take up arms. In sum, the Huguenot exiles needed
to rethink their identity in a spatial, temporal and ethical sense.
These three dimensions of national identity (spatial, temporal and
ethical) have been discussed by poststructuralist scholars of interna-
tional relations, such as Lene Hansen, who argues that identity is
intertwined with the conduct of foreign policy. According to her the
connection of these three dimensions of national identity and
views on foreign policy is a discursive one. There is a constitutive rela-
tionship between representations of identity and foreign policy []
identities are simultaneously constituted and reproduced through for-
mulations of foreign policy.6 Indeed it would be impossible to distin-
guish policy and identity, for identities are produced, and reproduced,
through foreign policy discourse.7
It is the purpose of this article to investigate how Huguenot exiles
imagined their own identity,8 and what the consequences were for
their attitude towards the Grand Alliance and France. Although the
exiled Huguenots obviously did not conduct any foreign policy as
such, they did extensively comment on the foreign policy that the
Dutch and British conducted vis--vis France. This article will propose
four different models of Huguenot identity, which will be explained
later on. Each model is characterised by the three dimensions as
described above. These views on foreign policy were interacting with
the self-perception of the Huguenot exiles, but also with perceptions of
the kingdom of France. The Huguenots constructed their own identity
vis--vis an image of Catholic France and her king.
In order to uncover these models, the article is based on a select
number of Huguenot writings (histories, sermons, published letters
and political pamphlets) by a small circle of distinguished Huguenot
authors: Pierre Jurieu, Abel Boyer, Michel Le Vassor and Guillaume de
Lamberty.9 This selection is based on the fact that most of these
authorswere connected to the court of William III, which strengthens
6
Lene Hansen, Security as Practice. Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), xvi.
7
Hansen, Security, 26.
8
The term imagined community is of course inspired by Benedict Andersonss
celebrated Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
(London, 1983).
9
De Lamberty was not a Huguenot, though. See my explanation on p. 197.
196 david onnekink
10
David Onnekink, The Anglo-Dutch Favourite. The Career of Hans Willem
Bentinck, 1st Earl of Portland (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 124.
11
Linda and Marsha Frey, The Treaties of the War of the Spanish Succession: An
Historical and Critical Dictionary (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press 1995), 400.
12
His dispatches are in BL, Add. MS 17677.
13
D.C.A. Agnew, Protestant Exiles from France in the Reign of Louis XIV (s.l.,
1866), 301.
14
According to the Anthonie Heinsius index/database compiled by A.J. Veenendaal:
http://www.inghist.nl/Onderzoek/Projecten/BrievenAnthonieHeinsius1702-1720/
Index.
15
Dijkveld to Portland 26 Oct. 1692, Correspondentie van Willem III en van Hans
Willem Bentinck, eersten graaf van Portland, ed. N. Japikse, RGP Kleine Reeks 23, 24,
26, 27, 28, 5 vols (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 19271937), vol. 28 (1937), 302.
models of an imagined community 197
M. le Vassor, History of the Reign of Louis XIII etc. (3 vols, London, 17001702).
16
Affairs from September 1678 to April 1714 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1857),
vol. IV. 598, 600.
18
D. Onnekink, Het fortuin van Henry Bentinck (16821726): de grillige carrire
van een Engels-Nederlands edelman, Virtus (2004), 5472.
19
According to Henry Horwitz, Parliament, Policy and Politics in the Reign of
William III (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977), 20, Lamberty was
in England in 1689, and returned to the continent with Williams adviser Lord
Dijkveld.
20
See his correspondence in PRO, SP 84/220; also e.g. Nottingham University
Library, MS PwA 2716. For evidence of Jurieus support for William III, see F.R.J.
Knetsch, Pierre Jurieu: Theologian and Politician of the Dispersion Acta Historiae
198 david onnekink
For many Huguenot authors, the wars against Louis XIV were paradig-
matic for their interpretation of recent events. The framework of the
European coalition wars was typically employed by historians of con-
temporary events, in which 1688 figured as the starting point, the year
Neerlandica 5 (1971) 213242, 228. Cf. G. Das, Pierre Jurieu als middelpunt van een
spionnage-dienst, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 41 (1926), 372382.
21
I.e. J. F. Bosher, Huguenot Merchants and the Protestant International in the
Seventeenth Century, WMQ, 3rd series, 52 (1995), 77102, 78. For a critique of
the concept, see L. H. Boles, The Huguenots, the Protestant Interest, and the War of the
Spanish Succession, 17011714 (New York: Peter Lang, 1997).
22
Gwynn, The Huguenots in Britain, the Protestant International and the Defeat
of Louis XIV.
23
Matthew Glozier, The Huguenot Soldiers of William of Orange and the Glorious
Revolution of 1688. The Lions of Judah. (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2002);
Matthew Glozier, Marshal Schomberg (16151690) The Ablest Soldier of His Age:
International Soldiering and the Formation of State Armies in Seventeenth-Century
Europe (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2005); Bosher, Huguenot Merchants and
the Protestant International in the Seventeenth Century.
models of an imagined community 199
Abel Boyer, The history of King William the Third (3 vols, London, 17021703),
24
frontispiece.
25
Boyer, The history of King William, preface.
26
Guillaume de Lamberty, Memoires pour servir lhistoire du XVIII sicle: conten-
ant les negociations, traitez, resolutions, et autres documens authentiques concernant les
affaires dtat : liez par une narration historique des principaux evenemens dont ils ont
t prcdez ou suivis, & particulirement de ce qui sest pass La Hae (14 vols, The
Hague, 172440). On Lamberty, see Frey, Treaties, 237.
200 david onnekink
the Spanish Empire, provided him with experience as well as first hand
documentation; indeed, rather than a chronology, the Memoires is
essentially a collection of original documents providing a detailed
account of the events that lead to the great War of the Spanish
Succession. De Lamberty begins his overview in 1698, although the
introduction rather traces the origins of conflict back to 1688 and
the establishment of the Grand Alliance against France. Clearly, the
Memoirs serve to provide a narrative to describe the battle against the
exorbitant power of France.27
At the same time, however, Lamberty weaves an alternative theme
through his history. This becomes clear at the beginning of his work,
where he situates his narrative within a Protestant framework. The
book is dedicated to the Republic of Bern, whom Lamberty praises for
its conduct in the Second Villmergen War of 1712, in which the
Protestant cantons of Bern and Zurich defeated Catholic cantons. The
juxtaposition between the European conflict and the wars of religion
contextualises the war against Louis XIV within the longer history of
the wars of religion in Europe. The works of Lamberty and Boyer thus,
in a subtle way, contextualise the European conflict as part of the wars
of religion which had ravaged Europe, particularly France, ever since
the Reformation. In this manner, recent history is spatially and geo-
graphically rooted in both the French wars and the international wars
of religion. This also becomes clear from Michel Le Vassors History of
the Reign of Lewis XIII, which, also adds a more pronounced ethical
dimension to the analysis.28 It was dedicated to Lord Woodstock, the
son of the Earl of Portland, to instruct him about the developments
which Europe has with Amazement beheld for thirty years together.29
Le Vassor, like Boyer and Lamberty, constructs his history within the
paradigm of French expansion, and refers to Woodstocks father
Portland, who (as ambassador to France in 1698 and favourite of King
William)witnessed key events.30 Woodstock should learn from this
history how the Dutch Republic struggled to maintain her freedom
in the face of French as well as Spanish aggression, referring explicitly
to Philip II who was fierce and bloody.31 Le Vassor, who has spoken to
27
Lamberty, Memoirs, 1.
28
Le Vassor, History,
29
Le Vassor, History, vol. I, dedication (no pagination).
30
Ibid.
31
Ibid.
models of an imagined community 201
Gilbert Burnet on occasion, takes the bishops History of His own Time
as an example. He argues that the reading of History, is the most
proper means to form the Mind and Inclinations, but also to confirm
in you the Good Sentiments of Religion, Virtue and Probity.32 In this
way Le Vassor continues the medieval and still popular tradition of the
Frstenspiegel. However, Le Vassor makes it clear from the start that
his study, which includes bloody battles and Protestants in France
oppressed, and in Hungary, in Germany and the United Provinces sup-
ported,33 is not simply a political history of Europe, but a confessional
interpretation of those events. Indeed, Le Vassor can pinpoint precisely
where it all went wrong again: the frontispiece shows an illustration of
the assassination of Henry IV in 1610.
As historians, Boyer, Lamberty and Le Vassor endeavour to inte-
grate confessional history in a subtle manner into the political narra-
tive, presumably for to reach a wider audience and appear to be
objective. In pamphlets, the role of religion is much more emphasised
in more persuasive prose. This was so because the pamphlets that will
be analysed addressed much more urgent matters, namely the need to
intervene in France for the sake of the very survival of Protestantism.
Still, pamphleteers wanted to make the argument acceptable for politi-
cians who may not be swayed by religious considerations per se. This
becomes clear in The Lawfulness, Glory and Advantage of giving
Immediate and Effectual Relief to the Protestants in the Cvennes, a
pamphlet written by Abel Boyer in 1703 which was also translated into
Dutch.34 Its purpose was to persuade the Maritime Powers to intervene
on behalf of the Cevennois. In the second year of the War of the Spanish
Succession, a revolt had broken out in the Cvennes in the south of
France organised by the Camisards. Protestantism in that area had a
long and complicated history. The sacred light (according to Boyer)
had been kindled by the Waldensians and Albigensians in the
late Middle Ages, and had survived the croisades.35 Protestantism
had taken root after the Reformation, but severe repression from the
French crown had caused it to mutate in a more ambiguous form of
Ibid.
32
36
Presumably he meant Ex Tempore. Boyer, The Lawfulness, 1920.
37
Boyer, The Lawfulness, 4.
38
Ibid.
39
Ibid.
40
Boyer, The Lawfulness, 5, 6.
41
Daniel Defoe, The True-born Englishman. A Satyr (London, 1701).
models of an imagined community 203
James II, they might be more receptive to the fate of Frenchmen suffer-
ing under Louis XIV. Boyer calls upon the traditional role of the
English monarch as defender of European Protestantism and contex-
tualises the current troubles in the historical French Wars of Religion:
during near Thirty Years that the Wars about Religion lasted in France,
She [Queen Elizabeth] did constantly interpose, and supported the
Protestant Party, sometimes with Men, but oftener with Money, so that
she had near half of that Kingdom depending on her.42 Ingeniously as
well, Boyer applies the title of the Kings and Queens of England,
Defender of the Faith, to the justification of foreign intervention for
the sake of assisting our Protestant Brethren in France.43
Still, Boyer takes pains to show that it is not just about religion,
indeed, a great many Roman Catholicks are actually in Arms in
Conjunction with the Cevenois; so a great many more would join with
them to assert their Common Liberties.44 Indeed, he needed to spell
out more secular advantages for England as well. Despite the tremen-
dous efforts of the Duke of Marlborough and Prince Eugene, because
of her superior defence lines France will never be brought to her knees,
as has become clear in the Nine Years War. The advantage of a diver-
sion in the south therefore becomes obvious.45
Similar themes appear in The Sighs of France in Slavery, Breathing
after Liberty, published in 1689, which contains two (presumably fic-
tional) memorials from French agents, in which the juxtaposition of
the regimes of James II and Louis XIV figures prominently.46 Authorship
is unclear, but according to F. Knetsch, it was probably written by
Michel le Vassor, with Jurieu as editor as well as co-author. This is
interesting, for Le Vassor was still a Catholic in 1689, albeit one increas-
ingly critical of his church.47
Perhaps more than the other works discussed, this pamphlet strug-
gles to come to terms with the ethical and temporal identity of France.
The pamphlet speaks of suppression of the French nobility, parle-
mentsand churches under the present regime. The English translation
48
[Le Vassor], Sighs.
49
[Le Vassor], Sighs, 4.
50
Ibid.
51
[Le Vassor], Sighs,
52
[Le Vassor], Sighs, 5.
53
Ibid.
54
Ibid.
models of an imagined community 205
Isay nothing of that Persecution it self; the King will quickly see all
he has gaind by this Conduct.55 Indeed, they argue that with the flight
of the Huguenots abroad, commercial enterprise has collapsed.56More
over, The Calvinists have just occasion to complain of these Violences;
but the Gallican Church has still more reason.57 It is argued that the
King has a boundless Empire over the Church.58 For all these reasons,
Huguenots, as French citizens, have the right to intervene. As Michel le
Vassor argued, Huguenots cannot be blamed if they picked up weap-
ons to defend their conscience, because they were driven to Extremity
by the frequent Infractions of the most inviolable Edict that ever was.59
Huguenot authors, then, constructed the political history of Europe
around the coalition wars against Louis XIV, but they did so by associ-
ating the wars with the wars of religion. It was a way of connecting the
wars of religion in France with the disastrous events that followed after
1685, but also to logically connect these to the European wars. In ana-
lysing these events, the Huguenots constructed their own identity and
its connection with France. The spatial construction of the Huguenots
as Frenchmen therefore tied them to the Kingdom of France. But at
the same time, they were part of the international Protestant commu-
nity. Protestantism thus becomes a spatial signifier. The ethical con-
struction presented France as suppressor and the Huguenots as
suppressed citizens, which gave them the right to resist. In a temporal
sense, the conflict is presented as rooted in the wars of religion. But as
seen in 1598, France seemed redeemable through secular means. All
this suggested a clear foreign policy: Huguenots should support the
Grand Alliance, which the Allies saw as a struggle against Universal
Monarchy but which the Huguenots argued was also a war of religion,
in which they strove for acceptance of their faith in France. The pur-
pose was to change the regime and return home.
55
[Le Vassor], Sighs, 10.
56
[Le Vassor], Sighs, 16.
57
[Le Vassor], Sighs, 10.
58
[Le Vassor], Sighs, 7.
59
Le Vassor, History, 2.
206 david onnekink
and calls for military action, the Hebrew model was more ambiguous.
Next to regarding themselves as suppressed Protestants or French citi-
zens, quite often the Huguenots identified themselves with the Hebrew
people.
The identification was, of course, not unusual among early modern
Calvinists. The Dutch Reformed, for instance, developed an elaborate
second Israel theology.60 In England as well, references to Israel
amongst Puritans were common during the Civil War, as well as dur-
ing the reign of William III.61 Naturally, for European culture, partly
rooted in biblical history, references to the people of Israel were com-
mon, but the political Hebraism, as it is described, was particularly
pervasive in the early modern age.62 It was far more specific in its par-
allels. Although it concerns the political history of Israel, is was strongly
prophetic in nature; prophetic not so much in the way of foreseeing the
future, but as describing a moral chronological cycle of sin, fall and
redemption of nations. This interpretation of events was based upon
an interpretation of what the German theologian Martin Noth
described as Deuteronomistic literature in the Bible.63 It entailed a the-
ological interpretation of political events mirrored on biblical books
such as Deuteronomy and I and II Kings. Although this type of Hebraism
seems to have been common in early modern Europe, it was most pop-
ular among nations that identified themselves as pure and embattled,
just like the Old Israel. Hence Calvinist states such as revolutionary
England and the Dutch Republic embraced Hebraism. So, the associa-
tion with the people of Israel in the Old Testament was popular and
grounded in sound theology, but for these Huguenot authors it was
otherwise also aptly chosen. In both cases a people were exiled from
their land and brought to another land, in which, however, they were
not real citizens. That, in a way, made both groups transnational com-
munities with national aspirations, complicating the spatial identity of
the Huguenot community considerably.
60
E.g. C. Huisman, Neerlands Isral. Het natiebesef der traditioneel-gereformeerden
in de achttiende eeuw (Dordrecht: Van den Tol, 1983).
61
Tony Claydon, William III and the Godly Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996).
62
Cf. Gordon Sochet et al. ( eds.), Political Hebraism: Judaic Sources in Early Modern
Political Thought (Jerusalem and New York: Shalem Press, 2008).
63
Cf. Richard Adamiak et al. (eds.), Justice and History in the Old Testament: The
Evolution of Divine Retribution in the Historiographies of the Wilderness Generation
(University of Michigan: John T. Zubal, 1982), 43.
models of an imagined community 207
64
Le Vassor, History, 2.
65
Le Vassor, History, 623.
66
I.e. [Jurieu and Le Vassor], Sighs, 4.
67
[Le Vassor], Sighs, 4.
208 david onnekink
are treated with a harshness unknown to all people who live under
Christian Princes.68 Rather, the King of France is in the same league as
that other despot, the Ottoman sultan. The authors compare the finan-
cial policy of Colbert with that of the Mahometan Princes of Turkey,
Persia, and Mogull who also have made themselves Masters of
Property of all Funds, and the Possession of which they give to whom
they think fitting.69 The Unhappy Tyranny is the Cause that the finest
Countries in the East are become Desarts.70 Just as these Oriental
states, France is changing for the worse. The spatial construction in
which the kingdom of France is presented as essentially oriental and
despotic, like eastern regimes, is clear here. The oriental construction
reverberates with Old Testament narratives on Egypt or Babel. The
kingdom of France had become essentially pagan.
Still, the identification of France with Egypt or Babylon was prob-
lematic, since it remained patria for many Huguenots. Religious iden-
tity and nationalistic feelings seemed at odds here. In fact, rather than
demonising, Jurieu constructs self and other in a different way. His
patriotism easily takes over when he describes France as the finest
Countrey in Europe, the Noblest part of the World.71 Le Vassor is also
unable to demonise his native country, rather he bemoans the troubles
that have overcome it.72
The Hebrew construction, then, presented the Huguenots as an
exiled people, suffering from a tyrant but waiting for the return to their
native country. But the model was ambiguous. Whereas, of course, the
people of Israel were dependent upon Divine intervention rather than
reliant upon military strength (in the words of Claude Brousson: the
Battle is not Ours, but Gods.73), the second Israel concept often
allowed for the possibility of armed struggle for the sake of defending
the faith. Moreover, even though French Huguenots considered them-
selves to be in a desert, it was still a beloved native country rather than
a foreign land.
68
Ibid., 4.
69
[Le Vassor], Sighs, 22.
70
Ibid., 22.
71
[Le Vassor], Sighs, 4.
72
If I am not in a Capacity to do my Country Service, I have the Liberty to deplore
its Misfortunes. Le Vassor, History, 5.
73
Brousson, The support of the faithful, 82.
models of an imagined community 209
The pastoral, unlike the Hebrew model, was not ambiguous at all. The
war against Louis XIV of the Allies was a war of liberation and one to
end the religious struggle in France. This conflict did not square with
the image of the exiled Huguenot community as part of the body of
Christ.
First, we must see how the Huguenots imagined themselves a perse-
cuted community based on the model of the first Christians in the
Roman Empire. This can be illuminated by focusing on Pierre Jurieus
Pastoral Letters to the Huguenots in France, published as a pamphlet in
1686.74 The subtitle, Directed to the Protestants in France, who groan
under the Babylonian Captivity, suggests a Hebrew model, rather than
a New Testament one a clear example of the fact that these models
were easily mixed up in discourses. But the format of Jurieus letters is
exactly that of the epistle of the apostle Paul. Indeed, the opening
words of the first letter are nearly exactly those of the epistle of Paul to
Titus: the Grace and Peace of our God and Saviour Jesus Christ be
with you all.75 The intertextual connotations would have been immedi-
ate for anyone reading this letter. Jurieu frames the Huguenot commu-
nity as the Christians in the Roman Empire. Evidently the addressees
are to understand that their position is similar to that of the small
Christian community facing pagan Roman oppression. This framing
adds significant weight to Jurieus exhortations to the Huguenots, as
the identification with Paul obviously asserts authority. But it also pro-
vides a frame of reference. The epistle to Titus, just like Timothy,
focuses in particular on strengthening the resolve of the church leaders
in the face of adversity and bad theology, which need to be countered.
The importance of this becomes clear from the contents of the letter.
Protestant Church leaders in France are to persevere in the face of
Catholic pressure to convert, to which some have subdued. Hence the
Huguenot community is constructed in a spatial, temporal and ethical
74
Pierre Jurieu, Pastoral Letters. Directed to the Protestants in France, who groan
under the Babylonian Captivity (London, 1688).
75
Jurieu, Pastoral Letters, 3. According to the King James Bible, Titus 1:4 runs:
Grace, mercy, and peace, from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ our Saviour.
The 1599 Geneva Bible: Grace, mercy and peace from God the Father, and from the
Lord Jesus Christ our Saviour.
210 david onnekink
76
Jurieu, Pastoral Letters.
77
Pierre Jurieu, Lettre de quelques protestants pacifiques, au sujet de la renion des
religions, lassemble de MM. du clerg de France, que se doit tenir St Germain-en-
Laye, le du mois de mai (Paris, 1685). I have made use of the Dutch translation, Brief
van eenige Vreedlievende Protestanten, geschreven aan de Vergaderinge van de
Geestelijkheyt van Vranckrijck, die den [] der maant Mey 1685 tot St. Germain en
Laye sal gehouden werden ter Materie van de Hereeniging der Religien (The Hague,
1685).
78
Jurieu, Brief van eenige Vreedlievende Protestanten, 6.
79
Jurieu, Pastoral Letters, passim.
80
Referred to in Jurieu, Brief van eenige Vreedlievende Protestanten, 1213.
models of an imagined community 211
t heoryallowed for armed struggle for a just cause, but only in the con-
text of secular concerns. In their capacity as Christians, the Huguenots
should rather suffer persecution, as the New Testament Christians did.
Hence, within this pastoral model, armed struggle within the context
of the Grand Alliance was unlikely. Just as the Christians survived the
Roman Empire by having faith and perseverance, rather than stage a
revolt against the Emperor, the Huguenots were to wait, perhaps even
die, and be rewarded with eternal life.
81
Pierre Jurieu, The Accomplishment of the Scripture Prophecies, or the Approaching
Deliverance of the Church etc. (London, 1687), second part, 268.
82
Jurieu, The Acomplishment, 3.
83
Jurieu, The Accomplishment, second part, 268.
84
W. Frijhoff, Prophesies in Society. The panic of June 1734 in idem, Embodied
Belief Ten Essays on Religious Culture in Dutch History (Hilversum: Verloren, 2002).
Frijhoff for example studies several Dutch Catholic prophecies which predict the lib-
eration of the Dutch Republic by Catholic powers.
212 david onnekink
85
Jurieu, The Accomplishment, title page.
86
Jurieu, The Accomplishments, 3.
87
Jurieu, The Accomplishment, 119.
88
Jurieu, The Accomplishment, 120.
89
Jurieu, The Accomplishment, 124.
90
Ibid.
91
Le Vassor, History, 7.
92
Jurieu, The Accomplishment, pt ii, 244.
models of an imagined community 213
Conclusion
Jurieu predicts that after a symbolic 3.5 years or 42 months (see Daniel 7:25) of
94
the so-called Great Tribulation, a sudden relief will take place. Remarkably, between
the revocation and the coronation of William III (and thus the end of the Babylonian
Kingdom in England) are exactly 3.5 years. Remarkably as well, 1715 is the year of
the death of Louis XIV. Jurieu himself was quick to point out that his predictions were
just the interpretation of an individual, and should not be seen as fully reliable. Jurieu,
The Accomplishment, second part, 2445.
95
Jurieu, The Accomplishment, second part, 265.
214 david onnekink
96
T. Claydon, Protestantism, Universal Monarchy and Christendom in Williams
War Propaganda, 16891697, in E. Mijers and D. Onnekink (eds.), Redefining William.
The Impact of the King-Stadtholder in International Context (Ashgate: Ashgate, 2007),
133.
models of an imagined community 215
Andrew C. Thompson
1
For the links between news, trade and the growth of capitalist society, see Jrgen
Habermas, The structural transformation of the public sphere trans. Thomas Burger
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989).
218 andrew c. thompson
To explore all of these themes lies beyond the scope of this chapter.
Yet within its compass it is possible to pursue several interesting lines
of enquiry. Much fruitful work has been done on what might be called
the local dimension to Huguenot studies exploring the impact of
diaspora communities in their new surroundings and, with the aid of
extensive genealogical study, discussing how those communities
evolved and changed over time.2 There is enormous value in such work
and it is an excellent example of the ways in which the concerns of
professional historical practitioners and amateur contributors can
overlap and cross-fertilise in important and stimulating ways. However,
there is also considerable value in seeking to put the Huguenot story
into a broader context of international experience and encounter.
In recent years there has been a strong move away from writing his-
tory within a national context and boundaries. Much emphasis has
been placed on how connected the world was, even before the twenty
first century. It is not entirely coincidental that this move has taken
place within a world in which the processes of globalisation are clear
for all to see from the instantaneous contacts made possible by the
rise of global communications technology, through the huge growth in
air travel overcoming borders and broadening perspectives to the
increasingly global nature of problems from financial crises and ter-
rorism to the challenges posed by how to continue to support life on
the planet. While the move towards a more supranational perspective
on historical writing may be as tied to contemporary concerns as other
important historiographical shifts, there is merit to it nevertheless.
Huguenot history, with its inbuilt sense of the global, has much to offer
transnational perspectives. As this chapter will demonstrate, Huguenots
thought about themselves as belonging to a community that could not
be confined within national borders and used this insight to make
claims on behalf of Protestants as a whole.
The court was also an important institution in many European
countries and historians have become increasingly interested in it in
recent years. As this chapter shows, courts offered a variety of oppor-
tunities for Huguenots. They were centres of conspicuous cultural con-
sumption and therefore offered opportunities for the employment of
skilled craftsmen and painters.3 Yet court patronage did not stop with
2
The very title of Randolph Vigne and Charles Littleton (eds.), From strangers to
citizens (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2001) underscores this impulse.
3
The essays in Vigne & Littleton, Strangers, part III, serve to open up this theme.
the huguenots in external relations 219
4
For an overview, see David Onnekink and Matthew Glozier (eds.), War, religion
and service: Huguenot soldiering, 16851713 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); cf. chapter 6,
by D. J. B. Trim, above.
5
For a recent studies on the protestant courts other than the ones discussed
here, see Guido Braun and Susanne Lachenicht (eds.), Hugenotten und deutsche
Territorialstaaten (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2007).
220 andrew c. thompson
the house that would ultimately obtain the British thrones. It explores
Huguenot efforts to alert British and German political leaders to their
cause and discusses how far Huguenot aims were achieved in the series
of conflict with Louis XIV that dominated the last years of his reign.
The chapter begins by looking at Huguenot encounters largely through
the lens of individuals but then expands to look at broader policy
issues. There are also some final reflections on the ways in which the
Huguenot story was subsumed into larger narratives of displacement
by subsequent generations.
The Huguenot departure from France was one chapter in a broader
European story of confessional strife. While 1685 was a landmark
within the history of Protestantism in France, from the perspective of
many European Protestants it had a depressingly familiar ring about it.
In the aftermath of the Thirty Years War, Protestantism seemed to be
in retreat on several fronts. In central Europe the forces of the catholic
reformation were making their presence felt. Large swathes of territory
were coming back to the tender arms of the mother church. In the
Holy Roman Empire, while open warfare had been brought to an end,
the Westphalian settlement, with its complicated mechanisms for reg-
ulating confessional relations, ensured that the venue of confessional
conflict had switched from the battlefield to the courtroom. The nature
of conflict had been transformed but it was still there and, again, the
balance seemed to be shifting in favour of the Catholics. The reasons
for this were several. The Habsburgs, as Holy Roman Emperors, had
been able to reassert their authority and their staunch support for the
Catholic church was of considerable importance. In a world in which
dynastic rulers had to think carefully about how to provide for their
offspring, the church provided a useful source of gainful employment.
This option was, of course, not available to protestant rulers and pro-
motion within the secular Imperial hierarchy was also difficult for
non-Catholics. Consequently, the pull of patronage was increasingly
forcing rulers, as well as ruled, back towards Catholicism. Whereas in
the sixteenth century Protestantism had seemed to offer considerable
secular advantages to rulers and precipitated a series of princely con-
versions, the direction of traffic had now been reversed.
Yet there are also good grounds for seeing 1685 as a particularly
fateful year for European Protestantism. In February Charles II of
England, Scotland and Ireland had died to be succeeded by his openly
catholic brother, James, duke of York. The efforts that had been made
during the last years of Charless reign in parliament to exclude James
the huguenots in external relations 221
from the line of succession on the grounds of his faith had finally failed.
Days before his death, Charles had been received into the Catholic
church, confirming what many had suspected for some time about his
personal faith. How the Church of England would survive a catholic
supreme governor remained to be seen. Protestant lights were being
extinguished in other parts of Europe as well. In the Palatinate, the
elector (another Charles II, as it happened) died childless in May 1685.
His territories went to his Catholic Pfalz-Neuburg cousins. The Elector
Palatine had been the first major prince within the Empire to convert
to Calvinism in the sixteenth century and his lands had provided mate-
rial and spiritual support for the protestant cause ever since.
When Louis XIV decided to bring protestant toleration to an end
through the Edict of Fontainebleu in October 1685 it seemed, there-
fore, to fit into a broader pattern of protestant retreat. The scale of the
exodus that followed was new and shocking but events in France could
be easily assimilated into a larger frame of reference. Several of the
elements that characterised protestant thinking about catholic behav-
iour were present. There was the association of catholic rulers with
tyranny, which expressed itself in the form of persecution. Blame for
the kings actions was also placed on an unholy cabal of clerics around
him.6 This fell neatly into narratives of dangerous clerics, exercising
undo influence over secular rulers, and reinforced anxieties about the
dangers of priestcraft. In some senses, therefore, the task for refugee
Huguenots should have been relatively straightforward. For those with
eyes to see, it was clear that Protestantism faced a real and present
danger within Europe. Whether this meant that something would be
done about it, however, was an entirely different question.
Huguenot refugees found a safe haven in protestant territories
throughout Europe following the Revocation and their impact was felt
wherever they went. Those territories closest to France, such as the
United Provinces and protestant Swiss cantons like Vaud, were obvious
places to go, but Huguenots also travelled further afield, reaching
Brandenburg in considerable numbers. The physical presence of the
Huguenots in Berlin is readily apparent even now the French church
6
Brian E. Strayer, The Edict of Fontainebleau (1685) and the Huguenots: Whos
to blame?, in Richard Bonney and D. J. B. Trim (eds.), Persecution and Pluralism:
Calvinists and Religious Minorities in Early Modern Europe 15001700 (Oxford, New
York & Bern: Peter Lang, 2006), 27394.
222 andrew c. thompson
7
Andreas Flick, Huguenots in the electorate of Hanover and their British links,
HSP 27 (2000), 335.
8
This number excludes the Imperial knights in south-west Germany whose terri-
tory often amounted to little more than a castle and the surrounding village.
9
The following draws on Ragnhild Hatton, George I (London: Thames and Hudson,
1978), ch. 1, Karin Feuerstein-Praer, Sophie von Hannover (Regensburg: Friedrich
Pustet, 2004), 6180 and Maria Kroll, Sophie: electress of Hanover (London: Gollancz,
1973), 5279.
the huguenots in external relations 223
Georg Wilhelm in the dispute and was rewarded with the county of
Diepholz for his trouble.
French influence was strong at Johann Friedrichs court in Hanover,
although it was more catholic than protestant because Johann Friedrich
had also converted to Catholicism in 1651. Ernst August and Georg
Wilhelm were close to William of Orange and so wary of the rise of
Louis XIVs power. Yet it was Huguenot, rather than Catholic, influ-
ence that was to create problems for Ernst August next. Ernst Augusts
plans for the advancement of his own rapidly growing family relied on
his brother keeping his promise and remaining unmarried. This prom-
ise had come under pressure because Georg Wilhelm had taken a fancy
to a young French noblewoman, Elonore dOlbreuse. Born in the
Poitou in January 1639, Elonore was travelling in the entourage of the
Calvinist princess of Tarente when she encountered Georg Wilhelm at
the court in Kassel. While not quite love at first sight, Georg Wilhelm
was sufficiently taken with Elonore to persuade Ernst August to ask
Elonore and her companion, Mademoiselle de la Motte, to join
Sophias suite for the trip that the two brothers and Sophia were plan-
ning to Italy for the winter of 166465. This initial effort was rebuffed
as Elonore elected to follow her mistress to The Hague instead.
Undeterred, Georg Wilhelm abandoned his trip south and journeyed
to the United Provinces instead. Sophia was persuaded to invite
Elonore to join her as a lady-in-waiting in Osnabrck and when she
and her husband travelled with Elonore to Celle, Georg Wilhelm
promptly entered into a morganatic marriage with Elonore (the dif-
ference in their respective social statuses was too large for anything
else to be considered).
Elonore gave birth to a daughter, Sophia Dorothea, in September
1666. Although the likelihood of Sophia Dorothea, as both illegitimate
and a woman, succeeding to her fathers titles was small, her existence
was worrying to the dynastic plans of Sophia and Ernst August.
These worries were confirmed by Georg Wilhelms subsequent actions.
Elonore was raised to the status of Imperial countess in 1671, partly
because of the strongly anti-French stance that Georg Wilhelm took.
In April 1675 Georg Wilhelm married Elonore formally and ensured
that Sophia Dorothea was retrospectively legitimated. Sophia Dorothea
had now become a potentially valuable bride even at the tender age of
nine and a queue of suitors soon formed. The queue was sufficiently
long to make Ernst August and Sophia realise that the only way in
which they could ensure that their dynastic ambitions were fulfilled
the huguenots in external relations 225
was for their son, Georg Ludwig, to marry his first cousin, Sophia
Dorothea and this ambition was eventually completed in November
1682. Ernst August was able to extract a dowry of 100,000 Taler from
his brother and Sophia Dorothea was also to receive an annual allow-
ance of 4,000 Taler from her father.10 The fate of this marriage was to
have important consequences for the fulfilment of Huguenot political
aims in a variety of ways but before considering these, it is important
to consider the broader impact that the Huguenots had on the court
in Celle.
The Huguenot community in Celle was different from those in many
other places in two particular aspects. The first is that, because of
Elonores presence, it pre-dated the revocation and the second was
that it was firmly rooted in the life of the court. Elonore had sur-
rounded herself with a number of her compatriots and co-religionists.
She used a room in the ducal palace in Celle to hold French services
and this room was also used by the small Huguenot community in the
town.11 A number of those employed at the court were French and
although not all were Huguenot, a majority were. Most of the musi-
cians in the court orchestra were catholic but the company of French
comedic actors was protestant. The longevity of the French community
in Celle meant that a degree of religious indifference emerged that
would have been unthinkable within France, perhaps because in a for-
eign context the differences between the French and German courtiers
were greater than the religious divide.12
Nevertheless, when the clouds began to darken, Georg Wilhelm was
prepared to step in to help Huguenot refugees. More than a year before
the revocation he issued an edict promising a safe haven in Celle.13
Like other princes, Georg Wilhelm hoped that Huguenot merchants
and craftsmen would provide economic stimulus. The significant
influx of high-ranking Huguenots also served to stimulate courtly life
in Celle. Although Beuleke has suggested that the impression that,
after Prussia, the highest number of Huguenot refugees found new
the duchy of Brunswick-Lneburg, in Onnekink and Glozier (eds.), War, religion and
service, 199.
12
Wilhelm Beuleke, Die Hugenotten in Niedersachsen (Hildesheim: August Lax,
1960), 146; Flick, Court at Celle, 197.
13
Flick, Court at Celle, 202.
226 andrew c. thompson
14
Beuleke, Hugenotten, 16.
15
Flick, Court at Celle, 203.
16
Ibid, 204. The most notable example was Jacques dAmproux du Pontpitin. His
regiment had a long and distinguished career in the Hanoverian army, as did many of
his descendents.
the huguenots in external relations 227
(ed.), Aus den Briefen der Herzogin Elisabeth Charlotte von Orlans an die Kurfrstin
Sophie von Hannover, 2 vols. (Hanover: Hahn, 1891), ii, 258, no. 740.
18
W.H. Wilkins, The love of an uncrowned queen, 2 vols. (London: Hutchinson &
Co., 1900), i, 92.
228 andrew c. thompson
Divorce proceedings were quickly put in place and by the end of the
year a separation had occurred. The real reasons for the divorce were
left opaque. Instead it was suggested that Sophia Dorothea had been
planning to desert her husband.19 Under an agreement reached
between Ernst August and Georg Wilhelm, Sophia Dorothea was to
spend the rest of her days under close supervision, primarily in the
castle of Ahlden.
Sophia Dorothea was accompanied by a number of Huguenot serv-
ants, as well as a reformed minister who acted as her spiritual advisor,
during her confinement in Ahlden. Sophia Dorothea, in common with
other people of her rank and background, spoke French regularly. In
her confinement she also seemed to value the companionship of serv-
ants from her mothers country. Some of the German soldiers given the
task of guarding the disgraced princess expressed worries that the
presence of so many French servants increased the chance of intrigues
but to little avail. Indeed, a Huguenot officer, Gabriel de Villars-
Malortie, took charge of Ahlden in 1711.20
The acrimonious nature of the split between Sophia Dorothea and
Georg Ludwig also increased suspicion of the Huguenots at the
Hanoverian court. This was not helped by the actions of the English
envoy James Cresset. Cresset had been critical of the process that led to
Sophia Dorotheas confinement and had made some rather impolitic
remarks in a dispatch about her innocence that found their way back
to Hanoverian officials. Efforts were made to get Cresset recalled but
without success. Hanoverian suspicions increased when Cresset mar-
ried a distant relative of Sophia Dorothea, the Huguenot noblewoman
Louise Marie de la Motte in December 1694. Cresset found himself
drawn further into Huguenot politics. He tried to get his master,
William III, to raise Sophia Dorotheas plight when William met Georg
Wilhelm at Het Loo, in the Dutch republic, in 1696. Further Hanoverian
pressure led to Cresset being temporarily stationed in Hamburg but he
remained active in Lower Saxon politics until 1703.21
19
Georg Schnath, Die Prinzessin in Ahlden: Sophie Dorotheas Gefangenschaft,
16941726, in idem, Ausgewhlte Beitrge zur Landesgeschichte Niedersachsens
(Hildesheim: August Lax, 1968), 169.
20
Schnath, Die Prinzessin in Ahlden, 171, Flick, Huguenots in the Electorate of
Hanover, 3367.
21
Schnath, Die Prinzessin in Ahlden, 2068.
the huguenots in external relations 229
Ibid, 21011.
22
230 andrew c. thompson
23
For a discussion of the evolution of these positions, see Tony Claydon, Europe
and the making of England, 16601760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007), 23541. Cf. chapters 3 and 5, by Gregory Dodds and Robin Gwynn, above.
24
The following draws heavily on Matthew Kilburn, Robethon, John (d. 1722),
Oxford DNB; online edn, May 2009 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/23821,
accessed 16 Sept 2009]. It also includes material from D.C.A. Agnew, Protestant Exiles
from France, 3rd edn, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: privately printed, 1886), II, 199207.
the huguenots in external relations 231
25
Georg Schnath, Geschichte Hannovers im Zeitalter der neunten Kur und der eng-
lischen Sukzession, 16741714, 4 vols. (Hildesheim: August Lax, 193882), IV, 53.
26
Andrew C. Thompson, Britain, Hanover and the protestant interest, 16881756
(Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2006), 501, R. Pauli, Jean Robethon und die
232 andrew c. thompson
ideal type of the protestant international. Yet even this short summary
of his career shows the levels of interconnectedness, in both people
and ideas, with some of the other themes discussed in this chapter.
It is therefore necessary to focus more directly now on the policy,
as opposed to the personnel, of international relations to assess
Huguenot impact.
The international situation provided Huguenots with a variety of
opportunities. The prevalence of conflict in this period enabled them
to press their claims for a resolution of their grievances. On at least
three occasions, Huguenot exiles planned invasions with Williams
overt aid to recover their lands and restore Protestantism within
France.27 The rest of the chapter, however, focuses not on the late sev-
enteenth but the early eighteenth century. Some work on the impact of
Huguenot propagandistic efforts on the course of international rela-
tions exists already.28 The perspective offered here is more positive
about the effectiveness of Huguenot efforts. Both Huguenot campaigns
inside France to unseat Louis XIV and the ways in which these were
justified are explored.
The War of the Spanish Succession was the result of diplomatic fail-
ure. It had been clear for some time that an agreement would have to
be reached about the fate of the Iberian Peninsula following the death
of the last Spanish Habsburg, Carlos II. Both Louis XIV and William
III had been keen to avoid armed conflict and efforts had been made to
ensure a peaceful transition of power through a series of Partition trea-
ties. The death of the agreed compromise candidate, a Wittelsbach
prince, before Carlos made matters more complicated. When Carlos
died in 1701, Louis backed the claims of his grandson, Philip, duc
dAnjou, while the Habsburgs decided to support the Archduke
Charles. William, still mindful of containing the power of France,
had little choice but to back his erstwhile Habsburg allies and conflict
W. Gregory Monahan, Between two thieves: the protestant nobility and the war
29
of the Camisards, FHS 30 (2007), 542; cf. Utt & Strayer, Bellicose Dove.
234 andrew c. thompson
30
Roy L. McCullough, Coercion, conversion and counterinsurgency in Louis XIVs
France (Leiden: Brill, 2007); Glozier, Schomberg, Miremont, 142, 544.
31
Boles, Huguenots, chs. 56.
32
Andrew Wellum-Kent, The role of frigates in Royal Naval operations in the early
eighteenth-century Mediterranean, unpublished BA dissertation (University of
Cambridge, 2008).
33
Glozier, Schomberg, Miremont, 1434.
the huguenots in external relations 235
34
[Abel Boyer], The lawfulness, glory and advantage of giving immediate and effec-
tual relief to the protestants in the Cvennes together with the ways and means to succeed
in such an enterprise, 2nd edn (London: 1703).
35
Ibid, 6. I draw here on my The protestant interest and the history of humanitar-
ian intervention, c.1685c.1756, in Brendan Simms and D. J. B. Trim (eds.),
Humanitarian interventiona history (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2011), 6788.
36
Boyer, Lawfulness, 610.
236 andrew c. thompson
37
G. C. Gibbs, Some intellectual and political influences of the Huguenot migrs
in the United Provinces, c. 16801730, Bijdragen en mededelingen betreffende de
geschiedenis der Nederlanden 90 (1975), 25587 and idem, Huguenot contributions to
the intellectual life of England, c. 1680c. 1720, with some asides on the process of
assimilation, in J. A. H. Bots and G. H. M. Posthumus Meyjes (eds.), La Rvocation de
ldit de Nantes et les Provinces-Unies 1685 (Amsterdam & Maarssen: APA Holland
University Press, 1986), 181200.
38
For a biographical details, see G. C. Gibbs, Boyer, Abel (1667?1729), Oxford
DNB, online edn, Jan 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/3122, accessed
17 Sept 2009].
the huguenots in external relations 237
43
Robin Gywnn, The Huguenots in Britain, the Protestant International and the
defeat of Louis XIV, in Vigne & Littleton (eds.), Strangers, 41224.
the huguenots in external relations 239
the wars was one of the means used to garner support for them and, as
Tony Claydon and others have argued,44 the religious aspects of the
struggle had tended to be underplayed. More importantly, though,
Huguenot writers made a significant contribution to debates on tolera-
tion and its desirability. At the time of the revocation, intolerance was
still intellectually respectable. Arguments could be mustered in its
defence that convinced a good many.45
By the middle of the eighteenth century the intellectual landscape
had shifted. This was not to say that persecution had ended and free-
dom of conscience reigned supreme far from it. Rather, the growth of
Enlightenment thinking meant that it was the persecutors who now
found it difficult to justify their conduct. Intellectual and philosophical
shifts had helped but so had the steady flow of information about prac-
tical instances of persecution. One of the ways in which the story of the
growth of tolerationist thought can be told is to focus on particular
individuals and the reception of specific texts, such as the work of
Baruch Spinoza and John Locke. However, it is also important to
remember that to create the context in which their work could be
received and appreciated, it was necessary for many other authors to
push the message of toleration, even if it arrived with less theoretical
sophistication than could be mustered by professional philosophers.
Journalism and passing on news of the horrors that the Huguenot
community experienced within France helped raise short-term aware-
ness but it also contributed to a greater awareness, in the long term, of
the undesirability of such practices. It reinforced a sense of collective
memory that helped to shift expectations and political values. The
message of the importance of toleration was spread as much by ser-
mons and political pamphlets as it was by intellectual treatises. In this
respect, Huguenot authors and pamphleteers were part of a large, but
generally unacknowledged, republic of letters that was slowly altering
the European intellectual scene.
Local studies of Huguenot experience performed and perform a
vital role in securing identity and perpetuating memory. Yet, as this
Peter Grell, Jonathan I. Israel and Nicholas Tyacke (eds.), From persecution to tolera-
tion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 33168, John Marshall, John Locke, tol-
eration and early enlightenment culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006), ch. 15.
240 andrew c. thompson
chapter and others in the volume illustrate, there was always an inher-
ent tension between Huguenot assimilation and the broader European
context in which Huguenot identity operated. Huguenots had a signifi-
cant vested interest in ensuring that Europes protestant powers sur-
vived. Consequently, they were willing supporters of efforts to ensure
that the protestant succession was secured in Britain. This was not,
however, an end in itself but a means to something larger. It slowly
became clear that a return to France was unlikely and, perhaps, even
undesirable. Yet, the story did not end there. Huguenot writers, their
views shaped by Huguenot history and collective memory, had helped
to create a political and intellectual world in which the fate that they
and their forebears had suffered had become intellectually disreputa-
ble. Practical politicians could no longer ignore this fact.
CHAPTER NINE
Vivienne Larminie
The Pays de Vaud, on the northern and eastern shores of Lake Geneva
and on the east bank of the upper Rhne, might appear to have been
the ideal land of exile for French Protestants.1 It was conveniently
placed for Huguenots fleeing their former strongholds in Languedoc
and Dauphin, yet protected by the Jura and the Alps. French-speaking
yet Reformed, it was politically neutral and relatively free from the
fickle favours of princes, with their unstable dynasties and shifting alli-
ances. The front door-way to the Pays, the independent but vulnerable
republic of Geneva at the western end of the lake, was of course a
familiar destination as the training ground of their ministers; some
families had established a bridgehead there early on through a son
engaged in trade or banking. The back doorways, the mountain passes,
provided well-trodden if hazardous escape routes in times of crisis.
During the exoduses associated with the sixteenth century wars of
religion and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV in
1685, many French Calvinists duly took these routes but then trav-
elled rapidly onwards.2
It has been estimated that, in the years around the revocation, about
200,000 of an estimated Reformed population of 850,000 opted to
leave France. Between 1680 and 1700 just over half of this number at
* The early stages of my research in Vaud (19961998), which underpin what fol-
lows, were funded with assistance from the British Academy and from the Open
University (where I was then an associate lecturer), for which I am most grateful.
1
The Pays became, with slight boundary adjustments, what is now the canton of
Vaud when it joined the Confederation in 1803.
2
For an overview of the refuge, see: Le Refuge Huguenot en Suisse: Die Hugonotten
in der Schweiz (Lausanne: Muse Historique de lAncien-Evch, 1985). See also:
L. Gacond, Bibliographie des Refugis Huguenots en Suisse aprs la Rvocation,
Revue Suisse dHistoire 36 (1986), 36891.
242 vivienne larminie
3
M.J. Ducommun and D. Quadroni, Le Refuge Protestant dans le Pays de Vaud
(Fin XVIIedbut XVIIIe s.): Aspects dune migration (Publications de lAssociation
Suisse pour lHistoire du Refuge Huguenot, vol. 1/Bibliothque Historique Vaudoise
[hereafter BHV], vol. 1, Geneva: Droz, 1991), 11, 13.
4
Ducommun and Quadroni, Le Refuge Protestant, chap. 2.
5
See e.g. F. de Capitani, Vie et mort de lancien rgime, Nouvelle Histoire de la
Suisse et des Suisses (Lausanne: Payot, 2nd edn. 1986), 42339; R. Braun, Le Declin de
lAncien Rgime en Suisse: un tableau de lhistoire conomique et sociale au 18e sicle
(Paris: Editions de la Maison des sciences de lhomme, 1998); De lOurs la Cocarde:
Ancien Rgime et Rvolution en Pays de Vaud, eds. F. Flouck, P.R. Monbaron,
M. Stubenvoll and D. Tosato-Rigo (Lausanne: Payot, 1998), parts 1 and 2; M. Blanchard,
Sel et diplomatie en Savoie et dans les Cantons suisses aux XVIIe et XVIIIe sicles,
Annales, 15 (1960).
exile, integration and european perspectives243
historian has pointed out, by the turn of the seventeenth century, Bern
was filling its coffers through disengagement from foreign conflict to
the extent of being able to lend to the British and Dutch governments.6
None the less, there was a continuation of the well-established tradi-
tion of economic emigration in search of employment as mercenary
soldiers, private tutors or engineers.7 The precarious concord between
the Protestant and Roman Catholic cantons of the Confederation, the
desire of all confederates not to compromise their hard-won neutrality
and independence, and somewhat paradoxically, the engagement of
many Swiss in French regiments, made them vulnerable to the manip-
ulations of King Louis.8 The impetus was thus to shift the problem of
French refugees on to someone else.
Moreover, in the Pays de Vaud peculiar disincentives to the estab-
lishment of French expatriates were in play towards the end of the sev-
enteenth century. Originally a possession of the dukes of Savoy, this
territory had been conquered by the Bernese in 1536 and converted to
their own brand of Erastian Protestantism, derived from Huldrich
Zwingli. A Presbyterian system of local classes was organised and con-
trolled from Bern by its councillors, commonly referred to as Leurs
Excellences. There were also colloques, but no general clerical assembly
equivalent to that in Scotland to challenge the secular powers.
Ministerial training at the Acadmie de Lausanne was strictly moni-
tored and calls to parishes were carefully vetted; censorship of press
and pulpit was strict. Theology was Calvinist, but of a narrow, con-
servative cast, determinedly upheld. An influx of relatively liberally-
minded French clergy, perhaps trained at the unorthodox and suspect
Acadmie de Saumur or accustomed to living in some sort with the
6
BL, Add. MS 9,741 (Blaythwayt Papers XXIII), f. 64 (Philibert dHerwart
from Bern, 3/13 Sept. 1693); S. Altorfer, To have or have not: state finance of the
Swiss Republic of Berne in the eighteenth century, (http://www.ehs.org.uk/ehs/
conference2003/assets/Altorfer.doc, accessed 18 Aug. 2009).
7
See e.g. Gente Ferocissima: Mercenariat et Socit en Suisse (XVeXIXe sicle.
Solddienst und Gesellschaft in der Schweiz (15.19. Jahrhundert, ed. N. Furrer,
L. Hubler, M. Stubenvoll and D. Tosato-Rigo (Lausanne and Zurich: Chronos,
1997). Instances of Swiss in Britain are returned by a search of Oxford DNB, online at
www.oxforddnb.com, employing a People search limited by born in Switzerland
between 1500 and 1700.
8
See e.g. V. Larminie, Exile and belonging: Philibert Herwarth, ambassador to
Switzerland and benefactor of the French hospital, HSP 28 (2006), 50923. The classic
work on Franco-Swiss relations in this period is E. Rott, Histoire de la Reprsentation
de la France auprs des Cantons Suisses, de leurs Allis et Confdrs, vols. IX and X
(Bern: Imprimerie A. Benteli, 1926, 1935).
244 vivienne larminie
9
The classic work on this theme is H. Vuilleumier, Histoire de lEglise Rforme du
Pays de Vaud sous le rgime Bernois (4 vols., Lausanne: ditions La Concorde,
19271933). See also: A. Bonard, La Presse Vaudoise: Esquisse Historique (Lucerne:
Raber & Cie., 1925); J.-P. Perret, Les Imprimeries dYverdon au XVIIe et au XVIIIe
Sicles (BHV 7, Lausanne, 1945).
10
J. Chavannes, Les Rfugis Franais dans le Pays de Vaud et particulirement
Vevey (Lausanne: Georges Bridel, 1874), 910, 689; Vuilleumier, Histoire de lEglise
Rforme, esp. IV, 6, 173, 178. See also: G. Marion, Paroisses et Pasteurs de la Broye
au XVIIIe Sicle: La Classe de Payerne 16751798 (BHV, 101: Lausanne, 1990), esp.
p. 55; V. Larminie, La vie religieuse en Pays de Vaud et le contexte europen, in Flouck
et al., De lOurs la Cocarde, 26180; I. Fiaux, Collaborateurs ou pertabateurs?
Les pasteurs huguenots rfugis dans les paroisses des Classes de Lausanne et Morges
au temps du Refuge (16701715), Revue Historique Vaudoise [herafter RHV],
112 (2004), 2953.
11
E.g. J. Bonzon, La direction des pauvres refugis franais de Nyon, Bull. SHPF,
50 (1901); E. Mottaz, Yverdon et les refugis de la rvocation, RHV (1903), 2825,
31118, 38845, 37986, and (1904), 535, 11925; M. de Chambrier, Solidarit prot-
estante: la direction des pauvres refugis Lausanne, Bull. SHPF 53 (1904), 5462;
J. Cart, Les protestants franais refugis dans le Pays de Vaud et la Bourse Franaise de
Rolle, RHV, 17182, 193205; A. Veyrasset, Etat des refugis au Pays de Vaud aprs la
rvocation, RHV (1926), 2125, 24852, 2814; H. Yersin, Les refugis pour la cause
de religion Rolle, RHV (1937), 23243.
12
E. Burgy, La Bourse Franaise de Rolle 17161986, Mmoire de licence, Facult
des Lettres, (Universit de Genve, 1987); F. Raymond, Les Refugis Huguenots
Lausanne de 1693 1698, Mmoire de licence (Facult des Lettres, Universit de
Lausanne, 1987); B. Baudraz, Refugis et proslytes Bex de 1695 1798, Bulletin
Gnalogique Vaudoise (1997), 22221; A. L. Rodondo, La Bourse Franaise de Vevey
(1687?1790), Mmoire de licence (Facult des Lettres, Universit de Lausanne, 1999);
A. Bachmann and T. Garlet, La Direction Franaise: Composition et Activits (1688
1699). Une Vie Commune Huguenote Lausanne?, unpubl. paper, Universit de
Lausanne, seminaire dhistoire moderne (6 April 2004).
exile, integration and european perspectives245
The wills in this study at held at the Archives Cantonales Vaudoises (hereafter
13
ACV). Inventories for the city of Lausanne are at the Archives de la Ville de Lausanne
(hereafter AVL). I am most grateful to the staff of both repositiories for the assistance
I have received at regular visits since 1995. Wills from Lausanne are entered in a con-
tinuous series of well-preserved volumes starting in the early seventeenth century;
records for other towns are more fragmentary.
14
E.g. see: V. Larminie, The Jacobean diplomatic fraternity and the Protestant
cause: Sir Isaac Wake and the view from Savoy, EHR 121 (2006), 1301.
15
Ducommun and Quadroni, Le Refuge Protestant, 63.
16
Ducommun and Quadroni, Le Refuge Protestant, 68, 70, 7980.
17
Ducommun and Quadroni, Le Refuge Protestant, 146; M.-J. Ducommun, Aspects
du Refuge Huguenot Grandson, 16801701, Memoire de licence (Universit de
Neuchtel, 1985), 1921; A. Leroy, Passage, acceuil et tablissement des rfugis hu-
guenots Moudon, Bull. SHPF 133 (1987), 22930.
246 vivienne larminie
18
Larminie, Exile and belonging, esp. 517.
19
E. Piguet, Les Dnombrements Gnraux de Rfugis Huguenots au Pays de Vaud
et Berne (2 vols., Lausanne, 1934 and 1942) (also in Bull. SHPF 87 (1938), 187202,
295310, 494551, and 88 (1939), 166205, 33056).
20
Piguet, Les Dnombrements Gnraux, ii. 45119, in Bull. SHPF, 87: 295310,
494551.
21
Bull. SHPF, 87: 296, 536; AVL, D533, ff. 5859v.
exile, integration and european perspectives247
ACV, Bg. 13/3, f. 30v. All to the end that they may be rendered capable of later
27
31
ACV, Bg 13bis/2, ff. 15v16v.
32
ACV, Bg 13bis/2, ff. 90v96; Bachmann and Garlet, La Direction Franaise, 37.
33
ACV, Bg 13bis/1, ff. 139146.
34
ACV, Bg 13bis/1, ff. 122v123.
35
ACV, Bg 13bis/1, ff. 1479.
36
ACV, Bg 13bis/2, ff. 22v, 36v.
37
ACV, Bg 13bis/2, f. 226v in funds lost in England.
250 vivienne larminie
38
Unwell because of her pregnancy: ACV, Bg 13bis/2, ff. 105109v.
39
ACV, Bg 13bis/2, f. 267; 13bis/1, ff. 13946.
40
ACV, Bg 13bis/2, f. 219.
41
H. Schwarz, The French Prophets: the History of a Millenarian Group in Eighteenth-
Century England (University of California Press: Berkeley, 1980).
42
ACV, Bg 13bis/1, ff. 158v160.
43
ACV, Bg 13bis/2, ff. 132132v.
44
ACV, Bg 13bis/3, f. 27v; Bull. SHPF, 87: 301.
exile, integration and european perspectives251
45
ACV, Bg 13bis/3, ff. 212.
46
ACV, Bg 13bis/2, ff. 3131v.
47
ACV, Bg 13bis/2, ff. 135136v; Piguet, Dnombrement, II, 9, 90.
48
ACV, Bg 13bis/2, ff. 38v, 1113v.
49
ACV, Bg 13bis/2, ff. 1921, 356.
50
ACV, Bg 13bis/2, ff. 22v, 36v, 184.
252 vivienne larminie
of his goods there, but pleaded with him en honneste homme to share
it with his elder brothers, qui ont tout habandonn pour pouvoir
en libert professer nostre religion.51 Although the aged Dauphinoise
Catherine Pestre left everything to her daughter who had accompanied
her to Vaud, and nothing to her children who had stayed behind and
changed their religion, others like her compatriot Isbeau Pelat threat-
ened forfeit to children who thought of apostacy and return.52 Marie
Champel allowed her brother the use of her goods for his life, provided
il non pourra rien divertir de ce pays nor carried it into France until
religion [y] soit restablie et la parole de Dieu en toute puret presche par
ses fidelles ministres .53 Jean Lacroix left 300 livres to his nephew, pres-
ently in Savoy or Holland, but remained uneasy, asking his wife to take
the greatest possible care that Jean the younger lived well in the fear of
God; he exhorted his nephew sur tout de navoir iamais la pense de
retourner en France si ce nest quil pleust a Dieu de restablir la Religion
Rforme.54
As in wills anywhere, there is the problematic possibility that testa-
tors were coached by an attendant minister or interpreted by the
attendant notary. Unsurprisingly, while refugee wills are readily distin-
guishable insofar as details of the testators social status and place of
origin are always given, they often display the same formulae, language
and preoccupations as those of native Vaudois. Yet there are echoes of
individual voices. Of those who avowed that they wrote with their own
hand, there was a tendency to make a firm personal profession. Rose
de Boileau de Perrotat, a woman in her sixties who had come with two
daughters, leaving her merchant husband behind in Languedoc, pro-
claimed herself refugie dans le Pays de Suisse pour cause de religion.
Imploring Gods mercy, she supplicated pardon of her sins by the merit
of Christs death and la possession des biens esternels, quil reserve ses
fidelles dans son paradis.55 Marie de Froment, wife of a cavalry officer
51
ACV, Bg 13bis/2, ff. 1812: as a gentleman; who abandoned everything for the
liberty to profess our holy religion.
52
ACV, Bg 13bis/2, ff. 156v7, 2612; Piguet, Dnombrement, II, 117, 513.
53
ACV, Bg 13bis/2, ff. 221v2: diverted nothing from this pays; our religion is re-
established there, and the word of God in all its purity is preached by his faithful
ministers.
54
ACV, Bg 13bis/2, ff. 2930v: never to think of returning to France until it pleased
God to re-establish the Reformed religion.
55
ACV, Bg 13bis/2, ff. 226v7: a refugee in Switzerland for the sake of religion; the
possession of an eternal inheritance, reserved by God for his faithful in Paradise; Bull.
SHPF 87: 305.
exile, integration and european perspectives253
56
ACV, Bg 13bis/3, ff.367: from the very bottom of my heart; all my sins in the
precious blood which my divine and beloved Saviour and redeemer has poured out on
the cross.
57
ACV, Bg 13bis/2, ff. 206v208v: persevere constantly in the profession of our
religion, and live and die in it as good Christians, against all oppositions of the flesh,
the world and the devil, so that God might raise them to his Paradise to enjoy for ever
glorious salvation and participate eternally in that certain joy found in the contem-
plation of his face, which is radiating with glory.
58
ACV, Bg. 13 bis/2, ff. 15v16v.
254 vivienne larminie
59
Chavannes, Les Refugis Franais, 21820, 238: a miserable sinner [who by trans-
gressions] has merited hell thousands of times over, and when I look in the mirror of
his law there is no commandment of which I am not found guilty innumerable times
in thought, words or actions; which reigned, and reigns still, in our unfortunate coun-
try, and for having guided me so happily in these parts, where the holy and divine
Word is preached in its purity and the holy sacraments administered.
60
Chavannes, Les Refugis Franais, 21718: which brought down so many people
whose life was more observant than mine
exile, integration and european perspectives255
61
ACV, Bg 13bis/2, ff. 90v96: Thus we are taught in the Word of Truth which is
taught and followed by the Reformed churches of France and those of this pays, in the
profession of which truth I hope to live and die by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.
62
ACV, BG 13bis/1, ff. 160v162v: I do not believe they need it.
256 vivienne larminie
-o-o-o-
63
ACV, Bg 13bis/1, ff. 165v167v: for the sole cause of my religion and my minis-
try; in Switzerland among brothers, according to my choice expressly mentioned in
exile, integration and european perspectives257
the passport sent in the name of his Majesty the last day of October in the year 1685;
who gave their fraternal support and asylum to our poor brothers exiled and fugitives
for religion alone; [bending] and [converting] in their favour the heart of our great
monarch and his successors, so that soon he will give us grace to recall, re-assemble
and re-establish his poor subjects who have always been faithful to his Majesty and
have been dispersed and oppressed for the same conscience that teaches them their
loyalty to him; during the seven years that the paternal providence of God has united
us together in these foreign lands for his great glory and our mutual consolation.
64
Vividly exemplified in Jacques Flournoy, Journal 16751692, ed. O. Fatio, M.
Granjean and L. Martin van Berchem, Publications de lAssociation Suisse pour
lHistoire du Refuge Huguenot, 3 (1994); the editors talk of une vritable guerre de
nerfs (xxvii). The tension is apparent also from a French angle in Charles Franois
dIberville, rsident de France Genve: Correspondance 16881690, ed. L. Vial-Bergon,
Publications de lAssociation Suisse pour lHistoire du Refuge Huguenot, 7 (2003). In
the 1710s and 1720s insecurity from natural disaster pervades the livre de raison of
Nicolas Bergier: AVL, Bergier. For further discussion, see; Larminie, La vie religieuse,
esp. pp. 2724.
258 vivienne larminie
65
ACV, Bt 25, f. 12 (Receuil of Augustin Scanavin); P Loys 4560, f. 40 (livre de
raison of John Rodolphe Loys).
66
ACV, Bt 25, ff. 35; Larminie, La vie religieuse, 266.
67
Receuils Gnalogiques Vaudois, 15573; P. Morren, La Vie Lausannoise au XVIIIe
Sicle daps Jean Henri Polier de Vernand, Lieutenant Baillival (Geneva: Labor et Fides,
1970); entries Polier in Oxford DNB, and in Dictionnaire Historique de la Suisse, ed.
M. Jorio, at www. hls-dhs-dss.ch.
68
See their entries in Oxford DNB.
69
E. Giddey, LAngleterre dans la Vie Intellectuelle de la Suisse Romande au XVIIIe
Sicle (BHV, 51: Lausanne, 1974), 25.
70
E. W. Monter, Witchcraft in France and Switzerland: the Borderlands during the
Reformation (Ithaca 7 London: Cornell University Press, 1976), 1068; P. Kamber,
Croyances et peurs: la sorcellerie dans le pays de Vaud, De lOurs la Cocarde,
24760.
exile, integration and european perspectives259
71
See Dictionnaire Historique de la Suisse; Le Livre Lausanne: Cinq sicles ddition
et dimprimerie, ed. S. Corsini et al. (Lausanne, 1993), 37; E. Robert, Entre orthodoxie
et critique: les tudes hbraiques et le discours sur le judaisme au 17e sicle autour de
lAcadmie de Lausanne (15881739), mmoire de licence (Universit de Lausanne
1999).
72
Vuilleumier, Histoire, III, 59n.
73
E. Ludlow, A Voyce from the Watch Tower, ed. A. B. Worden, Camden Society, 4th
ser., 21 *1978), e.g. 307; The Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, ed. C. H. Firth (2 vols.,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894), appendix vi, Letters of the English exiles; Ludlow,
Edmund and Lisle, John, in Oxford DNB.
74
Vuilleumier, Histoire, III, 25367; ACV, Bg 13bis/1, passim.
75
ACV, Bis 113, Livre des Inventaires, Vevey 16831719; AVL, D513 Chambre des
Orphelins, 16701690, D533.
76
ACV, P Loys, 4558, f. 56; 4559.
260 vivienne larminie
77
ACV, P Loys, 4559, ff. 15v, 21.
78
ACV, P Loys, 4560, ff. 3, 11v, 12v, 14v, 15, 21, 76v; 4562, f. 12.
79
ACV, P Loys, 4562, ff. 4v, 5v; Schomberg, Frederick Herman de, in Oxford DNB.
80
ACV, P Loys, 4562, f. 29.
81
Utt & Strayer, Bellicose Dove, esp. chapters 3 and 7.
82
AVL, P118, esp. p. 277. For external contacts see also Giddey, LAngleterre, 28.
exile, integration and european perspectives261
83
H. Meylan, La Haute Ecole de Lausanne 15371937 (Universit de Lausanne,
1986), 4253; D. Christoff, P. Javet, A. J. Voelke, G. P. Widmer, La Philosophie dans la
Haute Ecole de Lausanne, 15421955 (Universit de Lausanne, 1987), 2736; O. Fatio,
LAffaire du Consensus helveticus, De lAcadmie lUniversit de Lausanne
15371987: 450 Ans dHistoire (Lausanne: Muse historique de lAncien Evch, 1987),
645.
84
ACV, P Loys, 4556, ff. 1117, 25, 32, 34, 3944, 80, 103 etc; Giddey, LAngleterre,
passim; La Vie Lausannoise. See also C. Lasserre, Le Sminaire de Lausanne (1726
1812): Instrument de la Restauration du Protestantisme Franais (BHV, 112, Lausanne,
1997).
CHAPTER TEN
Randolph Vigne
See A. Wagner and A. Dale, The Wagners of Brighton (London: Phillimore, 1983).
1
With his bequest to the French Hospital were many books, and in the
mass of unpublished materials the largest component was some 5000
abstracts of wills of Huguenot testators proved in the Prerogative Court
of Canterbury between 1617 and 1849, the great majority of them
between 1680 and 1780. For eighty years after his death the abstracts
remained in manuscript, used by readers in the Huguenot Library in
University College, London to which the combined libraries of the
French Hospital and the Huguenot Society were moved in 1960.
In 2007 the Huguenot Society published Huguenot Wills and Admin
istrations in England and Ireland, 16171849 as Vol. 60 in its Quarto
Series, transcribed and edited by Dorothy North, and in 2008 as Part 2
the Complete Index of Names, listing some 25,000 testators, executors,
beneficiaries and others named in the wills.
Wagners five notebooks, in 16mo format, covered with minute
script and using his own abbreviation system, had become available for
all and await analysis by historians, not only of the Huguenot diaspora
but of social usages in the long eighteenth century. This chapter will
seek to give some impressions of the attitudes of refugees at the end of
their lives to the religious and social motivations that drove them into
exile, and of the apportionment of their estates among relatives, friends
and charitable institutions.
The abstracts were made mainly to satisfy Wagners genealogical
needs and the small random selection examined here some 150
often omit references to religion and exile, and names of beneficiaries
who in extreme cases run into the hundreds in a single will. They nev-
ertheless offer a glimpse of the Huguenot refugees state of mind as
they recall their experiences, express their religious beliefs, and con-
sider their attitude to their co-religionists in exile or still in France.
These are the wills of men and women whose adult lives had been
shaped by their confessional migration and memories of that migra-
tion are observable in many of them.
A popular study of English wills3 quoted some half a dozen by
Huguenot testators, a large proportion measured against the authors
3
E. Vine Hall, The Romance of Wills and Testaments (London: Fisher Unwin, 1912).
See A. Camp, Wills and their Whereabouts (London: Society of Genealogists, 1963) for
an account of the episcopal courts testamentary procedures.
testaments of faith 265
7
F.G. Price, Handbook of London Bankers, wiih Some Account of their Predecessors
(London: Simpkin Marshall, 1876).
8
See HSP 28 (2004), 29930.
9
Vine Hall, Romance of Wills and Testaments, 202. 211.
testaments of faith 267
10
R. Vigne, Some Directors of the French Hospital: the Early Years, HSP 29 (2009),
18007; D. C. A. Agnew, Protestant Exiles from France chiefly in the Reign of Louis XIV,
2 vols. (Edinburgh: privately printed, 1886; repr., Ticehurst, Piccadilly Rare Books,
2003), II, 206.
11
T. Murdoch and R. Vigne, The French Hospital in England: Its Huguenot History
and Collections (Cambridge: Adamson, 2009), 489.
268 randolph vigne
67 (80 per cent) Huguenot bodies, thirty of them (30 per cent of the
total) were to the French Hospital and 27 to Huguenot churches
and chapels, all of them in London. They were Threadneedle Street
(11), the Savoy (5), La Patente (3), the Artillery, Spitalfields (2) and one
each to Browns Lane, the Chapel Royal St Jamess, John Street, Le
Carr, Leicester Fields and Les Grecs. The remaining specifically
Huguenot charities were the Spitalfields feeding scheme, La Soupe (5),
the Westminster Charity School (for Huguenots) (4) and the Saintonge
[Friendly] Society (1).
The seventeen non-Huguenot charitable bequests were to the local
poor North Chapel parishes (Lincolnshire), Chiswick, the City of
London, New Sarum, or, very generally, in the five abstracts similar to
that of Claudius Amyand, principal and sergeant surgeon to H.M.,
who in 1740 left it to his two sons as executors to distribute 300
among indigent people who may be ashamed to beg and to apprenti
cing. There were also two benefactors of hospitals: Sir Edward Des
Bouveriess12 (1694) 100 to both St Bartholomews for the sick and
Christs Hospital school. A donation of 100 to the London Hospital
benefited the fourth of the great London infirmaries to follow the
French Hospitals foundation in 1718.
The only non-Huguenot church bequests were the widow Judith
Delamares (1798) to Christ Church Spitalfields for maintenance of her
fathers vault in the churchyard.13 Her husband Abraham Delamare
was buried there too and his will (1762, outside our sample) tells us
that he was a member of a voluntary society, the SPCK, which first met
in 1696 and has weekly meetings in house at Bartletts Buildings.
Huguenot support for the SPCK and the SPG is evident from the fre-
quency of bequests five in this sample, perhaps because of these bod-
ies aid to Protestant minorities in Europe in these years. The largest
such legacy was Sir John Chardins, the court jeweller and traveller,
(1712) of 1000 for the propagation of Gospel in foreign parts (i.e. the
SPG).14
12
Uncle of William de Bouverie, 1st Earl of Radnor, Governor of the French
Hospital, 1770.
13
See M. Cox and T. Molleson, The Spitalfields Project, 2 vols (London: CBA, 1993)
for an account of the clearing of Huguenot remans from the crypt of Christ Church.
14
Agnew, Protestant Exiles, II, 266. See also S. Nishikawa, The SPCK in Defence of
Protestant Minorities in Early Eighteenth-century Europe, Journal of Ecclesiastical
History 56 (2005), 73048.
testaments of faith 269
to the French Hospital in his abstract). The full text dealing with church
beneficiaries reads thus:
I give unto the Governours Ministers and Officers of the French con-
formist church or chappel in Castle Street in St Martins in the Fields the
County of Middlesex for the time being Twenty pounds to be by them
distributed to and amongst such persons or familys of their Congregation
as are most in want. Item. I give unto the Ministers and Officers of the
French Comformist Chappel in Berwick Street in St James Westminster
for the time being Twenty pounds to be by them distributed to and
among such Objects of their Congregation as are most in want., Item.
I give to the Governours and Directors of the French Hospital commonly
called the House of Providence the sum of Thirty pounds to be by them
distributed for the use and benefit of the poor relieved and maintained
thereby. Item. I give unto the Ministers and Officers of the French Church
of St Martin Orgards Thirty pounds for the use and benefitt of such per-
sons of familys of their Congregation as are most in want. Item. I give
unto the Reverend Dr Herret Minister of Greenwich aforesaid a Ring of
twenty shillings value and unto the poor of the said parish of Greenwich
six pounds the same to be distributed by him to such housekeepers as he
knows to be most in want. Item. I give unto the Reverend Mr Rivalie
Minister of the French Church at Greenwich aforesaid a Ring of Twelve
pounds value and to the poor of his Congregation there three pounds the
same to be distributed by him to those of his Congregation most in want.
Vine Hall noted the pathos in the prefaces to Huguenot wills which is
usually lacking in their English counterparts who had not gone through
persecution, flight and settlement in a foreign land, unforgotten after a
lifetimes exile. A preface of particular interest for its biographical con-
tent rather than its piety is that of the Revd Peter Allix (1717), which
typifies the loyalty of so many refugees to their new homeland and its
monarch, albeit perhaps in an extreme form in recognition of Royal
favour. He deals with loss of his property in France and its possession
by family members with comparative mildness. His preface reads, in
the words of Agnews translator:16
I recommend my soul to God, the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, and
I order my body to be buried privately and without expense. I was
16
Agnew, Protestant Exiles, II, 233. The original in the National Archives, Kew, has
the catalogue reference PROB 11/ 536.
testaments of faith 271
Like Jaques Fontaine in the memoir written for his children,19 Allix
set great store by keeping his family together, so easily dispersed in the
Huguenot grand refuge. He exhorted my wife and children to live in
the fear of God and to keep up the good union and understanding
wherein they have lived now, which is the sure and only way to bring
down the blessing of heaven.
It is intriguing that Wagner, in his very brief Peter Allix profile,
notes: from French, is given by Agnew interesting preamble, which
should be copied in full, suggesting his intention of using the abstracts
in a narrative of some kind
Many expressed their gratitude for the sanctuary they had been given
in other Protestant countries, in wills proved in England. Magdalen
Amyot, of St James Westminster (1743), widow of the physician Peter
Amyot MD and mother-in-law of Sir Theodore Colladon, physician to
the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, gave thanks to God for causing me to be
received into this country of liberty, in the same phrasing as was used
by Joseph Pandin, Sieur des Jariges (1721), which expressed gratitude
for the favour he hath granted me to come into this country of liberty,
which in his case was Brandenburg. Charlotte Damaris de St George
de Marsay was even more grateful to the Seven Provinces in 1772:
I tenderly love this republic as a second native country. Margaret
Perachon (the widow Huguetan), The Hague (1711) thanked God that
he has given me grace to make profession in the land of the Christian
and truly reformed religion in my advanced age.
England was seen by the Revd Balthazar Regis DD, Rector of
Adisham in Kent and a Canon of Windsor, as our dear country, the
Bulwark of our Holy Religion against Popery. Regis, like Allix, had
served the Church of England in high places and had his reward for it.
He had lost an estate in Dauphin, which he hoped to recover, with its
revenue since 1716 in case there should be a reformation in France, as
I am inclined to believe there will be high hopes indeed in 1757, six
19
The Memoirs of the Revd Jaques Fontaine, ed. D. Ressinger (London: Huguenot
Society, 1992).
testaments of faith 273
years before the Calas case revealed the intolerance that Voltaire was
inspired to do battle against.20
Peter de Ladeveze, whose will was drawn in Dublin and granted
probate in London in 1715, described himself as run astray like the
horse which has got loose until God had conducted me by the hand
into this country of refuge. Was he a fugitive on the run or had he
abjured and been a nouveau converti? a rarely confessed source of
shame, admitted by a widow of the petite noblesse Anne Muysson, of
The Hague, who had the unhappiness of the time of the persecution in
France to sign that I did myself reunite to the Roman church (1715).
Frances culpability
The Revd Peter de Tascher combined hard words for France with praise
for England. The preface to his full will contrasts with that of Revd
Peter Allix in the intensity of his gratitude to God, and penitence for
his sins, and continues with celebration of his escape from France my
unnaturall country:
I hope for everlasting Life in that Blessed Kingdom of His where there is
no Sin or Sorrow but praising of God Eternally I return my most humble
thanks to him for that I was by his Grace born and bred in the Protestant
Religion wonderfully delivered out of France my unnaturall country and
honoured here with the Ministry of his Gospell in the Church of England.
With more pathos than either of these is the preface to the will of John
Lacombe (1702, quoted by Vine Hall)21 of St Hipolite and Paris, a
recent refugee in Canterbury advanced in years, being in my seventy-
fifth year, very infirm of body but of sound mind and understanding,
by the grace of God:
After having received so many graces and favours from the mercy of God
in all the course of my life and, and chiefly in this time of affliction and
20
PRO, PROB 11/556; R. Vigne, The Killing of Jean Calas: Voltaires First Huguenot
Cause, HSP 23.5 (1981), pp. 28094.
21
Vine Hall, Romance of Wills and Testaments, 11718. PRO, PROB 11/ 469.
Grateful thanks to Mr Daniel Korachi-Alaoui, Kent Library and Archives, Canterbury,
for tracing two of the Huguenot wills quoted by Vine Hall in the Kent County
Archives www.kentarchaeology.ac/ekwills_a/. That of Rigoullott (below) is in neither
the Canterbury Cathedral nor the Kent County Archives. The PCC wills at the PRO
have also been checked unsuccessfully.
274 randolph vigne
grief for His Church in which so many persons do sigh after the liberty
of serving Him purely according to the motives of their conscience,
I render him my most humble actions of grace for conducting me
through His providence in this city. I am come into it with five chil-
dren, which it hath pleased God to leave me of a greater number which
He had given me. I have still in France Elizabeth Beauchamp my wife,
their mother. I hope that God shall grant me grace to see her in this
country to end together the few days that remain to us: to live and die in
it in peace and tranquillity, that is the prayer that I make daily to God.
None of these, Allix, De Tascher nor Lacombe, condemns their unnat-
urall country and its religion as bitterly as does the will of Isaac
Rigoullott (1720) deposited in Canterbury 22
and therefore, like
Lacombes, unabstracted by Wagner. It is quoted by Vine Hall:
Because death is certain and the hour thereof uncertain, after having rec-
ommended my body and soul to God by Jesus Christ our Lord through
His Holy Spirit, and being come out of France by reason of the persecu-
tion against our holy Christian Religion forcing us to worship the Bread
and Wine as being the blood and bone of our Lord Jesus Christ, making
us believe in the invocation of Saints, the imaginary fire of Purgatory,
and other falsehoods inspired by the spirit of the Devil, to worship the
true God in spirit and in truth as He has commanded us in His holy
word in the Old and New Testament, I Isaac Rigoulott give
A briefer recollection of the clash of religions is in the will of the refu-
gee Stephen Godin, a successful merchant of St Peter le Poer in the City
of London (1729), where Godin requires my body to be modestly
interred as becomes as one of the dispersed Protestants of France
where God in his providence fetched me out of a consuming fire of
Idolatry and persecution.
Glory in Protestantism
For many there was an element almost of joy in their praise of the
Protestantism for which they were ready to sacrifice all but life itself,
after enduring persecution. Jacob Chabaud of Long Acre (1712)
affirmed that I intend to die in the beliefs of the Holy Religion which
is professed by the Protestants and Reformed Church in which I have
ever lived and on account of which I refugied myself in the Province of
Holland in 1686 and since some years in the City of London where
I now live in Long Acre. The Revd Paul de Claris, Sieur de Florian,
Rector of Stradishall, Suffolk, and of St James Westminster (1737) gave
thanks that he had been born in the Christian, Protestant, Reformed
church the ark of God, door to Heaven. A soldiers simpler point of
view was expressed by a refugee from Grenoble in the Dauphin
Charles St Maurice, captain in the service of His Britannic Majesty, of
St Annes Westminster (1746) who quitted my country France on
account of the persecution for my reformed religion, the only motive
which made me abandon my estate and my country. Two years earlier
he had served on the committee that recruited 1600 volunteers from
among the refugees of Wesminster and Spitalfields for military service
against the threatened Jacobite rising.23
Transferring funds
Some wills exemplify the concern for family division brought about by
flight from persecution and the financial implications. Anne Allenet,
widow of Michael Boucher, La Rochelle merchant (1716), gives an his-
torical account of her financial affairs and the effect on them of the
persecution and partial exile of her family and property, which bears
fuller examination24 than Wagners abstract makes possible:
I declare that the Estate which I bequeath by my Will and all that I have
heretofore given to my children proceeds for the most part from that
which hath been bequeathed to me in France by the late Mr Repusard de
La Ramigere out of which Estate given to me and of that as well as per-
sonal left by my late husband deceased at Allever in 1681 and of that of
my Father in Law Paul Boucher deceased at La Rochelle in 1683 pro-
ceeding from our commonalty of Estates I have from time to time whilst
I remained in the Kingdom of France sent and remitted for my said three
children Paul Lewis and Anne Boucher who were then out of the
Kingdom of France diverse summs of money which they have received
to wit the said Paul the summ of seventeen thousand and odd Livers
andLewis as much or thereabouts of such money and Anne twelve hun-
dred pounds sterling which she has brought as a Marriage Portion to the
said Du Charnau25 and whereas on account of the coming away out of
France in the year 1702 and before that of my said sons Paul Michael
23
Agnew, Protestant Exiles, II, 299.
24
PRO, PROB 11/552.
25
Correctly Du Prat de Charreau, as in Jean, Director of the French Hospital, 1726.
276 randolph vigne
Money is, of course, the theme common to all wills, and Huguenot
testators were deeply concerned with the inheritance of families
divided as a result of persecution and the grand refuge. The salient fea-
ture of Huguenot wills, marking them out from their English counter-
parts, was the effect on inheritance of the linked questions of loyalty
toProtestant kin and of alienation from France. Thirty wills, chosen
or reside out of Great Britain. Neither failed at the first condition but it
is not known if Marys marriage to the ADC to the Duke of Wrttemberg
a few months after her fathers death caused her to fail at the second.
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography makes no mention of his
Huguenot background, but four more Dayrolles wills abstracted by
Wagner establish it beyond doubt.
Susanna Basnages suspicions of her nephews assertion that he may
not have apostatized in order to inherit is echoed in a milder form in
twelve of the wills in this sample focusing on conditional inheritance.
The longest probation period for heirs returning to Protestantism and
England was required by the Revd John Dubourdieu, pastor at the
Savoy Church in London, whose chief heirs were two sons, Peter
(Rector of Kirby over Carr, Yorkshire) and Armand and his eldest
daughter. Her sister Anne, still at Montpellier, would have her share if
she comes to England [but would not have] the power of disposal till
she have lived here for ten years a Protestant. A third daughter,
Elisabeth, married, had the same condition imposed on her, with her
children to inherit in her default on their compliance.
The widow Elizabeth La Pradelle (ne La Primaudaye) (1743) willed
400 to her husbands nephew, already out of France, on condition that
he stay out for five years. This probation was cut down to four years
for the period of time by which Mary Barbat (ne De Duroy) (1695)
required the departure from France of her niece Antoinette, daughter
of John James du Roy, Sieur de Reminier. Antoinettes brother,
Lieutenant David du Roy was serving in Ireland. For Mary Caillaud
(ne Bontin) (1787), nearly a hundred years later, and with the Edict of
Toleration only a year away, instructed a niece and nephew, Mary and
John Mongeon: I intend that John and Mary shall be at London before
three years are out if they are to have a share.
Peter Gallot, a Spitalfields silk-weaving master (1778), among many
bequests to family and charities, made assurance double sure by offer-
ing 100 to the first of my nephews and nieces who shall come from
France within a year of my death and remain two years in this country
without returning to France, to be paid at the end of the two years. Guy
Viouses estate (1753) went to his wife Mary Magdalen and thereafter
to be shared by his nephews and nieces if they come out of France
twelve months after my wifes decease, adding prudently or if Great
Britain and France be at war, twelve months after conclusion of peace.
Mary Magdalen died in 1769. Her heirs, Mary and Anne Fountain
(formerly de La Fontaine), spinster nieces, the only persons entitled to
280 randolph vigne
a distribution had clearly met the terms of their uncles will and come
to England well before their aunts death. The will of Mary Magdalen
Viouses sister Anne de La Fontaine dated 1766 names Mary and
Anne de La Fontaine, of St Benet Sherehog, who signed an affidavit
before probate in 1770. Guy Viouse, the son of Guy de Viouse, Baron
de La Court, Governor of the French Hospital in 1722, had himself
been elected a Director in 1732. Like other Huguenots of the noblesse
and petit noblesse in England, he had dropped the de and the barony.
Amongst the heirs of John Lichigaray (1743) were a nephew Jean on
condition he come to England within a year. There was more: he was
also to make profession of the Protestant Religion. Conditions were
more relaxed for Martha Viard, sister of the spinster Anne Viard of
Christ Church, Spitalfelds (1762), for whom there was 300 in trust
only if she come out of France in a limited period. Four more such
wills that named beneficiaries who must come out of France were
those of Lewis Duterme de La Cour (1742), James de Foyssac (1751), a
friend of Captain St Maurice and committee member recruiting
London Huguenots to serve against the Jacobites,27 the widow Mary La
Combe de Cluzel (1743), her brother De Loches would inherit on con-
dition he come to England and profess our bold Reformed Religion.
Once again showing that suspicion of nouveaux convertis Peter de
Vesis de Combrune of St Annes Westminster, widower (1731) left his
estate to his six surviving children, including William, gone into
France to make himself a Papist, to inherit only if he publicly abjure in
Les Grecs, the outstation chapel in Soho of the conformist French
Protestant Church of the Savoy.
By no means all of the refugee testators saw their future and that of
their families to be forever in England. Like the Revd Peter Allix,
Gaspard de Masclary in The Hague in 1710 expressed the happiness of
finding means to save the only four children we then had living,
remembered my sister the nunn, and his brother in France who had
benefited by the division of the family estates in France. He laid down
if restoration in France no lawsuit against my brother. In 1725
See www.maine-etaules.fr/tourisme/images/darcy-brun.
28
Agnew, Protestant Exiles, II, 292. See also G. L. Lee, The Story of the Bosanquets
29
the persecution. It stands today but history does not record if Davids
bequest was used to achieve its purpose.
This brief study has sought to glean from Wagners abstracts and a few
full wills evidence that sheds some light on Englands Huguenot testa-
tors charitable bequests, burial customs, attitudes to Protestantism in
France and to England and other countries of sanctuary. Perhaps the
clearest outline is of the effect of the division of families and the use of
inheritance to re-unite family members, to punish those still in France
and reward those willing to escape to England.
It should not be thought, however, that the abstracts in the samples
explored are representative of the wills en masse. In page after page of
Mrs Norths alphabetical transcription there might be found evidence
relating only to straightforward inheritance and small bequests, of
charities and burial. On pages 20203, as but one small example, wills
of seven members of the Guinand family do not stray beyond these
confines. These Guinands are Henry John (1756), his wife Elzabeth
(ne Hamelot), his brother Joseph (1764), two of Henry John and
Elizabeths unmarried daughters (Elizabeth, 1792, a regular old maids
will writes a somewhat acerbic Wagner), son Henry (1785, from
whom, with his wife Elizabeth Yvonnet, the Princes William and
Henry are descended, via their mother the late Diana, Princess of
Waless Roche ancestry), grand-daughter (Catherine, 1805) and grand-
son (John Henry, Bengal, 1793, aged 31).
Henry John Guinand, a substantial figure who had worked hard for
Huguenot charities, left money to bodies in Geneva and Neuchtel, his
birthplace, and England, including the French Hospital (of which
Ihave the honour to be sub-governor). His will30 began with a striking
preface which vividly displays his paternal feelings but has no trace of
Huguenot content:
I pray this God of mercy to shower his most precious blessings as a mark
of our dear children and to sanctify them by His spirit in order that they
may be found without reproach at the coming of our Saviour who will
change our vile bodies and here in this last and first day I may say with
confidence, Lord, I am here with the children thou hast given me.
Conclusion
The Wagner will abstracts give us brief glimpses into the minds of
those thousands of Huguenot testators, the great majority of whose
wills deal only with the distribution of their assets to their heirs and
ofmourning rings and small sums of money to a wider circle. As the
Hamelot gravestone suggests, memories of early sufferings for
their holy religion were surely in most cases as live at the end of their
days as they were to the Hamelots, looking back on leaving their
patrimony,
They are a mere soupon of the gargantuan feast awaiting research-
ers into the vast collection of Huguenot wills in Episcopal and County
Record Offices, the greatest proportion of them, those of the Prerogative
Court of Canterbury, held at the Public Record Office, the National
Archives, in Kew.33 The PCC wills are accessible online at a modest fee,
an unthinkable facility to Wagners generation. The prospect is almost
limitless and awaits the assiduity and motivation of the Wagners of
today. Here could be a major contribution to our understanding of
English Huguenots experience of their past, their memory of it and
the effect of both on their lives and the lives of those who came after.
mobile/default.
32
Agnew, Protestant Exiles, II, 267, describes this Hamelot family as illustrious
Rochellois.
33
www.nationalarchives.gov.uk.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Paul McGraw
Persecution cannot last for ever. Like all things human it wears itself
out.1 The words Hannah Farnham Lee used to conclude her two-
volume history, The Huguenots of France and America, epitomised not
only the condition of French Protestants by the early nineteenth cen-
tury, but also the process by which Americans viewed their plight.
Nearly half a century later, Charles W. Baird produced the first defini-
tive work on their entrance into, and impact on, American society.
When nineteenth-century historians of American religion focused
their attention on Huguenots, it was not a new field of historical study
but merely a new tack on the importance of this underrepresented but
arguably over-emphasised group of religious refugees. Huguenot num-
bers do not seem to justify the focus showered on them in over the
three centuries since the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. There are
few time periods since the establishment of English Colonies in North
America in which some voice has not found the ephemeral image of
the Huguenots a useful figure with which to foment agendas ranging
from anti-Catholic animosity to the promotion of millenarian apoca-
lypticism. American historians, preachers and politicians from the
early seventeenth century to the present have found the study of
Huguenots an important element in their polemics.
Huguenot history and European presence in the Americas parallel
one another in numerous ways. The short-lived settlement of Fort
Caroline, near present-day Jacksonville, Florida, established in 1562 as
a refuge for Huguenots, was destroyed by the Spanish in 1565. Fort
Caroline exemplifies the unique, if precarious, nature of Huguenot set-
tlement in North America. As early as the mid-seventeenth cen-
tury,the story of Huguenot persecution in France and the exile which
1
Hannah Farnham Sawyer Lee, The Huguenots in France and America, 2nd edn,
2 vols. (Cambridge: n.p.,1843), II, 268.
286 paul mcgraw
2
Jon Butler, The Huguenots in America: A Refugee People in New World Society,
Harvard Historical Monographs, V. 72 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1983).
the memory of the huguenots in north america287
3
Charles W. Baird, History of the Huguenot Emigration to America, 2 vols. (New
York: Dodd, Mead, 1885; repr., Baltimore: Regional Publishing Company, 1966).
4
J. F. Maclear, New England and the Fifth Monarchy: The Quest for the Millennium
in Early American Puritanism, WMQ, 3rd series, 32 (April 1975), 225; cf. B. S. Capp,
The Fifth Monarchy Men: A Study in Seventeenth-century English Millenarianism
(London: Faber, 1972).
5
John Cotton, The Churches Resurrection, or the Opening of the Fifth and Sixth
Verses of the 20th Chapter of Revelation (London: 1642; Wing C6419).
288 paul mcgraw
6
Ibid., 56.
7
Maclear, New England and the Fifth Monarchy, 236.
8
Howard C. Rice, Cotton Mather Speaks to France: American Propaganda in the
Age of Louis XIV, The New England Quarterly 16 (June 1943), 201.
the memory of the huguenots in north america289
the Lord, purely on the behalf of the church abroad weltring under the
grievous persecution.9 The next year, Increase Mather, Cottons father,
preached a sermon directly focused on how Frances continued pres-
sure on Huguenots to recant Protestantism and their Reformed herit-
age. In A Sermon wherein is shewed that the Church of God is
sometimes a Subject of Great Persecution: Preached on a Publick Fast
at Boston in New-England: Occasioned by the Tidings of a Great
Persecution Raised against the Protestants in France,10 Increase Mather
showed the awareness of New England clergy concerning the condi-
tion of Huguenots prior to the Revocation.
While some attention focused by Puritan ministers on the plight of
the Huguenots was an extension of the eschatology, much also stemmed
from New Englanders observation of their own world. Puritan minis-
ters equated the suffering of Protestants in France with their own fears
of what might happen in America. The fact that New France lay geo-
graphically just north of New England worried many Puritans that
they too may be subject to the incursions of and persecution by France.
They feared their proximity to New France would prove easily acces-
sible to an emboldened France and they worried that they too might be
forced to recant their Protestantism or flee their homes.
Throughout much of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth cen-
turies, New Englanders pushed the frontier further into established
Native American territory. In response, Native Americans fought back
against new settlements by attacking, killing or capturing English set-
tlers. The much-publicised attack on Deerfield in 1704 by a band of
Kahnawake Indians, who were supported by a Jesuit settlement near
Montreal, gave further reason for New Englanders to fear. The focus of
the Deerfield attack was the Puritan minister John Williams. The
French commissioned Kahnawake Indians to capture Williams who
they hoped to trade for Captain Baptiste, a French privateer who the
English had captured and the French government in Canada desper-
ately wanted returned. The result of the raid included the capture of
John Williams wife Eunice, a cousin of Cotton Mather, and either the
Cotton Mather, Diary of Cotton Mather, 2 vols. (New York: F. Ungar, 1957), I, 41.
9
Sermon Wherein Is Shewed That the Church of God Is Sometimes a Subject of Great
Persecution: Preached on a Publick Fast at Boston in New England, Occasioned by the
Tidings of a Great Persecution Raised against the Protestants in France (Boston: 1682).
290 paul mcgraw
capture or killing of almost his complete family. Even after the ransom
of the surviving members of the Williams family, one daughter, Eunice,
remained with her captors. Despite repeated attempts to achieve her
redemption, Eunice not only chose to remain with the Kahnawake,
but she married a Mohawk Indian and embraced the Catholic faith.11
In 1706, Mather contributed to the growing genre of captive narratives
with a collection entitled Good Fetchd Out of Evil.12 Following his ran-
som, John Williams and his son Stephen collaborated to write one of
the most popular captive narratives of the early eighteenth century
entitled The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion. In his account of
Jesuit captivity, John Williams told how his captors attempted to con-
vert he and other captives to the Catholic faith. He told of how the
Jesuit priest inquired which of the captives were baptised and explained
he had instructed the Indians sent to Deerfield to baptize all children
before they killed them; such was my desire of your eternal salvation,
though you were our enemies. Williams did not see these as acts
of compassion, rather the he said, All means were used to seduce
poorsouls.13
Following the Seven Years War and the absorption of Canada into
the British Empire, New Englanders continued to see Quebec as a dan-
ger. As late as 1774, New Englanders worried that Britains acquies-
cence to Catholicism in Canada in the Quebec Act, which guaranteed
the free practice of Catholicism in Quebec, might eventually open the
door to New England being forced to embrace the Catholic Faith.
Mathers attention to the early Huguenots was not merely a fear of
Catholics being forced onto New England via French governmental
power. In a January 1686/87 entry into his diary, Mather expressed
worry about a possible scandal with the new members of the New
England community. Mather showed concern that despite the mutual
Reformed faith of the Huguenots and New England Puritans, his
11
John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America, 1st
Vintage Books ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1995).
12
Cotton Mather, Good Fetchd out of Evil, The Garland Library of Narratives of
North American Indian Captivities, 4 (New York: Garland, 1977).
13
John Williams and Stephen W. Williams, The Redeemed Captive Returning to
Zion: Or, a Faithful History of Remarkable Occurences in the Captivity and Deliverance
of Mr. John Williams, Minister of the Gospel in Deerfield, Who in the Desolation Which
Befel That Plantation by an Incursion of the French and Indians, Was by Them Carried
Away, with His Family and His Neighborhood, into Canada (Northampton [MA]:
Hopkins, Bridgman, and Co., 1853), 44.
the memory of the huguenots in north america291
14
Mather, Diary of Cotton Mather, I, 134.
15
Ezechiel Carr et al., The Charitable Samaritan (Boston: 1689; Wing C638), 14.
16
Quoted in Rice, Cotton Mather Speaks to France, 206.
17
Butler, Huguenots in America.
292 paul mcgraw
18
Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana (Hartford, CN: Roberts & Burr,
1820).
19
Mather, Diary of Cotton Mather, I, 205.
20
Mather, Diary of Cotton Mather, I, 113.
the memory of the huguenots in north america293
21
Elias Neau, An Account of the Sufferings of the French Protestants, Slaves on Board
the French Kings Galleys (London: 1699; Wing N363).
22
Mather, Diary of Cotton Mather, I, 23839.
294 paul mcgraw
Provocation enough to fall foul upon us. To Mather, this possible attack
made sense based on the astonishing accounts, of the sufferings under-
gone by the Protestants in the French Kings Galleyes. Mather commit-
ted to spread the news as broadly as possible because it would be many
wayes a service unto the Christians in this Countrey, to be informed
thereof . To make this possible, Mather printed the account under the
title of, A Letter, Concerning the Sufferings of our Protestant Brethren.23
Two years later Mather happily announced Neaus release from
prison. Neau eventually returned to his adopted home in America. It
was more than a decade later that Mather included in his diary a sol-
emn note at the Apostasy of that famous French Confessor, Mr. Elias
Neau. Upon his return to America, Neau, like many Huguenots in the
early eighteenth century, affiliated with the Anglican church and began
to work for the Anglican Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in
Foreign Parts in New York. Mather lamented that this is to me one of
the most grievous and shocking things that I have mett withal. Mather
found Neaus story of imprisonment more beneficial to his narrative
about the Protestant March to the Reformation of the church, but that
sotry had much greater impact when Neau was imprisoned by French
Catholics than when a free Neau chose a Protestant tradition other
than his own. Mather made Neau a matter of prayer in an attempt to
do something towards his recovery.24
In 1715, after hearing of the death of Louis XIV, Mather published
the text of a sermon entitled, Shaking Dispensations an Essay Upon the
Mighty Shakes, Which the Hand of Heaven, Hath Given, and is Giving,
to the World; With Some Useful Remarks on the Death of the French
King, Who Left Off to Make the World a Wilderness, and to Destroy the
Cities Thereof; on the Twenty-First of August 1715; in a Sermon on that
Great Occasion, at Boston, New-England. Once again Mather saw an
event on the world stage as the harbinger of his hoped for Reformation.
As Mather reached the end of his life, he published one of his
mostpointed works on the place of Huguenots. In 1725, Mather pub-
lished an anonymous pamphlet, written entirely in French entitled,
Une grande voix du ciel a la France.25 Mather wrote this pamphlet
23
Mather, Diary of Cotton Mather, I, 398.
24
Mather, Diary of Cotton Mather, II, 89.
25
Cotton Mather, Une grande voix du ciel a La France. [Two Lines in French from
Ecclesiastes] ([Boston?: Printed by B. Green?], 1725), available at http://opac.news-
bank.com/select/evans/2554.
the memory of the huguenots in north america295
Ibid.
27
28
Thomas S. Kidd, Let Hell and Rome Do Their Worst: World News, Anti-
Catholicism and International Protestantism in Early Eighteenth-Century Boston,
The New England Quarterly 76 (June 2003), 28687.
296 paul mcgraw
29
Butler, Huguenots in America, 20.
30
Kidd, World News, Anti-Catholicism and International Protestantism, 27577.
31
Ellis Sandoz, Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 17301805
(Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1991), 198.
the memory of the huguenots in north america297
32
A. DAuborn, The French Convert Being a True Relation of the Happy Conversion
of a Noble French Lady, from the Errors and Superstitions of Popery, to the Reformed
Religion, by Means of a Protestant Gardener Her Servant. To Which Is Added, a Brief
Account of the Present Severe Persecution of the French Protestants (London: 1725).
33
Thomas S. Kidd, Recovering the French Convert: Views of the French and the
Uses of Anti-Catholicism in Early America, Book History 7 (2004), 105.
298 paul mcgraw
34
Kidd, Recovering the French Convert, 101.
35
Sandoz, Political Sermons, 502.
36
Sandoz, Political Sermons, 515.
the memory of the huguenots in north america299
41
Sandoz, Political Sermons, 1251.
42
Ellen Gould Harmon White, The Great Controversy between Christ and Satan
During the Christian Dispensation, 11th edn (Oakland, CA, New York, etc.: Pacific
Press, 1888).
the memory of the huguenots in north america301
not surprising. In the years previous to its initial publication, two very
important works which had substantial comments about Huguenot
oppression were published: James A. Wylies History of Protestantism
and Charles W. Bairds History of the Huguenot Emigration to America.43
Wylies classic History of Protestantism, first published in the late
1870s, spent a great deal of time on the French Reformation and the
persecution of Huguenots in particular. Historical research has shown
White relied heavily on Wylies work to the point that some have
claimed outright plagiarism.44 Wylie focused on the Huguenots and
their status as the object of Catholic persecution almost to the point of
obsession. Such a focus should not be surprising when taken in the
context of other of Wylies works which included The History of the
Waldenses, The Rise, Progress, and Insidious Workings of Jesuitism, and
The Papacy: Its History, Dogmas, Genius, and Prospects. As the titles
suggest, although a Scotsman and not a New England polemic, Wylies
perspective on Catholicism could be easily aligned with that of
American Protestants from John Cotton through any number of
Federalist preachers. Because a major premise of The Great Controversy
is built on the foundation of Catholic persecution of Protestants,
Wylies focus on Huguenots as the centre of papal persecution fit neatly
into Ellen Whites work.
In a chapter entitled The Bible and the French Revolution, White
also drew on Wylie, among others.45 She drew the same comparison of
the Two Witnesses of Revelation to the French Revolution as John
Cotton had two centuries earlier. The juxtaposition of the pure and
persecuted Huguenots to that of the menacing Catholics propped up
by the power of the state was very clear in Great Controversy. White
combined traditional apocalyptic perspective with the American ide-
als of freedom and separation of church and state. In the story of
theHuguenots, White saw both. She described Huguenots as battling
for those rights which the human heart holds most sacred. She then
43
J. A. Wylie, The History of Protestantism 3 vols. (London, Paris, New York: Cassell,
[187477]); Baird, History of the Huguenot Emigration to America.
44
Cf. William S. Peterson, A Textual and Historical Study of Ellen G. Whites
Account of the French Revolution, Spectrum 2:4 (Autumn 1970), 6365; Eric
Anderson, Ellen White and Reformation Historians, Spectrum 9:3 (July 1978), 2326,
esp. 2425; Jan Voerman, Ellen White and the French Revolution, Andrews University
Seminary Studies 45 (Autumn 2007), 24759.
45
Cf. Peterson, Textual and Historical Study, 6063, 6566; Voerman, Ellen White
and the French Revolution.
302 paul mcgraw
46
Ellen Gould Harmon White, The Great Controversy between Christ and Satan:
The Conflict of the Ages in the Christian Dispensation (Mountain View, CA: Pacific
Press Publishing Association, 1911), 271.
47
White, Great Controversy, ed. cit., 27273.
48
White, Great Controversy, ed. cit., 272.
the memory of the huguenots in north america303
Walsingham, Francis 62n50, 63, 112, 114, 116, 119, 154, 18186,
167n39 18890, 19496, 199200, 206,
War of the League of Augsburg: see Nine 213n94, 224, 226, 22829, 23132,
Years War 236, 247
War of the Spanish Succession Williams, John 28990
(170213) 27, 154, 164, 189, 194, Worcester, Bishop of 113
200201, 226, 232, 295 Wilson, James 126
Webster, Noah 299, 303 Wrttemberg 2, 251, 279
White, Ellen G. 31, 300303 Wylie, James A. 301
William I, Prince of Orange 39, 63, 154,
16065, 167, 170, 174 Zeeland 2, 16264
William III, Prince of Orange and Zrich 200, 242
King of England 103104, 108, Zwingli, Huldrich 243