The Anglo-French Entente in the Seventeenth Century

by Charles Bastide

CHAPTER V

Huguenot Thought in England

FIRST PART

From a literary point of view the intercourse between England and France in the period that immediately preceded and followed the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) has been exhaustively studied by M. Texte[140] and M. Jusserand,[141] both coming after M. Sayous.[142] We propose, while tracing the progress of political speculation among the Huguenots, to discover to what extent they influenced English thought. The field of research is extensive: a mass of information on the subject lies scattered in books, some of which are scarce, and the numerous manuscript sources have been hitherto imperfectly explored. We cannot hope to do more than draw a general outline of a profoundly interesting subject.

From the dawn of the Reformation, different reasons impelled the Huguenots to look towards England. Besides the natural link formed by community of thought in a matter that then pervaded life, i.e. religious belief, political necessities led the Huguenots to seek the friendship of England. Having the same household gods, the Huguenots and the English loved the same mystical Fatherland, which dangers, ambitions, and interests shared in common invested with stern reality. As the Huguenots increased, they grew from a sect to a faction which, seeking alliances abroad, sent envoys to the foreign Courts. According also to the vicissitudes of their fortunes, streams of Huguenot refugees would flow from time to time towards the neighbouring countries likely to welcome them. Thus from the first were the Huguenots represented in England, not only by their noblemen, but by their democracy.

A whole book might be written on the influence of Calvin in England, both within and without the Church. To a student of comparative literature, if the word be understood in the larger sense of intercommunication of thought among nations, the part played by Calvin in the early framing of the institutions of the English Reformation is a matter not too unimportant to be overlooked.[143]

The first mention of Huguenot refugees in England occurs under the reign of Henry viii., when in 1535-36 forty-five naturalizations were granted. When, responding to an appeal from Archbishop Cranmer, Bucer and his disciple Buchlein repaired to England, in 1549, they met in the Archbishop's Palace Peter Martyr and "diverse pious Frenchmen."[144] M. de Schickler and M. Jusserand have rescued from long oblivion Claude de Saint-Lien, who, quaintly anglicising his name into Holy-Band, began earning his bread by teaching his mother tongue.

But it was only after Saint Bartholomew's Day that the Huguenot colonies in England grew to such numbers as to form congregations. Several illustrious Huguenots then found a last home in England. Admiral Coligny's brother, Cardinal Odet de Chatillon, lies buried in Canterbury Cathedral. In 1591 Du Plessis-Mornay was in London with Montgomery and the Vidame de Chartres, negotiating an alliance with Elizabeth, and, with characteristic lack of diplomacy, availing himself of his stay in England to intercede with the Queen's counsellors in favour of the Puritans.[145] Though befriended by Archbishop Parker and Sir Robert Cecil, "the gentle and profitable strangers," as Strype calls the Huguenots,[146] were not generally welcome. Popular prejudice was so strong against the newcomers that a Bill was introduced in Parliament in 1593, prohibiting them from selling foreign goods by retail.[147] The settlers, averaging during the sixteenth century about 10,000, were chiefly skilled artisans, weavers, printers, binders, or ministers, physicians, and teachers. By some curious unexplained accident, Shakespeare lodged from 1598 to 1604 in the house of a Huguenot wig-maker, Christophe Mongoye by name.[148]

With James i. the political preoccupations fell into the background; the King sought the company of the most famous Continental scholars. In 1611 he invited to his Court Isaac Casaubon, and three years later, at the instance of his Huguenot physician, Sir Théodore Mayerne, Pierre Du Moulin, the minister at Charenton. In the train of the scholars came over the men of letters, among them Jean de Schélandre, the future author of the epic La Stuartide, inscribed to James I.

In 1642, on the eve of the Civil War, there died in London the notorious Benjamin de Rohan, Lord of Soubise, who had survived in exile an age that belonged to the past. With the fall of La Rochelle, the political power of the Huguenots was struck down, and there remained no further check on the path of absolute monarchy. Protestant historians are wont to lament the lukewarm faith that marked the period extending from 1629 to the Revolution. Indeed, the outward manifestations of Huguenot zeal had then ceased to be characteristic of the Church militant. The Bearnese or Languedocian gentleman no longer left his castle for the wars, bearing as a twofold symbol of his sect and party the Bible in the one hand and the sword in the other; and the time was yet to come when in the wild Cévennes mountains, in the "Desert," as they said in their highly-coloured language, arose the heroic witnesses of the persecuted Church. The accidental causes that had temporarily given the Huguenots an undue influence in the State ceasing to operate, they appeared from a formidable party suddenly to shrink into insignificance. But their intellectual development meanwhile must not be overlooked. Alone in France, with those that a popular dogmatism, no doubt justified in some cases, contemptibly nicknamed libertines, they were prepared by a suitable mental training to act as a check on the natural bias of the majority regarding its own infallibility. And over the libertines they had the advantage both of general austereness of life and of a certain readiness to suffer for their convictions.

No doubt the discipline exercised by the Calvinistic organisation discouraged individual eccentricity. The struggle for emancipation over, the leaders who had upheld against the Church of Rome their right of judging in spiritual matters concluded that no further encroachments of individualism on authority were permissible. The Confession of Faith lay heavy upon the Churches; the Synod of Dort, whose decisions had become laws for the French Synods, was singularly like a Reformed Council of Trent. Still, there remained in the early seventeenth century a wide difference between the mental attitude of a Huguenot and a contemporary Scotch Presbyterian. A minority in France, the Huguenot leaders could not cut off their flocks from the outer world; they mixed with the Catholics, who outnumbered them; they shared in the development of thought in their country; they were not all scholars and divines: some made bold to be men of letters, poets, even libertines.[149] In the literary coteries of the capital, in the incipient French Academy, over which the Protestant Conrart presided, abbés and pastors were reconciled in common admiration for an elegant alexandrine or a correct period.

In his own country, Calvin's system was imperfectly carried out. "The pastors," wrote Richard Simon, the Catholic Hebrew scholar, "subscribe their names to the Confession of Faith only by policy, persuaded as they are that Calvin and the other Reformers did not perceive everything, and effected but an imperfect Reformation."[150] "It cannot be denied," said Du Moulin the elder of a very influential contemporary divine, "that a third of Cameron's works are devoted to a confutation of Calvin, Beza, and our other famous Reformers."[151] Due allowance being made for the prejudice of a Roman Catholic or of an alarmed Orthodox, these statements are borne out by facts. For instance, the Huguenots had none of the Scotch Presbyterian's superstition for the Calvinistic system of Church government. "I think," said Samuel Bochart, the author of the Geographia Sacra, "that those who maintain the divine right either of Episcopacy or of Presbytery are equally in the wrong, and that the heat of the dispute makes them overstate their position; if we are asked which is the better and the fitter for the Church of these two forms of government, it is as though we were asked if it is better for a State to be ruled by monarchs, the nobility, or the people, which is not a question to be decided on the spur of the moment, for that there are nations to which Monarchy is more suitable, to others Aristocracy, and to others Democracy, and that the same laws and customs are not followed everywhere."[152] When Bishop Henchman, in 1680, asked the ministers at Charenton their opinion on the respective merits of Episcopacy and Presbytery, Claude and De l'Angle answered that the question of Church government was one of expediency.[153]

The same detachment appeared in a more important matter. The Reformation, certainly against the wish of its promoters, opened the flood-gates of free inquiry. From the Church of Rome the Reformers appealed to Scripture, but underlying that appeal was a right given to reason to decide what construction should be put upon the divine message. The inconvenience of the process was not felt at first. In an age of faith, reason is docile and asks no questions. On the points upon which the Reformers had made no innovation, reason accepted the traditional teaching; on the others, it had free play without arousing the suspicions of Synods. But soon the teaching of the Reformers came to be questioned. Once the horse held the bit in his mouth, he could not be restrained in his headlong progress. So it came to pass that in France, as in England and Holland, through the same cause, latitudinarians followed in natural sequence the Reformers. A Royal Edict of 1623 forbidding the students to the ministry to leave France, while severing the tie that bound the Huguenots to Geneva, hurried on the revolutionary movement. The students flocked to the Academies of Sedan and Saumur, and soon two schools of divinity flourished opposed to each other, that of Sedan upholding orthodoxy, while that of Saumur became the nucleus of French latitudinarianism. Neither Cameron nor his disciple Amyraut, the two luminaries of the latter school, were Arminians—their philosophy was an offshoot of Cartesianism; like the English latitudinarians, they drew a distinction between fundamentals and accidentals, and dreamed the generous dream—a dream at most—of a Church so comprehensive as to include all the Christians accepting the Apostles' Creed.

A little book published anonymously at Saumur in 1670, under the title of La Réunion du Christianisme ou la manière de rejoindre tous les Chrestiens sous une seule Confession de Foy, sets forth in a bold ingenuous form the aspirations of this school. "Some time ago a method of reasoning and of making sure progress towards truth was proposed in philosophy.[154] To that effect it is asserted that we must rid ourselves of all preconceived notions and of all preoccupations of mind. We must receive at first only the most simple ideas and such propositions as no one can dispute who hath the slightest use of reason. Might we not imitate the process in religion? Might we not set aside for a time all the opinions that we upheld with so much ardour, to examine them afterwards with an open unimpassioned mind, adhering always to our common principle, which is Holy Scripture?"[155]

D'Huisseau, the author of the book, answered with a young man's confidence the most obvious objection. On a few simple dogmas all Christians would be agreed; there would be no difference between a "Doctor of the Church" and a poor man, since primitive Christianity is understood of all men. Then, with Gallic faith in the efficacy of State intervention, he added: "Above all, I think that those who can strike the hardest blows on that occasion, are the Princes and those who rule the States and manage the public affairs. They can add the weight of their authority to that of the reasons alleged in that undertaking; and their power will be most efficacious in giving value to the exhortations of others."[156]

In spite of this appeal to secular aid, the school of Saumur furthered toleration. By the distinction they drew between fundamentals and accidentals, they tended to deprive the Churches of some pretexts for persecuting. No doubt they examined the question from the ecclesiastical and not the political point of view, but their freedom from the prejudices of their gown was a signal service to progress.

Another instance of detachment, all the more noticeable because of its consequences in England, was Daillé's attitude towards the Fathers. Published in 1632, his Traité de l'emploi des Saints-Pères pour le jugement des différends qui sont aujourd'hui en la religion was translated into English in 1651. It is no exaggeration to state that to this book was due the scant reverence shown in the seventeenth century by Protestant theology for the authority of the Fathers. The Bible, as the Saumur school desired, became the rule of faith, until in the early eighteenth century its authority came to be questioned in its turn.

The development of theological thought followed therefore in France about the same lines as in England. When considered from a merely intellectual point of view, the speculative activity of the Huguenots, in the period intervening between the fall of La Rochelle and the Revocation, gives the impression of an orchard in April, in which the trees covered with blossoms promise abundance of fruit. The impending frost blasted those hopes. What fruit ripened was not gathered in France.

The relation between a critical attitude in theology and in politics has often been noticed. A common charge brought against the early Reformers was that of sedition. Though the charge was unfounded in most cases, popular instinct sharpened by enmity was right in the main. Even Protestant writers admitted the temptation of men who had rebelled against the Church to rebel against the State. Some profound observations they made on the tendency of the human mind to extend the scope of a method of reasoning, and to evolve out of a philosophical theory a programme of political reform long before the students of political science of our own time made a similar observation. "All the subtleties," said D'Huisseau, "that are called forth in religion generally make the minds of the people inquiring, proud, punctilious, obstinate, and consequently more difficult to curb into reason and obedience. Every private man pretends to have a right to investigate those controverted matters, and, bringing his judgment to bear upon them, defends his opinion with the utmost heat. Afterwards they wish to carry into the discussion of State affairs the same freedom as they use in matters of religion. They believe that since they are allowed to exercise control over the opinions of their leaders in the Church, where the service of God is concerned, they are free to examine the conduct of those that are set over them for political government."[157] With still keener insight did Bayle, twenty years later, perceive the political import of certain tenets of the Reformation. The emphasis laid upon the divine command to "search the Scriptures," marked the beginning of a new era for humanity. Bidden as a most sacred duty to judge for themselves, men could not be withheld from wandering into the forbidden field of secular politics.

As the infallibility of the priest, so the infallibility of the ruler came to be questioned. But if the principle of free inquiry, or, as Bayle terms it, "l'examen particulier dans les matières de foi,"[158] would lead necessarily to civil liberty, another tenet led to equality. "When there was a pressing need, any one had a natural vocation for pastoral functions."[159] Universal priesthood drew no distinction between a caste of priests and the people, between the princes or magistrates and the rabble. In cases of necessity, leaders, political as well as religious, might spring from the ranks, as the prophets of Israel did, holding their commissions directly from Heaven.

But the seditious Huguenot negotiating against the King of France with Englishmen and Hollanders, and marching against the capital at the head of an army of mercenary Germans, had now disappeared as a type. The mangled remains of the great admiral, martyred for the cause of political and religious liberty, lay in the chapel of Chatillon Castle. The Condés had gone back to Roman Catholicism. With the advent of Henri de Navarre, sedition became loyalism. Though brought up upon the works of Hotman, Languet, and Du Plessis-Mornay, the Huguenot found little difficulty in bowing, with the rest of his countrymen, before the throne of absolutism.

The Synod of Tonneins condemning as early as 1614 the doctrine of Suarez, "exhorts the faithful to combat it, in order to maintain, together with the right of God, that of the sovereign power which He has established."[160] The Synod of Vitré (1617) addresses Louis xiii. in these words: "We acknowledge after God no other sovereign but Your Majesty. Our belief is that between God and the Kings, there is no middle power. To cast doubt upon that truth is among us a heresy, and to dispute it a capital crime."[161]

The Civil War in England made it imperative for the Huguenots to frame a theory of government. Readily confounded by popular malice with English Presbyterians and Independents, they were bound to be on the alert. In 1644, complaints from the Maritime Provinces of attempts on the part of "Englishmen belonging to the sect of Independents" to spread their doctrines among the people, gave the Synod of Charenton an opportunity of condemning them as "a sect pernicious to the Church" and "very dangerous enemies to the State."[162]

The relations between the Huguenots and the Puritans thus so unexpectedly revealed are still uncertainly known. As early as 1574, La Rochelle had been in close touch with the extreme Elizabethan Puritans, Walter Travers causing one of his works of controversy to be printed there.[163] In 1590 two of the Martin Marprelate tracts were issued from the presses of La Rochelle,[164] and Waldegrave, one of the factious printers, took refuge there. During the Civil War there seem to have been active negotiations going on between some of the Parliamentary leaders and the Bordeaux malcontents. These found the doctrines of the Levellers more to their taste than the more moderate schemes of Cromwell, Ireton, and the "grandees." They even sketched out for France, or at least Guyenne, a Republican Constitution. For those who have been taught to explain the French Revolution by racial theories, nothing is more disconcerting than to learn how the ancestors of the Revolutionists caught some of their most advanced ideas from their English co-religionists. They clamoured for a representative assembly, liberty of conscience, trials by jury, the abolition of privileges. "The peasant," they wrote, "is as free as a prince, coming into this world without either wooden shoes or saddle, even as the king's son without a crown on his head. So every one is by birth equally free and has the power to choose his own government."[165] If it is astounding enough to hear almost a century and a half before the fall of the Bastille the cry of liberty and equality, it is startling to think that the English had raised it.

The tragedy enacted at Whitehall on 30th January 1648-49, stirred up in Europe a horror equal only to that caused nearly a century and a half later by the execution of Louis xvi. of France. "We gave ourselves up," wrote Bochart, "to tears and afflictions, and solemnised the obsequies of your King by universal mourning."[166] One of the most distinguished laymen in the Rouen congregation, Porrée the physician, declared that "all true Protestants abhorred that execrable parricide."[167]

The Doctors of the Church delivered their opinion in emphatic terms. In 1650 two works appeared exalting the royal prerogative.[168] Amyraut, the latitudinarian professor of Saumur, was the author of one of them;[169] Bochart that of the other.[170] Their argument is mainly Biblical. The kings being God's vice-regents, are accountable only to Him. To sit in judgment upon them, to inflict them bodily injury, is heinous sacrilege. "Kings are absolute and depend only on God; it is never allowed to attempt their lives on any pretence whatsoever."[171] Yet Amyraut recorded a remarkable reservation in which the regicides could have found their justification: "Except there be an express command, proceeding from God directly, such as those given to Ehud and Jehu, nothing may be attempted against the kings without committing an offence more hateful to God than the most execrable parricide."[172] Dr. Gauden's Eikon Basiliké had a great success in France, two translations penned by Huguenots appearing, that of Denys Cailloué[173] in 1649, that of Porrée[174] a year later. Lastly, all students of English literature remember that Claude de Saumaise wrote the Defensio regia pro Carolo Primo, and Pierre Du Moulin the Clamor sanguinis regiæ ad cœlum contra parricidas Anglicanos (1652). The Huguenots showed zeal not only in condemning the King's execution and in vindicating his memory from the charges of the Commonwealthsmen, but in furthering the Restoration of his son, Charles ii., by proclaiming his title to the Crown of England.[175]

The Restoration coincided with the majority of Louis xiv. The Synod of Loudun, whose moderator was Daillé, then an old man, proclaimed the duty of passive obedience: "Kings depend immediately on God; there is no intermediate authority between theirs and that of the Almighty."[176] "Kings in this world are in the place of God, and are His true living portrait on earth, and the footstool of their throne exalts them above mankind, only to bring them nearer Heaven. Such are the fundamental principles of our creed."[177]

Significant it is to see the divine of world-wide repute, whose youth was spent with Du Plessis-Mornay, the co-author, most probably, of the Vindiciæ contra Tyrannos,[178] solemnly recalling the duty of subjects to princes on the threshold of an era of absolutism in Europe, supposed by every one except some Fifth-Monarchy men to be of long duration.

Yet the Huguenots, with all their submissiveness, were not thought sincere. Public opinion had not forgotten the lessons of the sixteenth century. "To be candid," wrote Richard Simon to Frémont d'Ablancourt, "most of your ministers were not born for a monarchy such as that of France. They take liberties permissible only in a Republic, or in a State where the King is not absolute."[179]

The factious individualism latent in every Huguenot only awaited favourable circumstances to come to light. The concessions of a vanquished party to their victors explain how political thought depended on theological thought. But among the refugees in England, the passive-obedience doctrine imbibed in the mother-country did not endure. Pierre Du Moulin, who, at the invitation of James i., had twice visited England, in 1615 and in 1623, left two sons, Peter and Lewis, who both settled in England. The elder, who accepted the living of Saint John's, Chester, and became at the Restoration chaplain to Charles ii. and Prebendary of Canterbury, is the author of Clamor sanguinis, wrongly attributed by Milton to another French pastor, of Scottish descent, Alexander Morus. A staunch Royalist, he published in 1640 a Letter of a French Protestant to a Scotsman of the Covenant, and also in 1650 a Défense de la Religion réformée et de la monarchie et Eglise Anglicane, and after the Restoration A Vindication of the Protestant Religion in the Point of Obedience to Sovereigns (1663). The younger brother, Lewis, threw in his lot with the Commonwealthsmen, was appointed Camden Professor of Ancient History at Oxford (September 1648), and deprived on the accession of Charles ii. He remained, in spite of the idle story of his recanting on his death-bed in presence of Burnet, a sturdy Independent, publishing the very year of his death an apology for Independency.[180] A more striking instance of the discord which rent England during the Civil War could hardly be found. Party spirit ran high among the refugees, Jean de la Marche, the pastor of the French congregation in Threadneedle Street, being violently opposed by his flock for becoming an Independent,[181] while Hérault, the minister of Alençon, having during a stay in London vented his Royalist opinions, was compelled to seek safety in flight.[182] Another minister, Jean d'Espagne, sided with the Protector, who granted him permission to preach in Somerset House, and graciously accepted the dedication of a book.[183] At an earlier date, three French divines had sat in the Westminster Assembly.[184] About the same time, some active, intelligent Huguenot was busy publishing in London for Continental readers a French newspaper.[185]

The refugees thus took part in the internal dissensions of their adopted country. As a rule, to be favourable to the Stuarts they need be dependents on the Court or the Church; if merchants, they would usually side with the opposition, thus revealing the revolutionist ever lurking in the Calvinist. When Shaftesbury, at the time of the agitation on the Exclusion Bill, thought of making London a Whig stronghold, in view of a possible coup d'état, his main coadjutors seem to have been the elected sheriffs for Middlesex, Papillon and Dubois, two refugees. The battle fought and lost, Papillon fled to Amsterdam; but not before the thought crossed his mind of returning to the beloved mother-country: "I should not," he wrote from Holland, "have taken refuge here if I could go to France and worship there freely."[186]

Such a letter helps us to realise the loss suffered by France from the exile of men like Papillon. Their talents were not uncommon; in their own country, unmolested, they would have led useful, obscure lives, open-minded enough withal to welcome the inevitable change sooner or later to take place in European politics.

In spite of the efforts of the French King[187] and the disfavour shown the Huguenots by the exiled Anglicans,[188] the intercourse between England and the Huguenots continued after the Restoration. The French churches in England formed a natural link which survived the Act of Uniformity. The Huguenots, as well as Louis xiv., had their ambassadors in London, and, in some cases, these unofficial envoys were better informed than Colbert de Croissy or Barillon, for they could speak and write English and showed little reluctance to become Churchmen. Some obtained high preferment. This explains how Jurieu, called to England on leaving college by the Du Moulins, was ordained in the Church.[189]

In the precincts of the Court gathered some men of letters, refugees and scholars, Catholics and Protestants, the best known of whom is Saint-Evremond. Vossius, his "ami de lettres,"[190] was then Canon of Windsor, and to the latter's uncle Du Jon (Junius), librarian to the Earl of Arundel, who though born at Heidelberg was of Huguenot descent, England owes some of the earliest studies in Anglo-Saxon. These literati gathered round the Duchess of Mazarin, the Cardinal's niece, at her little court at Windsor, when Vossius, a pedant like most scholars in his age, would discourse on Chinese civilisation and the population of ancient Rome,[191] Saint-Evremond read a paper of verses, the Duchess speak of her interminable lawsuit with the bigoted, doting old Duke, her husband; and the company would be merry upon her recounting how he directed his grandchild's nurse to make the infant fast, in literal accordance with the Church commandments, on Fridays and Saturdays.[192] The librarian to Archbishop Sancroft, Colomiès, may have been admitted to the circle. On his arrival in England, he had found Vossius a useful friend, and through the latter's exertions was ordained in the Church of England, became a thorough Episcopalian, and was, like his patron, strongly suspected of Socinianism. Their friendship for Dr. Morales, a Jew of Amsterdam and one of this literary circle, only confirmed the suspicion. But in Madame de Mazarin's salon theological disputes were infrequent. For France, anti-Protestantism then was not an "article of exportation." Far from being fanatical, the temper of these literati savours somewhat of a much later indifferentism. Perhaps the courtly scepticism of the Restoration proved contagious. For Saint-Evremond a system of ethics did very well in place of a Confession of Faith. "The Faith is obscure, the Law clearly expressed. What we are bound to believe is above our understanding, what we have to do is within every one's reach."[193]

Most of his friends were Protestants, and he never felt bitterness against them: "I never experienced that indiscreet zeal that makes us hate people, because they do not share our opinions. That false zeal takes its rise in conceit, and we are secretly inclined to mistake for charity towards our neighbour what is only an excessive fondness for our private opinions."[194]

This paragraph strikes the keynote of the temper that reigned in the French circle at Windsor. On foreign land, out of the reach of Gallican maxims of policy and priestly intrigue, the two Frances, Catholic and Huguenot, not without an admixture of "libertinage," met, a picture of what might have been, had the dream of Michel de l'Hôpital and De Thou, maybe of Henri iv., been realised.

The most notable Huguenot in this circle was Louis xiv.'s ex-secretary, Henri Justel, a "great and knowing virtuoso,"[195] as Evelyn calls him, whom Charles II. appointed King's librarian in 1681. He seems to have been a very grave, courteous, and modest scholar. Having no literary ambition,[196] he went through life exciting no envy, free from envy himself. His religious convictions were sincere, and he made sacrifices to ensure them. Martyrdom, Renan said, is not so difficult after all. With nerves strung to a high pitch, fearful lest the jeering crowd should discern a sign of weakness, the victim of the Roman emperors stepped forth into the arena without the slightest tremor. Physical pain, the apprehension of death, were lost in the light of the glorious crown which the witness of Christ's word felt already encircling his brow. Some such feeling may have stirred the humble preacher that the Intendant sentenced to be hanged, or the obscure peasant whom the dragoons dragged away to the Toulon galleys. But nothing short of a very rare uprightness of mind, a sound probity towards self, could drive Justel to forsake all that a man and a scholar loves—his books, his friends, his ease, his beloved country. Saint-Evremond failed to understand Justel's higher motives of conduct. "Allow me," he wrote to him, "not to approve your resolution to leave France, so long as I shall see you so tenderly and so lovingly cherish her memory. When I see you sad and mournful, regretting Paris on the banks of our Thames, you remind me of the poor Israelites, lamenting Jerusalem on the banks of the river Euphrates. Either live happily in England, with a full liberty of conscience, or put up with petty severities against religion in your own country, so as to enjoy all the comforts of life."[197]

So the tempter spoke, and, to support his hard lot, Justel had none of the martyr's incentives. To those of his own faith, his constancy must have seemed surprising. Far from encouraging him to keep within the fold, the Consistory of Charenton had grossly insulted him.[198] The great value to a country of men like that faithful scholar is their love of spiritual independence. A letter that he wrote to Edward Bernard, professor of astronomy at Oxford, on February 16, 1670, shows what a price he paid to keep his fathers' faith. After stating that Claude is preparing an answer to a book of Arnault, and wishes to adduce against transubstantiation the evidence of some modern Greeks, he says that all the libraries in France being closed to the religionists, he must perforce have recourse to the Bodleian Library and its rich collection of oriental manuscripts.[199] In this appeal of a scholar I find as much pathos as in any account of dragonnades.

A SCHEME OF THE PERSECUTION

Yet Saint-Evremond could not understand that the prize was worth the fight. His sense of equity was undisturbed by the Revocation. The King's method of dealing with heretics was rough, but justifiable. Instead of resisting openly, the Protestants should more or less sullenly acquiesce, and count on their sharpness of wits to evade the ordinances. "Churches are opened or closed according to the Sovereign's will, but our hearts are a secret church where we may worship the Almighty."[200] "Be convinced," he wrote to Justel, "that Princes have as much right over the externals of religion as their subjects over their innermost conscience."[201]

In its far-reaching consequences, the Revocation can be compared only to the French Revolution. Both events excited in England a profound pity for the victims and a feeling of execration against their tormentors; both led to a protracted struggle with France; both, after giving France a temporary glory, plunged her into misery, humiliation, and defeat. The Huguenots fled to divers countries, some settling in New England, others in South Africa, the most considerable portion finding a new home in Holland and England. In Holland they met the English Whigs, driven from their country upon the Tory reaction following the defeat of the Exclusion Bill. A close relationship was established between the Huguenots in England and in Holland, and when the crown of England was given to a Prince of Orange, the refugees in both countries formed one colony whose thoughts and aims were the same, and whose sympathy and interests were with the more liberal party in England. The sentimental impression made by the persecution strikes one the most: "The French persecution of the Huguenots," wrote Evelyn, "raging with the utmost barbarity, exceeded even what the very heathens used.... What the further intention is, time will show, but doubtless portending some revolution."[202] Several accurate accounts of the persecution, besides Claude's famous book, appeared in England, written or inspired by the refugees, and printed in a form suitable for speedy circulation.[203] The people showed themselves as eager for news from France as, at a later date, for Bulgarian or Armenian atrocities. "The people in London," Ambassador Barillon reported, "are eager to believe what the gazettes have to say on the measures resorted to in order to further the conversions in France."[204] When James ii. ascended the throne, the Whigs made capital out of the treatment of Protestants by a Catholic Prince. Loyal as he was, Evelyn could not help blaming the King for the scant charity extended to the Huguenots and the silence of the Gazette about the persecution. When at the instance of the French ambassador, Claude's book was burned by the common hangman, Evelyn ominously exclaimed: "No faith in Princes." The innate anti-popish feeling of the English was easily roused, and contributed in 1687 to the unpopularity even among the higher clergy of a Royal Indulgence. "This (Repeal of the Test)," said a contemporary pamphlet, "sets Papists upon an equal level with Protestants, and then the favour of the Prince will set them above them."[205] Allusions to the persecution are innumerable. "Witness," says the anonymous hack-writer after setting forth the dangers of tolerating Popery, "the mild and gentle usage of the French Protestants by a King whose conscience is directed by a tender-hearted Jesuit." When Ken, suspected of leaning towards Roman Catholicism, preached on the persecution, Evelyn remarked that "his sermon was the more acceptable, as it was unexpected."[206]

But the official Press tried to counteract the bad impression made by the Revocation; then it was that an extreme member of the Court party roundly asserted that persecution was the only remedy that Louis xiv. could devise against losing his crown, and inferred the expediency of persecuting the equally seditious English dissenters.[207] A few years later, a change coming over the policy of the Court towards the dissenters, His Majesty's intentions derived an advantageous construction from his granting relief to the French Protestants, "a kind of Presbyterians, who, because they would not become Papists, are fled hither."[208]

In rousing England against Popery, the Revocation dealt a blow at arbitrary government. The sequel to the Revocation was the English Revolution. Weakened by the Tory reaction, the Whig party, on the accession of William iii., found welcome allies in the Huguenot immigrants. It was remarked that the refugees generally sided with the Whigs. The Low Church party also found recruits in the numerous Huguenot ministers, the best known of whom are Allix, Drelincourt, Samuel de l'Angle, who all three took Anglican orders. William III., and especially Mary, showed them great favour. While the Prince of Orange was with the Dutch fleet on the way to England, in the most anxious time of her life, Mary every day attended prayers said by two refugees, Pineton de Chambrun and Ménard.[209]

The refugees enthusiastically adopted the dogmas of the Whig party, or rather of William iii.; they furthered his system of Church settlement, declaimed against Popery, hated France as cordially as he.

During the debates on the Toleration and Comprehension Bills, Dr. Wake, the future Archbishop of Canterbury, published a letter in which the dissenters were blamed by French ministers for approving James ii.'s Declaration of Indulgence. "The dissenters," he adds, "ought by no means to have separated themselves for the form of ecclesiastical government nor for ceremonies which do not at all constitute the fundamentals of religion. On the other side, the Bishops should have had a greater condescension to the weakness of their brethren."[210] Even on a question of internal policy, the opinion of the persecuted Church bore weight.

Popery of course was the arch-enemy to the refugees, some of whom refused to the last to believe that the King persecuted them, ascribing their misery to the evil counsels of the Jesuits. One of the worst consequences in England of the Revocation was an intensified hatred to Popery. The policy pursued by Louis xiv. made James ii.'s indulgence impossible and thwarted all the attempts of William iii. to relax the penal laws. When the Act of 1700 was passed, making confiscation of Catholic estates a rule in England, as kind a man as Evelyn wrote: "This indeed seemed a hard law, but the usage of the French King to his Protestant subjects has brought it on."[211]

The enmity that the English bore to France is a well-known fact. "The English have an extraordinary hatred to us," observed Henri iv.[212] "They hate us," said Courtin, the French envoy, at a time when French literature and French fashions were in highest favour in England. As Spain in the sixteenth century, so France in the seventeenth, embodied the power of darkness in Europe. This feeling was fostered by the refugees. A little after the Revocation, Louis xiv. received from Barillon a dispatch on the harm done him in London "by the most violent and insolent French Huguenots, minister Satur, minister Lortié, minister De l'Angle, above all a dangerous man named Bibo, who plays the philosopher, Justel, Daudé, La Force, Aimé, Lefèvre and Rosemond, and a vendor of all the wicked pamphlets printed in Holland and elsewhere against religion and the French Government. His name is Bureau, who provides every one with them and is now printing[213] in French and English a supposed letter from Niort relating a hundred cruelties against the Protestants. People talk quite freely in the London coffee-houses of all that is happening in France, and many think and say loudly that it is the consequence of England having a Catholic King and that the English are thus unable to help the pretended Reformed their brethren." In England, as in Holland, the Huguenot pamphleteers organised an anti-French agitation. No doubt the ambassador was right in a sense in stating that the charges against France were exaggerated. The English during all the eighteenth century imagined the French monarch was a Western grand-signior. The stories of the Bastille, popularised by the refugee Renneville, gave an incorrect idea of the French administration.[214] This popular prejudice is ridiculed by Pope in his attack upon Dennis the critic, whom he describes as "perpetually starting and running to the window when any one knocks, crying out 'Sdeath! a messenger from the French King; I shall die in the Bastille.'"[215] With his keen eye for absurdity, Voltaire noticed the prejudice. "In England, our government is spoken of as that of the Turks in France. The English fancy half the French nation is shut up in the Bastille, the other half reduced to beggary, and all the authors set up in the pillory."[216]

The Revocation was turned to good use by the Whigs against France, James ii., and later against the Pretender. "You shall trot about," says a pamphlet almost contemporary with the advent of William iii., "in wooden shoes, à la mode de France, Monsieur will make your souls suffer as well as your bodies. These are the means he will make use of to pervert Protestants to the idolatrous Popish religion. He will send his infallible apostolic dragoons amongst you.... If you fall into French hands your bodies will be condemned to irretrievable slavery, and your souls (as far as it lies in their power) shall be consigned to the Devil."[217] At the height of the Tory reaction that marked the closing years of Queen Anne's reign, the same argument was urged against a Popish successor. The Flying Post (7th March 1712-3) published one day a list of persecuted Huguenots "to convince Jacobite Protestants what treatment they are to expect if ever the Pretender should come to the throne, since he must necessarily act according to the bloody House of B(ourbon), without whose assistance he can never be able to keep possession, if he should happen to get it."

That the Whigs fully endorsed their pamphleteers' opinions seems evident from what such a judicious man as Locke once wrote to Peter King, the future Lord Chancellor, advising him as a Member of Parliament to aid William in his designs of war against France: "The good King of France desires only that you would take his word, and let him be quiet till he has got the West Indies into his hands and his grandson well established in Spain; and then you may be sure that you shall be as safe as he will let you be, in your religion, property, and trade."[218]

The influence of the refugees was due less to the weavers of Spitalfields, to the army of seventy or eighty thousand Huguenots who fled to England after the Revocation, than to the intelligent sergeants of that army, the men of letters, journalists, and pamphleteers. They usually met in London at the Rainbow coffee-house, near the Inner Temple Gate, in Fleet Street. Unlike the Casaubons and Scaligers of the early Stuart period and the Justels and Colomiès of the Restoration, they were no dependents on either Court or Church, and, earning a journalist's living or with a calling exclusive of literary patronage, they forestalled more or less the modern type of the man of letters. Over their meetings presided Pierre Daudé, a clerk in the Exchequer; round that doyen gathered the traveller Misson, Rapin Thoyras, then planning his History of Great Britain, Newton's friend, Le Moivre, and a Fellow of the Royal Society, Cornand La Croze, a contributor to Le Clerc's Bibliothèque universelle.

In those convivial meetings many a project was sketched for the advancement of learning. When Le Clerc, then a young man, was preaching at the Savoy, he took part in them. Later on, Pierre Coste came as tutor to the Mashams, with whom Locke then lived; later still, for the company grew less select as the years rolled by, Thémiseul de Saint-Hyacinthe, a converted dragoon, to whom France owes at least in part her translation of Robinson Crusoe;[219] and lastly, in 1726, the elder Huguenots who still repaired to the familiar tavern, beheld, fresh from the Bastille, his conversation sparkling with wit that must have taught them what a change had come over France since the death of the old persecuting King, M. de Voltaire.

In coffee-houses such as this, in Rotterdam and in London, during the eventful period between the Revocation and the death of William the Third, all the eighteenth century was thought out. Alone the refugees were able to establish a fruitful exchange of ideas between England and the Continent. Men of greater learning would not have done the work so well. These alone were possessed of the indispensable qualities: the journalist's curiosity, eager to know, little caring about the relative importance of what he knows, and the teacher's lucidity, not unmixed with shallowness. Thanks to them, the literary journals of Holland circulated in England and English thought found its way into France. The correspondents of those papers anticipated the modern reporter's methods to the extent that Locke one day read a private conversation of his printed in full in the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres.[220] Coste, of course, had written down the conversation and thought it worthy of publication. Better than Bayle and Le Clerc, indefatigable Desmaizeaux corresponds with most European scholars, advertises their opinions, reviews their books, writes their obituary notices, and edits their posthumous work, being withal incapable of uttering a single original idea.

One defect the refugees shared with the English Puritans, a supreme contempt of art. When Bossuet's Histoire des Variations appeared, they thought it long and tedious. "The book," exclaimed Jurieu, "will lie buried under its bulk and ruins."[221] Their knowledge, like a good reviewer's, is universal. Bayle, their leader, never wrote a veritable book, but cast his revolutionary thoughts in the mould of an encyclopædia. The masterpiece of refugee speculation is the Critical Dictionary. Nor was it the only dictionary that they produced—witness Chaufepié's Dictionary, Ancillon's Mémoires, Desmaizeaux's Lives, Le Clerc's Eloges. Their newspapers collect material for encyclopædias and their encyclopædias compile anas. Now that was exactly how the eighteenth century writers worked: neither Voltaire, Montesquieu nor Diderot cared about composing a book, as a skilful architect builds a house, to stand alone, imposing and complete. They jotted down ideas, dashed off a chapter or two, then passed on to another subject. You cannot compare the Spirit of Laws and the History of Variations, for while the latter forms a harmonious whole, whose splendid proportions inspire every one with admiration, the former is an indigested mass of research, brilliant wit, and profound criticism. To usher in the nineteenth century, a readjustment of traditional doctrines was necessary, and this the eighteenth century effected by leaving in the background literature and works of imagination and taking up the foreground with anecdotes, memoirs, and various disquisitions on philosophy, ethics, divinity, and politics. But the refugees had made the task easy. To these seemingly innocent compilers must be ascribed the sudden development in Europe of the spirit of criticism. When they had made the reading public familiar with doctrines hitherto confined to the schools, they disappeared, leaving it to others in England and France to give those now popularised doctrines a literary expression.

Another trait of the refugees is their cosmopolitism. Some were born in Geneva, others in France; not unlike a Semitic tribe, they roamed about Switzerland, Holland, Germany, England. After preaching in London, Le Clerc settled in Amsterdam. Before living at Oates with the Mashams, Coste had been a proof reader in Amsterdam, and after an adventurous life in Holland and Germany, he ultimately died in Paris. A barrister in early life, Rapin Thoyras fled to England after the Revocation, then to Holland, where he became a soldier, following first the Prince of Orange in his expedition against James II., then Marshal Schomberg to Ireland, became tutor to the Duke of Portland's children, drifted back to the Hague, and ended a singularly chequered career at Wesel. Through the medium of the refugees the learned societies could correspond. Such refugees as had remained on the Continent showed their desire to have information about England. "England," wrote Bayle, "is the country in the world where metaphysical and physical reasonings, spiced with erudition, are the most appreciated and the most in fashion."[222] For Jurieu, England was "the country in the world the most replete with unquiet-minded men, fond of change and aspiring to new things."[223] The refugee seeking, Narcissus-like, to see himself in his adoptive country, credited England with his own characteristics, turbulency and the thirst for scientific information.

An important fact is that these men, as their predecessors had done under the early Stuarts and the Commonwealth, learned English. No stronger contrast can be imagined than the indifference that courtly Catholic Saint-Evremond exhibited towards the language of his adoptive country, and the eagerness with which the French pastors, compelled now to read prayers and preach in the Church of England, studied English. And yet, it was after all natural that the Huguenots who took part in all the internal conflicts of their new Fatherland, should be ready to further their religious and political ideals by the tongue and the pen as well as the sword.