The Anglo-French Entente in the Seventeenth Century

by Charles Bastide

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]