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.
FOOTNOTES:
[140] Rousseau et le cosmopolitisme littéraire, 1895.