PERSECUTION.
Thomas Delaune, a Baptist schoolmaster, and a person of considerable learning, appears as an eminent sufferer in those dark days. He published A Plea for the Nonconformists, in answer to a sermon entitled A Scrupulous Conscience, published by Dr. Benjamin Calamy, Rector of St. Lawrence Jewry. Delaune simply endeavoured to prove that certain observances in the Episcopal establishment more resembled what is found in the Popish Communion than what is found in primitive antiquity. The publication being treated as a criminal offence, the author was committed to Newgate in November, 1683, and indicted for “a false, seditious, and scandalous libel concerning the Lord the King and the Book of Common Prayer.” The Jury, imbued with the spirit of the age, found him guilty, after which the Judge sentenced him to pay a fine of one hundred marks, to be kept a close prisoner until he paid the money, and to find security for good behaviour during twelve months afterwards. Delaune remained in confinement fifteen months, at the end of which time nature broke down under hardship and suffering. The poor man died, and it is shocking to add, his wife and two small children also expired during the same period within the walls of Newgate.[116] In the same prison Francis Bampfield, a Baptist minister, and an Oxford man, who had suffered repeatedly for his Nonconformity, perished in the month of February, 1684.[117] Of all sects, perhaps, the Quakers suffered most. Their meetings were disturbed by drums and fiddles; women were insulted, their hoods and scarfs torn, and little boys were beaten or whipped with a cat-o’-nine-tails. Seven hundred Friends were reported as being imprisoned in the year 1683.
CHAPTER VI.
At the time when English gaols were filled with Nonconformists, and English citizens were driven into exile, the English Sovereign offered an asylum to Protestant refugees from France; thus, at the same moment, persecuting his own conscientious subjects, and befriending those like-minded, who suffered from the tyranny of Louis XIV.
FRENCH PROTESTANTS.
After the Edict of Nantes, in 1591, had formally guaranteed to the Huguenots liberty of worship, vexatious interferences with their religious rights goaded them to resistance, and revived those political and military combinations which had proved so mischievous to the French Reformation. But, before the middle of the seventeenth century, the French Protestants became a purely religious community. The Count d’Harcourt bore witness to their loyalty in the well-known words, “the Crown tottered on the King’s head, but you have fixed it there:” and Cardinal Mazarin testified to their good conduct, when he said, “I have no cause to complain of the little flock,—if they browse on bad herbage, at least they do not stray away.”[118] The latter illustrious statesman, although a religious enemy, was a political protector of his Protestant countrymen; and, soon after his death in 1661, they became fully aware of the loss which they had sustained. His Royal master determined to govern alone, at the very moment when he became more than ever the slave of the Church; and, gathering up the reins entirely within his own hands, he sought to atone for his immoralities by the extirpation of heretical opinions. The conversion of the French King was a change from courtly gallantries to religious persecution,—from sensuality to intolerance,—from vice to crime. It is impossible to say, in how many districts he interdicted the exercise of the Reformed religion; how many places of worship he razed; how many schools he suppressed; how many Protestant endowments he confiscated for Roman Catholic purposes. Ordinances, declarations, decrees, and other acts of Council swiftly followed one after another, striking the heretics with blow upon blow.[119]
In 1681, Louis began his atrocious system of dragonnading, which consisted in billeting ten or twelve military brigands in a Protestant family, with authority to do anything short of murder, for the conversion of its members to Popery. Curés shouted to these new apostles, “Courage, gentlemen, it is the will of the King.”[120] Horsemen fastened crosses to the ends of their musquetoons, and compelled people to kiss them. They whipped their victims, they smote them on the face, they dragged them about by the hair of their heads, and drove them to church as they might drive so many cattle.
1681.
In the middle of the seventeenth century, French exiles had established themselves in different parts of England. A French Church had been founded at Winchelsea in 1560, at Canterbury in 1561, at Norwich in 1564, with others at Southampton, Glastonbury, and Rye. A Church at Sandtoft, Lincolnshire, dated from 1634; in the Savoy, from 1641; in Dover, from 1646; in Marylebone, 1656; not to mention others.[121] The Dragonnades, in 1681, sent at once a new and unprecedented wave of emigration across the Channel.
FRENCH PROTESTANTS.