The Anglo-French Entente In The Seventeenth Century Part 10

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,"

Amba.s.sador 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 amba.s.sador, 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 a.s.serted 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 Menard.[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 const.i.tute 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 pa.s.sed, 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 Lortie, minister De l'Angle, above all a dangerous man named Bibo, who plays the philosopher, Justel, Daude, La Force, Aime, Lefevre 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 amba.s.sador 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, _a 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 b.l.o.o.d.y House of B(ourbon), without whose a.s.sistance 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 Colomies 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 Daude, 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 _Bibliotheque 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, Themiseul 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 antic.i.p.ated 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 Republique 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 encyclopaedia. The masterpiece of refugee speculation is the _Critical Dictionary_. Nor was it the only dictionary that they produced--witness Chaufepie's _Dictionary_, Ancillon's _Memoires_, Desmaizeaux's _Lives_, Le Clerc's _Eloges_. Their newspapers collect material for encyclopaedias and their encyclopaedias 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 pa.s.sed 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 ma.s.s 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. .h.i.therto 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 litteraire_, 1895.

[141] _Shakespeare en France sous l'ancien regime_, 1898.

[142] _Litterature francaise a l'etranger_, 2 vols., Geneva, 1853.

[143] See Gairdner, _Lollardy and the Reformation_, iii. pp. 118-122; and for a bibliography of the translations of Calvin's works, Upham, _French Influence in English Literature_, App. A.

[144] Schickler, _Eglises du refuge_, i. pp. 5, 13.

[145] _Ibid._ i. p. 259 n.

[146] _Life of Parker_, i. p. 276.

[147] Sidney Lee, _French Renaissance in England_, p. 301. In 1586, Recorder Fleetwood warned Burghley of an intended apprentices' riot against Dutch and French settlers. See _N. and Q._, 1st July 1871.

[148] See Chapter VII.

[149] Theophile de Viau, for instance.

[150] _Lettres choisies_, iii. p. 9.

[151] _Letter to the Synod of Alencon_, 1637.

[152] _Lettre a M. Morley_, p. 4 (1650).

[153] Collier, _Church History_, ii. p. 399. "The French Protestants,"

wrote Pierre Du Moulin in the same spirit, "keepe their zeale of religion for higher matters than a Surplice or a Crosse in Baptisme" (_A Letter of a French Protestant to a Scotsman of the Covenant_, 1640, p. 35).

[154] Allusion, of course, to Descartes.

[155] _Reunion du Christianisme_, pp. 117-19.

[156] _Reunion du Christianisme_, p. 173.

[157] _Op. cit._ p. 198.

[158] _Avis aux refugies_, pp. 128, 129.

[159] _Ibid._ p. 155.

[160] Aymon, _Actes des Synodes_, 2 vols., La Haye, 1710, ii. pp. 38, 39.

[161] _Ibid._ ii. p. 106.

[162] _Actes des Synodes_, ii. p. 636.

[163] _Ecclesiasticae Disciplinae; et Anglicanae Ecclesiae ... dilucida Explicatio._

[164] Penry's _Appellation_ and Throckmorton's _M[aster Robert] Some laid open in his Colours_, 1590. Cf. Sir Sidney Lee, _French Renaissance in England_, p. 303.

[165] _Memoires de Lenet_, p. 599. and Ch. Normand, _Bourgeoisie francaise_, pp. 400 _ssq._ See also Chapter VIII.

[166] _Lettre a M. Morley_, p. 112.

[167] _Eikon Basilike_, Preface to translation.

[168] There had already appeared pamphlets by Vincent, minister at La Roch.e.l.le, and Herault, minister at Alencon. Bochart, _op. cit._ p. 113.

[169] _Discours sur la Souverainete des Rois_, Saumur, 1650.