Kobe University Repository : Kernel タイトル Huguenots in English Sea Port Towns in the Late Seventeenth Title Century(17 世紀後半のイングランド海港都市におけるユグノー) 著者 Gwynn, Robin Author(s) 掲載誌・巻号・ページ 海港都市研究,3:15-30 Citation 刊行日 2008-03 Issue date 資源タイプ Departmental Bulletin Paper / 紀要論文 Resource Type 版区分 publisher Resource Version 権利 Rights DOI JaLCDOI 10.24546/81000029 URL http://www.lib.kobe-u.ac.jp/handle_kernel/81000029 PDF issue: 2021-10-07 15 Huguenots in English Sea Port Towns in the Late Seventeenth Century Robin GWYNN INTRODUCTION I would like to express my thanks to Kobe University both for inviting me here, and for the opportunity to tackle this particular subject. I have spent much of my academic life exploring Huguenot settlement in Britain in the later Stuart period, but have never before been challenged to focus on the specific aspect of Huguenots in relation to English sea port towns. For the purposes of this paper, we can define the Huguenots as French‑speaking Protestants, or more precisely Calvinists, who were fleeing from the France ruled by King Louis XIV from 1661 – when he took up the reins of personal rule – to his death in 1715. A few also came from the Protestant Principality of Orange, which Louis invaded and overran. Two dates stand out as of particular significance in causing Huguenot migration from France in this period. The first was 1681, which saw the onset of the dragonnades, the deliberate billeting of soldiers on Protestant households to force their conversion to Roman Catholicism. The second was the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. The Edict of Nantes (1598) had granted privileges to the Huguenots in France by what was described as a ‘perpetual and irrevocable’ edict. However, there was a steady erosion of the privileges granted by the Edict across the first two decades of Louis’s personal rule. Protestant Synods ceased. By the time the Edict was finally revoked in 1685, 570 Calvinist temples had already been destroyed, and their total number reduced from 813 to 243. At the same time, the Huguenots were subjected to petty annoyances. Their ministers were not allowed to wear clerical garb outside their churches. Psalms could be sung only during worship, and then only softly and not if a Roman Catholic procession including the sacrament was passing by outside. Their dead were to be buried, in special cemeteries, only at 6 a.m. or 6 p.m. in summer and at 8 a.m. or 4 p.m. in winter. More serious were regulations such as those prohibiting Protestant ministers from marrying a Catholic to a Protestant if anyone objected, and forbidding Huguenots to persuade servants or employees to turn Protestant. In several cities it was ordained that aldermen must be Catholic; Protestants could occupy only such positions as clock-keeper or porter. Huguenots found it harder to enter crafts, whether as apprentices or masters. A fund was founded to buy conversions. By the 1670s, these actions had opened the eyes of the more far‑sighted French Protestants to 16 海港都市研究 what might happen. Their fears were realised when from 1679 onwards, oppressive interpretation of the Edict of Nantes was superseded by more direct action. The rate of destruction of Protestant temples increased, while the pretexts for their demolition grew weaker. The legal guarantees in the Edict of Nantes were withdrawn. Greater control was exercised over the movement of Protestant pastors, who were also subjected to increased taxation and severe legal penalties for minor offences. Marriages between Catholics and Protestants were prohibited. In 1681 Louis even decreed that Protestant ministers were not to visit dying members of their flocks, and that Protestant children from the age of seven could be converted without their parents being able to interfere. The Huguenots found themselves harassed by an ever-increasing stream of edicts damaging them economically, preventing their entry into various guilds and restricting them in the exercise of their professions. They were excluded from all public office, from posts in the royal household or on aristocratic estates. They were not to be admitted into the legal profession, not to practise medicine, not to act as midwives, not to print or sell books. If on the other hand they accepted conversion, they were offered substantial tax relief and did not need to pay their debts for three years. Then, in 1681, the royal intendant of Poitou, Marillac, quartered dragoons – mounted infantry soldiers - on Protestant households. In principle Marillac was not doing anything new, but the systematic employment of soldiers as agents of conversion was novel, horrifying - and effective. The soldiers were given licence to indulge themselves as they pleased. The households where they were placed had to pay their wages and upkeep. What persuasion, bribery and intimidation had failed to do was achieved, at least superficially, by the combination of force, brutality and a crushing financial burden. The resultant flood of abjurations was so great that the intendant at Montauban complained in 1685 that when troops approached towns in his district, the Protestants converted so rapidly that it was difficult to find enough homes to lodge all the soldiers for the night. On 22 October 1685, the ‘perpetual and irrevocable’ edict that had given shelter to the Huguenots for nearly a century was revoked. Previously, even in decrees licensing its subversion, Louis XIV had always repeated that he intended the Edict of Nantes to be observed. Now the Edict was simply annulled. All Protestant services were forbidden, all temples ordered to be destroyed. Ministers were exiled unless they accepted conversion. Huguenot laymen, however, were forbidden to leave the country, and their children were to be baptized and brought up as Catholics. The Gallican Church in France was delighted. It compared Louis to Theodosius and Charlemagne, great rulers of old. ‘You have confirmed the Faith; you have exterminated the heretics’, Bossuet wrote. However, it was not as simple as that. A final general clause in the Revocation assured surviving Huguenots that they could live freely in the kingdom as long as they Huguenots in English Sea Port Towns in the Late Seventeenth Century 17 held no religious gatherings. Some ‘new converts’ thereupon withdrew their enforced abjurations and tried to resume Protestantism, in the belief that persecution was at an end. They were soon undeceived, as the dragonnades were renewed and intensified; but Louis was left with hundreds of thousands of subjects who remained Protestant at heart and deeply resented what had been done to them. In all, about 200,000 left France as refugees against the will and despite the deterrent measures of its government, and went to live in the lands of Louis’ enemies. A far greater number – three or four times as many – stayed on in France, only nominally (if at all) Catholic, and abstaining from church attendance when they could. As far as England was concerned, this sequence of events meant that there were some signs of immigration in the 1660s. By 1673 the Huguenot church at Calais was reporting it was overburdened by the number of Protestants heading across the Channel. The floodgates really opened with the dragonnades in 1681, and a new word, réfugiés or ‘refugees’, came into the English language for the first time in that year. Even larger numbers of immigrants crossed the Channel in 1687, and others continued to arrive through the 1690s, with a final significant spurt in the years after the Peace of Ryswick of 1697. Across the period as a whole, perhaps forty or fifty thousand French Protestants settled in England. Although the Huguenots arriving from Louis XIV’s France introduced the word ‘refugees’ to Britain, they were not of course the first group – not even the first group of European Protestants – to seek a new home across the Channel. An earlier wave of French-speaking Protestants had come from the Continent during the reigns of Edward VI and Queen Elizabeth in the sixteenth century, and had established their own institutions. So the new Huguenot refugees of the 1680s arrived to find there were already long established French‑speaking settlements at London, Canterbury, Norwich and Southampton. These had royal authorisation, and their churches worshipped in the non-conformist way to which the refugees were accustomed. There was also one other French- speaking French church, at the Savoy at Westminster, which conformed to the Church of England liturgy and used the Anglican prayer book translated into French. ARRIVAL AND PATTERN OF SETTLEMENT When the Calvinist movement first became established in France in the sixteenth century, it struggled to grow in the centre-north of the country, where royal power was greatest, and in Lorraine and the east, a stronghold of the Catholic Guise family. Calvinist strength lay rather in the 18 海港都市研究 frontier regions, especially in a southern crescent stretching from La Rochelle in the west to Lyons in the east. It was also notable in Normandy and other isolated pockets where it was supported by the local nobility. So a good deal of Huguenot settlement in France had tended to be clustered near the coast. Across the Channel in England, the Protestant settlements which existed in 1680 on the eve of the dragonnades were not far from the sea either. Moreover every refugee who arrived, necessarily did so by sea: there was no alternative. The conditions under which the Huguenots left France pose insuperable problems for historians trying to track their steps. Faced by persecution, the refugees took whatever chances came their way to make their escape. Unless ministers, they were prohibited from leaving, so they travelled at night by unusual paths hidden from the public gaze.