mulgation, the Edict of Nantes. The number of persons who withdrew from the dominions of the French king upon this occasion is supposed by the lowest estimate to have exceeded three hundred thousand; but, including all who during some years before had fled from the coming storm, as well as those whom it swept before it when it actually broke out, they have been reckoned to amount to eight hundred thousand, or even to a million. Of the mere working people the greater part settled in Prussia; whither, Frederick II. informs us, in his Memoirs of the House of Brandenburg, they brought all sorts of manufactures which the country before wanted, establishing, under the protection of the Elector Frederick William, the fabrication of cloth, serges, stuffs, druggets, crapes, caps, stockings, hats, and also the dying of all sorts of colours; "Berlin," it is added, "now had goldsmiths, jewellers, watchmakers, and carvers; and such as were settled in the open country planted tobacco, and a variety of fruits and pulse." But those of a superior class or who had more money, generally took refuge in England and Holland. Voltaire, who makes the entire number that left France in three years about five hundred thousand, says, "An entire suburb of London was peopled with French manufacturers of silk: others carried thither the art of making crystal in perfection, which has been since this epoch lost in France."[1] Besides Spitalfields, the suburb alluded to by Voltaire, some thousands of them settled in Soho and St. Giles's; and, besides those who took up their abode in London, many were dispersed in various parts of the country. "It may seem somewhat strange," Anderson writes, "that more of them did not settle in England, considering the general liberty of this free nation; yet, through the too general and impolitic aversion of the English to all strangers, even though suffering for the Protestant religion, and their monopolizing corporation cities and towns, and, on the other hand, the great immunities, &c., allowed them in Holland, Switzerland, Germany, and Prussia, we are not to wonder that not above fifty thousand of them did actually settle in England; where, in-
- ↑ Siècle de Louis XIV. chap. 32.
