Gabet, daughter of Innocent Gabet, chief judge of Vienne, in Dauphine. He must have been her second husband, for she is designated Douairière du Plessis (Dowager-Lady Du Plessis). Joachim suffered persecution as a Protestant, and his son, Pierre, was born in the chateau of Buhy, where his parents had taken refuge, which was the seat of Philippe Du Plessis Mornay’s eldest brother. The date of the birth of Pierre Du Moulin is 18th October 1568.
The Du Moulins were in Paris during the St. Bartholomew massacre. Joachim, flying from the Romish butchers, managed to consign his four young children to the care of Ruffina, a Roman Catholic woman who had at one time been his servant. She laid them on a bed below the bed-clothes, and little Pierre (not quite four years of age) began to howl. At once some assassins appeared in search of him. The faithful Ruffina managed to upset a number of tin and brass utensils from a shelf, and with stentorian voice began and continued to exclaim about the supposed accident, noisily kicking the pots and dishes, while pretending to pick them up. She thus drowned the boy’s cries, and the ruffians went away without finding him. On lifting the bedclothes she found that Ester, the eldest child, had laid her hand so firmly on Pierre’s mouth, that he was almost choked to death. The parents with all their children made good their escape to Muret, thence to Sedan, where Pierre became the head-boy of the school.
While the son’s school years seem to have been tranquil, the father’s life was full of vicissitudes. On Good Friday, 1584, he was holding a meeting in a private house in Paris, and dispensing the Lord’s Supper, when the gendarmes entered and arrested him. By the king’s command, the parliament banished him out of the kingdom. During his exile he lived in Scotland — where he was, probably in 1586 when King James issued a license to French Protestants to live in Scotland — certainly in 1589, when the Presbytery of Haddington had before them their Synod’s warrant to make collections in the churches for “Mr. Mouling banest out of France.” The French congregation at Orleans was almost annihilated by the St. Bartholomew massacre, and its ministers had been allowed to transfer their services to London. Sometime before 1596 Joachim Du Moulin was doing the duties of a pasteur at Orleans, and in that year the Synod of Saumur settled him there. When he finally retired in 1615, he had been a minister of the gospel for fifty-six years.
To return to Pierre Du Moulin — at the age of twenty (anno 1588) he went to London for his higher school education. Thence he removed to Cambridge, where he was a pupil of Dr. Whittaker. During the long vacation he preached in the City of London French Church. After a four years’ residence in England he went to Leyden — as a student at first, but very soon he was made Professor of Philosophy and the Greek language. On 28th February 1599, he became a Protestant pasteur of Paris. In 1611, Andrew Melville, who had been banished to France, was his guest.
Isaac Casaubon died in 1614, and our King James, being bereaved of a literary and controversial associate, consulted Dr. Theodore Mayerne. I quote the following paragraph from Geeves’ Status Ecclesiae Gallicanae:—
“In the year 1615 King James sent by Sir Theodore Mayerne to invite Du Moulin into England, to confer with him about a method of uniting all the reformed churches of Christendom, to which he had been often solicited by Monsieur Du Plessis. The issue of which voyage was, that King James resolved to send letters to all Protestant princes to invite them to union, and desired the French churches to frame a confession, gathered out of all those of other reformed churches, in the which unnecessary points might be left out, as the means of begetting discord and dissension. Two months before Du Moulin’s coming into England, Du Perron had made an oration in the States assembled at Blois, where he had used the king very ill, and had maintained that the Pope had power to depose kings; and having published it in print, he sent it to his Majesty. To answer that oration, King James made use of Du Moulin’s service for the French language; and it was printed the first time in French, while Du Moulin was in England, in that year 1615, before it was printed in English. The king, going to Cambridge, carried Du Moulin along with him, and made him take the degree of Doctor.”
During this visit, which was of only three months’ duration, he preached before the king within the palace of Greenwich on Romans i. 16, “I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ.”
Du Moulin was a representative of the Provincial Synod of the Isle of France, Picardy, and Champagne in the National Synod of Gap in 1603, and again in 1612 at the National Synod of Privas, when Daniel Chamier was elected moderator, with Pierre Du Moulin as his assessor. In 1620 we find him moderator of the National Synod of Alez, but in 1623 Louis XIII. wrote to the National Synod of Charenton that his Majesty prohibited him from exercising the ministry. It will be sufficient
