with, not only expressions, but allsoe deeds of your worthyness and goodness, as well to myselfe as the rest of your most devoted humble creaturs heare, that I am as well as my poor drooping mother whoose continuall illness since the death of my father gives me but li tell hopes shee will survive him long, &c. . . . Litell Samuel, whoe speakes now very pretely, desiers to have his most humble duty presented to his most honrd. Uncle and Godfather which please to accept from your most humble litell disiple.” In 1686 Balthazar St Michel became Resident Commissioner of the Navy at Deptford and Woolwich with £500 per annum. He was married, but that his wife was the person whom Pepys called his wife’s brother’s lady, “my lady Kingston” (15th March 1661), is not probable: (there were other brothers). He appears among the relatives at Pepys’ funeral in 1703 as Captain St Michel; his son, Samuel St Michel, and his daughter, Mary, are mentioned. Perhaps he had been promoted to the rank of Post-Captain in 1702, as on that year a successor took his post of Commissioner.[1]
*⁎* Mr Pepys had in his service a native of Pluviers (or Pithiviers), the capital of Le Gatinois. The man’s name was James Paris Du Plessis, and he was the author of a manuscript (British Museum, No. 5426), entitled, “A short history of human, prodigious, and monstrous births,” for which Sir Hans Sloan, in 1733, gave him a guinea. Du Plessis, in his letter to Sir Hans, dated from The Hat, Port Street, over against Rider’s Court, Soho, says of himself and his manuscript:—
“It is a collection I made wilst I was a servant to my most honourable master, Mr Samuel Pepys, in Yorck Buildings, and Mr Laud Doyley in the Strand, of most honourable memory, and in my travels into several countries of Europe with Mr John Jackson in the jubily year, and several others. Being aged of 70 years, I being sickly and not able to serve any longer, and having about a thousand volumes of books I had collected in my younger dayes, with a considerable collection of prints, medals, curiosities, I took a little shop and exposed my said goods to sale; but it not pleasing God to bless my undertaking, and spending in it all the money I had, I have been oblidged to leave off shopkeeping, and take a garret to lodge myself and goods,” &c.
The thirty-six pictorial illustrations and descriptive articles in the manuscript are catalogued in All the Year Round for 1861 (vol. v., page 331). From this account it appears that he was a son of Jacques and Charlotte Du Plessis Paris; that a sister of his mother was the wife of the Sieur Martel, Doctor of Physic and Surgeon; and that he himself married a daughter of James De Senne, of London, a French Protestant of Dieppe, by Mary Rosel, his wife.
VII. Le Gay.
Pierre Le Gay, a merchant in La Rochelle, fled after the calamitous surrender of that town and stronghold, and took refuge in Southampton, “bringing little or nothing with him.” Walking one day in a street of Southampton, he met unexpectedly a young lady to whom he had been attached in his native country. They renewed their acquaintance as refugees, and were married. He embarked in mercantile transactions; and “so extraordinary” was “the blessing of God on his industry in merchandise,” that in a few years he was able to buy the estate of West Stoke in Sussex, “where he lived in great credit to the day of his death.” Soon after 1662 his daughter became the second wife of the Rev. John Willis, who had been ejected from the Rectory of Wollavington for conscience sake. During her life this son-in-law lived with Mr. Le Gay, and preached in his house to the family and to a small congregation of friends and neighbours.[2]
VIII. De la Pryme.
The siege of La Rochelle filled the Protestants in French Flanders with such a sense of insecurity, that about eighty Walloon and Huguenot families came over to Hatfield, near Doncaster, in Yorkshire, about 1628-30. They were drawn to this royal village by the scheme for draining the great fens in the levels of Hatfield Chase, presided over by Sir Cornelius Vermuyden. The head of one of those families was Charles De la Pryme,[3] of Ypres, in Flanders. In Flemish the word
- ↑ Except for the dates connected with the Commissionership, my sole authority for the above Memoir is Pepys’ Diary, and accompanying materials. The ancestry of St Michel and his sister is described in Balthazar’s Letter to Pepys, dated 8th Feb. 1673-4, and summarized in the Editor’s Life of Pepys. Why that letter is not given there, verbatim and at full length, I do not understand. It seems to have been printed along with one edition of the Diary, for the late Mr Burn gives this quotation from it (Balthazar is alluding to his father), “He for some time, upon that little he had, settled himself in Devonshire, at a place called Bideford, where and thereabouts my sister and we all were born.”
- ↑ The “Non-Conformists’ Memorial,” by Calamy and Palmer, vol. iii. page 336.
- ↑ I am almost entirely indebted to The Surtees Society’s Publications, vol. liv., and to the late Professor Pryme’s Recollections, edited by his aughter.
