ye flames whereof perisht himsf wife children and servants to the number of 10 or 12. twas a brick house, the fire began in ye lowest roomes, twas on Dec. 25 at night.” A few years later Michael Delaune, while walking, was killed by a fall of bricks from a house. The English Delaunes descend from a brother or brothers of Gideon, the Royal Apothecary; but I have not the means of tracing and affiliating them.[1] There were two names of some celebrity. Thomas Delaune, being challenged to the work by the Anglican Reverend Dr. Benjamin Calamy, wrote and published “A Plea for the Non-Conformists,” together with some strictures on Infant Baptism, for which he suffered imprisonment in the reign of Charles II. There was also Rev. William Delaune, D.D., of St. John Baptist’s College, Oxford, BA. in 1683, B.D. in 1688, and D.D. in 1697, President of his College, March 12, 1698 (n.s.), for four years successively Vice-Chancellor of the University, Lady Margaret’s Professor of Divinity, Rector of Chilbolton in Hampshire, Prebendary of Winchester in 1701, Prebendary of Worcester in 1714. He died the 3d of May 1728, aged sixty-nine. After the Revolution of 1688, the Non-jurors, having expected him to adhere to their party, bore him a grudge, which found vent after his death in a satirical Latin epitaph, describing him as tenuis in body but tumens in spirit. But his true monument is a volume containing “Twelve Sermons upon several subjects and occasions,” by William Delaune, D.D., President of St. John’s College, Oxford, and Margaret Professor of Divinity. London, 1728.
II. Paul Delaune, M.D.
Dr. Paul Delaune was the youngest and apparently the favourite son of the old Pasteur William Delaune. He was MA. of the University of Cambridge in 1610. He studied medicine abroad, and became M.D. of the University of Padua on 13th October 1614, and was incorporated at Cambridge on 19th January 1616 (n.s.). He was admitted a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of London, 21st April 1618, and rose to be Senior Censor in 1643. Several years of his prime he spent in Ireland as physician to the Viceroy, and thus he never gained much ground as a practitioner in London. But as a medical lecturer he was eminent. He read in his turn the Anatomy Lecture at the College of Physicians. A vacancy occurred in the Chair of Physic in Gresham College in a singular manner in the year 1642. Professor Thomas Winston, M.D., foreseeing the triumph of the Parliamentary Party, and fearing (as it was thought) that he might have offended some of its leaders by repeating words which he had overheard, formally asked and obtained leave from the House of Lords to emigrate to France. He went away quietly without resigning his chair, which was after the lapse of six months declared to have become vacant. Partly through the interest of his relative, Mr. Thomas Chamberlan, Dr. Delaune was appointed to the professorship. As Professor of Physic he was a great success, and the college was highly satisfied. In 1652, however, Dr. Winston became homesick, and having satisfied Oliver Cromwell’s government that he never offended the parliament by any public action, he obtained leave to return to England, and obtained the restoration of his property, and along with it the Gresham professorship. Dr. Delaune in his old age (a septuagenarian) found himself destitute, and this through the action of one to whom he had been a true friend in time of trouble, and who through his ample fortune was in no need of a professor’s salary. Cromwell provided for Dr. Delaune in 1654, by appointing him Physician-General to the English Fleet. After that date all that is certainly known is that he sailed for the Pacific Ocean, and was present at the taking of Jamaica. The fleet returned without him; and the general belief was that either the West Indian climate or the yellow fever had occasioned his death in the month of December 1654. (See Munk’s Roll of the Royal College of Physicians, vol. i.)
III. Chamberlan (or Chamberlen).
We have to chronicle four generations of medical practitioners, descended (it is said) from Guillaume Chambrelan, a younger son of Le Comte de Tanquerville, in Normandy, who fled from the St. Bartholomew’s Massacre to England, accompanied by “Jeneveva Vignon,” his wife. He had (with other children) two sons, and for some sentimental reason he named each of them Pierre. These sons have been identified as good refugee Protestants of the designated period, and it is immaterial
- ↑ The late lamented Colonel Chester intended to print a very minute Delaune pedigree, and so contented himself with answering, in a letter to myself, only a very few questions, for which I was duly grateful, and can now only regret that he did not live to print the pedigree. He informed me that the old pasteur and physician was the progenitor of all the Delaunes in England.
