for kings, and their attachment to a royal family that was so intimately connected with their own, disposed them to sympathise with Charles. Yet they were repelled by insults both in word and deed, hurled by the favourite royal advisers against their religious doctrines, worship and church government. Being Presbyterians both in polity and in worship, their sympathy on theoretical grounds might have been confidently claimed by a Parliament which had abolished the Laudean Prelacy, and had created the Westminster Assembly.
But we have to pass on to the execution of Charles I. This was the crime and blunder by which the Parliament lost all durable sympathy. The Presbyterians could prove that this judicial murder was not their doing. And the Congregationalists are free from all blame, as far as their church principles are concerned; though the individual offenders, being members of the bar and of the army, professed a theory of Church Discipline which bore the name of Independency. But the great mass of mankind were led to believe that all Protestants who were not Episcopalians were Presbyterians. The name of Presbyterian was given to every form of Protestant Dissent from Anglican Prelacy. And thus public report inculpated the Presbyterians. As to the French Protestants, though they did not fall into that mistake, yet their feelings of pity for the royal sufferer and for his illustrious family, and for individuals among his clergy, amounted practically to the withholding of sympathy from the Presbyterians of England.
The most celebrated writers against the execution of Charles I. were French Protestants. They were well practised in the most courtly style of language, because being accused of disloyalty by the Papists, they had continually to assert their devotion to their own king. Having nothing to protect them but a monarch’s good pleasure or good humour, they favoured theories as to kingly claims which sound rather slavish in modern ears. They saw the English court and country from a distance; and being inexperienced in the grievances of their English brethren, they could bring forward their ultra-royalist arguments, without feeling encumbered by any sense of provocation associated with the name of the Royal Charles Stuart.
The name of Claudius Salmasius was, in French, Claude Saumaise. It was his attack on the executioners of King Charles that drew forth John Milton’s first defence of the Commonwealth of England. More notably connected with the Protestants of France is the name of Du Moulin, Latinized Molinaeus. Two sons of the great French pastor of that name adopted England as their country, and both abjured Presbyterianism, Louis becoming an Independent (he was M.D. of Leyden), and Pierre becoming an Episcopal clergyman. The former, while clearing all religious parties of the guilt of the king’s murder, was a polemical author against the English Presbyterians. The latter, a D.D. of Leyden, wrote the curious little book, for whose title-page the printer contributed his blood-red ink to impress upon the reader that the king’s blood was crying from the ground for vengeance — “Regii Sanguinis Clamor ad Caelum adversus parricidas Anglicanos.”
The correspondence between the English and foreign Universities circulated news and sentiments regarding England. The Theological colleges of the French Protestants were of unsurpassed efficiency. Their University-seats were Saumur, Sedan, Montauban, Nismes, Montpellier, and Die. Oxford and Cambridge recognised their degrees, and were always willing to admit their graduates ad eundem. Persecution gradually suppressed all the French Protestant Colleges and Academies first, by a perverse interpretation of the Edict of Nantes, to the effect that theology was not one of the liberal sciences intended by the Edict — and next, by a tyrannical decree, that schools teaching only reading, writing, and arithmetic, were quite enough for Huguenots. But during their brief existence, their universities were most worthy of the name. The most intimate connections between them and those of England were formed by natives of the Channel Islands, who studied in a French University because their mother tongue was French, and yet were eligible for an English Church living because England was their native kingdom.
The opinions of French Protestants concerning the divisions in England varied in each individual case according to the views of their English correspondents. Being foreigners, they had few means of sifting any statements which an esteemed English friend might make or send to them. It would be a mistake, therefore, to ascribe to the Huguenots one uniform sentiment regarding English politics. While Du Bosc’s biographer declared that all their theologians were on the Royalist side, James, Duke of York, formed a totally different opinion. The Duke said to Burnet, “that among other prejudices he had at the Protestant Religion this was one, that both his brother and himself, being in many companies in Paris incognito, where they met many Protestants, he found they were all alienated from them, and were great admirers of
