in whom they could trust, and by whom family re-unions in some land of liberty would eventually be brought about. And as a preparation for this step, he proposed that they all should have one purse. At the meeting the gentlemen all approved of the proposal. But upon reflection they, and especially the ladies, shrank from the difficulties of the moment. So the dragoons, under the command of the Marquis de Baupre-Choiseul, beat up their quarters in detail, and all the principal gentry had to sign a recantation. Dumont’s wife’s mother died of humiliation and grief, and others of the Grosmenil family fled to Holland.
For a time the public authorities seemed satisfied with Dumont de Bostaquet and his family and neighbours as new converts nominally; but a demand for their regular observance of the Roman Missal and Ritual loomed in the distance. A large party of them accordingly conspired to escape from France, and on the 19th May 1687 negotiations with the crew of an English ship were made. The intending emigrants were rendezvoused on the sea-shore in two parties, one at Quiberville, and the other at Saint-Aubin. At the latter point Dumont himself was; but owing to some omission in the agreement with the sailors as to giving a signal, his party was kept waiting in vain, until some men, supposed to be the coast-guard, came down upon them.
“The pilgrims,” says the Edinburgh Reviewer, “were three hundred in number, and it is hardly possible to doubt that their flight had been winked at by the local authorities. The character of the time in France is well illustrated by what followed afterwards. A band of marauders attacked the emigrants just as they had reached the sea-shore, pretending to be the royal guard which had been stationed along the coast in order to stop any Huguenot’s passage.”
It being night, the general skirmish and discharges of firearms in the moonlight were of a random and unrecitable kind. If the fugitive Protestants had been sufficiently supplied with war material, their victory would have been complete and not merely partial. But the plan of the sea voyage having come to nothing, the conductors had to think of securing the safety of the ladies and children before daybreak. The ladies now were forward to propose what they should have agreed to in 1685, namely, that the gentlemen should make their escape from their deadly perils, seeing that the worst temporal evil that could befall the weaker sex was to be immured within convents.
After employing a few days in settling his affairs as well as haste would permit, the Seigneur de Bostaquet rode off for Picardy. He was suffering from a dangerous gunshot wound received in the melee on the coast. At the frontier the guards allowed him and his valet to pass, telling him, at his request, the route for Beaumel. His real destination was Prouville, where he arrived safely. He inquired for the house of a rich Romanist gentleman, but succeeded in quietly housing himself under the roof of a Protestant friend, Monsieur de Monthuc, his wife’s kinsman. He stayed here for some time under the care of his affectionate host and hostess, and of a competent surgeon, until he was joined by a Norman comrade, Monsieur de Montcornet, who shared with him the dangers of the onward route until they reached Ghent in the Spanish Netherlands. There they were comparatively safe, except from swindlers, who took advantage of the necessity Dumont was under of selling his horses by giving him a shamefully small price, and who would have arrested him for pretended custom-dues, if a good Samaritan had not helped him to slip away from their grasp. From Ghent Montcornet took the road for Brussels. Dumont and his valet took the boat for Sas-van-Ghent, and landed on the shores of Holland (un pays de repos et de tranquillité d’âme) with a sacred joy. He went by easy stages to Rotterdam, and thence by water to the Hague.
On the 29th June 1687, in the Walloon church, he made his public declaration of contrition for the signature which the converters had extorted from him in France. He now realized all the advantages which he had expected from the friendship of General De Torcé. By command of the Prince of Orange he was enrolled in the Dutch army as a captain of cavalry, the rank to which he had attained in the French service. France, by its laws, proscribed and cast him off on the 14th of August. A legal narrative of his flight and its attendant consequences, which has been preserved among the De Bostaquet Papers, may be here quoted:— “En 1687 il fut poursuivi criminellement, soupconne d’avoir voulu favoriser la sortie du royaume de quelques particuliers, et entre autres de . . . , ce qui l’obligea de sortir effectivement du royaume, et en haine de cette sortie le proces criminal fut continué, et lui condamné, et ses biens declarés confisqués.”
The letters which he received from his wife contained melancholy details of calamity and desolation; but in the course of the autumn she managed to send him
