abandoning the house with its furniture,” said Judith, the young wife of Pierre Manigault, “we contrived to hide ourselves for ten days at Romans, in Dauphiny, while a search was made for us; but our faithful hostess would not betray us.” Nor could they escape to the seaboard, except by a circuitous journey through Germany and Holland, and thence to England, in the depths of winter. “Having embarked at London, we were sadly off. The spotted fever appeared on board the vessel, and many died of the disease; among these, our aged mother. We touched at Bermuda, where the vessel was seized. Our money was all spent; with great difficulty we procured a passage in another vessel. After our arrival in Carolina, we suffered every kind of evil. In eighteen months, our eldest brother, unaccustomed to the hard labour which we were obliged to undergo, died of a fever. Since leaving France, we had experienced every kind of affliction — disease, pestilence, famine, poverty, hard labour. I have been for six months without tasting bread, working the ground like a slave; and I have passed three or four years without having it when I wanted it. And yet God has done great things for us, in enabling us to bear up under so many trials.” . . . When the struggle for independence arrived, the son of Judith Manigault entrusted the vast fortune he had acquired, to the service of the country that had adopted his mother. The Hall in Boston where the eloquence of New England rocked the infant spirit of independence was the gift of the son of a Huguenot [Peter Faneuil].
Section II.
THE CORRESPONDENCE OF THE FRENCH PROTESTANTS WITH ENGLAND IN THE TIME OF CHARLES II.
The restoration of the younger Charles as King Charles II. was a proposal which few thinking men could contemplate without painful misgivings. Apart from the divine right of inheritance, nothing reliable could be said in favour of this royal person; and very much could with truth be said against him. His conduct had been immoral; and he gave no indications of any taste or temper for the momentous business of government, and for the delicate exercise of the royal prerogatives of bounty and mercy.
It was also reported that he was a secret convert to Popery. This report had several important confirmations, for which I refer the reader to Burnet. And the alleged policy of such a step was plausible. Mazarin had politely dismissed Charles and James from France as obstructives to his negotiations with Oliver. The usurper had established claims of gratitude upon all foreign Protestants; while by vigour and good information he had extinguished all cavalier conspiracies against him on British soil. The hopes of the royal Stewarts were therefore transferred to a great anti-protestant league, which should make Britain both loyal and Roman Catholic by a new conquest. Spain was believed to be a party to a secret treaty of this kind with Charles, who (it was said) had qualified himself for such a holy alliance by uniting himself to the Church of Rome.
Charles had in 1658 sent a letter (which was published) from Brussels to a loyal Presbyterian exile residing at Rotterdam, the Reverend Thomas Cawton. and in that letter he denied the report of his conversion or perversion. But this epistle did not quiet the minds of people conversant with religious affairs in 1660; for might not the contradiction be a pious fraud? In this dilemma the aid of the French Protestant pastors was solicited; and a few of them wrote letters to the Presbyterian ministers of England, in which they asserted Charles’s unwavering Protestantism.
The kind-hearted divines looked upon a nominally Protestant king as a figure that they would gladly see on the throne of France, and for which England might be envied. They could not allow themselves to believe that the only august person of this description, whom they had ever seen, could prove to be an impostor. They were also glad to come forward as acknowledged advocates of royalty. The names of the pastors, whose letters were printed, were Daillé, Drelincourt, and Gaelics (three ministers of the Parisian Temple of Charenton), and De L’Angle of Rouen.
Their depositions as to facts amounted to no more than this: Had not the Prince’s chaplains, Brevint and Durel, assured them that he was “a Protestant of the best sort”? And could it have been his fault that he never worshipped with the Parisian Protestants at Charenton? for did he not go to the Protestant churches at
