this Patent, King James gave a royal license to “their manner accustomed,” called by Burnet the Charenton system. To le rite Calviniste, Daillon conscientiously and firmly adhered. Only one church, and that in Soho, was built under this Patent, and went by the name of La Patente. After the Revolution, churches sprang up as they were required, without requiring any such legal formality to justify their erection. One of these was called La Nouvelle Patente.
In 1691 a reprint seems to have been published in Holland of his book, Examen de l’oppression des reformés en France, ou l’on justifie l’innocence de leur religion. It had a sermon prefixed, which the Assemblée Pastorale at the Hague was petitioned to censure, as containing some peculiar views about the Devil. Fortunately Jurieu addressed a Letter to the Assembly, proving that the accusation arose from a misunderstanding; and so the petition was dismissed. Rou informed Jurieu of this result in a letter dated 21st January 1692, which intimated the mind of the assembly that Daillon had neglected to guard his readers against some consequences of his Thesis, and that he had been spared on account of his varied merits, accompanied with docility and modesty, and even with submission.
The thoughts of Daillon, in the course of a very few years, were turned to Ireland. The Nicolas family, to which Madame de Daillon belonged, were high in Lord Galway’s favourable estimation. Daillon himself was an able and learned man; and Luttrell’s “Historical Relation” points to him (spelling the name, Dallions) as designed by the noble chief of the refugees to be the head of a Protestant College at Kilkenny. Lord Galway, as already stated, built and endowed both an English and a French Church at Portarlington — the latter was opened in 1694 according to the Charenton model. The first ministers were Messieurs J. Gillet and Balaguier. In 1698, Daillon was appointed to that charge, and entered upon its duties on the 26th of June. From the old French Church Register we learn that he had two daughters, Pauline and Anne. Pauline was the wife of Jean Posquet, escuyer, Sieur de la Boissière; Anne was the wife of Cornet John Grosvenor.
The chequered fortunes of the noble Earl of Galway influenced Daillon’s future career. The Portarlington estates having been resumed by the English Parliament, his Lordship’s churches and schools were at the disposal of the Earl of Rochester and the High Church party. One of Lord Galway’s faults in their eyes was that he was an unbeliever in the virtue of the episcopal consecration of churches. Believers in that ceremony might have thought the churches sufficiently consecrated by seven years’ religious use, and at least might have confined their ritualistic programme to the English Church (St Michael’s). What took place is thus recorded by Sir Erasmus Borrowes:— “In the first year of Queen Anne’s reign, an Act of Parliament was passed confirming the leases made by Lord Galway, which had been shaken by the Act of Resumption, and vesting the churches, school-houses, and endowments, in the Bishop of Kildare [Dr William Moreton], in trust for the purposes specified by the noble founder. The Bishop issued an address to the French inhabitants of Portarlington, setting forth his intention of consecrating the two churches, transmitting a copy of the Consecration Service, inviting them to conform to the discipline of Episcopacy, and complaining of Daillon for holding tenaciously to his consistorial authority, being unwilling to part with it on any terms.”
The “terms” which the bishop proposed to M. de Daillon were liberal as to money; if his stipend was not included in the new Irish budget, the bishop would pay him out of his own pocket an annuity of the same amount, and even more, if he would be tractable. But there were other terms. The French pasteur was to regard himself, and each of his predecessors in the pastorate, not as a minister of Christ, but as a “teacher” set up contrary to the Apostolical injunction (implied in 2 Timothy iv. 3, which text the bishop supposed to be a prophecy that the Portarlington refugees would “after their own lusts heap to themselves teachers”) — so that Divine Service could never be duly celebrated by him or by any similar outcast from Apostolicity.
As to the French congregation we are told that, soon after, it “acceded to the wishes of the Bishop.” But this triumph was obtained at the expense of the union between pastor and people. On the 3d October 1702, the Rev. Antoine Ligonier de Bonneval succeeded Monsieur De Daillon, who, about this time, seems to have removed to Carlow. There Pauline, his wife, died on the 31st December 1709, and he himself followed her, four days after, on the 3d January 1710 (n.s.), aged seventy-nine. Every kind of church register in Carlow, prior to the year 1744, has unfortunately been lost. There is, therefore, no vestige of a French church there. There is, however, sufficient evidence that there was a congregation of French worshippers. In the estimates, then called the “establishment,” for Ireland, there was this item:— To a French Minister at Catherlogh, £30 per Annum.
