France now undergoes, and on the conduct and acts of the Assembly of the clergy of that kingdom. Translated out of French, 4to., 1685.” Mr. Godfrey Holden Pike, in his “Ancient Meeting Houses” (p. 177), states that Monsieur Guill left property in France to the value of £12,000. Louis XIV. promised Lord Preston that the estate should be restored, and signed a document to that effect; but the promise was not kept.
4 Mary Roussel (born 15th August 1666) was the great-grand-daughter of one of the two Roussels, the bosom friends of Farel, the Reformer. Her father, Lawrence Roussel of Pont-Audemer, was arrested in 1684 as he meditated flight, and he died a prisoner for the Protestant faith in his own house in 1691. Her mother, with two boys, reached Calais in safety, en route for England. Mary’s duty was to follow with her brothers, Stephen and Francis, aged eight and four. Having dressed herself as a peasant-girl, she placed them in two panniers which were swung over the back of a donkey, covering them with vegetables and fruit; she put a basket containing poultry on the donkey’s back. The little ones were charged neither to speak nor to move, whatever might happen on the road. A servant, dressed as a farmer, rode on horseback, moving in advance as if unknown to the girl. They travelled by night; but as time was precious, the latter part of the journey had to be taken by day-light. Suddenly a party of dragoons came in sight; they rode up, fixed their eyes upon her, and then on the panniers. “What is in those baskets?” they cried. Before she could give an answer, one of them drew his sword, and thrust it into the pannier where the younger boy was hid. No cry was heard, not a movement was made; the soldiers concluded that all was right, and galloped off. As soon as they were out of sight the sister knocked off the inanimate contents of the pannier, the little boy lifted up his arms towards her, and she saw he was covered with blood from a severe cut on one of them. He had understood that if he cried, his own life and the lives of his brother and sister would be lost, and he bravely bore the pain and was silent. She bound up the wound and nursed him on the road with the fondest care, and had the joy of finding that his life was spared, though he carried a scar from the wound all his days. The party reached Calais, and the family crossed to England. The two elder boys were Isaac and Lawrence; and they, with Stephen and Francis, were educated in England. Isaac left two married daughers. Lawrence, after a chequered life in America as a slave, and then as a proprietor, was a London physician, and had a daughter, Bridget, who married her cousin Isaac, son of Francis. Francis, “the wounded Huguenot boy,” married Esther Heusse, a refugee from Quilleboeuf, and had eight children; from two of his daughters, Elizabeth, wife of Peter Beuzeville, and Mary Ann, wife of Thomas Meredith, the collateral representatives of the Roussels descend. One of these was Esther Beuzeville (born 1786, died 1851); she wrote the account of Mary Roussels flight in “Historical Tales for Young Protestants,” edited by Mr. Crosse for the Religious Tract Society; she was a daughter of Peter Beuzeville, son of the aforesaid Peter and Elizabeth, and was married to the Rev. James Philip Hewlett of Oxford. Her son, the Rev. James Philip Hewlett of London, has with admirable industry and accuracy compiled a genealogy of the Roussels, showing their relation to the families of Beuzeville, Meredith, Byles, Jolit, and others; to this genealogy, a copy of which Mr. Hewlett presented to me, I owe the above details. Mary Roussel the intrepid refugee was never married; a husband worthy of her would have been a prodigy of worth. [The elder Rev J. P. Hewlett died in 1820, aged thirty-nine; a volume of excellent sermons by him was printed in 1821; among the subscribers are P. Levesque, Esq. (10 copies), Mr. Barbet, Mrs. and Miss Beuzeville, Messrs J.C., H.N., and J.B. Byles and Miss Byles, James Guillemard, Esq., Mrs. Jolit, Mr. Samuel Jolit, Mrs. Saubergue.]
5. René de Saint-Leger, Sieur d’ Orignac, son of Le Sieur de Boisrond, was a Huguenot; the Revocation dispersed his family. His wife and daughter were refugees in England; the latter was imprisoned in France, and was conveyed to one convent after another from 1685 to 1688, until, proving “obstinate,” she was banished.
6. Lady Douglas, at the time of the Revocation, had completed her first year of married life in France; her maiden name was Anne De Bey de Batilly, and she had brought to her husband an estate in Alsace. From a state paper Sir John Dalrymple gives the following extract; it occurs in a letter to the Earl of Sunderland, dated 19th December 1685, from our ambassador at Paris, Sir William Trumball:—
