your lordship would do us a singular pleasure to let us know whether they were not some of those that approved your Exposition. It was a pity that they did not set their reverend names to your Pastoral Letter too. We should then have been abundantly convinced of their integrity, and that they are as fit to approve such tracts, as your lordship to write them. And he must be very unreasonable that would not have been convinced by their authority, that your Exposition gives as true an account of the doctrine of your Church as your Pastoral Letter does of the state of your diocese.
“You will excuse me, my lord, that I have insisted thus long upon these reflections. If you are indeed sensible of what you have done, no shame that can from hence arise to you will seem too much; and if you are not, I am sure none can be enough. I beseech God, whom you call to witness against your own soul, to give you a due sense of all these things; and then I may hope that you will read this with the same sentiments of sorrow and regret as I can truly assure you I have written it.”
Thus the flames which consumed Claude’s little book, and the falsehoods circulated in pamphlets, failed in the villainous design against the Protestants, and only contributed to display to fuller advantage the claims of the Huguenot refugees to British hospitality. The English people believed in the Persecution. But the great arguments by which they were convinced, were the living flesh, blood, and tongues of the refugees. A cotemporary English expositor of the Apocalypse remarked, concerning the Persecution, “at the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by the king of France:”—
“Nothing of that kind, since the heathen persecutions, did ever make a greater noise in the world to draw the like observation of all men after it, than the new acts of cruelty against the French Protestants, which made life appear more dreadful to them than present death and martyrdom. There was indeed all artifice used by the Ecclesiastics to conceal and disguise the truth of these proceedings, as if there had been no methods of force or violence heard of among them. But the vast multitudes, which poured themselves into all the neighbouring nations round about them, were a sufficient cloud of witnesses to all the world to confirm them in the certainty of it. And the miseries, to which they exposed themselves to get free from the force and violence which they were there under, are unquestionable assurances of the horrors of it.”[1]
The Huguenot sailors, who returned to France on the invitation of Bonrepaus, had probably been starved through King James’s neglect; for it is recorded that at an early period of his reign he had prohibited the employment of their military officers. Yet, such was the benevolent and sympathetic feeling of the people of England, none of the refugee ministers or civilians had to complain of any visible tokens of royal displeasure.
Among the benefactors of the refugees the Earl of Bedford was conspicuous; to him the French Protestant Synodicon was dedicated. Rachel, Lady Russell, had the Huguenots constantly in her thoughts. In consulting about a tutor for her son, she writes (Jan. 7, 1686), “I am much advised, and indeed inclined, to take a Frenchman; so I shall do a charity, and profit the child also, who should learn French. Here are many scholars come over, as are of all kinds, God knows.” Sir William Coventry of Bampton, in Oxfordshire, died in the summer of 1686, and his will contained this important paragraph:— “I give and bequeath the sum of £2000 for the relief of poor French Protestants in this kingdom, and £3000 to be employed for the redemption of English captives in slavery in Turkey or Barbary, both which sums I will shall be paid to Dr. Henry Compton, now Bishop of London, and Dr. John Fell, now Bishop of Oxford, or the survivor of them, to whose pious care I recommend and entrust the disposition thereof.” [Richard Lower, F.R.S., an eminent London physician, left £500 to the French Protestant refugees. His will, dated 5th January 1691 (n.s.), and proved 9th February, contains this item:— “I give to the French Protestants, now in or near London, £500, to be distributed amongst such as shall need it most, by Dr. Freeman, minister of St Paul’s, Covent Garden, and by Dr. Tennison, minister of St Martin-in-the-Fields.”]
When as a step to Popish ascendency a Declaration of Liberty of Conscience was issued by the king, the Protestants felt that the interests of toleration were unsafe in such hands, and that its promotion ought to be delayed till a true friend and genuine promoter of toleration should arise. The Protestant Dissenters, having endured both mental and bodily suffering under the penal laws, found themselves in a perplexing difficulty, on account of the evident reasons for joy and congratulation upon the suspension of pains and penalties. But the great majority of their leaders, with singular sagacity and patriotism, came to the decision that, liberty of conscience being a boon belonging to man through the gift of God, they should use it, but
- ↑ “The Judgment of God upon the Roman Catholic Church,” by Drue Cressener, D.D., Lond. 1689, page 137.
