Protestant Exiles from France/Volume 2 - Historical Introduction - section II
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 Rouen and La Rochelle? One sentence of Drelincourt’s letter (addressed to Pastor Stouppe), fully represents the advice which the pastors offered:— “God entrusts at this day your Presbyterians, the gentlemen now in power, with the honour and reputation of our churches. For, if without the intervening of any foreign power, they recal this Prince, and set him in his throne, they acquire to themselves and to their posterity an immortal glory, and stop their mouths for ever who charge us falsely as enemies to royalty.”
Raimond Gaches’ letter was addressed to the Reverend Richard Baxter, at the suggestion of their mutual friend, Anna Mackenzie, Countess of Balcarres. He too gave Charles a good character, but also argued on the opposite supposition thus:— “Some, whether really or counterfeitly, are dissatisfied as to his constancy to the true religion, and allege that it concerns the Church very much that he, who is to rule others, should excel them in godliness. I will not answer (which truly may be said) that it belongs not to us to inquire into the Prince’s religion. Be he what he will (if his power be otherwise lawful, and the right of reigning belongs unto him), obedience in civil matters must be performed to the king, and other matters must be committed unto divine providence.” Baxter objected to this and the other letters, not because they advocated monarchical principles, but because they seemed to urge the hurrying on of the restoration of the son of the late king to the throne of England, without any consideration of the personal safety of the Presbyterian ministers in England; and all to procure the good humour of the King of France towards the Protestants of France. Not only the Presbyterians, but all good men soon regretted that the Restoration took place with so little deliberation.
Part of a correspondence is preserved between Pastor Du Bosc and Dr. Brevint, in which the former pleads for fair dealing with the Presbyterians on the part of Episcopalians, while the latter wishes Du Bosc to believe that the English Presbyterians would make no concessions. The fact was, the Episcopal was the immoveable party. The Presbyterians expressed their willingness to accept Archbishop Usher’s modified form of episcopacy; and by such yielding on their side, they emboldened the Bishops and the High Church party to be unyielding as to the sacramental ceremonials, and as to the scruples concerning the Apocrypha, and objections to words and sentences in the English Book of Common Prayer.
A few approving letters from French pasteurs to such prelatical clergymen as Brevint and Durel having been printed in England, the English Nonconformists rejoined in a small volume entitled:— “Apologie des Puritains d’Angleterre à Messieurs les Pasteurs et Anciens des Eglises Reformées en France.”[1] Its conclusion was argumentatively and convincingly arrived at, and was to this effect, that the Huguenot letter-writers had little information as to recent English Church History, and that panegyrics on the Church-Government of the Restoration were the reverse of complimentary to the entirely different procedure of the Protestant Consistories and Synods of France. “M. du Bosc (says the Apologie, page 148) ne comprend pas bien ce que c’est de l’Episcopât d’Angleterre s’il le prend pour un Episcopât moderé.”
On several occasions a few of the French divines showed a tendency to be rather too liberal in their laudatory letters to the dignified clergy of England. The plea that they believed prelatical and liturgical principles to be consistent with genuine faith and piety, was surely an insufficient reason for inditing epistles which were sure to be used against their own most hearty friends in England, namely, the Puritan party. Under the restored monarch of the Stewart family, the days of Laud had been revived. The governing policy was to make the Church of England distasteful to Puritans, to compel them, as conscientious men, to be dissenters, and then to treat their dissent as a crime. Every circumstance in the penal laws and proceedings against Puritan nonconformists proved this — circumstances of which foreign correspondents must have been ignorant, if they really intended to condole with the Right Reverend Bench of King Charles’ Church Establishment as the injured party in the strife.
In the Appendix to Stillingfleet’s “Unreasonableness of Separation,” there are three letters from foreign divines to a Lord Bishop, which seem to be answers to some theoretical questions ingeniously (if not ensnaringly) framed by his lordship.
The first letter is from Professor Le Moyne (dated at Leyden, 3d September 1680), who, after combatting the man of straw “that a man cannot be saved in the Church of England,” supposes, on the ground that the Thirty-Nine Articles are sound, that the ritual and offices of the subscribers must also be essentially pure and innocent; and he condescends to mention that some dissenters, whom he heard in London in 1765, were not edifying preachers.
The second letter is from Monsieur De l’Angle (dated at Paris, 31st October 1680), who seems to consider it a sufficient condemnation of the English nonconformity of that time, that he himself had felt at liberty, when in England as a visitor, to preach for clergymen of the Established Church; he further states that he believes Durel’s assertions to the effect that the Episcopal divines at the Savoy Conference breathed out nothing but charitable sentiments; and his climax is that Schism is the most formidable evil that can befal the church.
The third letter is from Monsieur Claude (dated at Paris, 29th November 1680), who says: “I would not that any one should make Episcopacy an occasion of quarrel in those places where it is established” — also, that Peace and Christian Concord are essentials like faith and regeneration; and, that separate congregations held by those, who dissent from the Established Church only on points of Church Order, are schismatic.
Monsieur Claude, however, could have had no intention of upbraiding the English nonconformists as having themselves to blame for the penalties and imprisonments which they suffered. For there was then in existence another letter of his, from which Du Moulin, in 1679, had quoted the following sentence:— “If one party, who find themselves to be the more prevailing, should have a mind to constrain the rest against their judgment in point of conscience, even in things of little consequence, as are the points which make all the disorder in the English Church, the schism lies on their side who impose.”
With regard to the letters of 1680, I make the following extract from “An Historical Account of my own Life, 1671-1731, by Edmund Calamy, D.D.,” imprinted and edited by John Towill Rutt in 1829, 2 vols. In Calamy’s 1st vol., p. 173, he says:—
“Dr. Frederick Spanheim (born 1632, died 1701), the son of Frederick, is acknowledged to have written as well and to as good a purpose, upon Ecclesiastical History, as any one that has appeared in the Protestant churches. . . . This Dr. Spanheim was one of those divines to whom the Bishop of London [Compton] wrote, for his sentiments about the Established Church of England and Conformity to it, at the very same time that he wrote to Monsieur Le Moyne and Monsieur de l’Angle upon the same subject, whose letters are printed by Dr. Stillingfleet at the end of his Mischief of Separation. Spanheim’s answer was not printed among the rest, not being thought enough in favour of the Church of England. . . . Le Moyne was a great and learned man. . . . I cannot help upon this occasion recollecting a passage of a worthy English divine, who was speaking of a letter of this Monsieur Le Moyne, relating to our contests here in England, of which he had made much use. He says that he had certain knowledge that M. le Moyne had both with his tongue and pen declared that Mr. Durell had much abused him, in leaving out sundry passages in his letter, wherein he did moderate and regulate the episcopal power, which if they had been inserted, the letter would not at all have fitted his design. (Bonasus Vapulans, or some Castigations given to Mr. John Durell, Sec, p. 80.)”
- ↑ It was published at Geneva in 1663; this rare volume was drawn up by the Rev. Thomas Hall, B.D., of King’s Norton, Worcestershire, who died in 1665.