Page:Protestant Exiles from France Agnew (1st ed. vol 3).djvu/16

 “They tell me the number of Protestants within the last twenty or thirty years has manifestly increased here, and does daily, notwithstanding their loss every day of some privilege or other.” The dragoons changed this to a great extent in 1685. At that date refugees in considerable numbers came to England, of whose reception I shall speak in a subsequent Section. In 1685 the dragoons bore down with ten-fold violence upon the Protestants of France, stupefied by the tale or the memory of the former brutalities of the troopers, and deluded into a life of unguarded and unvigilant security by the lying promise of toleration, embodied in the Edict of Revocation. Every Huguenot, who desired to continue peaceably at his trade or worldly calling, was forced to declare himself a proselyte to the Romish religion, or an inquirer with a view to such conversion. In the eye of the law they all were converts from Protestantism, and were styled New Converts, or New Catholics.

Bishop Burnet mentions the promise contained in the Edict of Revocation that “though all the public exercises of the religion were now suppressed, yet those of that persuasion who lived quietly should not be disturbed on that account.” But how was that promise kept? “Not only the dragoons, but all the clergy and the bigots of France broke out into all the instances of rage and fury against such as did not change, upon their being required in the king’s name to be of his religion (for that was the style everywhere).… I saw and knew so many instances of their injustice and violence, that it exceeded what even could have been imagined; for all men set their thoughts on work to invent new methods of cruelty. In all the towns through which I passed, I heard the most dismal account of those things possible.… One in the streets could have known the new converts, as they were passing by them, by a cloudy dejection that appeared in their looks and deportment. Such as endeavoured to make their escape, and were seized (for guards and secret agents were spread along the whole roads and frontier of France), were, if men, condemned to the galleys; and, if women, to monasteries. To complete this cruelty, orders were given that such of the new converts as did not at their death receive the sacrament, should be denied burial, and that their bodies should be left where other dead carcases were cast out, to be devoured by wolves or dogs. This was executed in several places with the utmost barbarity; and it gave all people so much horror that it was let drop.”

British Christians heard the tidings with tears and forebodings. John Evelyn, in his Diary, under date 3d Nov. notes, “The French persecution of the Protestants, raging with the utmost barbarity, exceeded even what the very heathens used.… I was shewn the harangue which the Bishop of Valentia-on-Rhone made in the name of the clergy, celebrating the French king as if he was a god for persecuting the poor Protestants, with this expression in it, ‘That as his victory over heresy was greater than all the conquests of Alexander and Cæsar, it was but what was wished in England; and that God seemed to raise the French king to this power and magnanimous action, that he might be in capacity to assist in doing the same there.’ This paragraph is very bold and remarkable.”

A few sentences in Lady Russell’s Letters give an affecting view of those times, for instance:

15th Jan., 1686.—“The accounts from France are more and more astonishing; the perfecting the work is vigorously pursued, and by this time completed, ’tis thought, all, without exception, having a day given them.… ’Tis enough to sink the strongest heart to read the accounts sent over. How the children are torn from their mothers and sent into monasteries, their mothers to another, the husband to prison or the galleys.”

Happily, three hundred thousand found refuge in England, in America, in Holland, in Switzerland, in Brandenburg, in Denmark, Sweden, and Russia. These (including the fugitives of 1681 and some others) are the famous French Refugees. 