Page:Protestant Exiles from France Agnew (1st ed. vol 3).djvu/258

 :21st March 1722. Rev. Joseph Querray, formerly a curate in France, and canon regular and prior, declared that he had abjured in London, and having produced a certificate to that effect, and also his deacon’s and priest’s orders, he received a licence from the Very Rev. Jean Bonamy, Dean of Guernsey, having at the same time taken the oaths and signed the three articles of the thirty-sixth canon. [He was made vicar of the parish of St Pierre du Bois.]


 * Same day. Rev. Pierre Garcelon, formerly priest in the diocese of Clermont.


 * 6th May 1722. Thomas Dacher, native of St Martin in Normandy, abjured in the church of St Martin, Guernsey.


 * 1st March 1724-5. Claude Coquerel, from France.


 * 16th April 1725. Jacques Drouet, from Normandy.


 * 18th December 1725. Jean Le Sevestre, native of Paris.


 * 22d February 1725-6. Le Sieur Jean La Serre, native of Billmagne in Languedoc. [On the next day he married a Guernsey lady, and is still represented in the island.]


 * 18th November 1726. Bernardin Rossignol, native of Quimper in Lower Brittany, formerly a priest of the Church of Rome, having abjured within the church of St Pierre Port, was received into the communion of the Church of England on the 15th inst.


 * 29th October 1727. Jean Ferdant, from Normandy.

 

(1.) was a Huguenot of noble birth who took refuge in Geneva. His son, Isaac de Thellusson, was born 14th, and baptized 15th October 1690, at St Gervais in Geneva, and rose to be Ambassador from that Republic to the Court of Louis XV. He died in 1770; his wife was Sarah, daughter of Mr Abraham le Boullenger, to whom he was married at Leyden, 11th October 1722. Peter Thellusson, son of Isaac, came to London in the middle of last century, and prospered; he purchased the manor of Broadsworth in Yorkshire. One of his sons, George Woodford Thellusson, married Mary Ann, third daughter of Philip Fonnereau, Esq.; and his youngest daughter, Augusta Charlotte, was married to Thomas Crespigny, Esq. (who died in 1799); his third son was Charles, M.P. for Evesham. Mr Thellusson died on 21st July 1797; his eldest son, Peter Isaac, was made Baron Rendlesham, in the peerage of Ireland, in 1806, but survived only till 1808; the second, third, and fourth barons were his sons; the present, and fifth baron, was the only son of the fourth. The celebrated will of Peter Thellusson, Esq., dated 1796, is matter of history. He left £4500 a year of landed property, and £600,000 of personal property, to trustees for accumulation during the lives of his three sons, and of their sons alive in 1796; the vast fortune expected to have accumulated at the death of the last survivor was left to the testator’s eldest male descendant alive at that date. The will was disputed, but was confirmed by the House of Lords on 25th August 1805. Charles Thellusson (born 1797), son of Charles, M.P. (who died in 1815), was the last survivor of nine lives; he died 5th February 1856. Litigation was necessary to decide who was the heir intended by Peter Thellusson, and the decision was in favour of Lord. Rendlesham on 9th June 1859. The fortune, however, was comparatively moderate, vast sums having been swallowed up by the sixty-two years of litigation. One good result of the monstrous will was the Act of Parliament (39-40 Geo. III. c. 98), “which restrains testators from directing the accumulation of property for a longer period than twenty-one years after death.”

The unsuccessful litigant was Arthur Thellusson, Esq. (born 1801, died 1858), sixth son of the first Lord Rendlesham, who reasonably thought that, having been born after his grandfather’s death, and being thirty-eight years the senior of his noble kinsman, he was the eldest male descendant. He died before the decision, and left his claims to his only son, the present Colonel Arthur John Bethell Thellusson, of Thellusson Lodge, Aldeburgh, Suffolk. The Rendlesham estate is near Woodbridge in Suffolk. (Imperial Dictionary of Universal Biography, and other authorities.) 