Page:Protestant Exiles from France Agnew (1st ed. vol 3).djvu/268

 and Peter Teulon; Charles was a Captain of the 28th Regiment at the battle of Waterloo, and brought the regiment out of action. Pierre is represented by G. B. Teulon, Esq. of Bandon, Major Thomas Teulon, and Charles Peter Teulon, Barrister-at-law. The surname Teulon is, or was indigenous in Scotland; Melchior Seymour Teulon of Greenock, John Hall Teulon his son, and Captain James Teulon, are names on record. — Smiles’ Huguenots.

P. 75. Rev. Theophilus Abauzit was probably descended from a younger brother of the talented Firmin Abauzit, a refugee in Geneva (born at Usez, in Languedoc, 11th Nov. 1679, died 20th March 1767). That brother died in London in 1717. Their father died in 1681. By the Edict of 12th July 1685 the children of a deceased Protestant father were to be removed from the charge of the widowed mother, and an Edict of January 1586 provided as to all children of Protestants, that at the age of five they were to be transferred to Romish tutelage. Madame Abauzit (whose maiden name was Ann De Ville) sent her children to Orange, thence to a village near Die. The elder brother was forcibly brought back to Usez, entered by the Romanists in the books of their college in that place; and it was ordered that he should be boarded with a Romanist householder. His mother carried him off; the boy was hunted from place to place among the mountains of the Cevennes; he was nearly captured in one house, but the besiegers allowed an ass with paniers to pass out, and in one of the paniers Firmin was hidden. At last he was safely lodged in Geneva, two years before his mother. As to the younger son, we are told that “he experienced the same persecutions.” Madame Abauzit suffered a rigorous imprisonment in the castle of Sommieres. She fell into a slow fever; and the Bishop of Usez sternly refused the physician’s request for her release from her dungeon. “Here she would have ended her life (says a biographer), if a happy incident had not called the commander of the fort to Paris. His brother, who took his place, was as intelligent and humane as the other was ignorant and brutal, he was penetrated with the signal merit of his prisoner, and warmly interested himself in her fortune. You wish her to die here (so he told the bishop in a letter), but I will not he her executioner. He wrote to the court, and obtained her enlargement until her health should be re-established. Madame Abauzit, after surmounting a thousand perils, arrived at Geneva, two years after her son.” She had a nephew, M. de Ville, whose only child was married to Monsieur de Lisle Roy of St Quintin. William III. made handsome offers to Firmin Abauzit, through Michael le Vassor, for his settlement in England; but he preferred Geneva. — (See Abauzif’s Works, translated by Harwood, London, 1774.)

Here I may quote a sentence regarding the Prophecies of Holy Scripture, contained in a letter from F. Abauzit to William Burnet, (Governor of New York: “I have often been witness to the happy effects they have produced in the minds of sensible persons who, though once surrounded with all the felicities of their native soil, have in the indigence of a foreign refuge preserved great cheerfulness of soul. They acknowledged that they lived on the prophecies, so powerfully were they supported by the soothing hope of a speedy re-establishment.” In his Discourse on the Apocalypse, he says: “The English find here the revolutions of Great Britain; the Lutherans, the troubles of Germany; and the French refugees, what happened to them in France . . . . There is only the [Roman] Catholic Church which hath circumscribed it within the limits of the first three centuries, during which it maintains that everything was accomplished, as if it were afraid lest, descending lower, it should see Antichrist in the person of its Metropolitan.”

P. 86. . — Mr Thomas Lefroy, M.A., Q.C., in his memoir of his father, Chief Justice Lefroy, gives the following memorandum from an old paper which was written in 1611, and which is preserved in Ewshott House, Hampshire: “Antoine Lefroy came from Flanders about the year 1569, in the time of the Duke of Alva’s persecution. He brought with him a considerable sum of money and jewels; but his estate shared the same fate with that of many other refugees who left France on account of their religion, being confiscated, and all the family writings, papers, &c., destroyed. His wife was a Flanderine lady of the first quality, and very rich, of the family of the Du Hoorns. He had two sons, Isaiah, born in Flanders,