Page:Protestant Exiles from France Agnew (1st ed. vol 3).djvu/27

 new buildings which is so burdonous to the subject that His Majesty hath not any work to perform for the good of his commons (especially in cities and towns) than by the taking of the benefit of the law upon them, a thing which is done against his own subjects by common informers. But their daily flocking hither without such remedy is like to grow scarce tolerable.”

In 1606 “double custom” was imposed upon baize as upon cloth exported. Lord Dorset seems to have been inclined to discourage further immigration, on the plea that foreign persecutions had ceased. That noble Lord died in 160S, and Salisbury, who succeeded him as Lord High Treasurer, died in 1612. The complaints made against refugees in 1615 and 1621 were each responded to by the taking of a census, one in 1618 and another in 1621. The lists collected in 1618 are printed in the appendix to the Camden Society volume, and the lists of 1621 in the body of the volume, pp. i to 26. These lists rather injured the case of the complainants by revealing that they had exaggerated the number of foreigners and overstated the proportion between foreign and native tradesmen. On the 30th July 1621 a Board of Royal Commissioners was appointed to consider the laws affecting aliens, and to propound regulations for the liberty of their wholesale merchants and for enforcing the restrictions upon retailers. On 7th September 1622 (says Mr Cooper) “the Commissioners ordered that, as the retailing of English goods by strangers was hurtful to home trade, all strangers selling to strangers English goods should pay half the duty on such commodities as would be paid for custom on export, &c., &:c. But little further took place. Any restrictions upon the refugees were unpopular with the mass of the people, however desirable they might appear to the chartered companies.” — (Introduction, page x.)   (extending from p. 12 to p. 21) is entitled The Connection of French Protestants with English Politics in the times of Charles I. and Cromwell. Charles, who ascended the British throne on March 24th 1625, was, as a jure Divino prelatist and potentate, rather unfriendly to Foreign Protestants. The ambition of his father and himself had led them to court princes of the Romanist creed, with a view to a matrimonial alliance; and, on the 1st. May after his accession, our King Charles by his marriage with Henrietta Maria became a brother-in-law of Louis XIII. As a man he was averse to befriend the Huguenots, while as an English King he could not deliberately change the national friendship for them; hence his procedure was fickle. He pleased them, however, in November 1626, by an official recognition of the existing immunities of the Foreign Protestants and their children, basing his order upon a sense of gratitude for the honourable reception and substantial bounties accorded to British subjects and their children beyond the seas.

(Page 13). In 1633 the elevation of Laud to the rank of Archbishop of Canterbury was the seed of serious division between Charles and the Huguenots. Laud was forward to declare the true brotherhood of the Church of Rome, and to change the official language of the English nation which had called the Protestant religion “the true religion.” He issued injunctions to French refugee churches requiring English natives to be removed to the English parish churches (the children of refugees being included by him among born Englishmen), and commanding that the English Liturgy (translated) should be used by the refugee churches, (the French translation, then existent, is described in my vol. i., p. 67). I have jirinted the remonstrance and petition of the Norwich congregations, and an extract from Laud’s pcremjitory reply, as given by Prynne, also Prynne’s reference to a book about those proceedings by the pastor, John Bulteel of Canterbury, entitled, “A Relation of the Troubles of the Three Forraigne Churches in Kent.”

(Page 15). The king having provoked a civil war, the English Parliament, enacted the abolition of Episcopacy, the measure to become law on the 5th November 1643. The Lords and Commons, with a view to the establishment of a British Church, summoned the Westminster Assembly of Divines which met in Henry VII.’s chapel on 1st July 1643 and held eleven hundred and sixty three meetings. The Rev. John de la March of Guernsey acted as spokesman for the French ministers and their people. On 22nd November the Parliament