Page:Protestant Exiles from France Agnew (1st ed. vol 3).djvu/87



Of the Directors in the ahove list the last elected was Charles Magniac, Esq., of Colworth House, in Bedfordshire, who was chosen in 1867, and who since 1868 has been M.P. for St. Ives, the ancient capital of Cornwall. His father, the late Hollingwortii Magniac, Esq., was a director from 5th August, 1843, till his death. The ancestors of this family were French Protestants. The family is still represented at Magnac-Laval, the cradle of the English stock, a town in the ancient province of Limousin and department of Haute-Vienne.

The List of Directors has, since my previous publication, received the following additions;

The surname of Mercier often occurs in memoirs. Jean Le Mercier, known to the learned as Joannes Mercerus, was a famous Hebrew scholar and critic; though a layman of good family, born at Usez in Languedoc. He married one of the Morell family, a native of Embrun, and died in the prime of life in the year 1570, leaving a worthy son Josias Le Mercier, whom Colomies honours as the father-in-law of Claudius Salmasius; (see Gallia Orientalis by Colomies). In 1691 Martha, daughter of René Bertheau, D.D., and sister of Rev. Charles Bertheau, was married in London to Lieutenant Claude Mercier, and left a son. There were Huguenot refugees of the name in Prussia, and one of the family removed to England — viz., Philip Mercier, born at Berlin in 1689, a painter praised by Horace Walpole, his departments of the art being portraits, and interiors of houses. After acquiring a considerable reputation in Germany, he accepted an invitation from Frederick Prince of Wales, and continued to reside in England till his death on i8th July, 1760, (see Haag). Louis Mercier became pastor of the City of London French Church, in 1784; his death is recorded in the New Annual Register for 1811:— Died, “July 18, Rev. Lewis Mercier, pastor of a French Church in London, and a very eloquent preacher.”

Among the Chaplains there is the surname Abauzet. Mr Burn spells it Abauzit, which I believe to be correct. Enquirers after Huguenot surnames should read the lists in Burn’s history; there is no index to those lists, and as to the French names in them I felt inclined to supply the omission by compiling an alphabetical table of them for my readers. Whether such a resolution would have been strictly legal I am not sure; at all events, I have fallen from it, and content myself with quoting a favourable notice published in 1S54, in the Edinburgh Review, vol. 99, page 455:— “The refugees who settled in England waited long for a history of their fortunes, but they at length found a chronicler in Mr Southerden Burn, who, having been appointed in 1843, secretary to the commission for collecting the non-parochial registers of baptisms, marriages, and burials, undertook the work of extricating from the papers committed to his hands, all the profitable matter they could yield. He has thence drawn an authentic sketch of the French, Walloon, Dutch, and other foreign Protestant congregations harboured in England since the reign of Henry VIII., in the form of a catalogue raisonné of those curious archives, full of particulars, dates, family names, and quotations; being rather well-arranged materials of a book than the book itself.”


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