Page:Protestant Exiles from France Agnew vol 1.djvu/121

 of the Duke of Guise, but which now raised a cry in favour of Charles, Cardinal of Bourbon, the next heir after the Royal Navarre heretic. On 7th July 1585, Henri III. made a treaty with the League, in which he bound himself to extirpate the Reformed Religion, and which resulted in a declaration of war against the Huguenots. And this civil war was desolating France in 1586.

In 1586 King James gave his royal licence to French Protestants and their ministers to live in Scotland; and the General Assembly of the Scottish Church of that year instructed Andrew Melville to write a letter in their name, assuring the refugees that every effort would be made to render their situation agreeable. One of the first who came over was Joachim Du Moulin, Pasteur of Orleans. The Town Council of Edinburgh voted stipends to the ministers of the refugees (11th May 1586), and allowed them to meet for public worship in the common hall of the College. A general collection was made throughout the parish churches in 1587. Dr. Lorimer gives an interesting extract, from the Minute Book of the General Kirk-Session of Glasgow, May 23, 1588, “the which day the session ordains Mr. Patrick Sharp, Principal of the College of Glasgow, and Mr. John Cowper, one of the ministers there, to go to the [Town] Council on Saturday next, and to propound to them the necessities of the poor brethren of France banished to England for religion’s cause, and to crave of them their support to the said poor brethren.” The Presbytery of Haddington took a special interest in Monsieur Du Moulin himself, on October 18, 1589, when they had before them “the warrant from the Synodal for the ingadering of the support to Mr. Mwling banest out of France.”

I compiled the above paragraph for my previous edition, and out of reverence to history and historians I do not alter it. But according to my information, it was about a hundred years afterwards that a French refugee congregation assembled in the Edinburgh College Hall; and as to the Town Council Minute, its tone was as cordial as could be desired, but no definite grants were made. The rubric describes it as being “Anent the fraynche kirk to cum to yis bur$h.$” I have the Minute Book open before me, but as the minute has been printed, I take it for my readers’ use from the printed copy, and give them a version of it in modern spelling in a parallel column:—