Page:Protestant Exiles from France Agnew vol 1.djvu/211

 

Guillaume Chambrelan and Geneviève Vignon, his wife, and sons were refugees in England from the St. Bartholomew massacre. He is said to have been a younger son of Le Comte de Tanquerville (or Tankerville), in Normandy, a very ancient family, with a pedigree going back through a long track of centuries. That such was his descent was believed by Bishop Atterbury more than a century and a half after his arrival on our shores. The bishop said of the refugee’s direct lineal descendant in 1728 (as the Latin scholar may still read for himself on one of the finest monuments in Westminster Abbey), “He was a man so elegant and brilliant — of a spirit so brave and lofty — of a disposition so prone to munificence, and a nature so ingenuous and liberal — that it had easily been supposed that his race had sprung from some noble founder, although it were not known that he was a descendant of an illustrious family, now 400 years old, the ancient Comtes de Tankerville.” The Chambrelan refugee was also connected with the Huguenot Norman families of De Laune and Papillon. Guillaume De Laune, a member of the family of Belmenil, I have memorialized in Chapter V., he was a refugee clergyman and physician; and his descendants will be found at the beginning of my Chapter XIII. In the last-named chapter I shall go into the particulars of the lives of the Chamberlans — those whose memory has been preserved. Here I can give only some fragmentary information. The refugee was so anxious to preserve the name of Pierre in his family, that he had two sons of that name, who grew up and married. The senior Pierre left a daughter, wife of Mr. Cargill, of Aberdeenshire. The other, sometimes called Pierre Chambrelan, junior, married Sara, daughter of the above-named Guillaume De Laune. I infer from the French registers, that besides the two Pierres, the refugee couple had two sons, Abraham, husband of Estre Papillon, and David, husband of Anne Papillon. Abraham is described as a merchant of London, alive in 1633, who had married “Hester, daughter of Thomas Papillon, of France.” His second son, Thomas, also a merchant of London, became Sir Thomas Chamberlain, Knight; his wife was “Mary, daughter of Philip Burlimachi, of London, merchant.” The line of Pierre Chambrelan, junior, can be traced further, thus:—

&#42;&#8270;* The following notice of a death, inserted in the Historical Register, seems to apply to a brother or an uncle of the last-named Dr. Chamberlen:— “1723, October 26. Dy’d John Chamberlen, Esq., Secretary to the Governors of the Bounty of Queen Anne, and Member of the Society for propagating the Gospel in Foreign Parts.”

 

The surname of Papillon is of great antiquity in France, in England under the Norman dynasty, and again in France at the era of the Protestant Reformation. In the London Lists of Strangers in 1618, under the heading Broad Street, there is this entry:— “David Papillon, born in the city of Paris in France, free denizen in London 30 years.” His great-grandfather was Antoine Papillon (died 1525), an influential Huguenot, a correspondent of Erasmus, and a protege of Marguerite de Valois, sister of Francis I., in whose Court he held an appointment. David’s grandfather was also a staunch Protestant, and one of the victims of the St Bartholomew