Page:Protestant Exiles from France Agnew vol 1.djvu/282

  Lists in my vol. ii. So that a descendant of refugees is, perhaps, memorialized in old Tom Hood’s artistically facetious

 

Among the notes of one of Charles II.’s Crown Counsel was found the case of a French refugee, Jacques du Moulin, who was sentenced to death, and would have been executed if proof of his innocence had been withheld for a very few days. One of a gang of coiners, in the disguise of a footman out of place, called on Du Moulin, who was a family man and a dealer in Custom-house goods; and he was forthwith hired as a servant. This man purchased a key, by means of which he frequently opened Du Moulin’s drawers, took some of the gold, and replaced it with pieces of his own coinage. Whenever Du Moulin discovered counterfeit money in his repositories he took it to his customers; and remembering where he had laid each sum when paid to him, he insisted that he had received the rejected pieces from them. They had no alternative but to replace them with good money, but made loud and severe complaints, which spread so widely that Du Moulin raised an action against a customer for defamation. The defendant retorting by a criminal information, Du Moulin was apprehended. The footman, knowing that the officers would make a search, introduced some of his coins and coining apparatus into his master’s drawers, where they were seized, and further search was deemed unnecessary. Upon this evidence Du Moulin was convicted; but while he was in the condemned cell the wife of one of the coiners, being at the point of death, betrayed the gang, one of whom thereupon became king’s evidence, and saved Du Moulin’s life and character. (Gentleman’s Magazine, vol. xxiv., p. 404.)  

In my memoir of the family of Du Quesne (now Du Cane), I called attention to the fact that at one time there had been a confusion in its attempted pedigree through the introduction into it of individuals with the same surname but of different parentage. A foreign correspondent of Sir Edmund Du Cane furnished him with information regarding a second Pierre Du Quesne and his family, of which the following is a summary:—  

In the Visitation of London for 1664, there is the pedigree of Daniel Duthais, gentilhomme, of St. Martin’s in the Isle of Rhé; his wife was Anne Baudin of Laflote in the same isle. They had two sons, Daniel and David. The latter is merely named. Daniel Duthais of St. Olave’s, Southwark, was twice married, first to Katherine, daughter of Philip du Jardin; secondly to Judith, daughter of Richard Bezar of St. Giles, Cripplegate. By the second wife he had a daughter, Judith. By