Page:Protestant Exiles from France Agnew vol 2.djvu/260

 

De Rocheblave was born in France on the 6th December 1655 [1665?]. At the date of the Revocation he was a student of theology at Schaffhouse, and there he was admitted to the ministry at the age of twenty-one. France being closed against him, he took refuge in England, and arrived at Greenwich, where the Marchioness of Ruvigny made him her domestic chaplain. In 1692 he was one of the ministers of the French Church of Le Quarré, Little Dean Street, Westminster. He thereafter went to Ireland, having received a parochial benefice. This he resigned in a few years, and in 1703 we find his name on the list of ministers of the French Church of Lucy Lane, Dublin. When he was solicited to transfer his services to St. Mary’s, a conformist French congregation patronised by the Archbishop of Dublin, he promised his attached Huguenot people that he would never leave them. He died, after a brief illness, in the prime of life, at Dublin, on the 14th September 1709 (3d Sept., old style). His sermon on the last Sabbath of his ministry, was on Acts xx. 32, being the Apostle Paul’s adieux to the elders of Ephesus; he had not time to finish the sermon, and announced that he would finish it on the following Thursday. This was a displacement of his weekly lecture on the Catechism. Some of his congregation suspected that he meditated a translation to another church, which being reported to him, he was much amused. On the Thursday he kept his promise, being apparently in perfect health; he preached with great energy, and this strengthened the conjecture that he was giving a hint of his having accepted another ministerial appointment. The next day he was seized with what proved to be his last illness, but it seemed to be very slight; he, however, from the first, said calmly and decidedly, “I am ready to go wherever Providence leads me. I have not preached the truth, as it is in Jesus, so long, without making a personal application of it. Whatever be the way God may be pleased to dispose of me, I have no other will but His.”

He appears to have been twice married. His first wife’s maiden name was Elizabeth La Caux. Their son, Pierre, was baptised in Le Quarré French Church on 23d December 1694, and was named after the pasteur, Pierre Desgalenière. His second wife, who survived as his widow, and whose Christian name was Isabeau, had the sad and pleasing duty of superintending the publication of the posthumous volume of his sermons, which she dedicated to the Earl of Galway in 1710. (See the Appendix to my vol. i., where her Dedicatory Epistle is printed.) The son, Pierre de Rocheblave, is probably the person intended in the following notice inserted in the Historical Register:— “1730, Sept. 12. — The Rev. Dr. Rocheblave was sworn in Preacher to the French Chapel Royal at St. James’s, by the Sub-Dean of His Majesty’s Chapel.”  

M. Sanxay, pasteur of St. Jean d’Angely, became a refugee in England in 1686, along with his wife and children. There is a copper-plate portrait of him, from a drawing executed when he was nineteen years of age. His father was a merchant at Taillebourg, in Saintonge, where he built a very fine house; and the refugee was the younger of two sons. He was sent for an academic course of humanities to the Jesuits’ College at Bourdeaux, where he won the prize for eloquence; and both the certificate and the handsome volume presented to him were preserved. The Jesuits having set their hearts upon his entering their Society, his father removed him from their college and sent him to London to learn English. He had not been in that city for quite two years, when both his father and his brother died. He returned to France, and went to the Protestant College of Saumur. There he finished his humanities under the famous Professor Tanneguy Le Fevre, and finally took his Degree of Master of Arts, the diploma of which is an heirloom. On the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, he was ordered by the authorities to shut up his church and to desist from preaching. On the apostolic plea that we ought to obey God rather than men, he continued to preach in his church at St. Jean d’Angely. He was arrested, and dragoons were quartered on his house; he himself was conveyed to the prison of La Rochelle, where he was confined for six months. He was released in consequence of an order of the Court, sent through the Duc de Boufflers, Governor of Guienne, requiring M. Sanxay to quit France within fifteen days, on the pain of being sent to the galleys. 