Page:Protestant Exiles from France Agnew vol 2.djvu/29

 In the third head of his discourse Dr. Hickes gave the following summary of their sufferings:—

“They are deprived of the ancient liberties which were granted unto them by former Princes, the father and grandfather of this present king. Many of their Universities are dissolved (Sedan, the college of Rochefoucauld and that of Chatillon); and more than half their temples are razed, contrary to the faith of oaths and edicts, and against the common right of prescription of three and four score years. They are not allowed to erect Free Schools for the education of their own children, nor hospitals for the maintenance of their own poor, nor can they have the benefit of any already erected, without turning to the Popish religion. The Lords of Manors among them, who formerly had right to keep ministers and set up the Reformed Worship in their own houses, and call their neighbours and tenants into it by the sound of a bell, are now in the most arbitrary manner deprived of that privilege. And in the cities where they are most numerous, Colleges of Jesuits or Houses of Mission for propagating the faith are erected, into which undutiful children or servants, under a pretence of turning Catholics, may retreat when they please. And in the greatest of those cities, where perhaps ten schoolmasters could hardly teach all their children, the late laws allow them but one, and their unjust magistrates commonly none.

“They are forbidden to set up the Fleurs de Luces in their churches, because they must not bear any marks of royal favour; and as a further token of royal displeasure and contempt, their chief seats and most costly pews are ordered to be pulled down.

“Formerly Papists were allowed solemnly to renounce their religion in the Protestant Temples (as at Charenton, La Rochelle, Montpellier, Nismes); and scarce a Lord’s Day passed in the places where they were numerous, but some converts might be seen so to renounce. But now all Papists are forbidden to turn Protestants, under pain of death, or the penalty called l’amende honorable, in which the recanting person, only in his shirt, with a torch in his hand, and a rope about his neck, and the hangman standing behind him, begs pardon of God and man for having renounced the Catholic (as they miscall the Romish) religion, and is afterwards punished with banishment, if not with confiscation of goods.

“On the contrary, Protestants have all imaginable encouragement to turn Papists — pensions, honours, offices, and preferments; and to secure them after they have once declared, the aforementioned severity (as I have been informed) is the punishment of a relapse.

“The magistrates of the place have authority to go with the priest and what other company they please, to visit sick Protestants and turn their friends and attendants out of the room, and discourse with them about their religion. And if either hopes of reward, or a delirious condition, or impatience, or any other cause, make them speak anything in favour of the Romish religion, then they presently take witness that they turned Papists; after which, if the sick persons die, they are to be buried as Papists, and if they left children behind them, they also are to be bred Papists. But if they recover, they are obnoxious to the law against a relapse.

“Their ministers cannot, without great danger and difficulty, visit Protestants who lie sick in Popish houses; but every pitiful Sacrificulus, every ignorant busy priest, hath authority to go into Protestant houses and visit the sick as often as they please. And when their women are in travail, like the Hebrew women in the time of hardened Pharaoh, they must have Popish Egyptian midwives, which is a far greater terror to many of them than the pains of childbed itself.

“Formerly they were capable of the magistracy in cities and boroughs, where they lived; but now they are incapacitated Formerly they were to sit in their Courts of Justice as the Chambers of the Edict (so called from the Edict of Nantes by which they were erected in favour of Protestants) and the Parti-Chambers of the Provinces (where half the judges are Protestants and half Papists), but now they are deprived of that privilege. So that for want of judges of their own religion they have little or no benefit of the law when a Catholic is their antagonist. But when both parties are Protestants, if one change (or promise to change) his religion, he is usually sure to gain the cause.

“And as they are banished from the Bench so are they banished from the Bar and Faculties, for no Protestant can be counsellor, attorney, notary, surgeon, apothecary, midwife, &c. In one word, they are made utterly incapable of all employments civil or military, and by that means are deprived of all honours and better conveniences of life, of all the comfortable means of subsistence and well-being which the Papists enjoy in their offices, at court and in the country, in peace and in war, and in the armies both by sea and land.

"This is their miserable condition; and (what is yet worse) their children have liberty at seven years of age to choose their own religion. And if, to prevent the mischief that may follow upon this, they send their children away, they must forfeit a year’s revenue of their estates if they do not produce them within a year, but if they do not produce them within two years, then they must forfeit the whole. In case they have no visible estates, then they are subject to arbitrary valuations, and to arbitrary fines imposed thereupon.

“If their children upon this liberty happen to change their religion (as many will do rather than endure wholesome discipline), their parents are bound to maintain them as they do their other children, or else to allow them a pension for their maintenance. And their daughters so changing may leave their parents and go into nunneries when they please. 