Page:Protestant Exiles from France Agnew vol 2.djvu/349

 of his wife and two sons, Israel Antoine, and Noel Daniel; they took up their abode in Amsterdam. On 30th April 1688 the good man of the house summoned to his bedchamber Henry Rams, Notary Public, and his visitor describes him as being “sick a-bed but of sound mind and understanding.” The notary at his dictation wrote a disposition of his estate, to be shared between his two sons, “after it shall have pleased God to retire him out of this world for to introduce him into the life eternal which he hopes to enjoy with the blessed, through the only merit of Jesus Christ his Saviour and redeemer.” He bequeathed 1000 florins to “Jesus Christ’s poor persecuted in France for the truth of His Gospel, and to whom God hath given grace to come to glorify Him in these Provinces.” Monsieur Aufrère’s illness did not prove fatal, and on 1st July 1690 he made a will, substantially confirming the above settlement, but amending and adding to it. The preamble is as follows:—

“I, Anthony Aufrère, considering the certainty of death, and the uncertainty of the time and moment of its coming, which cannot be prevented and expected too soon by every person who will lessen the surprisal and the fear of its approaches and its seizing, and put himself better by that means in a condition to think on the eternal;alvation prepared for all the faithful elected for whom it was acquired and merited by the sufferings and death of Jesus Christ our divine Saviour and Redeemer to which I do aspire by the grace of my God, though I have wholly rendered myself unworthy thereof by the number and enormity of my sins, hoping through the grace and merciful bounty of that great God that he will grant me the pardon thereof according to my earnest prayers and supplications, very often re-iterated and accompanied with a sincere and serious repentance for having so much, so often, and so unworthily offended his holy and divine Majesty. Finding myself in that good disposition, and besides sound of body and mind, having escaped from a fit of sickness which it pleased Gpd to send me two years and two months since, which was short but nevertheless dangerous,” &c.

One alteration in the will is to reduce the legacy to poor refugees to 500 florins. In neither document does he make any allusion to his wife, so that we conjecture that she died before 1688. Monsieur Aufrcre lived to emigrate with his eldest son to London in 1700. To this son we return.

Israel Anthony Aufrère was born in 1677. Though only eighteen years of age when he fled from France he was not a mere follower in the train of his father, but deliberately defended his faith against the. Romanists and refused to recant. He studied for the ministry in Holland, and was ordained there. On May 2nd, 1700, he married Sarah Amsincq, “one of the daughters of a gentleman belonging to a family of great distinction both at the Hague and at Hamburgh, where they filled the highest posts.” This marriage connected the Aufrère family with the distinguished Dutch families of Boreel and Fagel. It is more germane to this volume to observe that it connected them with the glorious Huguenot family of Basnage. In later years we find the Rev. Mr. Aufrère obligingly managing the English part of the property of Marie Basnage de Beauval, alias Amsineq (1752), and Susanna Basnage, alias Dumoulin.

This marriage probably decided in the affirmative the question as to removing into England. Through this union of hearts and hands our king, William of Orange, may have been informed of the young divine’s talents and excellence. There was also an intimacy between the Aufrères and the Robethons, James Robethon (resident in Amsterdam in 1688), having been one of the advisers named by old Mr. Aufrère for his sons’ interests. Among the naturalisations at Westminster, and near the end of List XXIV (dated 11th March 1700), we have the names of Anthony Aufrère and Israel Anthony Aufrère (clerk).

The date of the father’s death is not known. The career of the son was highly influential. He was enrolled as an M.A. of Cambridge. As to his talents and acquirements, we are informed that he was a proficient in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew — also in German, which he spoke with ease. He understood English, but conversing chiefly with French refugees, he never attained to any tolerable pronunciation of the language of his adopted country. As to French, his native language, his composition was very pure and elegant, and in preaching he was sometimes eloquent. A manuscript memoir says that he was a preacher at the Savoy French Church. He does not appear in any of Mr. Burn’s lists until 1727, when he was promoted to be one of the ministers of the French Chapel Royal, St James’s.

In February 1720 Mr. Aufrère was appointed one of the Secretaries of the General Assembly of the French Churches of London, among whom he was a leading minister. In 1736, on occasion of the Prince of Wales’s marriage, the Duke of Newcastle introduced at Court Mr. Aufrère and other ministers of the French Protestant refugees, to present four congratulatory addresses to the King, the Queen,