Page:Protestant Exiles from France Agnew vol 2.djvu/377

 D.D., Dean of Lichfield, and sister of the Right Hon. Joseph Addison. He died 3rd September 1713, and was buried in Westminster Abbey; Mrs. Sartre remarried with Daniel Combes, Esq. (Col. Chester’s MSS.)

10. was in 1704 a pasteur of the City of London French Church; Pierre Barbauld was pasteur of La Nouvelle Patente in Spitalfields in 1709, and of La Patente in Soho in 1720. Whether either of these was the French refugee who, “when he was a boy, was carried on board a ship inclosed in a cask and conveyed to England,” I am not informed. The boy refugee was surnamed Barbauld, and he lived to be the father of the Rev. Theophilus Lewis Barbauld, whom George II. presented on 22nd June 1744 to the rectory of St. Vedast in London; the rector’s son was the Rev. Rochemont Barbauld, a dissenter, whose wife, Anna Laetitia Aikin, made his own surname celebrated: he left no descendants. Mrs Barbauld, being an English authoress, should not have a place in this work, but a few of her sentences illustrative of its subject must be quoted. As to French Protestant preaching at Geneva, she writes in 1785 —

“As soon as the text is named, the minister puts on his hat, in which he is followed by all the congregation, except those whose hats and heads have never any connection (for you well know that to put his hat upon his head is the last use a well-dressed Frenchman would think of putting it to). At proper periods of the discourse the minister stops short, and turns his back upon you, in order to blow his nose, which is a signal for all the congregation to do the same; and a glorious concert it is, for the weather is already severe, and people have got colds. I am told, too, that he takes this time to refresh his memory by peeping at his sermon, which lies behind him in the pulpit.”

With regard to the Protestant congregation at Marseilles:

“The minister is an agreeable and literary man; his wife has been six years in England, and speaks English well. Her family fled there from persecution; for her grandfather (who was a minister), as he came out from a church where he was officiating, was seized by the soldiers. His son, who had fled along with the crowd, and gained an eminence at some distance, seeing they had laid hold on his father, came and offered himself in his stead, and in his stead was sent to the galleys, where he continued seven years. L’Honnête Criminel is founded on this fact.”

[L’Honnête Criminel was written by Fenouillot de Falbaire. The fact on which it is founded, is the filial devotion of Jean Fabre (born at Nismes 1729). Although the self-devoted substitute of his father, he was awarded no mild sentence, but was sent to the galleys for life on March 11, 1756. M. de Mirepoix, minister of marine, obtained his release on May 22, 1762, after six years’ servitude. See Freville’s Beaux Exemples, Paris, 1817.]

11. Rev. was descended from a very good family in the Isle of Rhé, near La Rochelle. He came over to England in 1685 a refugee from the persecution, and was in 1693 appointed minister of the Eglise de Hungerford, in Hungerford Market, London, and afterwards officiated in the French Churches of Berwick Street, Soho, and St Martin Orgars. The Marchioness of Halifax selected him at a later date for the post of tutor to her grandson, the Hon. Philip Dormer Stanhope, afterwards Earl of Chesterfield, who was born on 22nd September 1694; and the branches in which he grounded the future statesman were history, philosophy, and the languages. His pupil afterwards corresponded with him, and six of his letters have been printed, the last, from Paris, concludes with practical proof that he had learnt the French language tolerably well —

“Je ne vous dirai pas mes sentimens des François, parceque je suis fort souvent pris pour un; et plus d’un Francois m’a fait le plus grand compliment qu’ils croyent pouvoir faire a personne qui est, Monsieur, vous êtes tout comme nous. Je vous dirai seulement que je suis insolent; que je parle beaucoup — bien haut et d’un ton de maitre; que je chante et que je danse en marchant; et enfin que je fais une depense furieuse en poudre, plumets, gands blancs, &c.”

This nobleman, who was the patron of Bishop Chenevix, employed another minister of Berwick Street French Church, Samuel Coderc, to be his son’s tutor, Michael Maittaire being his Latin master. Rev. Samuel Coderc married Francis Mary, daughter of Colonel Savary, on 21st December 1729, in the Castle Street French Church, to which the Berwick Street congregation had been united.

12. Rev. ministered to a conformist congregation in Canterbury from 1710 to 1716 in opposition to the recognised refugee congregation in the Undercroft of the Cathedral. There is a minute-book with a few registrations of baptisms solemnised in the “Malthouse Chapel, Canterbury.” Under date 4th