Page:Protestant Exiles from France Agnew vol 2.djvu/389

 William Anderson’s translation), Migault says of the refugees, “The fear of losing their children, if they remained in the country, was what decided the greater number of them to emigrate."” The children of Protestants in France were to be taken from their parents and shut up in monasteries and convents, to be brought up as Papists. In Household Words, vol. viii., No. 194, there is an admirable article on the French Protestants, and it has only one blot. Writers, if they are of liberal politics, when they narrate persecuting deeds done by Roman Catholics, think that they ought to insert a single comment, here and there, in order to propitiate Roman Catholic readers. Accordingly, the above writer fixes on the horror of parents at a daughter being carried off to a convent; and he says sneeringly, “A convent to the Huguenot’s excited prejudices implied a place of dissolute morals as well as of idolatrous doctrine.” Surely this writer is a bachelor, who thinks that parents should cheerfully give away their own children to Mother-Church or to any applicant, if the house to which it is proposed to transport them be a comfortable one.

In the London French Church registers, Olivier Migault is described as a native of Mauzé in Poitou. I should rather say, in the register of Leicester-fields French Church. There on the 26th August 1708, he married Jeanne Huart, a native of Nerac in Guienne. And there his children were baptized, Gabriel, born 1st August 1709; Jeanne Elizabeth, born 27th January 1711; Francois, born 9th April 1712; Susanne Jeanne, born 19th November 1713; and twins, named Olivier and Jean, born 22nd April 1715. From the registrations of the eldest son and daughter, it appears that Olivier’s brother, Gabriel Migault (born 22nd June 1669), was in London in 1709, and a Madame Jeanne Elizabeth Migault in 1711.  

Rev. Henri Chatelain was born in Paris, 22nd February 1684. He was the great-grandson of Simon Chatelain (born 1590), the famous Protestant manufacturer of gold and silver lace. This lace was a much-prized article. It procured for the steadfast Huguenot the toleration of his religion, in which he was zealous from the fifteenth year of his age to the eighty-fifth, which proved to be his last. In 1675 he died, leaving more than eighty descendants, who all paid fines for openly attending his funeral. Henri’s grandfather was Zacharie Chatelain (born 1622), and was married to Rebecca Bonnel. On old Simon’s death, he was harassed with a view to a forced apostasy; but at length, in 1685, he fled to Holland in disguise. For this offence he was hanged in effigy, and his house at Villers-le-Bel was razed to its foundation. He died at Amsterdam in 1699, having had five daughters and an only son. This son, the second Zacharie Chatelain, was married to Catherine Bonnel, and had an infant family before he left France. He was thrown into the Bastile in 1686, and on being set at liberty, removed to Holland with his wife and children. There he introduced the gold and silver lace. His eldest child, Henri, studied for the ministry at Amsterdam and Leyden; and having removed to England in 1709, he was ordained by the Bishop of London on the 3rd October 1710. He was pasteur of the Church of St. Martin Orgars (St. Martin’s Lane) from 1711 to 1721, when he removed to the Hague, and in 1727 to Amsterdam, where he died on the 19th May 1743. His sermons were published in six volumes, with his portrait, bearing the motto, “Flexanimo sermone potens.” — (Haag.)  

Jean Deschamps, Sieur de Bourniquel, born 1667 at Bergerac in Perigord, became a refugee in Geneva in 1685. He removed into Germany about 1699, and from that date till 1729 was the French pasteur at Butzow in the Duchy of Mecklenburg. He died in the beginning of 1730 when about to remove to Berlin, in which city he had intended to settle, having received an appointment from the King of Prussia. His wife née Lucrece de Mafiée, was a refugee lady from Dauphiny whom he married in Geneva; she survived him till December 1739, leaving out of eight children, five survivors, Gabriel, Jacques (who succeeded his father at Berlin), Jean, Antoine, and Sophie.

Of these the third, Jean, born at Butzow, 27th May 1709, and educated at Geneva and Marbourg, and for many years a litterateur and courtier at Berlin, ultimately adopted England as his country. At Marbourg he had been a pupil of the famous Wolfius (Christian Wolff), and in 1736 he had obtained the notice of the Prince-Royal by his translation into French of Wolff’s Logic. On the accession of this Prince (Frederick the Great) to the throne in 1740, he appointed Deschamps tutor to the