Page:Protestant Exiles from France Agnew vol 2.djvu/42

 

“By the King and Queen. A Declaration for the encouraging of French Protestants to transport themselves into this kingdom.

“Whereas it hath pleased Almighty God to deliver our Realm of England and the subjects thereof, from the persecution lately threatening them for their religion, and from the oppression and destruction which the subversion of their laws and the arbitrary exercise of power and dominion over them had very near introduced, — finding in our subjects a true and just sense hereof and of the miseries and oppressions the French Protestants lie under, — for their relief and to encourage them that shall be willing to transport themselves, their families, and estates, into this our kingdom, we do hereby, That all French Protestants that shall seek their refuge in, and transport themselves into, this our kingdom, shall not only have our royal protection for themselves, families, and estates within this our realm, but we will also do our endeavour in all reasonable ways and means so to support, aid, and assist them in their several and respective trades and ways of livelihood as that their living and being in this realm may be comfortable and easy to them.”

The biographies, of which this work is composed, show what a true friend of the refugees King William was. In his beneficence Queen Mary completely and practically sympathized; and her wisdom and thoughtfulness in this and all the other cares of her exalted station will appear all the more admirable when we observe, that at her death in 1694 she had not completed the thirty-third year of her life. The king’s admiration and employment of the French refugees explain a very large portion of the meaning of Defoe’s allusions in the following lines from “The True-born Englishman.”

In this reign an end was put to the High Church endeavour to interdict the descendants of French Protestant refugees from being baptized and married by French pasteurs in their own churches. The Laudean theory was to compel them to be English. The rational and triumphant theory was to allow time to do its slow but certain work. The controversy as to marriages was now settled by a compromise, by which the members of French churches might be married in their own churches by their own pasteurs, provided that the banns had been published in their parish church. On 27th June 1695, such a marriage was registered in the Canterbury French Church, as their first marriage preceded by banns published in the parish church according to Act of Parliament.

On the 16th April 1696, a public Thanksgiving to Almighty God [“for discovering and disappointing a horrid and barbarous conspiracy of Papists and other traitorous persons to assassinate and murder His most gracious Majesty’s royal person, and for delivering this kingdom from an invasion intended by the French”] was observed.