CHAPTER XIV.

HUGUENOT SETTLEMENTS IN ENGLAND-MEN OF

INDUSTRY.

We now come to the immigration and settlement in England of Huguenot merchants, manufacturers, and artisans, which exercised a still greater influence on English industry than the immigration of French literati and divines did upon English literature.

It is computed that about 100,000 French manufacturers and workmen fled into England in consequence of the Revocation, besides those who took refuge in Switzerland, Germany, and Holland. When the Huguenot employers shut up their works in France, their men usually prepared to follow them. They converted what they could into money, whatever the loss might be, and made for the coast, accompanied by their families. The paper-makers of Angoumois left their mills; the silk-makers of Touraine left their looms, and the tanners their pits; the vine-dressers and farmers of Saintonge, Poitou, and La Rochelle, left their vineyards, their farms, and their gardens, and looked out into the wide world, seawards, for a new home and a refuge, where they might work and worship in peace.

The principal emigration into England was from

Normandy and Brittany. Upwards of 10,000 of the industrial class left Rouen; and several thousand persons, principally engaged in the maritime trade, set out from Caen, leaving that city to solitude and poverty. The whole Protestant population of Coutances emigrated, and the fine linen manufactures of the place were at once extinguished. There was a similar flight of masters and men from Elboeuf, Alençon, Caudebec, Havre, and other northern towns. The makers of noyal and white linen cloths, for which a ready market had been obtained abroad, left Nantes, Rennes, and Morlaix in Brittany, and Le Mans and Laval in Maine, and went over to England to carry on their manufactures there. The provinces further north also contributed largely to swell the stream of emigration into England: the cloth-makers departed from Amiens, Abbeville, and Doullens; the gauze-makers and lacemakers from Lille and Valenciennes; and artizans of all kinds from the various towns and cities of the interior.

Notwithstanding the precautions taken by the French government, and the penalty of death, or the galleys for life, to which those were subject who were taken in the act of flight, the emigration could not be stopped. The fugitives were helped on their way by their fellowProtestants, and often by the Roman Catholics themselves, who pitied their sad fate. The fugitives lay concealed in barns and farmyards by day, and travelled

*FLOQUET, the accredited historian of Normandy (Histoire du Parlement de Normandie), calculates that not less than 184,000 Protestants took

advantage of the vicinity of the sea, and of their connection with England and Holland, to abandon their country.

by night towards the coast. There the maritime population, many of whom were Protestants like themselves, actively connived at their escape. France presented too wide a reach of sea-frontier, extending from Bayonne to Calais, to be effectively watched by any guard; and not only the French, but the English and Dutch merchant-ships, which hovered about the coast waiting for the agreed signal to put in and take on board their freight of fugitives, had usually little difficulty in carrying them off in safety.

Of those fugitives who succeeded in making good their escape, the richest took refuge in Holland; while the bulk of those who settled in England were persons of comparatively small means. Yet a considerable sum of ready money must have been brought by the refugees, as we find the French ambassador writing to Louis XIV. in 1687, that as much as 960,000 louis d'ors had already been sent to the Mint for conversion into English money. This was, however, the property of a comparatively small number of the more wealthy families, for the greater proportion of those who landed in England were altogether destitute.

*

Steps were immediately taken for the relief of the poorer immigrants. Collections were made in the churches; public subscriptions were raised; and Parlia

Many of the refugees were eminent merchants and manufacturers, and did undoubtedly bring along with them much money and effects. I have seen a computation, at the lowest supposition, of only 50,000 of those people

coming to Great Britain, and that, one with another, they brought £60 each in money or effects, whereby they added three millions sterling to the wealth of Britain. - MACPHERSON— Annals of Commerce, ii. 617.

ment voted considerable sums from the public purse. Thus a fund of nearly £200,000 was collected, and invested for the benefit of the refugees, the annual interest, about £15,000, being intrusted to a committee for distribution among the most necessitous; while about £2000 a-year was applied towards the support of the poor French ministers and their respective churches. The pressure on the relief fund was of course the greatest in those years immediately following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, before the destitute foreigners had been able to maintain themselves by their respective callings. There was also a large number of destitute landed gentry, professional men, and pastors, to whom the earning of a livelihood was even more difficult; and these also had to be relieved out of the fund.

From the first report of the French Relief Committee, dated December 1687—that is, only fourteen months after the Revocation-it appears that 15,500 refugees had been relieved in the course of the year. "Of these," says Weiss," 13,050 were settled in London, and 2000 in the different seaport towns where they had disembarked. Amongst them the committee distinguishes 140 persons of quality with their families; 143 ministers; 144 lawyers, physicians, traders, and burghers. It designates the others under the general denomination of artizans and workmen. The persons of quality received weekly assistance in money throughout the whole of that year. Their sons were placed in the best commercial houses. About 150 of them entered

the army, and were provided, at the cost of the committee, with a complete outfit. The ministers obtained for themselves and their families pensions which were regularly paid. Their sons found employment in the houses of rich merchants or of persons of quality. Weekly assistance was granted to the sick, and to those whose great age prevented them earning their own living by labour. The greater part of the artizans and workmen were employed in the English manufactories. The committee supplied them with the necessary implements and tools, and provided, at the same time, for all their other wants. Six hundred of them, for whom it could not find employment in England, were sent at its cost to America. Fifteen French churches were erected out of the proceeds of the national subscription -three in London, and twelve in the various counties where the greater number of the refugees had settled."*

The help thus generously given to the distressed refugees by the nation was very shortly rendered in a great measure unnecessary by the vigorous efforts which they made to help themselves. They sought about in

* WEISS - History of the French Protestant Refugees, p. 224.

+ The emigration from France, however, did not come to an end until about the middle of the eighteenth century. Every revival of religious persecution there, was followed by a fresh influx of fugitives into England. In 1718, the Rev. J. A. Dubourdieu, one of the ministers of the Savoy church, published An Appeal to the English Nation, in vindication of the body of

the French Protestants against the calumnies of one Mallard and his associates, as to the alleged misapplication of the national bounty. It appears that the number of poor foreign Protestants relieved out of the fund in that year was 5194. M. Dubourdieu says "There are some among the refugees who, having been over here twenty or thirty years, have by their industry and labour maintained themselves without being burthensome to