Kobe University Repository : Kernel
Title
Huguenots in English Sea Port Towns in the Late
Seventeenth Century(17 世紀後半のイングランド海港
都市におけるユグノー)
Author(s)
Gwynn, Robin
Citation
海港都市研究,3:15-30
Issue date
2008-03
Resource Type
Departmental Bulletin Paper / 紀要論文
Resource Version
publisher
DOI
URL
http://www.lib.kobe-u.ac.jp/handle_kernel/81000029
Create Date: 2017-06-16
15
Huguenots in English Sea Port Towns in the Late Seventeenth Century
Robin GWYNN
INTRODUCTION
I would like to express my thanks to Kobe University both for inviting me here, and for the
opportunity to tackle this particular subject. I have spent much of my academic life exploring
Huguenot settlement in Britain in the later Stuart period, but have never before been challenged to
focus on the specific aspect of Huguenots in relation to English sea port towns.
For the purposes of this paper, we can define the Huguenots as French‑speaking Protestants,
or more precisely Calvinists, who were fleeing from the France ruled by King Louis XIV from
1661 – when he took up the reins of personal rule – to his death in 1715. A few also came from the
Protestant Principality of Orange, which Louis invaded and overran.
Two dates stand out as of particular significance in causing Huguenot migration from France in
this period. The first was 1681, which saw the onset of the dragonnades, the deliberate billeting of
soldiers on Protestant households to force their conversion to Roman Catholicism. The second was
the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685.
The Edict of Nantes (1598) had granted privileges to the Huguenots in France by what was
described as a ‘perpetual and irrevocable’ edict. However, there was a steady erosion of the
privileges granted by the Edict across the first two decades of Louis’s personal rule. Protestant
Synods ceased. By the time the Edict was finally revoked in 1685, 570 Calvinist temples had
already been destroyed, and their total number reduced from 813 to 243. At the same time, the
Huguenots were subjected to petty annoyances. Their ministers were not allowed to wear clerical
garb outside their churches. Psalms could be sung only during worship, and then only softly and not
if a Roman Catholic procession including the sacrament was passing by outside. Their dead were
to be buried, in special cemeteries, only at 6 a.m. or 6 p.m. in summer and at 8 a.m. or 4 p.m. in
winter.
More serious were regulations such as those prohibiting Protestant ministers from marrying
a Catholic to a Protestant if anyone objected, and forbidding Huguenots to persuade servants or
employees to turn Protestant. In several cities it was ordained that aldermen must be Catholic;
Protestants could occupy only such positions as clock‑keeper or porter. Huguenots found it harder
to enter crafts, whether as apprentices or masters. A fund was founded to buy conversions.
By the 1670s, these actions had opened the eyes of the more far-sighted French Protestants to
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海港都市研究
what might happen. Their fears were realised when from 1679 onwards, oppressive interpretation
of the Edict of Nantes was superseded by more direct action. The rate of destruction of Protestant
temples increased, while the pretexts for their demolition grew weaker. The legal guarantees in the
Edict of Nantes were withdrawn. Greater control was exercised over the movement of Protestant
pastors, who were also subjected to increased taxation and severe legal penalties for minor offences.
Marriages between Catholics and Protestants were prohibited. In 1681 Louis even decreed that
Protestant ministers were not to visit dying members of their flocks, and that Protestant children
from the age of seven could be converted without their parents being able to interfere.
The Huguenots found themselves harassed by an ever-­increasing stream of edicts damaging
them economically, preventing their entry into various guilds and restricting them in the exercise of
their professions. They were excluded from all public office, from posts in the royal household or on
aristocratic estates. They were not to be admitted into the legal profession, not to practise medicine,
not to act as midwives, not to print or sell books. If on the other hand they accepted conversion,
they were offered substantial tax relief and did not need to pay their debts for three years.
Then, in 1681, the royal intendant of Poitou, Marillac, quartered dragoons – mounted infantry
soldiers - on Protestant households. In principle Marillac was not doing anything new, but the
systematic employment of soldiers as agents of conversion was novel, horrifying - and effective.
The soldiers were given licence to indulge themselves as they pleased. The households where they
were placed had to pay their wages and upkeep. What persuasion, bribery and intimidation had
failed to do was achieved, at least superficially, by the combination of force, brutality and a crushing
financial burden. The resultant flood of abjurations was so great that the intendant at Montauban
complained in 1685 that when troops approached towns in his district, the Protestants converted so
rapidly that it was difficult to find enough homes to lodge all the soldiers for the night.
On 22 October 1685, the ‘perpetual and irrevocable’ edict that had given shelter to the
Huguenots for nearly a century was revoked. Previously, even in decrees licensing its subversion,
Louis XIV had always repeated that he intended the Edict of Nantes to be observed. Now the Edict
was simply annulled. All Protestant services were forbidden, all temples ordered to be destroyed.
Ministers were exiled unless they accepted conversion. Huguenot laymen, however, were forbidden
to leave the country, and their children were to be baptized and brought up as Catholics.
The Gallican Church in France was delighted. It compared Louis to Theodosius and
Charlemagne, great rulers of old. ‘You have confirmed the Faith; you have exterminated the
heretics’, Bossuet wrote. However, it was not as simple as that. A final general clause in the
Revocation assured surviving Huguenots that they could live freely in the kingdom as long as they
Huguenots in English Sea Port Towns in the Late Seventeenth Century
17
held no religious gatherings. Some ‘new converts’ thereupon with­drew their enforced abjurations
and tried to resume Protestantism, in the belief that persecution was at an end. They were soon
undeceived, as the dragonnades were renewed and intensified; but Louis was left with hundreds of
thousands of subjects who remained Protestant at heart and deeply resented what had been done to
them.
In all, about 200,000 left France as refugees against the will and despite the deterrent measures
of its government, and went to live in the lands of Louis’ enemies. A far greater number – three or
four times as many – stayed on in France, only nominally (if at all) Catholic, and abstaining from
church attendance when they could.
As far as England was concerned, this sequence of events meant that there were some
signs of immigration in the 1660s. By 1673 the Huguenot church at Calais was reporting it was
overburdened by the number of Protestants heading across the Channel. The floodgates really
opened with the dragonnades in 1681, and a new word, réfugiés or ‘refugees’, came into the
English language for the first time in that year. Even larger numbers of immigrants crossed the
Channel in 1687, and others continued to arrive through the 1690s, with a final significant spurt in
the years after the Peace of Ryswick of 1697. Across the period as a whole, perhaps forty or fifty
thousand French Protestants settled in England.
Although the Huguenots arriving from Louis XIV’s France introduced the word ‘refugees’ to
Britain, they were not of course the first group – not even the first group of European Protestants –
to seek a new home across the Channel. An earlier wave of French‑speaking Protestants had come
from the Continent during the reigns of Edward VI and Queen Elizabeth in the sixteenth century,
and had established their own institutions. So the new Huguenot refugees of the 1680s arrived
to find there were already long established French-speaking settlements at London, Canterbury,
Norwich and Southampton. These had royal authorisation, and their churches worshipped in the
non-conformist way to which the refugees were accustomed. There was also one other Frenchspeaking French church, at the Savoy at Westminster, which conformed to the Church of England
liturgy and used the Anglican prayer book translated into French.
ARRIVAL AND PATTERN OF SETTLEMENT
When the Calvinist movement first became established in France in the sixteenth century,
it struggled to grow in the centre-north of the country, where royal power was greatest, and in
Lorraine and the east, a stronghold of the Catholic Guise family. Calvinist strength lay rather in the
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海港都市研究
frontier regions, especially in a southern crescent stretching from La Rochelle in the west to Lyons
in the east. It was also notable in Normandy and other isolated pockets where it was supported by
the local nobility. So a good deal of Huguenot settlement in France had tended to be clustered near
the coast.
Across the Channel in England, the Protestant settlements which existed in 1680 on the eve of
the dragonnades were not far from the sea either. Moreover every refugee who arrived, necessarily
did so by sea: there was no alternative.
The conditions under which the Huguenots left France pose insuperable problems for historians
trying to track their steps. Faced by persecution, the refugees took whatever chances came their way
to make their escape. Unless ministers, they were prohibited from leaving, so they travelled at night
by unusual paths hidden from the public gaze. Some took their chances in small open boats. Others
came together in larger groups, seizing a moment to depart when they thought Louis’s patrols were
away or off guard.
There are no passenger lists a historian can analyse. Only occasionally can we even identify a
route, as when The True Protestant Mercury: or, Occurrences Forei[g]n and Domestick reported
the arrival of Huguenots at Dartmouth from near La Rochelle, and at Falmouth from Bordeaux, in
late 1681. The Currant Intelligence likewise noted arrivals in the second half of the same year at
Dover from Dieppe, at Plymouth and Dartmouth from La Rochelle, and at Weymouth from Niort,
La Rochelle and Bordeaux. The London Gazette reported an open shallop from La Rochelle with 40
or 50 French Protestants reaching Plymouth and a vessel from St. Martin’s putting in to Penzance,
while The Domestick Intelligence commented on arrivals at Dover from Calais and at Deal from
Dieppe. Also in 1681, we know of one occasion when 51 refugees reached London from Tremblade
‘by way of Portsmouth’. As the refugee influx continued and its newsworthiness lessened,
newsletter accounts ceased, but the same pattern persisted. For example, in 1692 new arrivals
landed at Dartmouth from Charente, and at Stonehouse aboard an open boat possibly from Brest –
on this occasion we have the evidence because the state authorities had them questioned to glean
naval intelligence.
We simply do not know which of these were regular routes, which the outcome of chance
winds. What is clear, though, is that fugitives landed all along the south coast, and north at least
as far as Bristol in the west and London in the east. As well as the towns mentioned, Cowes,
Folkestone, Hastings and St. Ives are amongst the places where refugees are known to have landed,
French Church of London Library, [hereafter FCL], MS 226, Account I, p.222.
Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, [hereafter CSPD], 1691-92, pp.205, 408.
Huguenots in English Sea Port Towns in the Late Seventeenth Century
19
although in none was there ever a French congregation.
Few Huguenots stayed where they first arrived, and many made multiple steps before finally
settling. However the great majority ended up in proximity to the coast and to port towns. By 1700
there were between 28 and 30 separate groups of Huguenots worshipping simultaneously in the
area that is now Greater London. Outside the capital there were eighteen places where there was
sufficient settlement to have a regular French congregation. None of them were in the north of
England, or the Midlands, or in Wales; all were in the south and east, and all were close to the sea. Since in France and England alike Huguenot settlement was often near the sea, one would
expect the nature of port towns to have been an important factor in deciding where the refugees
went. I am not sure how far that is strictly true, since the large majority of refugees did not rely
directly on seafaring or mercantile trade for their livelihood. However for Huguenots who did find
their living working with ships and sailing, or directly with the import and export trade which was
centred on London, it was vital.
SHIPPING
Unfortunately we lack the evidence to form any solid idea of the Huguenot contribution at
sea. Unless they can be checked against the records of a French congregation, English records can
bury all traces of Huguenot origin very quickly. Some names the historian encounters, ‘Robert’
for example, could equally have been French or English in origin. Others simply became instantly
translated, like ‘Blanc’ into ‘White’. Yet more were rendered almost invisible by clerks struggling
to put them into a form they found recognizable, so that the French frigate captain Jean de Lestrilles
de la Clide became ‘Lacklead’ to an English scribe. ‘William Drewit, mariner’ looks English
enough, and it is only when we happen to have a record of him asking for the release of a barque so
that his father ‘Guillaume Drouet’, a Protestant, could come to England with some seamen, that the
historian will realize he was Huguenot.
Surviving records of crew are scanty at best, and the impossibility of identification of French
names leaves a historian with only occasional leads regarding individuals. Moreover the nature of
their occupation could keep sailors away at sea for extended periods, so they do not feature in the
A full list of new refugee congregations in England established in or after 1681 and surviving into the eighteenth
century will be found in Robin Gwynn, ‘Conformity, Non-conformity and Huguenot Settlement in England in
the Later Seventeenth Century’, in Anne Dunan-Page (ed.), The Religious Culture of the Huguenots, 1660-1750,
(Ashgate, Aldershot, 2006), pp.29-30.
CSPD, 1703-4, p.346.
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海港都市研究
surviving refugee church registers to the same extent as other craft groups. The little information we
have about them does not allow any serious estimate of numbers.
However, there are general indications suggesting a significant refugee presence on the sea.
First, there is the evidence from France itself. Marshal Vauban estimated the number of seamen
France lost to her enemies at between 8,000 and 9,000. The Venetian Ambassador at Paris wrote
home in 1688 that the majority of sailors along the western coast of France had left. These estimates
were rejected as exaggerations in 1960 by the American historian Warren Scoville, who offered an
alternative figure of two or three thousand without providing supporting evidence, but I have argued
elsewhere there are serious problems with Scoville’s approach. Whatever the true number may have
been, all would agree that the French King was worried by the loss. Louis viewed the seamen as
a scarce skilled resource of strategic importance, and decreed life imprisonment on his galleys for
any French sailor caught serving under a foreign flag without permission. One of the priorities for
Louis’s special agent François d’Usson de Bonrepaus was to secure the return of Huguenot seamen
to France.
Second, it is worth noting one entry in particular in the Entring Book or ‘Historical register of
Occurrences’ kept by the former Presbyterian clergyman Roger Morrice across the troubled decade
of the 1680s. (The Entring Book has been published for the first time this year, and is a major
newly available source for the period.) Morrice has been shown to have been generally remarkably
accurate and well informed in his statements in regard to the refugees. On 5 March 1687 he wrote,
‘it is very credibly reported there is full 2,000 French Protestants fled out of France into Plymouth,
Falmouth, Sussex and London whereof about 600 are seamen’. As if to confirm his accuracy on
this occasion, that very day 68 refugees came before the French Church of Threadneedle Street in
London to acknowledge their fault in abjuring Calvinism in France. This was the largest group since
the Revocation, and it proved to be the harbinger of successive waves so that 2,237 new arrivals
made their peace in this one church during 1687. Assuming the information about the percentage
of seamen is as accurate as Morrice’s information about timing, this is important evidence that there
were indeed many of them among those who sought refuge across the Channel.
Warren C. Scoville, The Persecution of Huguenots and French Economic Development 1680-1720, (University
of California Press, 1960), pp.281-8; Robin Gwynn, Huguenot Heritage, (2nd revised edn., Sussex Academic Press,
2001), pp.199-200.
Robin Gwynn, ‘Roger Morrice and the Huguenot Refugees’, in Jason McElligott (ed.), Fear,Exclusion and
Revolution: Roger Morrice and Britain in the 1680s, (Ashgate, Aldershot, 2006), pp.32-48.
Entring Book, Q, p.79. Emphasis added.
Robin Gwynn, Minutes of the Consistory of the French Church of London, Threadneedle Street, 1679-1692,
(Huguenot Society Quarto Series [hereafter HSQS], LVIII (1994), p. 2.
Huguenots in English Sea Port Towns in the Late Seventeenth Century
21
Finally, it is noteworthy that by the end of the 1690s the authorities were admitting large
numbers of Huguenot refugees as denizens with a new clause permitting them to be shipmasters.
Previously this had not been allowed. Now they could be masters of ships during the time they and
their families inhabit within the dominions of the Crown of England, under a proviso that such a
clause be not brought into precedent hereafter: and also a proviso that they and their families live
in England or elsewhere in his Majesty’s dominions. On 29 September 1698 denization under these
conditions was granted to 188 people (plus some family members), and on 11 March 1700 similar
denization was granted to a further 351.
Some Huguenot settlements had clear maritime connections. This was most obvious at Rye,
where the French community was a fishing settlement, planned and organized by the Consistory
(governing body) of the Threadneedle Street church with support from Bishop Compton of London.
The first two boats were ready by December 1681,10 and one of the deacons of the church, Daniel
Brulon, was granted the freedom of the city of London the following year for conveying the total
Rye catch to the capital.11 Most of the settlers were poor, but some sought denization in 1700 which
argues for a certain degree of substance.12
There were problems associated with having a seafaring settlement so close to France. ‘Severall
seamen are afraid to goe in the straits for fear their ships should either be visited by French men
of war or they forced by stresse of weather in any French port’, it was noted by French Church of
London officers in 1681. That led to investigations further north on the east coast: ‘Qu[ery]’ the
officers asked, ‘whether there is any lawfull ground in their fear and in case of that whether they
may in ships for Newcastle’.13 It looks as though Whitby (Yorkshire) and Yarmouth (Norfolk) may
also have been investigated, and a few refugees did actually go to Whitby14 and to Fring (Norfolk),
where they disappear from our records. Sir John Lowther also hoped to settle some French seamen
at Whitehaven on the Cumberland coast, but was thwarted by local opposition.15
Moving westwards along the south coast from Rye, the next coastal French community was
at Southampton, which had strong links with the Channel Islands. Further west again, one reaches
Devon, where some three thousand Huguenots settled in the years after the Revocation.16 While
HSQS, XVIII (1911), p.288-93,310-17.
10　FCL, MS 7, p.81.
11　Public Record Office, [hereafter PRO], SP/44/66, p.100.
12　Lambeth Palace Library, MS 1029, no.92; FCL, MS 8, f.116r.
13　FCL, MS 226, Account H, p.199.
14　Corporation of London Record Office, ex-Guildhall MSS 279, f.71v and 346, no.227.
15　Gwynn, Huguenot Heritage, pp.47,150.
16　Alison Grant and Robin Gwynn, ‘The Huguenots of Devon’, Report and Transactions of the Devonshire
Association…, 117 (1985), p. 171.
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海港都市研究
not much evidence has survived about the Devon settlements, it is plain that all had significant
connections with the sea. Some ship-owning Huguenots crossed over from France bringing their
own vessels and crew, and sometimes cargo. For example, Alison Grant’s researches have identified
these vessels in that category coming to Stonehouse, near Plymouth:
Ship
From
King David
Port Louis, Brittany
Mary Ketch
Tremblade
Hope
Royan
Moses
Royan
Judith
Royan
Two Brothers
St Martin, Ile de Ré
Susanna
La Rochelle
Hector La Rochelle
Francis
La Rochelle
Such ships were small by modern standards, from 20 to 80 tons burden, but they were sea- and
ocean-going boats. King David is known to have traded with Carolina and Virginia, Moses with
St Malo, Hope and Two Brothers with the Mediterranean.17 Like the fishermen at Rye, the refugee
sailors had cause for anxiety should they fall into the hands of the French authorities. Pierre Perreau
was a French pilot who, a month after he had married at Plymouth, ‘being sailed for the Straits [of
Gibraltar], was taken, and carried into France: where he was condemned to the Galleys for 101
years.’18
Refugee sailors sometimes largely manned ocean-going sailing ships, but that is only likely to
come to the attention of the historian when an owner found his ship confiscated. Thus the merchant
Nathaniel Dowrish of Plymouth sent his ship Agnes to Barbados in June 1691. He equipped her
with a Huguenot master, André Dubois, and manned her ‘with French Protestants inhabiting about
Plymouth, thinking that they were and should be accompted freemen and duly qualified to sail a
ship to the West Indian plantations’. However the ship was seized on arrival in Barbados for not
being ‘manned by a master and three fourths English’ in accordance with the Navigation Acts, so
17　Grant and Gwynn, ‘Huguenots of Devon’, pp. 172-6.
18　Hilary Reneu, Preface to the Second English Translation (1707) of Jean Claude’s Les Plaintes des Protestants
cruellement opprimés dans le Royaume de France, reprinted in Edward Arber (ed.), The Torments of Protestant
Slaves..., (London, 1908), p.420.
Huguenots in English Sea Port Towns in the Late Seventeenth Century
23
Dowrish had to petition the Treasury in order to get proceedings against him dropped.19
Finally we should consider Bristol, which had significant ties with La Rochelle. A high
percentage of its refugees came from maritime districts, and the relationship with the sea was
critical for this settlement. The French church registers for Bristol have unusually good information
about trades. According to Ronald Mayo’s analysis, sailors (31%) and textile workers (32%)
dominate the lists of occupations, with merchants next at just under 10% of the total. Mayo lists
46 individual seafarers from Aunis and Saintonge, consisting of 16 ship captains and masters, 25
seamen and sailors, and 5 pilots.20
NAVAL CONTRIBUTION
Our evidence is no better for seamen serving in the Royal Navy than for those in the mercantile
marine, though we know that places for Huguenot officers were reserved in the royal fleet, and
that the French ambassador and special agent were anxious about their country’s loss. Only
occasionally do we get clear leads on individuals, as when Abel de Verdun Sancé, ‘lately served as
a L[ieu]t[enant] in the French Kings service but dismist for his Religeon’, was made a midshipman
extraordinary on Lord Dartmouth’s flagship in 1683. 21 Arthur le Comte, and William and John
Marets, were also former members of the French navy who moved to serve with the English navy
as midshipmen extraordinary.22
A fascinating case recently brought to light concerns Peter Fontaines, a younger son of a
Norman noble, who relinquished his position as master surgeon in charge of a French hospital
ship at the time of the Revocation. By 1689, having spent some years in Ottoman service, he was
serving as surgeon aboard a small English frigate, when it was captured by the French. Recognized,
he was stripped, confined, sent ashore in chains, and beaten. He had enough local influence to
appeal successive sentences first that he be executed, then that he be condemned to the gallies
for life. Instead he was ordered back into French naval service (at his own expense). Following
a fight he was arrested again, escaped, and was recaptured. However the vessel taking him back
to trial and probable death at Brest was itself captured by English men of war. He was then used
by Admiral Russell for advice on French naval medicine, and by Secretary of State Daniel Finch,
19　Grant and Gwynn, ‘Huguenots of Devon’, p.179.
20　HSQS, XX (1912), pp.ix,xx; Ronald Mayo, The Huguenots in Bristol, (Bristol Branch of the Historical Association,
1985), pp.26-7. One captain, Etienne Bourdet from La Rochelle, was a Royal Navy captain.
21　PRO, Adm. 2/1750, p.319. I owe the reference to J. David Davies.
22　CSPD, 1696, pp.29, 133; 1699-1700, p.320.
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海港都市研究
Earl of Nottingham, for naval information. One of his first intelligence reports for Nottingham
was a detailed military appreciation of the strengths and weaknesses of the towns between Brest
and Rennes along the route he had traversed four times while on trial with his hands manacled
and his feet tied under his horse’s belly. Later, at his own suggestion, he was locked up among
French prisoners of war in English prisons, and continued a dangerous game of counter-intelligence
through the mid 1690s. 23
As with the army, such evidence as we do have tends to concern officers rather than men,
but it is clear that there were refugees in the lower ranks too. Nathaniel Dowrish claimed in 1691
that many Devon Huguenots were ‘actually in the service of their Majesties’ ships of war [and]
imprested into their Majesties’ sea service’, and Francis Delacombe , elder of the Stonehouse
congregation, noted later ‘that many poor women of Stonehouse had lost husbands or sons in the
service of the English crown’.24 Jean Brunelau and Lewis Diore, certified French Protestants, were
allowed to serve in the royal fleet in December 1703 when they opted to stay in England rather
than be exchanged and returned to France.25 Presumably they were prisoners of war, as were other
sailors, William Le Berquier and Claude Prigent, who received the same permission.26
TRADE
While there is more surviving evidence for Huguenots in relation to trade than service in the
fleet, it is once again often fragmentary and difficult to interpret. With mercantile activity our focus
has to be on the extraordinary city of London, which combined the role of capital city with that of
great port. It was the one great English financial centre, the hub of overseas trade, the deep-water
shipping centre, connected by invisible but powerful links to all major provincial towns and to the
other great cities of Europe.
By 1700 London, with a population of some half a million, was over twenty times the size of
the next largest English city, and one in every nine or ten Englishmen was a Londoner. It was the
centre of fashion, of specialised crafts and skills, of theatre and of every kind of entertainment.
It was a manufacturing centre, and the national centre for the distribution of goods of all sorts.
23 Sonia P. Anderson, ‘The Adventures of Peter Fontaines, Naval Surgeon and Intelligence Agent’, Proceedings
of the Huguenot Society of Great Britain and Ireland, XXVIII:3 (2005), pp. 336-49. Nottingham made much
use of Huguenots for intelligence purposes, see Historical Manuscripts Commission 71: Report on the Finch
Manuscripts vol. V.
24　Grant and Gwynn, ‘Huguenots of Devon’, p.179.
25　CSPD, 1703-4, p.241.
26　CSPD, 1702-3, pp.146, 164, and 1703-4, pp.214,219.
Huguenots in English Sea Port Towns in the Late Seventeenth Century
25
It was the seat of the royal court, and of Parliament, and of the law courts. From the refugees’
point of view, it was also the fount of charitable relief, the place where news of home was most
likely to be found, and the home of the largest French churches and communities in the country.
So it is not surprising that by 1700, at least half the Huguenot refugees in England were living in
London, drawn there by employment opportunities, friends or contacts, and the need for advice and
companionship.
Most Huguenot refugees were poor. A few, though, who were more farsighted or luckier or had
better connections with the authorities than their brethren, managed to bring substantial resources
with them. In such cases the resources were unlikely to involve land. They were much more likely
to be in the form of uncommitted ready cash, ideal for trade and investment. At the foundation of
the Bank of England in 1694, for example, £104,000 of the first £1,200,000 deposited came from
123 recently arrived Huguenots.
They may have also contributed something like a tenth of the investment in other early English
Funds, though this is a matter of debate,27 and they were important in early English insurance
ventures.
Huguenot merchants who left France and came to London in the 1680s operated in an
environment with two critically significant aspects. First, they had come to a city where earlier
French-speaking Protestant refugees had made a considerable impact. These were Walloons and
French who had escaped persecution in the southern Netherlands and France a century before.
The descendants of such families as Delmé, Denew, Desbouveries, Dubois, Houblon, Le Keux,
Lethieullier, Lordell and Papillon were wealthy and well connected; in most cases they could speak
French, and some were still regularly attending the long established Threadneedle Street church.
That background provided a framework within which new Huguenot arrivals could obtain advice
and get to know local requirements comparatively easily. The economic success of the earlier wave
of foreign Protestants also increased the willingness of the authorities to be supportive of the new
refugees.
The other fundamentally important aspect of the background to trade across the quarter century
after the Huguenots came was the state of war that existed with France. Between 1689 and 1713
England was continuously at war with Louis XIV except for a respite from 1697 to 1701 following
the Peace of Ryswick. The cost was unprecedented. It could not have been sustained without the
major changes in the structure of English finance, changes which have been described as adding up
27　A.C. Carter, Getting, Spending and Investing in Early Modern Times, (Van Gorcum, Assen, 1975); F. M. Crouzet,
“Walloons, Huguenots and the Bank of England”, Proceedings of the Huguenot Society, XXV (1989-93), pp. 167-78.
26
海港都市研究
to a ‘financial revolution’, in which both the descendants of the older refugees and the new arrivals
played an important role. At the same time, war changed and distorted trade patterns. Under such
circumstances, the French refugees had much to offer. Both their assets and their international
connections were important.
Historians have found it hard to make sense of what was happening in the London economy in
the crucial decade of the 1690s. Conclusions reached by D.W. Jones in his extensive studies28 might
be summarized as follows:
・Britain faced a huge balance of payments deficit in the mid 1690s.
29
・Despite ‘ill-defined indications of a severe financial crisis’ and an unprecedented war burden,
the joint-stock flotations of the Bank of England (1694) and the new East India Company (1698)
were successful.
・Imports of tobacco and naval stores remained high, but other imports - from Near Europe, the
Iberian peninsula, the Mediterranean and the Levant, and the East Indies - declined.
・Exports maintained or increased their previous level. Cloth exports to the Levant declined
sharply, but this was compensated by increases to Near Europe and the Iberian peninsula.
・The handling of London trade became thoroughly cosmopolitanised, as Huguenot merchants
gained a significant share in export trade and their activity was supplemented by German and
Baltic firms.
・Foreign immigrant merchants gained an increasingly large share in the export trade in old
draperies.
・As John Houghton put it in 1694, ‘trade being obstructed at sea, few that had money were
willing it should be idle, and a great many that wanted employments studied how to dispose of
their money, that they might be able to command it whensoever they had occasion’. Levant and
wine merchants, particularly hard hit by war, had to reallocate their assets, and played a major
part both in the joint-stock flotations and in equipping privateering ventures. Their prominent
role was ‘the common denominator…in both the great flotations of 1694 and 1698’.30
With such a rapidly changing scene, it would be hard to assess the Huguenot contribution accurately
even if historians had much more surviving evidence than they do. Jones concludes that the ‘inflow
28　‘London Overseas-Merchant Groups at the End of the Seventeenth Century and the Moves against the East India
Company’, (Oxford University D.Phil thesis, 1970); War and Economy in the Age of William III and Marlborough,
(Blackwell, Oxford, 1988).
29　Jones, ‘London Overseas-Merchant Groups’, p.3.
30　Jones, ‘London Overseas-Merchant Groups’, p.262.
Huguenots in English Sea Port Towns in the Late Seventeenth Century
27
of foreign firms must have provided a powerful supplementation of resources in London, which
helped the merchant community to survive the pressures of the 1690s’. 31 However the elusive
nature of the evidence prevents him going much further. ‘With regard to the Huguenot[s] one can
but pose the question of whether they brought their balances with them when they fled from France,
or whether these were kept in the circuits of international commerce outside France, and were then
drawn into English export business when government remittances generated an export boom’.32
My own work has been concerned with French church records rather than London trade
patterns. Putting my findings on the membership of the Consistory of the Threadneedle Street
church alongside those of Dr. Jones and others in the economic sphere reveals the formidable
concentration of wealth and mercantile connections that existed in the Consistory room, just a few
yards down the road from the Bank of England. To offer a sample, let us take the men serving as
lay elders or deacons of the church during the last three years of the century from 1698 to 1700.
There were eighteen elders and the same number of deacons serving at any one time. Normally they
served for three years or a little more, with some of their number being replaced every six months.
Across the three year period, this provides a sample of 64 men.
We know the place of birth of all but two, and the cosmopolitan nature of the community
is striking. Ten had been born in London, six in Rouen, five in Dieppe, four each in Paris and
Valenciennes, three each in Bordeaux and Canterbury, two each in Amiens and Champdeniers.
The others came from Alzey in the Palatinate, Autun, Blois, Boulogne, Calais, Chinon, Corbigny,
Geneva, Guernsey, Honfleur, Ile de Ré, Loudun, Montélimar, Nérac, Nîmes, Pittenweem (Fife),
Poitou, Saintes, St Martin, Ségur, Sommières, Uzès and Vitry-le-François.
Whereas the geographical spread is very broad, the spread of trades is narrow. We know the
trades of 37 of these 64 officers. One was a medic, one a goldsmith and jeweller. Three were
associated with weaving. Five seem best described simply as ‘gentleman’. All the other 27 were
merchants, some also stock dealers. The evidence indicates they were a very wealthy group indeed,
not small traders but international players.
Some of the 27 were substantial investors in the new joint stock flotations of the 1690s. Jacques
du Fay was an original subscriber to the Bank of England in 1694, with £2,800, as was Louis
Gervaise with £800. Gervaise also subscribed £3,000 to the Million Bank the following year. Pierre
Albert, a wine merchant, contributed £7,000, and Elie du Puy £3,000 to the New East India loan of
1698. Others became stock dealers, like Robert le Platrier, who seems to have moved from buying
31　Jones, ‘London Overseas-Merchant Groups’, p.192.
32　Jones, ‘London Overseas-Merchant Groups’, p.85.
28
海港都市研究
skins from the Hudson Bay Company in the 1680s to becoming more involved in stocks. Robert
Caillé was a substantial stock dealer who had a personal holding of £2,450 in Bank stock in 1697,
and bought over £4,000 and sold over £3,000 in the latter part of that year, largely on behalf of
Huguenot and Sephardic clients.
As might be expected with such diverse geographical origins represented in the Consistory, the
trading range was wide. For example, Jean Esselbroun had £6,900 turnover of cloth exports to Near
Europe in 1695/96. Jacob de Lillers traded with Portugal. Daniel Jamineau was a substantial trader
with Africa, Barbados and Zante.
Some of the 27 I have classified as merchants might equally, by this stage in their careers,
be viewed as gentry rather than merchants. Amongst them are Jean Denew; ‘His Majesty’s
Fishmonger’, Daniel Brulon; or Joseph Ducasse, who had married Algernon Sidney’s daughter.
Finally, there are some among the 27 for whom no direct evidence of their trading activities
has been found, but where other information is suggestive of their wealth. Jean le Moteux’s father
had abandoned five houses in and around Rouen when taking refuge. Louis Berchere’s son, James
Louis, was later said to be worth £120,000. Hilaire Carbonnel went on to become Governor of the
Bank of England.
CONCLUSION
A similar sample, but involving different individuals, could be produced for the Threadneedle
Street Consistory for any other three years in the period immediately following the ‘Glorious
Revolution’. It tells us that the lay officers of this particular church were predominantly merchants
at this time, forming a group remarkable alike for its financial muscle, its world-wide trading
connections, and the part it played in the foundation of the Bank of England and other early English
funds.
However it needs to be understood that none of the many other French congregations around
the capital were similarly placed. The churches of east London and Spitalfields were full of
members who were associated with weaving. Those of Westminster and west London included
military men and people representative of all the fashionable trades of the day. For none of them
did the port facilities of London carry the significance they did for the great international traders of
Threadneedle Street.
What, then, are we to conclude from this study of Huguenots in English seaport towns in the
later seventeenth century?
Huguenots in English Sea Port Towns in the Late Seventeenth Century
29
The refugees had no other possible route than the sea to reach a haven in an island nation, and
we have seen that both in France and after settling in England, most of them lived near the sea. That
tendency was reinforced by the nature of their situation as refugees.
They had – sometimes quite literally – cast their fate to the winds. For many that meant seizing
any opportunity that presented itself, whether near where they first landed or far away. Often they
shifted repeatedly, like Jaques Fontaine, who after landing in England at Appledore near Barnstaple
in Devon, moved to Bridgwater in Somerset, then Taunton, then across the Irish Sea to Dublin, then
Cork, finally Dublin again.33 So it was not the specific relation of any one port town with another
that drew the refugees. Rather it was the employment opportunities that such towns offered, openly
in the case of sailors, fishermen and merchants, more indirectly for other tradesmen.
Those opportunities sparkled brightest in London, although many Englishmen and Huguenots
alike found that the glitter concealed a tawdry reality of poverty and ill-health. For the refugees,
the appeal of the capital was enhanced not only by its unique nature but by hopes of accessing poor
relief, and by the availability of French news, provincial contacts and companionship. By 1700
London was by far the largest refugee centre in Europe, and the concentration of wealthy Huguenot
merchants in the City was helping change the balance of power in their world.
(Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa)
33　See Dianne W. Ressinger (ed.), Memoirs of the Reverend Jaques Fontaine 1658-1728, (Huguenot Society, New
Series No.2, 1992).
30
海港都市研究
日本語要約
17 世紀後半のイングランド海港都市におけるユグノー
ロビン・グウィン
本論ではイングランドの海港都市との関連から見たユグノー（フランス語を話すカル
ヴァン派信徒）の特徴を扱う。イングランドでは既に 1660 年代には先行するユグノー亡
命民の定着が始まり、迫害盛期の 1680 年代には約 4 万～ 5 万人のユグノーが移住した。
フランスのユグノー居住地の多くが沿岸近くに分散する傾向があった。また彼らは亡命す
るにあたり、必然的に海路をとらねばならず、東西南北の広範囲にわたるイングランドの
海港に上陸した。
ほとんどのユグノーが最初の上陸地を離れたが、それでも大多数が沿岸と海港都市の近
くで生涯を終えた。従って、海港都市の性質がユグノー亡命民の行き先を決定する重要な
一要因だったと予測できる。確かに、海運・国際商業と直接には関係しない職業につくユ
グノーも多くいたので、この予測がどこまで正確に真実を表しているかは分からない。し
かし、船と航海もしくはロンドンを中心とする国際商業に関わったユグノーにとっては、
この点が非常に重要だった。本論では、これをイングランドの各海港都市で海運業・海軍・
国際商業に関与したユグノーの具体例から検証する。
考察の結果、ユグノーは彼らに巡ってきた偶発的機会に応じて最初の上陸地である海港
都市の近くに留まるか、遠くに移住するかを決定したと言える。この移動において重要な
のは海港都市間の関係ではなく、むしろその海港都市にどれほどの雇用機会があるのかと
いうことであった。船乗り、漁師、国際商業商人の場合は明らかにこの説が当てはまり、
その他交易商人にも間接的に当てはまる。
こうした雇用機会はロンドンに最も多かった。さらに首都ロンドンは、都市そのものの
特質に加えて、救貧受給の望みがあり、フランスのニュースが入手でき、故郷との連絡や
亡命者同士の仲間づきあいが可能な場であったため、亡命者にとっていっそう魅力的だっ
た。こうして、
1700 年までにロンドンはヨーロッパで最大のユグノー亡命民の拠点となる。
そして、裕福なユグノー商人がロンドン・シティに集中したことがイングランドの「財政
革命」に大きく寄与し、またユグノー世界の勢力バランスを変える一助となるのである。
（作成：神戸大学大学院人文学研究科　雪村加世子）