That water, pouring into fountains at three shillings a pint, evoked caustic comments from John Locke the revolutionary, but he could not but be impressed, whether it was by the thirty-gun man-of-war anchored in the canal, by Le Vau’s Trianon de Porcelaine with its fanciful Chinoiserie decorations, or the elephant in the menagerie which ate ‘50 lb.s of bread per diem & 16lb.s of wine with rice’. Here was magnificence which Europe had not seen since the days of the Roman Emperors. Here was the awesome marriage of all arts and sciences, wealth which furnished rooms with solid silver, power which filled a barren valley with running water. As John Locke watched the King’s cane point out along the great axis of Le Nôtre’s gardens, it was hard not to believe that he had tamed all France as he had tamed this valley; that the order and control which the Sun King brought did indeed spread out in illimitable vistas across the whole of France and would spread one day all over the world. ‘The King of France’, wrote Gregorio Leti, an Italian Protestant in Holland who became a tireless critic of the French King, ‘wants it known that just as the sun encircles the whole world, his authority also extends everywhere, and that he should be as much elevated on earth as the sun is in the heavens.’2
That power did not appear overnight. France, like England and Holland, had undergone political turmoil in the 1650s, when Louis, still a minor, had seen his throne threatened by the Frondes uprisings, first popular, and then under the direction of rebel aristocrats. His response, on assuming personal rule in 1661, was to marginalise all rival sources of power in France and gather all authority to his throne. In process he pushed monarchy still further along the road Cardinal Richelieu had marked out for it during his father’s reign. He made of it a display both ritual and architectural whose lavish purpose was to trumpet his own glory. Monarchy engrossed the arts and sciences through patronage, advanced the military through foreign wars. Its tireless eye looked ever outwards through every circle of French life.
‘Louis XIV desires and has set out to attain [wrote Leti] such a monarchy as other monarchs have not even considered. He desires empire over body and soul; he wishes to be both Caesar and Christ. He wants not only his subjects’ persons but their very consciences to bow to his edicts.’3
In Louis XIV’s hands, monarchy became a power not static but dynamic, ceaselessly expanding in order to survive. On the day he visited Versailles, John Locke noticed how small the original hunting lodge was compared to the palace growing around it – the rooms inside seemed cramped. Versailles was a work in progress, however, not a completed vision. The enveloppe which Louis Le Vau threw around the hunting lodge would itself be demolished shortly after Locke’s visit, to make way for a still grander garden front. Throughout Louis’s reign, Versailles was constantly under construction as the King’s ideas grew ever more ambitious and the chateau ever larger. This was the restless, encroaching energy which so intimidated the Sun King’s neighbours – for was France itself also a work in progress, forever to be extended? ‘The King of France advances in great bounds towards Universal Monarchy,’ Leti concluded. ‘The King of France will soon be master of Europe; all his plans are directed at that one goal.’4
There was a diplomatic row in London in the first year of Louis’s personal rule when he refused to let his own representative accept equal treatment with the ambassador of the Spanish King: ‘The pre-eminence belongs to me and ... I claim it all times and in all places.’5 In the negotiations at Nijmegen, Sir William Temple saw at first hand ‘that imperious way of treating, which [French diplomats] afterwards pursued in the whole negotiation ... declaring such and such were the conditions they would admit, and no other, and upon which their enemies might choose, either peace or war’.6 Few chose war. Louis’s cannons were embossed with the words RATIO ULTIMA REGUM, the final argument of Kings. Those who countered that argument paid a terrible price, as the Dutch discovered in their year of disaster. ‘I can assure you’, the Prince de Condé wrote back to the minister of war, Louvois, during the campaign, ‘that I am following so well your intention not to spare the country that I am very sure you would never, if you were present, allow all the cruelties which I commit.’7 The letter in which Louvois passed on Louis’s personal instructions was somehow the more chilling for its courteous language:
‘He desired that Your Highness should show himself as aggressive and pitiless as you would be the opposite if you showed your natural inclination.’8
By the time James came to the throne in England, the borders of France had expanded further than ever before. Louis had no rivals. The Treaty of Ratisbon, in 1684, froze all Europe in an attitude of supplication to the Sun King. ‘He does whatever he wants,’ Gregorio Leti wrote, half bitterly and half admiringly,
‘whatever pleases him, in matters both spiritual and temporal. He makes war wheresoever he pleases and against whomsoever he wants. He dictates the terms of peace as he wishes. He makes himself master of any place or town which suits him ... All those who refuse to fall in with his desires he considers enemies.’9
As Louis XIV’s cane swept along the horizon at Versailles, it encompassed a continent of whose balances he could call himself absolute master. Spain was stagnating under the drooling, impotent Carlos II. Denmark and Sweden were following France down the road of absolutism. In Vienna, the Emperor Leopold I was too hard pressed by the Ottomans to challenge France. In 1683 Vienna itself had been besieged by Turkish armies; Leopold had little power to spare in the west. In the United Provinces, meanwhile, Louis’s ambassador, the Comte d’Avaux, could always check William of Orange’s warmongering with the help of those Amsterdam merchants who desired only peace with their greatest trading partner, and were forever eager to repeat to d’Avaux ‘l’envie qu’ils ont de plaire à Votre Majesté’.10
As for England, the French King could virtually treat it with contempt. Here was a country whose Secretaries of State ‘never remembered one day what had been done the day before; or never cared what would be done the next’,11 a country whose previous King had depended on French bounty, and whose new monarch assured Louis ‘that his heart was French’.12 ‘I will take good care to hinder Parliament from meddling with foreign affairs’, James promised the French ambassador, Barillon, when called on to explain why he had summoned Parliament,
‘and will put an end to the session as soon as I see the members shew any ill will ... The King your master ... [should] have no cause to complain of my having taken so hastily so important a resolution [of calling Parliament], without consulting him, as I ought to do, and will do in everything.’13
VIII
‘THE FIFTH GREAT CRISIS OF THE PROTESTANT RELIGION’
‘When I have named France, I have said all that is necessary to give you a complete idea of the blackest tyranny over men’s consciences, persons, and estates, that can possibly be imagined.’1
Gilbert Burnet, 1689
It was as well English politicians, so nervous at the start of James’s reign, knew nothing of that correspondence. The euphoria of the King’s initial declarations allowed them to ignore warning signs like the King’s outburst in March against Anglican clerics who attacked Catholics from their pulpits. Thanks in part to Dudley North, they voted James better supplies than his brother had ever had – and supplies, what was more, for life. But perhaps the MPs did not expect James’s life to last that long. He would be sixty in eight years time, an age neither his grandfather nor brother had reached – nor his father, of course. So long as James kept to his declaration, perhaps a brief Catholic interregnum would bring no trouble. So long as the King kept the Papists at bay and didn’t encroach on Parliament or the courts. So long as he died soon and without issue, so that Protestant Mary could inherit. Perhaps, above all, if no one stirred up the hornets’ nest of ‘popery and arbitrary government’; if those demons stayed quietly slumbering, maybe all would be well. Unfortunately, the issue of ‘popery and arbitrary government’ was about to be reignited in the most dramatic manner possible. If it had been hard for the Engl
ish to love a Catholic monarch in 1680, by the end of 1685 it would be virtually impossible.
On a cold day in mid-November, a crowd of more than fifty men, women, and children huddled on the windswept shore of the Bay of Biscay. The sand blew over small bundles of clothes and packages of food. Angry waves surged in from the sea. Behind the dunes, wind hissed through the salt-stunted pine trees of the forest of Arvert.
Nobody spoke. Children who squabbled were quickly hushed. From time to time someone would stand up to look out to sea, or glance nervously over their shoulder at the forest. Mostly they stayed huddled in hollows of the sand, out of the wind and out of sight.
Anne Elisabeth Boursiquot was with her fiancé, Jaques Fontaine, and her sister Elisabeth. The last member of the group was Jaques’s niece Janette. They were apprehensive. The pilot at La Tremblade was a drunkard whom none of them trusted. Besides, there were too many of them on the dunes, they thought; a crowd would attract attention, and most, as Jaques wrote in the family memoir long afterwards, ‘were young girls and boys. Some had not taken precautions to conceal their intention to escape.’2
They were waiting for an English ship. They had been waiting all day, but out at sea nothing could be seen but the grey outline of the Ile d’Oléron. The only sails belonged to small patrol boats battling through the waves and a frigate from the naval base at Rochefort. As long as the frigate was there, the ship would not come.
Mid-afternoon, there was an alarm. The priest from La Tremblade was seen approaching along the dunes. He had a guide with him, and a dog; the refugees could hear its barks carried faintly to them on the wind. They saw it nose into hollows in the dunes, tail sweeping. Some started to pray. They watched as two fishermen approached the black-robed priest. The fishermen were friends; peering over the dunes, the refugees saw the men gesticulate and point; at last the priest shook his head and turned away. God had saved them again. All her life Anne Elisabeth would read in the family book the prayer they offered up that day.
Anne Elisabeth and her companions were Huguenots, French Protestants of what was officially known as the RPR, the Réligion Prétendue Réformée. Once, the Huguenots had been a large minority in France, their heartlands stretching down the west coast and across the Languedoc to the Mediterranean. Their conflict with Catholics divided France in bitter wars of religion, which had ended only when Henri of Navarre converted to Rome as Henri IV. Religious toleration was proclaimed in his Edict of Nantes in 1598.
That toleration had been eroded gradually over the following century. La Rochelle, the Protestant stronghold, was subdued by Cardinal Richelieu in 1628. Huguenots had supported the crown during the disturbances of the Frondes, being rewarded with renewed tolerance, but those promises had not survived Louis XIV’s assumption of personal power in 1661. Since then a stream of edicts had issued from Paris to restrict Huguenots’ freedom both as citizens and Christians. What began as a slow squeeze had quickened, in 1681, into active persecution. Louis’s morganatic wife, the devout Madame de Maintenon, was widely blamed. Others saw it as the result of his 1678 peace with the Dutch. Louis had finished with heresy abroad; now he was turning to the enemy within.
Anne Elisabeth and the others were living in Royan when the King’s dragoons arrived. Terror at the soldiers’ approach had been spreading for days; many Protestants had left for the woods with whatever they could carry. Two hours after Jaques Fontaine abandoned his house, eighteen dragoons clattered into the courtyard. The Royan Protestants knew exactly what to expect. They would be summoned and told to convert to the Catholic church. Those who refused would have soldiers quartered on them, and the dragoons would appear, ‘with their swords in their hands, crying, Kill, Kill, or else be Catholics’. The obdurate would then be forced to welcome their new ‘guests’ into their homes.
‘The first days were spent in consuming all provisions the house afforded and taking from them whatever they could see, money, rings, jewels, and in general, whatever was of value. After this, they pillaged the family and invited ... the Catholics of the place ... to come and buy the goods, and other things which would yield money. Afterwards they fell on their persons, and there’s no wickedness or horror which they did not put into practice, to force them to change their religion.’3
As household after household succumbed and recanted from their ‘heresy’, the dragoons moved on to the next. And alongside these dragonnades came a deluge of restrictive legislation. Once, Jaques and Anne Elisabeth had had Catholic friends; Jaques thought M Certani, priest of Royan, ‘a sensible and honest man, and a reasonably good preacher’. No longer. The worst part of the persecution consisted ‘in disposing insensibly the people by degrees to desire our destruction, to approve of it when done, and to diminish in their mind the horror which naturally they must have at the cruelties and injustices of our persecutors’ contrivances’.4 France was becoming impossible for Huguenots to live in. Escape, though, was not easy. Frontiers and seaports were blocked, foreign ships searched. Somehow, though, escape the French Protestants did, in a steady stream throughout the early 1680s. They went to the United Provinces, to Brandenburg – and to England, where Huguenot communities sprang up even in small towns like Ipswich and Rye.
In autumn 1685, however, that trickle of emigration suddenly increased to a flood. On 8 October 1685, in a statement which promised the destruction of all temples, the proscription of Protestant worship, the banishment of ministers from France, and the forcible conversion of Huguenot children, Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes.
At the end of the day, when the English ship didn’t appear, Anne Elisabeth and her companions made their way back to La Tremblade. A group of them found refuge in the house of a Huguenot apostate. There they stayed hidden for a whole day until their protector lost his nerve and ordered them out into the streets. That was more of God’s providence, it turned out – half an hour later the soldiers arrived to search the house. It was four or five anxious days before the English captain came back to La Tremblade. He agreed to take them on board if they could meet him at sea next day between the Ile de Ré and the Ile d’Oléron. They left the same night and dawn found them tossing at anchor off the Ile d’Aix. All morning they scanned the bay for sails. At last, about three o’clock in the afternoon, the English ship hove into view. Huddled down in the dinghy, the Protestants cheered. They watched the ship anchor, and the customs men and pilot depart, and prepared to give the arranged signal of hoisting and lowering the mizzen sail thrice in a row. And at exactly that moment a royal frigate ghosted into sight from behind the island.
‘Dreadful change!’ Jaques Fontaine remembered. ‘A moment ago full of hope ... What would they think a small boat was doing there at anchor? ... We were less than a cannon shot away.’ The frigate ordered the English ship to drop anchor, and searched it, then ordered the captain to make sail immediately. In despair Anne Elisabeth and her companions watched their hope of escape dwindle towards the horizon.
There was only one thing to be done. ‘If we returned to La Tremblade it was a hundred to one that we would not escape.’ In desperation they persuaded the boatman to hoist sail and follow the English ship out to sea. As they passed the frigate ‘within a pistol shot’, they hid under a tarpaulin at the bottom of the boat. The boatman pretended to be drunk, beating his son and swearing at him. The boy clumsily hoisted the sail and dropped it again – three times. That was the signal to the English captain, and by a miracle the frigate let them pass. As night fell on 30 November 1685, Anne Elisabeth climbed wearily onto the deck of the English merchantman.
In London, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes was greeted with outrage. ‘The French persecution of the Protestants,’ exploded the normally mild John Evelyn on 3 November,
‘raging with utmost barbarity, exceeding what the very heathens used: Innumerable persons ... leaving all their earthly substance & hardly escaping with their lives ... The Fr[ench] tyrant ... demolishing all their churches, banishing, imprisoning, sending to the galley
s all the ministers: plundering the common people, & exposing them to all sorts of barbarous usage.’
The year 1685 would be reckoned by Gilbert Burnet ‘the fifth great crisis of the Protestant religion’.’5 The news from France unleashed all England’s anti-Catholic demons. In 1685, however, England had a Catholic on the throne, and the question was how he would respond. Twenty years earlier, during a lesser outbreak of persecution, Charles II had issued an immediate declaration in support of migrant Huguenots. Henry Compton, the Bishop of London, now set about raising aid for the new refugees, but to his astonishment the King hesitated in endorsing it. That was a bad sign, and there were others to reinforce it. ‘Never all this time,’ John Evelyn raged, did the Gazette print ‘one syllable of this wonderful proceeding in France, nor was any relation of it published by any ... Whence this silence, I list not to conjecture, but it appeared very extraordinary in a Protestant country, that we should know nothing of what Protestants suffered.’ On the contrary, the Gazette of 29 October happily informed readers that ‘yesterday was celebrated ... the anniversary of the Pope’s coronation’. To public disgust the Pope now had a Nuncio at the Court of St James, ‘the first ... that had ever been in England since the Reformation,’ John Evelyn noted when he met him, ‘so wonderfully were things changed’.6 Suddenly English captains were banned from taking Huguenot refugees on board without passports (which they were unable to obtain). When a Huguenot writer, Jean Claude, produced an Account of the Persecutions and Oppressions of the Protestants in France, the censor refused it a licence. That autumn Edmund Bohun had begun work on a version of Bishop Jewel’s Apology for the Church of England, ‘that I might contribute what I could to the preservation of the Church in this her great danger’.7 To his astonishment, that too was banned.
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