factions, we would have the £250,000 to account for, which has been named at the beginning of this paragraph.
For this sum left with the city as a loan, interest at the rate of 5 per cent, had been given (or offered?) by the Metropolitan Corporation. The Williamite wars, however, rendering money more than ordinarily needful for the national exchequer, the Government offered one per cent, more, and the money was transferred from the City Chamber to the Treasury, my correspondent says. A quarter of a million at 5 per cent, yields an income of £12,500, but at 6 per cent., £15,000. What was called a Parliamentary grant was, according to this representation, only the incurring of a plain obligation to pay stipulated interest upon a loan. Accordingly, a reduced payment would be a reduced rate of interest, and could not justly take effect without consultation with the lenders, or without an offer on the part of the borrower to refund the money. Sir Robert Walpole, according to his own statement, retrenched by a half the grant which had become too large for duly qualified recipients. But was not the transaction simply a reduction of the rate of interest to 3 per cent., without allowing the lenders the option of receiving back their own capital fund? The critical question, however, had been practically put and disposed of before the reign of George the Second, perhaps before the reign of George the First, or even of Queen Anne.
There can be no doubt that there was a sum of about £125,000 in the Chamber of the City of London, belonging to the Commissioners for relieving distressed French refugees. (I do not deny the additional sum, but it may be left out of the discussion at present.) That money has disappeared; its fate cannot be traced. It has been spent. When, and by whom was it spent? Was it spent in paying King William’s army? Was it spent during the glories of Marlborough’s campaigns? Was it spent by Lord Treasurer Harley? That political quack offered to eclipse the great Treasurer who had preceded him, and by means of State lotteries to govern us for nothing. Amidst his arithmetical experiments, ready money would be a clamant desideratum. Did he appropriate the poor refugees’ money? And was the best reason for withholding their income the fact that there was no capital? The Hanoverian dynasty was not responsible for the loss of the capital. It found the refugees without capital; whatever may have been their former funds, and whosoever had spent their last penny for them, and however much punishment the crime of peculation merits, they were penniless at the footstool of King George’s throne; and then, if not before, the annual sum of £15,000 became a public grant and liable to reduction. That it was on this footing in the reign of George I. is evident from the fact, that in 1718, when the incorporated Society for the relief of converts of any nation from the Church of Rome petitioned for funds, the king allocated to it £400 per annum “from the .£15,000 granted out of the Civil List for the relief of the poor French Protestants.”[1]
All trace of the capital having disappeared, the grant was reduced to about £8500 under Sir Robert Walpole’s ministry. There is in the Lambeth Palace Library a MS. “Royal Warrant for the payment of the sum of £8591 to poor French Protestants. 11 Dec. 1727”" The prosperity of so many of the descendants of the refugees, and their amalgamation with the native population, as well as the occasionally successful applications of impostors for relief, contributed arguments for increasing economy and diminishing grants. During the great French Revolution many Roman Catholics fled for refuge from France to England, and, as our fellow-creatures, were hospitably treated. And though they were usually called “French emigrants” and not “refugees,” yet their presence in the country led some members of Parliament to suppose that the grant to poor French refugees (the epithet “Protestant” having been accidentally omitted) was a grant to Papists, a supposition which raised opposition. In the year 1812 a most serious reduction was made, and nothing but the Bourbon Persecution in the south of France saved it from utter extinction three or four years afterwards — the ferocity and ingratitude of the Bourbons reviving a Protestant feeling in England. In 1836 the mistaken allegation that the refugees were Papists was repeated in Parliament, but officially contradicted by the Right Honourable John Charles Herries.
The once magnificent grant is now reduced to the puny annuity of £120, and the Treasury announces that with the lives of the present recipients the vote will disappear (1869).
Considering what we owe to the refugees, and that the effect of the methods of manufacture introduced by them, and which for us were new creations, inaugurated those gradually advancing processes by which the descendants of the Huguenots
- ↑ Stowe’s London.
