Protestant Exiles from France/Volume 2 - Book Third - Chapter 13 - Section I
Chapter XIII.
MEMBERS OF NOBLE FAMILIES.
Castelfranc.
The estate of this old Huguenot family[1] was not far from La Rochelle. Their patronymic was De Nautonnier, and they were Seigneurs of Castelfranc. There was among the scions of the house a distinguished astronomer and mathematician, J. de Nautonnier, Protestant minister of Vènes in Quercy, author of Mécographie (or Mécométrie) du Guide-Aimant, a method for ascertaining Longitudes; he is praised by Casaubon in a latin epistle addressed to the younger Scaliger; a letter from himself to the later savant is preserved, dated from Castelfranc in the year 1606.
In 1619 the head of the family, Philippe de Nautonnier Sieur de Castelfranc, pasteur at Montredon in Le Castrais, married Marguerite, daughter of the great Chamier and of his wife who was a lady of the Portal family. The eldest son of this marriage Was the refugee nobleman, and Quick gives us information as to both father and son.
As to the father : —
“The Lord of Castelfranc was a noble gentleman of a fair estate, who yet did not think it beneath himself to be a minister of the gospel. When the city of Rochelle was besieged, the Chateau of Castelfranc, which lay in Poitou, was ordered by the king to be demolished, his estate and lordship was confiscated, and he was condemned for high treason. Though God knows he was most innocent; his greatest and only crime being this, that he was a Protestant minister, and preached the everlasting gospel in its power and purity unto his tenants and vassals, and charged his whole church to persevere in their holy religion, whatever it might cost them, unto the last. For this capital offence he ran the risk of his life, estate, and all. But the Lord hid him; and upon the conclusion of the peace, which the Duke of Rohan made for the churches, he was reinstated in all his rights.”
Quick informs us that “this noble minister had two sons.” The younger son, Jacques de Nautonnier de Castelfranc (so he signed himself in 1659, when witnessing a deed) was a minister, “a man highly esteemed for his great learning and exemplary godliness; he was pastor of the church at Angers, the capital city of the Province of Anjou, but he was murdered, as he was riding on the highway, by a crew of robbers.”
The elder son (says Quick) inherited the lands of Castelfranc, and was the father of a numerous family, who, together with their father, did all then glorify God in a most exemplary manner by their faith, love, and zeal for the truth, patience, and constancy in this last and most dreadful persecution. I had a particular acquaintance with this Sieur de Castelfranc, who lived for some time in the house just against me on Bunhill, London. As this gentleman and his wife, with their nine or ten children, were getting out of France, they were arrested and cast into prison. His three sons and six daughters were brought before that infamous, inhuman, and bloody butcher of God’s saints, Rapine, who could never by any of his cruelties and torments (for which his name and memory will rot and be had in perpetual execration) prevail with so much as one of them to prevaricate in the least in their holy profession. Whereupon the three sons and three of their sisters were transported into America, and made slaves there in the Caribbee Islands. The father, by some means or other, got out of the hands of Rapine, and came over into England. His three other daughters were detained by Rapine, but sustained all their sufferings with a masculine and heroic courage, till such time as the Lord, having tried their patience and found them faithful, did even wonderfully, beyond their hopes and expectations, work out their deliverance. For the French king issued out an order that they should be set at liberty and conducted in safety unto Geneva. And those six who had been carried to America were taken by the English, who, compassionating their many and heavy trials, did free them of their bonds and sufferings, and brought them over unto London. Two of Monsieur Castelfranc’s sons were slain in the wars of Flanders, in the service of King William. The third is yet alive. Their poor afflicted father, passing from London into Holland, was taken captive by a ship of Algiers, where he finished his life as became a most sincere Christian in that miserable slavery.”
The noble and venerable refugee had two sisters, daughters of his reverend father by Marguerite Chamier. Of these, one was married to a Monsieur Testas; their son, Aaron Testas, was a reformed pastor of Poitiers, and afterwards a minister of the City of London French Church. The other was married to a Monsieur Bondet, and was the mother of the Rev. Mr. Bondet, minister of New Rochelle, in New England, a pastor concerning whom Quick writes thus:— “This gentleman preachcth in three languages unto three several nations, English, French, and Indians; he espoused a most virtuous lady of a ducal family in France.”
A surviving son of the Lord of Castelfranc was Le Sieur Gedeon de Castelfranc. He was a Cornet in Miremont’s Dragoons, and, like his brothers, served in Flanders. He retired on half-pay and settled at Portarlington. His name appears in the register of the French church of that town.
- ↑ Our knowlege of this family is derived from a paragraph or two in Quick’s M.S. Life of the Great Chamier, printed in Read’s “Daniel Chamier,” pp. 102, &c. , and from the notes in the Appendix to Mr. Read’s work, p. 395. which the information afforded by Quick and others is revised and corrected. In the printed Chamier Pedigree the title is erroneously entend as “Castelnau.”