Protestant Exiles from France/Volume 2 - Book Third - Chapter 18 - Section I
Chapter XVIII.
REFUGEES ON THE CONTINENT AT THE REVOCATION EPOCH WHOSE DESCENDANTS SUBSEQUENTLY SETTLED IN BRITAIN.
I. Migault.
Jean Migault was in 1663 a schoolmaster and lecturer at Moullé in Poitou, having succeeded his father in those functions, to which, in 1670, he added the business of a notary. He was, like his father, a Reader in the Protestant Church of Mougon. In 1681 he was thrown out of his practice as a notary by the Royal Edict excluding Protestants from all civil employments, and he immediately removed to a house in Mougon, hoping to be able to continue his school there. But in August of that year he became houseless through the ravages of the dragoons of France, and his wife and ten children were scattered among the chateaux and houses of kind friends, and before the end of the year a second dragonnade finally drove them from Mougon, in whose Protestant Church he had been for twenty years both Reader and Secretary, and Conductor of Sacred Music. On 31st January 1682 he became schoolmaster at Mauzé, in the same province. There he prospered for a time, but bis excellent wife died there on 28th February 1683. Twelve days thereafter a new Royal Edict prevented him from keeping boarders, but the parents of his pupils requested him to continue his superintendence of the studies of their sons, who were removed to lodgings. In a few months a charge was entered against him before a local judge, that by teaching music and singing he was disobeying the Edict which commanded Protestant schoolmasters to teach nothing but reading, writing, and arithmetic; but the Protestant consistory having, by appeal, referred the case to the Lords of Council, the matter was allowed to drop.
For two or three years Mauzé was exempted from the persecutions and desolations suffered elsewhere; and its Protestant church, which was spared, was crowded with worshippers from very distant towns and parishes. This was through the influence, at the Court of Versailles, of “Her Serene Highness the Duchess of Brunswick-Luneberg and Zell.” Her father, the Marquis d’Olbreuse, had been one of the Protestant noblesse of Poitou; her brother was his worthy successor; and she herself had been baptized in the Protestant temple of Mauzé. It was not till the 23rd September 1685 that the dragoons invaded and occupied Mauzé. But at that date its Protestant inhabitants were finally scattered. Migault was a wanderer for nearly three years, frequently visiting La Rochelle, and constantly planning the escape of himself and his children from France. At last, after more than one fiasco, they embarked from the shore below the Chateau de Pampin, near La Rochelle, and landed at the Brille, in Holland, on 8th May 1688, and by the 1st of June they were settled at Amsterdam. In September 1689 he completed his graphic and heart-stirring narrative of himself — a manuscript which was found at London in Spitalfields about the year 1824, in the possession of one of his descendants, and was translated and printed under the auspices of the Rev. Dr. Adam Clarke. Another translation was made at a later date by Professor William Anderson, of the Andersonian University, Glasgow; and the French original has also been printed.
Migault had been married on the 14th January 1663; he writes to his children in the above-mentioned narrative, “I had completed my eighteenth year, and your mother her nineteenth” (her maiden surname was Fourestier). He gives a list of his fourteen children, of whom eleven were living in 1689, and ten were refugees in Holland. An examination of the French registers in Somerset House shows that it was the youngest of these children, Olivier Migault (born 21st February 1683) who ultimately came over to England and settled in London. Jean Migault in his MS. has mentioned him several times, and specially in connection with an unsuccessful attempt to embark at La Bugandière for Holland, in December 1687. He writes, “When we were leaving La Bugandière, little Olivier, in his insinuating and affectionate manner, asked, Where are we going, papa? My heart was full, and to avoid the necessity of an explanation I said, We are going to our house at Moullé, my child. In the morning, the little fellow finding himself on the beach surrounded by sea and rocks said, Are we in our house, papa? I hastily answered, Yes; and he replied, Then our house has tumbled down, papa. I relate this anecdote in order solemnly to express my sorrow for the untruths I unguardedly uttered.” I may take this opportunity of quoting one short but very suggestive sentence. At page 42 (of Professor William Anderson’s translation), Migault says of the refugees, “The fear of losing their children, if they remained in the country, was what decided the greater number of them to emigrate."” The children of Protestants in France were to be taken from their parents and shut up in monasteries and convents, to be brought up as Papists. In Household Words, vol. viii., No. 194, there is an admirable article on the French Protestants, and it has only one blot. Writers, if they are of liberal politics, when they narrate persecuting deeds done by Roman Catholics, think that they ought to insert a single comment, here and there, in order to propitiate Roman Catholic readers. Accordingly, the above writer fixes on the horror of parents at a daughter being carried off to a convent; and he says sneeringly, “A convent to the Huguenot’s excited prejudices implied a place of dissolute morals as well as of idolatrous doctrine.” Surely this writer is a bachelor, who thinks that parents should cheerfully give away their own children to Mother-Church or to any applicant, if the house to which it is proposed to transport them be a comfortable one.
In the London French Church registers, Olivier Migault is described as a native of Mauzé in Poitou. I should rather say, in the register of Leicester-fields French Church. There on the 26th August 1708, he married Jeanne Huart, a native of Nerac in Guienne. And there his children were baptized, Gabriel, born 1st August 1709; Jeanne Elizabeth, born 27th January 1711; Francois, born 9th April 1712; Susanne Jeanne, born 19th November 1713; and twins, named Olivier and Jean, born 22nd April 1715. From the registrations of the eldest son and daughter, it appears that Olivier’s brother, Gabriel Migault (born 22nd June 1669), was in London in 1709, and a Madame Jeanne Elizabeth Migault in 1711.