England's First Refugees - The Huguenots - by Rosemary Hayes

Huguenot scholar on the intolerance of Louis IV

I have a lot of information about my two grandfathers and their antecedents, going back hundreds of years, and a certain amount about my paternal grandmother, but I knew little of the background of my maternal grandmother, other than that she came from Huguenot stock and that the family’s French name was Lafargue. 

The Huguenot Cross

The origins of the word Huguenot are obscure but we do know that it was used as an insult. Huguenots referred to themselves as Reformers.

Huguenot Tympanum

I came across a whole chapter about the Lafargue family in the proceedings of the Huguenot Society and was captivated by the story of ‘the brave widow’ Lidie Grenouilleau de Lafargue who fled to England with her three young children in 1692.

I'll come back to Lidie later.  Hers is only one among many stories of families who fled persecution, part of the great wave of French Protestant migration (over 50,000) that transformed London - and England.

The impact of the Protestant Reformation was felt throughout Europe. In France, Calvinism penetrated all ranks of society, especially those of the literate craftsmen in the towns and of the nobility. Between 1562 and 1598   there were eight civil wars in France - the Wars of Religion – between Catholics and Protestants.

Hanging and Execution of Huguenots at Amboise, witnessed by Francis II and Mary Stuart in 1560

Of the many attacks against Huguenots, probably the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre is the most notorious.  Traditionally believed to have been instigated by Catherine de Medici, regent at the time, the massacre began on the night of 23/24 August 1572, a few days after the wedding  of the king's sister Margaret to the Protestant Henry III of Navarre (the future Henry IV of France). Many of the most wealthy and prominent Huguenots had gathered in largely Catholic Paris to attend the wedding and the attacks quickly spread from Paris to other areas. Modern estimates for the number of dead across France vary widely, from 5,000 to 30,000.

St Bartholomew's Day Massacre 1572

Catherine de Medici

In 1589 the Protestant Henri de Bourbon inherited the French throne, and in a bid to put a stop to these civil wars, in 1593 he converted to Catholicism.  Five years later he issued the Edict of Nantes which gave the Huguenots considerable privileges, including widespread religious liberty. 

For some years after this the Huguenots thrived but their position became increasingly insecure when Henri’s grandson, King Louis XIV, came to power. His advisers warned him that the existence of this sizeable religious minority was a threat to the absolute authority of the monarch so gradually the Huguenots' privileges were eroded. 

In the 1680s Protestants in certain parts of France were deliberately terrorised by the billeting of unruly troops in their homes ['the Dragonnades']. Finally, in 1685 Louis revoked the Edict of Nantes, exiling all Protestant pastors and at the same time forbidding the Protestant laity to leave France. 

Dragonnades

However, to the considerable surprise of the government many did leave, often at great risk to themselves. Men who were caught were either executed or were sent as galley slaves to the French fleet in the Mediterranean, women were imprisoned and their children sent to convents. About 200,000 Huguenots left France, settling in non-Catholic European countries and further afield.

The great majority of these ‘refugees’ (a new word, coined to describe the incomers) who came to live in towns in Protestant Europe were artisans. Those who came to England included many skilled craftsmen -  weavers, silversmiths, watchmakers, bookbinders – as well as professionals such as clergy, doctors, merchants, soldiers and teachers, There was also a small sprinkling of the lesser nobility. By and large these refugees were received with sympathy and kindness because of the skills they offered and because of anti Catholic sentiment at the time. 

Silk weavers in Spitalfields

But to go back to the brave widow. Lidie Grenouilleau married Samuel Lafargue in 1684. At the time of her marriage she was 20 and her husband, an avocat, 24.  The family of Lafargue had for some generations made their home in the town of Castillon-sur-Dordogne not far from Bordeaux. Castillon had long since lost its strategic importance and had become the home of many well to do Protestant families who asked for nothing more than to be left in peace. Samual’s father, Samual de Lafargue, the elder, Docteur en Medecine, was a wealthy man from an ancient and noble house which for generations had been faithful to the Protestant cause.  Indeed, many Lafargues had sacrificed their lives for their faith in the turbulent religious wars.

Then, with the revocation of the Edit of Nantes on 22^ndOctober 1685, abjurations (renunciations) began to be enforced.  In the jurisdiction of Castillon, there are numerous records of ‘new converts’. However, it seems that the Lafargues held out for longer than most, for with one exception, their names as ‘new converts’ don’t occur until 1688, 1689 and 1692.

Samuel Lafargue, Lidie’s husband, died on 8^thAugust 1692, the very day on which his ‘conversion’ was recorded. Who knows how he died, but this is, at best, a sinister coincidence. In those dark days it was not uncommon for Huguenots to die shortly after their ‘conversion’ and in that year a new wave of persecution had overwhelmed the region. Houses were razed to the ground, children torn from their parents, women imprisoned and men slaughtered.

Surrounded by these horrors, the only way Lidie could retain her religious liberty and save her children, was to flee. 

Only a few years previously, she and her friends and relations had been part of a tightly knit, supportive community, free to worship God in their own way. Now, death, flight or renunciation had shattered that community.

I can find no record of how Lidie escaped, but it can’t have been easy travelling with three very small children and her widowed mother.  She had succeeded in rescuing a small amount of her husband’s fortune and we know that she took with her some diamonds, plate and trinkets, among them an old silver seal engraved with the de Lafargue arms, together with four family portraits, apparently ‘by a master’s hand’.  

With little else to remind her of home, Lidie settled down at first in Westminster but eventually in a house at Hammersmith.  What chiefly attracted her to this quiet suburban area was that it was the home of a small Huguenot colony and had in it one of the few French churches outside the city, of which she became a loyal member. She would have certainly needed her faith to sustain her when two of her three children predeceased her.

Lidie lived in Hammersmith until her death, forty years after she had first set foot in her adopted country.

Huguenots Leaving Church in what is now Soho, in 1763 (Hogarth)

That she was a kind, charitable and devout woman is evident from her will which opens with an earnest expression of Evangelical faith.  She left the bulk of her property to her surviving son, Elias, and the rest to charities for the French poor in London.  The omissions from the will are saddening. There is no mention of any of her kinsfolk in France and we are left with the impression that hers was a rather lonely life.  Her son and his wife lived miles away and she seldom saw them and she only seemed to have a few acquaintances. It must have been so different from the warm and cheerful days of her early marriage spent among all her Gascon friends and relations in Castillon.

Lidie’s son Elias became a clergyman and married the daughter of a fellow refugee (originally from Normandy) and after 14 years ministering to a quiet parish in Lincolnshire, when nearly 50, he finally became a father.  His son, Peter, did not marry young but he married wealth – twice – so that, although he was a clergyman, like his father, he had no need of a living. Peter’s two children from his first marriage rescued Lidie’s family in England from extinction and now there are hundreds who have her as their common ancestor.

One of these was my grandmother.  Known in the family as ‘naughty grannie’ I have to say that she inherited neither Lidie’s piety nor her generosity – though she certainly had some adventures.

But that’s another story!

Naughty Grannie

Thank you to Rosemary Hayes for her reserve post as one of our number copes with a bereavement.

Bizarre Silks by Joan Lennon

I've got some French Huguenot blood in me* and so when I saw there was a programme about them, presented by the wide-eyed Amber Butchart and called The First Refugees,** I gave it a go.  Which is where I stumbled across Bizarre Silks.  These unlikely looking fabric designs were made between 1695 and 1720.  They were big, bold, and bright, featuring strong diagonals and asymmetry, Oriental-style architecture, and giant flamboyant foliage.  The silk - much of which was being woven in Spittalfields by Huguenot immigrants - was the height of fashion, and big names such as James Leman were swept up in it.  (Leman's carefully preserved designs from the period are in the process of being made available to the public by the V&A.)

a James Leman Bizarre Silk design from 1710 (Wikicommons)

Bizarre Silk Mantua circa 1708 (Wikicommons)

detail (Wikicommons)

Man's sleeved waistcoat circa 1715 (Wikicommons)

Here are some other patterns for Bizarre Silk fabrics:

a design by Charles Baudouin 1707 (Wikicommons)  

a design "after James Leman", described as "Geometric and Floral Meanders" 

(circa 1708-1709)

(Wikicommons)

Sadly, the term Bizarre Silk wasn't coined until 1953 (first used in the title of Dr Vilhelm Sloman's book Bizarre Designs in Silks).  In its heyday, these exuberant fabrics were probably known simply as very, very desirable.


* along with 1 in 6 people in Britain, according to the programme
** available on BBC IPlayer - well worth a watch.


Joan Lennon's website.
Joan Lennon's blog.
Granny Garbage.

A FRENCH AFFAIR – Dianne Hofmeyr

On New Years Day this year I embarked on a French affair. I drove into a small valley tucked between the mountains in an area known as Franschhoek… French Corner, situated not in France but in the Cape of Good Hope.

The name is derived from the nearly 300-strong group of Huguenots who arrived here during the Huguenot diaspora after Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes (which assured religious freedom) in 1685. They were given land by the Dutch in the Cape in a valley then called Olifantshoek ('Elephant’s Corner'). Where local farmers saw vast herds of marauding elephants, hardships by the bushel and bleak mountains, the Huguenots saw great wine terroir – and set to work.

I discovered no elephants trampling through the immaculate rolling vineyards or lurking behind the low white-washed walls of farms with names like La Motte, (named by Pierre Joubert after his village – La Motte d'Agues) Cabrière, Provence, Chamonix, L’Ormarins, Dieu Donné and La Dauphine ­– reminders of the huge impact the Huguenots had on the Cape. Spread out and given tracts of land amongst Dutch farmers and made to speak Dutch in order be absorbed into the culture as soon as possible, the Huguenots brought with them their French names, their French heritage and their French knowledge of producing fine brandy and wonderful fruit preserves especially figs.

L'Ormarins – Franschhoek

Surnames adopted a Dutch intonation but never lost their French source – names like Blignaut, de Klerk (from Le Clercq), de Villiers, du Plessis, Du Preez (from Des Pres), du Toit, Franck, Fouche, Fourie (from Fleurit), Gervais, Giliomee (from Guilliaume), Gouws (from Gauch), Hugo, Jordaan (from Jourdan), Joubert, Labuschagne (from la Buscagne), le Roux, Lombard, Malan, Malherbe, Maree, Minnaar (from Mesnard), Nortje (Nortier), Pienaar (from Pinard), Retief (Retif), Rossouw (Rousseau) Taljaard (from Taillard), TerBlanche, Theron, Viljoen (from Villion) and Visagie (Visage).

The stamp the Huguenots put on Cape cuisine was to refine it. They changed the way food was served, from laying it out all at once, to serving dishes in a sequence of multiple courses. Today there is a cheese named Huguenot and most famous are the wafer thin brandy snaps known as oblietjies. After baking the walnut-sized ball of dough, delicately flavoured with naartje peel (clementines), cinnamon and brandy, in an iron pan the cook would skilfully roll the oblietjie into a crisp cone. Tradition has it that the name 'oblietjie' was derived form the words 'Hoc oblatum est', spoken by the priest as he raised the fragile unleavened bread of the Host during the Latin Mass which although Protestants, the Huguenots would have been very familiar with.

Today the area attracts gastronomes and sybarites from across the globe. It’s famous for producing hand-turned sparkling wines in the French style, called Cap Classique rather than Champagne. And on the farm of Haute Cabrière. winemaker, Achim von Arnim still practices sabrage, ­ the art of cutting off the top of a champagne bottle with the swoop of a sabre.

Pierre Jourdan Cap Classique from Haute Cabriere – Franschhoek 

The farm Babylonstoren, (Tower of Babylon or Babel which suggests the melting pot of languages) named for the high mountain peak it nestles against, might not be French in name but marries past to present in the formality of its eight acre ‘werf’ (farmyard) garden based on the old Company Garden laid down in Cape Town in the 1650’s. The farm has been recently renovated by its present owner and by the French garden designer, Patrice Taravella from the Prieuré Notre-Dame d’Orsan. Stone-lined channels of ‘leiwater’ (watering furrows), hen coops, geese, even a cactus maze (for prickly pear fruit) and old fashioned fruits like persimmon, quince, tamarillo and mulberry, plump figs and the sweetest reddest plums on earth have all been revived. 

Chickens and the white walls of the 'werf' at Babylonstoren– Franschhoek

The restaurant 'Babel' at Babylonstoren 

Water being pumped into the leiwater furrows 

A thirst quencher of pure plum, beetroot and apple juice for breakfast  

Gates weighted with heavy stones on pulleys to pull closed automatically. 

The quintessential Cape Dutch architecture, so striking as you drive around the valley of Franschhoek can be traced to those early wooden Huguentot homes, built from clay and stone and eventually Dutch-influenced with gables, though always with a slightly softer appearance. Materials changed. Floors originally made of peach pips or compacted earth began to be covered in Robben Island slate and shutters were added to protect windows. Later still, outbuildings began to appear which included a jonkershuis (house for the eldest son), stables, a coach-house, slaves' quarters and a wine cellar. Low white walls with the delicious texture of thickly dolloped meringue still typically encircle farmyards and mark off vineyards. 

Basse Provence – Franschhoek

Burgundy Bourgogne established in 1694 by Pierre de Villiers

When a hundred years later, during the discovery of vast indigenous forests in the the Knysna and Plettenberg Bay area, (needed for ship building) and Britain and Holland were at war (1780-1783), a  British fleet sailed to take ownership of the Cape but was attacked and disabled by the French. As a result two French regiments arrived in the Cape amongst them, Louis Michel Thibault, a Parisian architect who became one of the most significant contributors to Cape Dutch architecture.

For those of you who need not just a feast for the eyes and a taste of the food and wine, there's a monument and museum in the heart of Franschhoek village that celebrates the arrival of the Huguenots in the Cape. You won’t find any elephants but you will be able to raise a glass of Cap Classique, Voignier or Pinot Noir to the people who saw potential in the terroir of Oliphantshoek. 

www.diannehofmeyr.com

The Aliens have Always been Landing, by Leslie Wilson

WHITE BRITONS A MINORITY BY '66
shouted a headline in the Sun last week. This, Professor David Coleman announced, would be due to 'soaring immigrant birthrates', fuelled by 'record-breaking levels of immigration, coupled with the departure of thousands of Brits for a better life abroad,' (white Brits, presumably, though I can think of quite a few black Britons who have had to go abroad in order to get the level of jobs they are qualified for, due to discrimination) and it would 'represent an enormous change to national identity - cultural, political, economic and religious.'

While Roger Scruton mourned, on the pages of the Guardian - which now and again gives its readers a taste of how the other half thinks - over 'Englishness,' which is being trashed by the modern Tory party, including the common law of England, which, he argues, is now being supplanted by 'the abstract idea of human rights, slapped upon us by European courts.'  

Cricket on the village green, via Wikimedia Commons
by geograph.org.uk

I'm not qualified to pronounce on the accuracy or otherwise of Coleman's statistical analysis - though I know it has been challenged, and in any case, projections of future birthrates are notoriously unreliable. But what I want to talk about is the narrative that both of these men are drawing on, a narrative about a historic Britishness - or Englishness - which should be unchanging and stable, but is threatened with dilution by incoming foreigners or foreign ideas. Scruton, too raises the threat of 'wave upon wave of immigrants' who want the benefit of our 'hard-won assets and freedoms.' (He doesn't mention that Britain's past prosperity was greatly contributed to by looted assets from the countries we colonised.)

The immigrants are at the gates: seething verminous multitudes who will destroy our treasured culture.

Flick back through history to 1938, and you can see a headline from the Daily Mail. GERMAN JEWS POURING INTO THIS COUNTRY. 'The way stateless Jews from Germany are pouring in from every port of this country is becoming an outrage,' inveighed Mr Herbert Metcalfe, a magistrate at Old Street, referring to the 'aliens entering this country through the 'back door' - a problem to which The Daily Mail has repeatedly pointed.' The Observer asserted that by the summer of 1938, there were more Jews in Britain than Germany ever had - this statistic definitely proved to be questionable. And once again the spectre of an eroded national identity was invoked.

Go back to February 3rd, 1900 and we find the Daily Mail again in full cry: 'There landed yesterday at Southampton from the transport Cheshire over 600 so-called refugees, their passages having been paid out of the Lord Mayor's Fund. . .There was scarce a hundred of them that had, by right, deserved such help, and these were the Englishmen of the party. The rest were Jews. . .They fought and jostled for the foremost places at the gangways. . .When the Relief Committee passed by they hid their gold and fawned and whined, and, in broken English, asked for money for their train fare.' These were refugees escaping from the South African war.

Store founded by Jewish refugees, (Wikimedia images,
photo by Michael Maggs)

'Englishness' seems to have remained intact, though, in spite of these past influxes - it must have done, for it to be so threatened again now. It must be intact or there would be no need for anxiety about the fraying, snipping and gnawing away of its boundaries, threatened as this narrative always has it by foreigners and foreign ideas (like human rights, though I believe quite a few British philosophers have been quite keen on that idea from the eighteenth century onwards). 

And yet - what we regard as Englishness (or Britishness) has changed rather a lot from what we thought of as Englishness in the past - which makes me wonder, if Roger Scruton went back two hundred years, how at home would he feel? I don't regard a changing national identity as problematic.

But then, I have to come out and admit that I am one of those dreadful people - deplored by the BNP and the Mail alike - born to a mother who was herself born abroad. I am one of the fifth columnists, apparently.

My mother's baggage tag
for her arrival in Britain, 1947

What is quintessentially English, though? Tyneside dialect, for example? I had a Norwegian student who spent some time in Newcastle and understood Geordie speech better than many English people would, because, she said, they were talking Norwegian. When I went to Oslo, I didn't register the word 'gate' for street, because it seemed perfectly normal to me, having lived for eight years in Kendal, that a street should be called 'gate. (Gillinggate, Stramongate..) The Viking heritage. In 1066, a rather large influx of Normans radically changed English language, culture and custom, not to mention the landscape. How many of us understand Anglo-Saxon?
Incidentally, the fact that the self-appointed defenders of national identity can't decide whether to call that identity 'Englishness' or 'Britishness' shows the United Kingdom's lack of cultural homogeneity even within its borders and among those people you might call its natives.

We have had the Huguenots, who altered our English ways of working with cloth by introducing their far more efficient looms, thus giving this land a commercial edge over the French who had chased the Huguenots out. They were also accused (by pamphlets that must have been the ancestors of the Daily Mail) of threatening jobs, standards of housing, morality, hygiene - and eating weird foods. I believe it's now estimated that 75% of Britons are descended from Huguenots. And undoubtedly a considerable amount of us are descended from Jewish converts, not to mention the smaller doses of different-nationality descent from individual marriages (like myself). This is the national identity which, we're told, cannot survive immigration.

Door, French Protestant Church, London
By Ruskin via Wikimedia Commons

 I can remember, as a child, describing yoghurt to my friends - I could only get it in Germany in those days. 'Yuk!' they said. So, has Britishness/Englishness been damaged by all that yoghurt on the supermarket shelves? How far has chicken tikka masala, that very British dish, eroded our national standards? Or pizza? Or lager? We also have vegemite and US products on our shelves - and on our TV sets - which doesn't seem to trouble the contemporary authors of this narrative. Americans and Australians are white, I guess.

OK - I know it's not all jam (or yoghurt). For example, I don't think it's right for little girls to be mutilated by their communities; I don't like 'honour killings.' I want to see British Muslim girls get an education and not be forced to get married against their will. There will always be tensions between the values we want new incoming Britons to absorb, and their need to remain connected to what they come from. But the things we value can come under threat from very British people - like the attacks on the National Health Service. We can never lean back and take anything for granted.

 Most importantly, considering where I'm posting today - the stories about our national identity are an area where I believe that knowledge of history is quite vital, to counteract that misleading, sadly popular narrative of a heritage which is supposed to be - always at the present moment and with unique dreadfulness -  threatened with annihilation.